It seems our attachment to identification and individuation stems from our need to identify to be considered meaningful. If we rejected the terms of individual identity, we would have no fixed or stable meaning with which to understand ourselves in society. However, as much as singular identification provides people with a socially intelligible identity, it also permits their subjection to hierarchies of classification. In order to claim subjectivity, we must subject ourselves to subjection/dominance.
Cheng inquires, "How is racial identity secured? How does it continue to generate its seduction for both the dominant and the marginalized? And what are the repercussions, both historical and personal, of that ongoing history?" (7). I wonder the same; how and why do we cling on to racial meaning "even when such identities prove to be prohibitive or debilitating"? (7).
Cheng locates the role of grief in racial subject-formation, how the trauma of history, the psychological "negotiation" of a constantly reinscribed objecthood/otherness, works to situate cultural identities. Yet she seems to find possibilities in grief and loss as a dynamic process able to transform the political imagination (xi). What are the possibilities of melancholia, of “a concept of identity based on constitutive loss"?
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