what is melancholia?

Cheng points out for us “identity’s instability and its indebtedness to the dis-identity it is also claiming” (24). For Cheng melancholy is a kind of exclusion but not really loss; racism is like melancholia because it seldom expels the racial other but tries to maintain the other within existing structures, just not in the same place as the self. “The social lesson of racial minoritization reinforces itself through the imaginative loss of a never-possible perfection.” (17) This perfection, the white ideal, is internalized by the black kid to generate “a web of self-affirmation, self-denigration, projection, desire, identification, and hostility” (17). Rather than arguing for the establishment of a “black ideal,” however, Cheng calls for us to question the grounds of identity itself and the binary views of identity and dis-identity that necessarily comes with it, proposing “a concept of identity based on constitutive loss.” I hope to discuss in class what this means, especially in terms of politics and activism. Also, in the preface, Cheng terms racial melancholia as “both the technology and the nightmare of the American Dream”; I’d like to talk about in what sense it functions as these.