Join us for this illuminating conversation with Drs. Mary Kim Brewster, David Eng, and Shinhee Han. Our guests confront the dangerous myths of yellow peril and the model minority in the context of negated geo-political histories. They encourage us to imagine the Asian American subject’s relationality as both “Asian” and “American” and as a necessary condition towards repair and recognition.
Episode References
- A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia – David Eng & Shinhee Han
- Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans – David Eng & Shinhee Han
- Reparations and the Human – David Eng
- Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974 – 1989
- Caucasia – Danzy Senna
- Joan Wallach Scott
- Hate in the Countertransference – Donald W. Winnicott
About Our Guests
Mary Kim Brewster is an executive editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and the guest editor of the special edition of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 24(40): “On Being Asian in America”. She is a clinical psychologist, faculty member of The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis, and the Director of the Serious Mental Illness and the Family Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family. She supervises in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at City University of New York and has a private practice in New York.
Shinhee Han, PhD is a senior psychotherapist at the New School UniversityCounseling Service and in private practice in New York City. She is the co-author of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans, co-authored with David Eng, published 2019 by Duke University Press. She is also a founding member of the Asian Women Giving Circle in NYC, a philanthropic organization that funds Asian women artists creating social activism and change. Previously, she was a therapist at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Barnard College and Columbia University.
David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Professor in the Programs of Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. Eng is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. In 2016, Eng was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City. In 2021, he was awarded the Kessler Prize from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS), which is given to a scholar and/or activist who has produced a body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies. His most recent publications are Reparations and the Human (Duke, 2025), and Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (co-authored with Shinhee Han, Duke, 2019). Learn more