Racial Melancholia, Guilt, and Repair

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Our presenters for the November 11th program have some brand new material written up for this presentation. They have suggested that you might want to watch the show "Beef" on Netflix before the event, but it's not necessary.

Below is an updated title and description: 

Title
Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America

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 comedy series 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.