The unfulfilled desire to be assimilated into White culture and the resultant melancholia have been read as central wounds of minority subjecthood within formally multiethnic nations like the USA and Britain. This seminar invites papers that dissect the workings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century assimilation narratives: not only their failures, but also the strategies they employ, the majoritarian pressures they respond to, and their (however partial) successes.

 Analyses of assimilation are foundational to multiple theoretical traditions. Within Black British studies, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Hazel Carby all theorise assimilation as a rapidly evolving framework in post-WWII Britain, which saw a significant influx of Commonwealth migrants. These newly racialized “subjects become  British and…are inscribed into ideologies of empire and beliefs of whiteness” (Carby). In a similar vein, while considering Black and Asian American selfhoods, Ann Anlin Cheng defines “white preference,” the love and desire for Whiteness as a superior schema, as a complex and fraught process that is central to creating a racialized subject. David Eng and Shinhee Han discuss how, for Asian Americans, the frustrations of not being able to become White—and the state of perpetual aspiration this inaugurates—revises Freudian melancholia, making it a collective condition of everyday life instead of an individual pathology. For each critic, the question of assimilation into White culture is central to the processes of racialization. Since racial identity is “the very stuff of the ‘partially invented’” (Cheng), this seminar solicits papers that analyze how a variety of non-White racial formations respond to the multifarious and potent fictions of Whiteness. Papers on literary, filmic, pop culture, and new media texts are all welcome. 

Topics include but are not limited to: 

Narratives of passing

Assimilation and empire

Affect and assimilation

Performing/negotiating with Whiteness in popular culture (celebrity, reality TV, etc.)

Assimilation via interracial romance/marriage 

The intersections of race and class in assimilation narratives

Failures to assimilate and their aftermath

Comparative, transnational studies of assimilation 

How the definition of assimilation changes across time

The role of interracial solidarity/competiton in aspiring to Whiteness

Food cultures and assimilation

Multicultural narratives and assimilation