Browsing by Subject "Psychoanalysis"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    THe fantasy of Asian America : identity, ideology, and desire.
    (2009-07) Kim, Chang-Hee
    This dissertation reconsiders the extant critique of Asian American identity politics in Asian American literary studies. The intellectual "war of position" initiated over claiming the legitimacy of Asian America has been articulated in the combined terms of both race and gender. I argue that the way in which the war of position is articulated in the binaries between nationalist and feminist critiques and between race-bound identity politics and non-identity politics is a misguided framework for understanding the point at issue in Asian American literary studies. The intra-racial anxiety about the identity-based politics of Asian America originates not so much in the identitarian distinction between the real and the fake or between the good subject and the bad subject; rather, it is attributed to a discursive gap in the self-affirmation of "what Asian America is" within the larger framework of American nationalism. This gap results from the variable extent to which Asian Americans make their dynamic relationship--namely, both resisting and collaborating--with American nationalism in relation to which Asian America came into being both autonomously and subordinately. Within the contextual framework, this dissertation explores the way in which the stereotypes of Asian Americans operate as fundamental to the constitution of both Asian America and white America. I make use of psychoanalysis as a methodological tool to analyze the dialectical dynamics between Asians in America and the gaze of white-centered American society where the exotic presence of the former evokes the desire and anxiety of the latter simultaneously. Within this framework, this dissertation collects some representative cultural products of Asian America as touchstones of Asian American representation. I consider the collection an ideological matrix of the symbolic reality that constitutes the uneven relations of our lives in terms of race, gender, and sexuality and takes them for granted. Simultaneously, this collection shows how both white and Asian Americas negotiate with each other to attend to both intra-racial and inter-racial anxiety and trauma caused by their racial, cultural, sexual, geographical encounters at various levels of different historical and political contexts.
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    The Melancholy of Schooling: A Critical Ethnographic Study of Race, Trauma, and Learning in a High School English Classroom
    (2017-06) Grinage, Justin
    This year-long critical ethnographic study discusses the difficulties that arose when a multiracial class of 12th grade high school English students engaged in learning surrounding the reality of racism in the United States amid public displays of police brutality. Most notably, three high-profile cases of racial violence committed against black males, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, took place within five months of each other and coincided with the school year that I conducted my fieldwork for this study. Using the psychoanalytic concept of racial melancholia (Cheng, 2001) as a theoretical framework, I demonstrate how repressed forms of racial trauma and grief are experienced through the process of teaching and learning and how these processes are connected to larger formations of American racialization. My analyses focuses on the psycho-social (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008) construction, production, and transmission of trauma in the context of learning about race in the classroom. I place racial melancholia in conversation with theories of history (Benjamin, 1969), mourning (Freud, 1917), emotion (Ahmed, 2004), haunting (Frosh, 2013), whiteness (Thandeka, 1999) and affect (Massumi, 2015) to document the various ways that both the students and the classroom teacher struggled to learn and teach about racism. I argue that melancholic trauma and racial loss permeates American identities as a result of the nation’s extensive history of denying its racial transgressions. The implications of the study emphasize that we must learn to identify and work through unresolved racial grief if we are to improve our comprehension of race and engender anti-racist agency in the face of persistent systemic and individual acts of racial subjugation. This dissertation makes a distinct contribution to social justice approaches to education by underscoring the generative and productive possibilities for designing curriculum and employing critical pedagogies that center on understanding racial trauma.
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    Modernity and ethics: the ghost of terror in French thought.
    (2010-08) Reinberg, Mira
    "Modernity and Ethics" examines the different incarnations of terror in literary and philosophical works, as well as in film, in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. I follow texts engaged in thinking the dialectic between Enlightenment and violence and which had critical influence on French and Francophone thought in particular and contemporary global thought in general. Three principal questions emerge from my reading of these works: First, in light of the turbulent post-colonial reality in North Africa and France, as well as the Middle East, are there unique historical moments that call for a state of exception in which the law is suspended for raison d'Etat, or does ethics demand a rethinking of insurrection? Second, how do the positions which these writers take toward the understanding of violence shift the ideological frameworks that articulate or contest the conceptualization of terror? And third, what are the ethical stakes in the intersection of art and resistance? In works by Genet and films by Godard which confront the question of revolution I trace an ethics of resistance that is grounded more in the artistic interpretation of lived conflicts than in political endorsement or condemnation of violence. I analyze the notion of the gaze in Genet's work, and of time in films by Godard. I examine the continuing dialogue of modern thinkers such as Marx, Arendt, Benjamin, and Lyotard with the ethics of universalism founded by Enlightenment thought. The tension of this dialogue is exemplified in Hegel's conceptualization of the Reign of Terror as the logical consequence of an ideological philosophy. Modernity is haunted by the relationship between two seemingly incompatible phenomena: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and terror. The philosophical debate illuminates crucial questions that indicate the difficulty in articulating a viable understanding of modern conflicts. With a reading of Lacan's essay "Kant avec Sade," in which psychoanalysis confronts (Kant's) moral categories with Sade's literary formulation of "happiness in evil," I analyze the discourse of evil in a 19th-century short story by Villiers. A psychoanalytic analysis of the literary text provides important insights into the understanding of categorical ethical formulations.