Racial melancholia as praxis: Refusal and collective life beyond the model minority formation

Abstract

This paper investigates the affective politics of doing delivery work while being Asian amidst the conditions of racial capitalism. It specifically looks to identify how Asian racialization in the United States operates through processes of racial melancholia, an unresolved process of identification that situates Asian immigrants amidst the past and present conditions of exclusion, dispossession, and differentiation. Racial melancholia operates in contrast to the model minority formation, which obscures these conditions, justifying the intensified exploitation of other dispossessed racial groups and facilitating the continued racial capitalist processes of accumulation by dispossession. To do so, the paper turns to the lives of two Asian delivery workers in New York City, considering how racial melancholia might operate as a praxis, and identifying its limits when it confronts the mobilization of Asian identity to justify policing and criminalization. It brings together the literatures on negative affects and carceral geographies to identify how racial melancholia is a suspended mode of affective politics that operates through limits, ambivalence, and impotentiality.