David L Eng
Biographic Data
| ID | 567141 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David L Eng |
| GIVEN NAMES | David L |
| FAMILY NAME | Eng |
| SIGNATURE | ENG D L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 457 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Black Crows of Psychoanalysis
This article comments on essays written by Andrew Asibong, Sandra Park, and Michelle Stephens in response to our theories about racial rage, racial guilt, and the uses of anger in Asian America. It argues that until we address the history of an unthought Asian American subject in the face of the subject of an untaught Asian American history, we will not be able to undo the dissociated knowledge constituting the disturbing thought of race at the h…
Racial Rage, Racial Guilt
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 i…
The Unthought Asian American Subject
Responses to ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’
The History of the Subject and the Subject of History
This article explores unexamined links between psychic and political theories of trauma to investigate the constitution of victims deserving and undeserving of reparation as they emerge in the context of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Tribunals. While genocide and nuclear catastrophe oriented the world imagination toward the specter of planetary annihilation, the “final solution” and the atomic bombings also cleave from…
Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation
In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes …
Colonial Object Relations
This article investigates how colonial modernity frames not only the material development but also the psychic emergence of liberal subjectivity by reexamining Melanie Klein's notions of reparation, a key concept in both psychoanalysis and political theory. The article reconsiders the recent turn in affect studies emphasizing the redemptive quality of love in the reparative process by offering a very different reading that I describe as "colonial…
The Feeling of Photography, the Feeling of Kinship
Affective Difference
This essay is a tribute to José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013). It explores Muñoz’s engagement with psychoanalytic theory and affective difference as they play out in queer theory’s “antisocial thesis.” I suggest that Muñoz’s conception of racial identity as a performative cluster of common affects, of “feeling brown,” inveighs against the ways in which queers of color are continually made to bear the burden of psychic negativity, with performance as …
The Civil and the Human
The Civil and the Human David L. Eng (bio) There will never be a stable definition of “the human”; the concept is grounded not in biology but in stories. Like organic life, stories change, but their evolution is considerably more rapid. In her dazzling presidential address, from which I draw the above epigraph, Priscilla Wald retells the story of Henrietta Lacks with great political passion. Wald reveals in the process the remarkable power of nar…
Queering the Black Atlantic, Queering the Brown Atlantic
This essay reviews two books, M. Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred and Gayatri Gopinath's Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, both of which focus on the intersections of queer studies with diaspora studies, area studies, and postcolonial theory. These books help forge the burgeoning field of "queer diasporas," which works against the genealo…
Public Policy
Ethics is a vigorously contested field. There are many competing moral frameworks, and different views about how normative considerations should inform the art and craft of governmental policy making. What is not in dispute, however, is that ethics matters. The ethical framework adopted by policy analysts and decision makers not only shapes how policy problems are defined, framed and analysed, but also influences which ethical principles and valu…
The Queer Space of China
This essay examines the contemporary emergence of gay and lesbian life in the People's Republic of China through an analysis of Stanley Kwan's 2001 film Lan Yu and in relation to liberal distinctions between public space and private desires. Following anthropologist Lisa Rofel's recent scholarship on expressive desire, I investigate the ways certain self-identified Chinese gays and lesbians are positioning themselves as individuals who are unique…
The Feeling of Kinship
In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of "queer liberalism"-the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our "colorblind" age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and …
China
How should we go about interpreting, reading, and understanding “China” as a social text, in the face of persistent Orientalism and self-Orientalism, in an age when the ghosts of socialism are still all around us? Given its semicolonial history and its passage through communist and capitalist visions of modernity, China cannot be studied in isolation, as a preexisting thing in itself. Instead of reducing it to a preconstituted object of knowledge…
Passed On
Book Review| September 01 2007 Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (A Memorial) David L. Eng David L. Eng Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (3): 625–627. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-030 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation David L. Eng; Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (A Memorial). American Literature …
Out Here and Over There
Cultural Studies Book Prize Awardee
Martin F. Manalansan IV's Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America is a stunning collection of essays that maps out an expansive terrain of Asian American ethnography. In so doing, this groundbreaking anthology collapses the distinctions between "native" and "foreign," inside and outside, home and the field, subject and object, and ethnographer and informant. Manalansan's collection offers a kaleidoscope of ethnographic topics…
Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas
Research Article| September 01 2003 Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas David L. Eng David L. Eng Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2003) 21 (3 (76)): 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-21-3_76-1 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation David L. Eng; Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas. Social Text 1 September 2003; 21 (3 (76)): 1–37. doi: https…
Loss
Taking stock of a century of pervasive loss—of warfare, disease, and political strife—this eloquent book opens a new view on both the past and the future by considering "what is lost" in terms of "what remains." Such a perspective, these essays suggest, engages and reanimates history. Plumbing the cultural and political implications of loss, the authors--political theorists, film and literary critics, museum curators, feminists, psychoanalysts, a…
The Value of Silence
What is the value of silence? And what is that value of silence from which it is impossible to escape
Racial Castration
Racial CastrationI am an Oriental.And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man
A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia
As Freud's privileged theory of unresolved grief, melancholia presents a compelling framework to conceptualize registers of loss and depression attendant to both psychic and material processes of Asian American immigration, assimilation, and racialization. Freud initially formulates melancholia as a pathological form of individual mourning for lost objects, places, or ideals. However, we propose a concept of melancholia as a depathologized struct…
Melancholia in the Late Twentieth Century
Out Here and Over There
The Feeling of Kinship
In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of "queer liberalism"-the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our "colorblind" age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and …
Racial Castration
Racial CastrationI am an Oriental.And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man
Loss
Taking stock of a century of pervasive loss—of warfare, disease, and political strife—this eloquent book opens a new view on both the past and the future by considering "what is lost" in terms of "what remains." Such a perspective, these essays suggest, engages and reanimates history. Plumbing the cultural and political implications of loss, the authors--political theorists, film and literary critics, museum curators, feminists, psychoanalysts, a…
Colonial Object Relations
This article investigates how colonial modernity frames not only the material development but also the psychic emergence of liberal subjectivity by reexamining Melanie Klein's notions of reparation, a key concept in both psychoanalysis and political theory. The article reconsiders the recent turn in affect studies emphasizing the redemptive quality of love in the reparative process by offering a very different reading that I describe as "colonial…
Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas
Research Article| September 01 2003 Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas David L. Eng David L. Eng Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2003) 21 (3 (76)): 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-21-3_76-1 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation David L. Eng; Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas. Social Text 1 September 2003; 21 (3 (76)): 1–37. doi: https…
Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation
In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes …
The Queer Space of China
This essay examines the contemporary emergence of gay and lesbian life in the People's Republic of China through an analysis of Stanley Kwan's 2001 film Lan Yu and in relation to liberal distinctions between public space and private desires. Following anthropologist Lisa Rofel's recent scholarship on expressive desire, I investigate the ways certain self-identified Chinese gays and lesbians are positioning themselves as individuals who are unique…
The Value of Silence
What is the value of silence? And what is that value of silence from which it is impossible to escape
Out Here and Over There
Queering the Black Atlantic, Queering the Brown Atlantic
This essay reviews two books, M. Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred and Gayatri Gopinath's Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, both of which focus on the intersections of queer studies with diaspora studies, area studies, and postcolonial theory. These books help forge the burgeoning field of "queer diasporas," which works against the genealo…
In the Shadows of a Diva
1994). In the Shadows of a Diva: Committing Homosexuality in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly. Amerasia Journal: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 93-116
The History of the Subject and the Subject of History
This article explores unexamined links between psychic and political theories of trauma to investigate the constitution of victims deserving and undeserving of reparation as they emerge in the context of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Tribunals. While genocide and nuclear catastrophe oriented the world imagination toward the specter of planetary annihilation, the “final solution” and the atomic bombings also cleave from…
Love at Last Site
In the Shadows of a Diva
1994). In the Shadows of a Diva: Committing Homosexuality in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly. Amerasia Journal: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 93-116
Out Here and Over There
A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia
As Freud's privileged theory of unresolved grief, melancholia presents a compelling framework to conceptualize registers of loss and depression attendant to both psychic and material processes of Asian American immigration, assimilation, and racialization. Freud initially formulates melancholia as a pathological form of individual mourning for lost objects, places, or ideals. However, we propose a concept of melancholia as a depathologized struct…
Melancholia in the Late Twentieth Century
Racial Castration
Racial CastrationI am an Oriental.And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man
Loss
Taking stock of a century of pervasive loss—of warfare, disease, and political strife—this eloquent book opens a new view on both the past and the future by considering "what is lost" in terms of "what remains." Such a perspective, these essays suggest, engages and reanimates history. Plumbing the cultural and political implications of loss, the authors--political theorists, film and literary critics, museum curators, feminists, psychoanalysts, a…
The Value of Silence
What is the value of silence? And what is that value of silence from which it is impossible to escape
Cultural Studies Book Prize Awardee
Martin F. Manalansan IV's Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America is a stunning collection of essays that maps out an expansive terrain of Asian American ethnography. In so doing, this groundbreaking anthology collapses the distinctions between "native" and "foreign," inside and outside, home and the field, subject and object, and ethnographer and informant. Manalansan's collection offers a kaleidoscope of ethnographic topics…
Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas
Research Article| September 01 2003 Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas David L. Eng David L. Eng Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2003) 21 (3 (76)): 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-21-3_76-1 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation David L. Eng; Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas. Social Text 1 September 2003; 21 (3 (76)): 1–37. doi: https…
Out Here and Over There
Passed On
Book Review| September 01 2007 Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (A Memorial) David L. Eng David L. Eng Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (3): 625–627. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-030 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation David L. Eng; Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (A Memorial). American Literature …
China
How should we go about interpreting, reading, and understanding “China” as a social text, in the face of persistent Orientalism and self-Orientalism, in an age when the ghosts of socialism are still all around us? Given its semicolonial history and its passage through communist and capitalist visions of modernity, China cannot be studied in isolation, as a preexisting thing in itself. Instead of reducing it to a preconstituted object of knowledge…
Public Policy
Ethics is a vigorously contested field. There are many competing moral frameworks, and different views about how normative considerations should inform the art and craft of governmental policy making. What is not in dispute, however, is that ethics matters. The ethical framework adopted by policy analysts and decision makers not only shapes how policy problems are defined, framed and analysed, but also influences which ethical principles and valu…
The Queer Space of China
This essay examines the contemporary emergence of gay and lesbian life in the People's Republic of China through an analysis of Stanley Kwan's 2001 film Lan Yu and in relation to liberal distinctions between public space and private desires. Following anthropologist Lisa Rofel's recent scholarship on expressive desire, I investigate the ways certain self-identified Chinese gays and lesbians are positioning themselves as individuals who are unique…
The Feeling of Kinship
In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of "queer liberalism"-the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our "colorblind" age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and …
Queering the Black Atlantic, Queering the Brown Atlantic
This essay reviews two books, M. Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred and Gayatri Gopinath's Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, both of which focus on the intersections of queer studies with diaspora studies, area studies, and postcolonial theory. These books help forge the burgeoning field of "queer diasporas," which works against the genealo…
The Civil and the Human
The Civil and the Human David L. Eng (bio) There will never be a stable definition of “the human”; the concept is grounded not in biology but in stories. Like organic life, stories change, but their evolution is considerably more rapid. In her dazzling presidential address, from which I draw the above epigraph, Priscilla Wald retells the story of Henrietta Lacks with great political passion. Wald reveals in the process the remarkable power of nar…
The Feeling of Photography, the Feeling of Kinship
Affective Difference
This essay is a tribute to José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013). It explores Muñoz’s engagement with psychoanalytic theory and affective difference as they play out in queer theory’s “antisocial thesis.” I suggest that Muñoz’s conception of racial identity as a performative cluster of common affects, of “feeling brown,” inveighs against the ways in which queers of color are continually made to bear the burden of psychic negativity, with performance as …
Colonial Object Relations
This article investigates how colonial modernity frames not only the material development but also the psychic emergence of liberal subjectivity by reexamining Melanie Klein's notions of reparation, a key concept in both psychoanalysis and political theory. The article reconsiders the recent turn in affect studies emphasizing the redemptive quality of love in the reparative process by offering a very different reading that I describe as "colonial…
Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation
In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes …
Responses to ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’
The History of the Subject and the Subject of History
This article explores unexamined links between psychic and political theories of trauma to investigate the constitution of victims deserving and undeserving of reparation as they emerge in the context of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Tribunals. While genocide and nuclear catastrophe oriented the world imagination toward the specter of planetary annihilation, the “final solution” and the atomic bombings also cleave from…
The Black Crows of Psychoanalysis
This article comments on essays written by Andrew Asibong, Sandra Park, and Michelle Stephens in response to our theories about racial rage, racial guilt, and the uses of anger in Asian America. It argues that until we address the history of an unthought Asian American subject in the face of the subject of an untaught Asian American history, we will not be able to undo the dissociated knowledge constituting the disturbing thought of race at the h…
Sociology (18 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · History (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Art (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Asian American and Pacific Histories (7 works) · Art history (6 works)