All the feelings and emotions in American from the mid-20th century to the present.
Melancholia
Shame
Anger/Rage
Fear/Paranoia
Hope
The Bluest Eye 
Toni Morrison
The story happens in Lorain, Ohio in 1941 after the Great Depression. It narrates the story of a young African-American girl named Pecola who grows up during the years following the Great Depression. Due to her mannerisms and dark skin, she is consistently regarded as "ugly". Therefore, she develops an inferiority complex, which fuels her desire for the blue eyes of the white people which she considers as "whiteness" and "beauty". Eventually, the abominable family environment drives her crazy, and she gets her longing "blue eyes" in her own fantasy.
Link to "Shame": The shame and self-contempt transfers between generations of the Breedlove, especially Pecola and her father Cholly. Shame is the major factor in their lives causing them to incorrectly recognize themselves, leading to tragedy of the whole family and future generations.
"Shame can be transferred between generations."
The Woman Warrior
Maxine Kingston
The book blends Kingston's autobiography with what Kingston purports to be old Chinese folktales, though Kingston never mentions her own name in the book. Kingston illustrates the culture clash and struggle of early Chinese immigrants in America, while they still remain strong attachment to China.
By telling the stories of Chinese woman, Kingston focuses on telling the characteristics and quality of Chinese females in traditional China and modern America.
Link to Racial Melancholia
Characters's alienation to traditional Chinese culture and China becomes the ghosts which harass them constantly. The narrator feels depress in native school with children of other races, but feels alive and happy within the collective of Chinese, though she is trying her best to fit in American society and culture.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz
The book talks about the life of a Dominican American boy Oscar de León, who is obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels and with falling in love, as well as the curse that has plagued his family for generations. The fate and curse of him and his whole family is closely connected to the Dominican Republic experience under dictator Rafael Trujillo. Eventually Oscar is dead because of his longing for a real love.
Link to Decolonial Love
The novel focuses on the viewpoint of diaspora from the Dominican Republic. "Decolonial Love" is a critic point of the novel. Although all Dominican characters are not in Dominica any more, their lives and fates are deeply bind to Dominica.
Link to shame and Melancholia
In his childhood, Oscar is betrayed by his lover, which brings him shame and inferiority. Since then, Oscar loses the masculinity that Dominican males should have. The loose connection between Oscar and his culture gradually destroys his life.
Racial
With Shame and Decolonial Love
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid
The novel tells the story of break up of a Pakistani young man Changez's American dream around 9/11 event and his regain of underlying attachment to his home country Pakistan.
Changez was a admirer of America. He tried to fit in the mainstream American society and fell in love with a charming American girl Erica. However, he constantly feels the alienation to the environment of society and workplace, and his lover Erica. After 9/11 event, the break up with Erica, and the journey in Chile, he realizes his "betray" to his home country and decides to go home and contribute to his country.
Link to Fear/Paranoia:
Changez's firstly does not completely realize his underlying fear towards America. He can only feel his alienation to the surrounding. However, the fear from surroundings created by 9/11 event makes him realize his fear towards the essentially strange environment-America.
Get Out
Jordan Peele
The film tells the story of an African American Chris's escape from the conspiracy of a white clan. One day, Chris's white girlfriend invites him to visit her family in the suburban area during the weekend. Arriving there, Chris is pleasant to find that Rose family is quite kind to the black Americans. However, later he finds out that they are actually the organizers of "The Coagula" plan, which transplants the brain of white people into the black people's body. Eventually he kills all family members of Rose and escape from the villa with his friend Rod.
The film subtly fit the racial issues into horror elements. The considerable contrast between the illusion of the Armitage's goodwill and their persecution on the black reflect the underlying racial issue in the reality.
Link to Fear/Paranoia:
Chris's fear towards white and trauma in childhood are important factors in the film. His fear turns into his anger after finding out the truth. His trauma becomes his weakness which is used by the Armitage to controls him.
Link to Anger/Rage
The betrayal of Rose, Chris's lover and the most important character of him, deeply hurts him and makes him angry. The persecution of the white on his other Black people also makes him angry about their guilt.
Twilight: Los Angeles 1992
Anna Deavere Smith
The film shows people's reactions and comments from different races and collective toward 1992 Los Angeles Riots. By playing roles of mobsters, innocent victim, government officers and so son, Deavere Smith demonstrates the complex racial issue in the American society.
The direct cause of the riot is the edited video of police brutality, showing four white police officers fiercely beating the Black Rodney King and later acquittal of these four police officers. Also, the death of an African American teenager Latasha Harlins shoot by a Korean storekeeper Soon Ja Du raised the anger between different races.
Link to Anger/Rage
The video does not only illustrate the police brutally, but also reminds people of slavery and lynch in the past. Later, the acquittal of four police officers is considered as the official 'racial discrimination' and injustice by the black Americans. The injustice and discrimination raise the anger among African Americans. Then, they show their anger by destroying their own communities and innocent people's
Can Hope be Disappointed?
Ernst Bloch
This paper argues that every kind and degree of hope can be disappointed, since every life is full of unrealized dreams. As a result, this wholly or mostly imaginary construct can fall aprat, with no harm done
Cruising Utopia
José Esteban Muñoz
The paper argues the concept of Queerness relating to the future
"The center of Cruising Utopia is the idea of hope, which is both a critical affect and a methodology."
Link to Hope:
"Cruising Utopia not only asks readers to reconsider ideas such as hope and utopia but also challenges them to feel hope and to feel utopia, which is to say challenges them to approach the queer critique from a renewed and newly animated sense of the social, carefully cruising for the varied potentialities that may abound within that field."--Krizia Puig
Poetry is not a Luxury
Audre Lorde
The paper argues that women has the potential and creativity, which is deep, dark, and ancient, to use poetry to express their ideas and free themselves. Poetry should not be a Luxury that is reachless.
Link to Hope
"Poetry is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before."
Poetry is a tool to give woman hope for the future. Woman use them to fulfill their dreams and pursue their freedom of mind.
The Affective Politics of Fear
Sara Ahmed
The paper argues the utilization of fear as a tool or policy to form the recognition in the mind of people in one side against the other side.
It first applies an example of the white creating the horrible and evil image of the black to oppress the black. Then it argues the relationship between fear and anxiety and their effects on individual body. Finally, it demonstrates the application of fear policy in the real world, using the example of 9/11 event.
Link to "The Reluctant Fundamentalist":
"Fear re-establishes distance between bodies whose difference is read off the surface, as a reading which produces the surface(shivering, recolouring). "
The difference in physical appearance between Changez and other Americans, like skin color, accent, and mustache creates the mutual fear in both sides.
"Fear works to restrict some bodies through the movement or expansion of others."
The underlying alienation of Erica and the society restrains Changez's pursue in American Dream, forces him to rebuild his connection with his home country.
Link to "Get Out":
"Fear projects us from the present into a future. "
The strange environment and black people in the suburban area creates the fear in Chris's mind, making him worry about the future and want to get out. The expression is that Chris feels nervous in front of a group of white people.
Shame and Its Sisters
Author: Silvan Tomkins
The paper argues the relationship between shame-humiliation and contempt-disgust and the significant effects of them on self-consciousness and physical body of a person.
Link to "The Bluest Eye":
Pecola's father, Cholly was humiliated by white hunters when he was young and having sex with a girl. Later, when he was facing his original father, he was deeply humiliated again by his father. From then on, shame and self-contempt were stuck with him.
Moreover, Pecola is humiliated a Mulatto Maureen when she shows her contempt and discrimination on the black's appearance after pretending to be nice. According to,
"Shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation."
"If the ashamed, defeated, hopeless parent is internalized, the child’s shame response may be continually activated by the discouraged, ashamed, internalized face and head of the parent"
"One must have expected good things to have come from the other person before the other’s contempt produces shame."
Link to The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao
"Shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul"
The humiliation from the betrayal of the girl continuously tortures Oscar throughout his life. He cannot get rid of his weakness and timidity because of the shame in childhood.
Mourning and Melancholia
Sigmund Freud
Freud argues the definitions and explanations of mourning and melancholia in his paper. Then, he concentrates on arguing the significant difference between mourning and Melancholia.
While "Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. ", "The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment."
Link to The Woman Warrior
After Moon Orchid's husband breaks Moon Orchid's heart, she is in the deep mourning because her husband is her important emotional attachment
Link to The brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
After the shame and humiliation left in Childhood, Oscar is in the light Melancholia. His love towards female is tortuous, morbid, and paranoid. He even falls in love with a whore, facing the threat from her violent boyfriend.
A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia
David Eng & Shinhee Han
Analyzing the group experience and cultural production of Asian Americans, mainly Chinese, Eng and Han argues methods by which a more speculative approach to psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice might offer a deeper understanding of Asian American mental health issues.
Link to The Woman Warrior:
"Society denies Asian Americans, especially Chinese early, as American citizens."
The narrator and other Chinese children are not recognized as Americans in the school. Teachers do not like them, and do not allow them to speak Chinese in school. Thus, "They remain at an unattainable distance, at one a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal."
Link to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:
"Suspended assimilation into mainstream culture not only may involve severe personal consequences; ultimately, it also constitutes the foundation for a type of national melancholia, a national haunting, with negative social effects."
Dominican immigrants remain somehow connection with Dominica. However, they are also not a solid part of America Society. They are outsiders of both their home country and new country. In the story, Belicia is the immigrant that bridges the Dominican Republic with the United States in the novel. However, her children feel the effect of the diasporic movement as well. Belicia, Oscar and Lola all seem to be on a quest to find where they belong.
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
Gloria Anzaldua
Anzaldua talks about her love and insistence on her home culture and language. White teachers forbids Mexicans to speak Spanish in the school. However, Anzaldua considers it as the oppression towards her culture. Speaking Spanish makes her feel the deep attachment to her country and culture.
Link to The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao:
Both Anzaldua and Oscar are outsiders of their own countries as well as in the new country. They both feel the alienation to their country, while they still pursue the culture of countries. Anzaldua insists on speaking Spanish, and Oscar looking for love to regain his masculinity.
Link to The Woman Warrior
As Anzaldua is told not to speak Spanish in school, Narrator and other Chinese students are told not to speak Chinese in school. However, they both feel the power and pleasant by speaking their home language.
Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination
Bell Hooks
The paper mainly argues the representation of white people in the perspective of the black people. The author thinks that the black internalize the discrimination from the white so that they consider themselves as the inferior and do not realize the separation of the whiteness from them.
"Systems of domination, imperialism, colonialism, and racism actively coerce black folks to internalize negative perceptions of blackness, to be self-hating. "
"Collectively black people remain rather silent about representations of whiteness in the black imagination."
Link to "The bluest eye"
"Black people learned to appear before whites as though they were zombies, not appear uppity"
Pauline Breedlove, the mother of Pecola, lavishes her love on the Fishers, her generous white employers, while her own family falls apart. She sacrifice her family for the appreciation from the white.
Pecola internalizes the discrimination from the white to her shame.
Link to "Notes of a Native Son"
"White people were regarded as terrorists, especially those who dared to enter that segregated space of blackness. "
The white teacher who is trying to teach the protagonist at home in Notes of a Native son is deeply untrusted by his father
Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin
Baldwin talks about African Americans' attitude toward 1943 Harlem Riots through the first-person perspective of a African American. First, he talks about the story of his father and his relationship with him. Father does not trust the white and has the hatred towards them until his death. He cannot understand his father's hatred until he meets the racial discrimination by himself.
By referring to the thought of an African American, Baldwin demonstrate the reason for African Americans' rage in Harlem Riots.
Link to Twilight: Los Angeles 1992:
"They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly."
Although the video showing police brutality is edited, people still choose to believe that it is the authentic fact because it gives them a reason to express their anger.
Link to Get Out:
“There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood.”
Chris's anger is activated by the persecution of the Armitage on African Americans
Link to Aptness of Anger
Both paper argues the aptness of anger when facing the injustice, especially about the racial issue.
Beyond Anger
Martha Nussbaum
This paper argues that anger is the most violent emotion which will cause the significant feedback. Even "when people acknowledge anger’s destructive tendencies, they still so often cling to it, seeing it as a strong emotion, connected to self-respect and manliness. " In the end, Nussbaum applies Mandela as an example to provide a prudent means to deal with the anger.
Link to Twilight: Los Angeles 1992:
"Anger is a response to a significant damage to something or someone one cares about, and a damage that the angry person believes to have been wrongfully inflicted. "
African Americans care about the justice that they want-the penalty of those four police officers. However, the acquittal of them completely breaks the justice that they are longing for. Thus, their response is riot with anger and rage.
Link to Get Out:
"Anger wants some type of payback."
The betrayal of Rose makes Chris feel disappointed and angry. For the betrayal, Chris want the payback from Rose. He wants her to suffer from her betrayal, so he kills her
The Aptness of Anger
Amia Srinivasan
In the paper, Srinivasan "grant the counterproductivity critic’s empirical supposition that anger generally makes things worse, in order to focus on occasions where anger would be counterproductive but nonetheless apt." Then, she gives out an instance of anger tobe apt and descirbes the nature of the normative conflict presented by occasions for apt counterproductive anger as an invidious choice betwee nmaking the world as it should be and affectively appreciating the world as it is.
Link to Twilight:Los Angeles 1992:
"Anger presents its object as involving a moral violation: not just a violation of how one wishes things where, but a violation of how things out to be."
African Americans believe that these four police officers should be punished because it is the justice that they want. They are not begging or wishing the court to give police officers penalty.
Link to Get Out
"Victims of injustice must chose between making the world as it should be, and appreciating and marking the world as it is."
Chris must choose either to be controlled by his childhood trauma or kill the Armitage. Killing people is a tough choice for Chris, since he has never killed anyone before.
Link to Beyond Anger
Srinivasan suggests that Nussbaum takes the role of sympathizer and criticize those people who chooses anger while facing the injustice without considering their conflicts between accept the injustice and fight back.
Moving Politics
Deborah Gould
The paper argues the strategic of motivating anger and grief applied by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an international organization helping AIDS people get help and attention from the society.
"ACT UP motivates the anger inside people to protest against the government"
ACT UP turns AIDS people's grief on their friends' death into anger, and then turns their anger into action against the government's ignorance. For example, they convince people to deposit AIDS people’s ashes on the White House lawn and hold political funerals in streets of New York.
Previously, AIDS Queers are separated from AIDS “innocent people”-children, hemophiliacs, and other ostensibly straight. ACT UP Activists reconfigured Queers' feelings. They encourage Queers to unite against the government.
"Lesbians and gay men angrily fighting back were righteous and responsible, and rather than feeling ashamed, they should feel proud of both their sexual practices and their confrontational activism. Government should be shame."
Link to Anger/Rage:
"Members repeatedly exhorted one another to feel their anger."
ACT UP utilizes people's anger, which is a violent moral weapon, to fight against the government.
Interview with Gran Fury
Douglas Crimp
The interview between Crimp and organizers of Gran Fury reveals the story and rules of Gran Fury and "Art as tools to change people’s mind on AIDS."
One purpose of Gran Fury is to raise questions during the catastrophe of AIDS. They want the mainstream society to pay attention to minor AIDS people.
However, eventually the stop of ACT UP was the result of frustration with their inability to find a means to continue working. They do not find any other means to change the mainstream attitude towards AIDS people and queers.
Link to Anger/Rage:
Artworks in Gran Fury express AIDS people's anger on the ignorance from the government and mainstream society.
Link to Moving Politics:
Gran Fury collaborates with ACT UP to propagandize the information for AIDS people