“The Melancholia of Beginnings: Post-Migrant Fiction” was a two-year project on Western post-migrant narratives which I began in May 2011, and was concluded in April 2013. The report mainly describes the initial aims and goals, the concrete procedures ...
“The Melancholia of Beginnings: Post-Migrant Fiction” was a two-year project on Western post-migrant narratives which I began in May 2011, and was concluded in April 2013. The report mainly describes the initial aims and goals, the concrete procedures over the two-year period, and finally the research outcome. The result report describes in details each of the four published articles. The first article was theoretically informed by Hegel’s philosophy of history and Freud’s notion of melancholia. I went back to Hegel’s philosophy of history—as well as Fukuyama’s translation of Hegel’s end-of-history thesis into global discourse—in order to broaden my notion of post-migrant experience, the notion of coming after; to live in the shadow of others’ histories. The article more broadly focuses on what I call global melancholia, which has a concrete bearing on post-migrant experience in that it essentially involves a dynamic of absorbing a loss that in a proper sense belongs to someone else. In the second research article, entitled “Cultural Hybridity, Theory, and Literary Realism,” I wanted to explore further questions of the in-between. The research that went into this article turned out to be fundamental in my understanding of “generational conflicts.” In the third research article, entitled “Realism and Reification in the Postcolonial World,” I attempted to pursue further some of the issues that I raised in the previous article, namely the desire for authenticity and a corresponding literary-aesthetic discourse, realism. This research was crucial in terms of understanding and evaluating the meaning of the larger theme of “questions of belonging.” Finally, in the fourth and final research article, entitled “Post-Migrant Subjectivity and Secondary Loss: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club,” I explored the notion of post-migrant subjectivity through a discussion of Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” and Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club. As stated in the result report, all initial goals and aims were reached within the two-year research period. Furthermore, a substantial part of the research was used in course material, lectures, seminars, and conference papers.