a Zoom event
Saturday, June 1st, 2024, 9:30am to 12:30pm PDT

Program description:

Asian Americans are conventionally described as “middle-man minorities,” outside of dominant racial paradigms of white and black, adjunct to white privilege and exempt from the brunt of systemic violence directed against black people. Historical accounts of the in-betweenness of Asian Americans trace their origins to how Asian coolie labor has served to triangulate white capital and African slavery over the course of European modernity. If this is the material history of in-betweenness, what is the psychic corollary of the middle-man thesis? Through an analysis of the Netflix dark comedyseries Beef, as well as case histories of our Asian American patients and students, we argue that the psychic effects of occupying a racially intermediate position implicate an unexplored terrain of racial rage and racial guilt that Asian Americans are insistently socialized to hold on behalf of others.

In this workshop, we will consider how social and psychic processes of loss for Asian Americans are mediated, mitigated, and exacerbated by the problem of guilt. Scholars working on identity politics have embraced a range of affective states – including melancholy, pride, shame, and anger – as theoretically and politically productive emotions. In contrast, guilt is more typically attributed to others than assumed by the self. Indeed, discerning the guilt of others is often a means of proclaiming the righteousness of one’s self. If guilt is the sine qua non for initiating psychic processes of repair in object relations, how does the repudiation of guilt foreclose the possibility of reparation? More specifically, how do Asian Americans hold, embrace and repress guilt such that reparation of both the other and the self become impossible?

The presenters will consult on clinical case material from ICP third year candidate, Dr. Carrie Atikune.