Anne Cheng, Assistant Professor in English, will work during the term of her Townsend fellowship on a book entitled The Melancholy of Race: Fantasy and Incommensurability in the Racial Imaginary. Within a vocabulary of mourning, grief, and grievance, Professor Cheng will investigate the double processes of expulsion and incorporation which contribute to the material and philosophical construction of racialized subjects. Using the Freudian notion of the melancholic as one who can only incorporate loss as part of the ego, she argues that the minority subject is also a melancholic subject, enjoined to renounce the self. Professor Cheng sites her work at the intersection of several newlydeveloping fields: Asian-American Studies, psychoanalysis as social critique, film theory, and comparative ethnic studies.