Depathologising Racial Melancholia in Intergenerational Herstories

Abstract

This chapter examines how intersubjective connection is forged and strengthened between first-generation mothers and their second-generation daughters who manage racial melancholia. It examines the transforming and revisioning powers within communication in Asian American¹ women’s writing, with an emphasis on Chinese American literary texts. It aims to draw attention to the intergenerational transmission of stories as a vital strategy for strengthening identity and establishing identification within the mother-daughter dyad. Stories mediated between women feature as herstories that function to voice a former silence necessitated by white America’s dominant hegemony. The dual workings of memory, active forgetting and active remembering, encompass the oral and written transmission of personal and shared collective histories and memories. It is both history and memory that are channeled within the Chinese oral tradition of ‘gong gu tsai’ or ‘talking-story’, which allow for the recording of previously obfuscated stories that speak of the personal and social stories of a cultural ethnic community. The recovery of Chinese female voices in talking-story is pertinent when considering the way it facilitates greater communication and the reclamation of identity, by establishing and reinforcing social ties amongst an intergenerational, intersubjective community of women. Storytelling’s revisionist quality that is inherent to the Chinese traditional practice of talk-story makes possible the process of depathologisation as a means of managing losses brought about by racialisation.