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Walking on Thin Ice: Discussion of Kris Yi’s “Asian American Experience: The Illusion of Inclusion and the Model Minority Stereotype”

2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10481885.2023.2160173

1940-9222

Andrew Asibong,

Cinema and Media Studies

ABSTRACTUsing Kris Yi's article in this issue as a point of departure, I explore the desperate lengths of "not-knowing" to which a simultaneously invisibilized and racialized individual must go in order to survive in the care of a narcissistic parents and/or state structures. Following Yi, I consider the ways in which violently racialized events can release repressed knowledge, together with traumatic affect, in the dissociated individual in psychotherapy, and, continuing to respond to Yi, I think about the implications for the gendered and racialized transference that I have personally experienced, both as psychotherapist and as patient. I compare Asian-American and (especially "mixed-race" or multi-ethnic) Black British identities, both marked by hybridity and divided subjectivity: a part that colludes, and a part that is oppressed unto death. Reflecting on my clinical practice at times of traumatically racialized socio-political disintegration, I outline the stages of a potential psychic structure of new kinship, based on the shared vulnerabilities of complexly and intersectionally racialized therapist and patient. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Assayas's (Citation2022) remake of Irma Vep as an 8-part series for Apple TV develops the original film's interest in the violent erasure of Asian-ness, by casting the white Swedish actor Alicia Vikander as a new star playing Irma Vep, before eventually becoming haunted by the figure of "Jade Lee" (Vivian Wu), a ghost inspired by long-disappeared Maggie Cheung, who interrogates the intra-diegetic director René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne) on his motivation for remaking Les Vampires/Irma Vep without her. Irma Vep (Citation2022) deserves to be further analyzed as the third of a madly neglected trio of recent televisual remakes, reboots, and uncanny returns, all of which enact racialized disappearance, resurrection, and replacement to dazzling effect. The other two shows in the triptych are HBO's dismayingly underrated In Treatment 4 (Citation2021), in which the white male psychotherapist of the first three seasons is replaced by a Black woman therapist played by Uzo Aduba; and Amazon's wonderful Little Fires Everywhere (Citation2020), in which racially nonspecific protagonists from the bestselling novel by Celeste Ng (Citation2017) are turned quite beautifully and complexly Black.2 This post-traumatic dynamic of collaborative not-knowing may be usefully compared with a whole range of psychotherapeutic and socio-political discourses and phenomena. Consider the useful formulation of the 12-Step Program ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) when describing the shared credo of all alcoholic family structures – "Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel" – and how reminiscent it is of Bion's (Citation1962) more intellectually respectable concept of "−K." But consider too the idea of a diabolical bargain between colonist and colonized underlying Fanon's (Citation1952/2008 concept of the self-denying "white mask," and how helpfully this maps onto the terrifying developments currently taking place in the contemporary British political context, with the rise of (sometimes extreme) rightwing, brown-skinned politicians such as Rishi Sunak (British Prime Minister at the time of writing), Priti Patel, James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch, and notorious Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who has boasted of her desire to deport as many undocumented migrants from the United Kingdom as possible to Rwanda: "that's my dream, it's my obsession" (The Guardian, Citation2022).Additional informationNotes on contributorsAndrew AsibongAndrew Asibong, Ph.D. is an intercultural psychodynamic psychotherapist and film theorist, whose recent publications include Post-Traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image: Something to Watch Over Me (Routledge, 2021) and "Whiteness and Fog: Thinking about Traumatic Narcissism in a Racialized Context" (Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2022).