melancholic migrants - those who can't "let go"
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Ahmed explains Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia in that melancholia is the inability to "let go" of grief. This idea of letting go is continuous throughout the text. To achieve happiness, Jess in Bend it Like Beckam must let go of her family's cultural "impositions" and pressures. She must also let go of her hurt and emotion resulting from her encounters with racism, which she does. Jess is depicted as the model migrant or "happy object," as Ahmed writes, because she accepts the gift of empathy and the gift of heterosexual love from her white male coach. Ahmed indicates the significance of heterosexuality, as well as the proximity to whiteness that Jess achieves by entering this interracial relationship.
Jess's parents, on the other hand, cling to their melancholia and hurtful experiences withe racism. While Jess can "put racism behind her," her father is unable to limiting himself to a status of "melancholic migrant" instead of a "happy object" like his daughter. This expectation of the migrant to display gratitude to the imperial, colonial entity is imperative not only to the migrant's individual happiness, but to the happiness of the nation. So, in order to successfully integrate, the migrant must serve the colonial nation by forgetting its violent history and remembering the past as "happy."
Ahmed asserts that happiness has been used as a colonial tool, and it continues to permeate contemporary colonial national identity. Native peoples were required to accept the imposed happiness of the colonizer, and migrants must do the same to assimilate into these nations.