Consuming Desires: Melancholia and Consumption in Blu’s Hanging

The controversy surrounding the Association for Asian American Studies' decision to award its 1998 fiction prize to Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Blu's Hanging was a watershed moment in the field of Asian American studies. At issue was Yamanaka's depiction of the novel's libidinous villain, the Filipino American Uncle Paolo, since several members of the Asian American community criticized Yamanaka--and AAAS--for reproducing, rewarding, and thereby reaffirming a stereotypical portrait of a sexually-charged Filipino American predator. Following several protests, AAAS rescinded the prize, a decision that attracted publicity to the dispute and added to the growing debate within the field. In the aftermath of the controversy, however, Yamanaka's novel came to occupy a curious position in Asian American studies. While still criticized for its questionable politics, Blu's Hanging continues to be taught in Asian American studies classes, and both the novel and the dissent it provoked among critics have been discussed in several recent articles and monographs on Asian American literature. (1) Most recently, Crystal Parikh has proposed that alternative readings of the novel might be explored through the idea of "racial melancholia," a concept that focuses on the complex and circular task of negotiating grief; yet she argues that the characters' "seemingly uncontrollable consumption" of various alimentary and cultural products can only "fail to compensate" (202) for loss. The relationship between consumption and melancholia, however, is not solely negative, as demonstrated by the divergent ways that the characters' melancholia is informed by consumption and the manner in which this consumption lends itself to a melancholia that can be both socially productive and politically reactionary, or socially conservative but politically subversive. A reading of consumption into Blu's Hanging is particularly salient because the continued consumption and reinterpretation of the novel in Asian American criticism suggests that Blu's Hanging has come to manifest or exemplify an alternately idealized and demonized narrative of a particular image of Asian America--a circular, self-reflexive process that might itself be considered "melancholic." Just as the novel contains characters who try to "get over" their losses and those who cling adamantly to the painful past, its readers (and the Asian American community in general) may be divided between those who consume the book and eagerly celebrate its teleological resolution, and those who remember the pain--whether depicted in the novel or elicited by it--viscerally, and refuse to forget. From the opening lines of the first chapter, Blu's Hanging asserts an explicit link between acts of consumption and the process of mourning. Images of food and eating are juxtaposed with descriptions of the Ogata family's grief at the recent death of wife and mother Eleanor, whose absence causes the bottomless hunger and "cravings" (12) in her only son, Blu. Although his older sister Ivah unsuccessfully attempts to serve as her mother's surrogate by providing meals for the family, neither the extravagance of Blu's eating nor the resourcefulness exhibited by Ivah's poor cooking can adequately ease the pain caused by Eleanor's death. This pattern of melancholic consumption, repeated throughout the novel, traces the characters' attempts to deal with the inconsolable psychic loss made manifest in both the private dysfunction of the Ogata household and the social breakdown of the larger Kaunakakai community. Yamanaka's depiction of the violence, poverty, and cruelty of this local society works to contradict the myth of the idyllic island paradise and multiculturalist utopia of "mainland" American (and Asian American) fantasies; (2) in this context, the constant and repetitive consumption of food, medicines, and cultural products reveals the way that the novel's protagonists become consumers as a means of negotiating subjectivity within the boundaries of a society defined by the prior loss of an idealized past. …