Psychoanalytic theory has been the critical instrument of choice for colonial critics. This book examines why critics who are otherwise suspicious of Western forms of knowledge are drawn to psychoanalytic theories, and whether it is possible to use such theories without reproducing the colonial discourse that also structures psychoanalytic thought.
Sigmund Freud infamously referred to women's sexuality as a “dark continent” for psychoanalysis, drawing on colonial explorer Henry Morton Stanley’s use of the same phrase to refer to Africa. While the problematic universalism of psychoanalysis led theorists to reject its relevance for postcolonial critique, Ranjana Khanna boldly shows how bringing psychoanalysis, colonialism, and women together can become the starting point of a postcolonial feminist theory. Psychoanalysis brings to light, Khanna argues, how nation-statehood for the former colonies of Europe institutes the violence of European imperialist history. Far from rejecting psychoanalysis, Dark Continents reveals its importance as a reading practice that makes visible the psychical strife of colonial and postcolonial modernity. Assessing the merits of various models of nationalism, psychoanalysis, and colonialism, it refashions colonial melancholy as a transnational feminist ethics. Khanna traces the colonial backgrounds of psychoanalysis from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century up to the present. Illuminating Freud’s debt to the languages of archaeology and anthropology throughout his career, Khanna describes how Freud altered his theories of the ego as his own political status shifted from Habsburg loyalist to Nazi victim. Dark Continents explores how psychoanalytic theory was taken up in Europe and its colonies in the period of decolonization following World War II, focusing on its use by a range of writers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Octave Mannoni, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Wulf Sachs, and Ellen Hellman. Given the multiple gendered and colonial contexts of many of these writings, Khanna argues for the necessity of a postcolonial, feminist critique of decolonization and postcoloniality.
An oft-neglected element of postcolonial thought is the explicitly psychological dimension of many of its foundational texts. This unprecedented volume explores the relation between these two disciplines by treating the work of a variety of anti-colonial authors as serious psychological contributions to the theorization of racism and oppression. This approach demonstrates the pertinence of postcolonial thought for critical social psychology and opens up novel perspectives on a variety of key topics in social psychology. These include: the psychology of embodiment and racialization resistance strategies to oppression 'extra-discursive’ facets of racism the unconscious dimension of stereotypes the intersection of psychological and symbolic modalities of power. In addition, the book makes a distinctive contribution to the field of postcolonial studies by virtue of its eclectic combination of authors drawn from anti-apartheid, psychoanalytic and critical social theory traditions, including Homi Bhabha, Steve Biko, J.M. Coetzee, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, Chabani Manganyi and Slavoj Żiżek. The South African focus serves to emphasize the ongoing historical importance of the anti-apartheid struggle for today’s globalized world. A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial is an invaluable text for social psychology and sociology students enrolled in courses on racism or cultural studies. It will also appeal to postgraduates, academics and anyone interested in psychoanalysis in relation to societal and political issues.
Postcolonial Lack reconvenes dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory in order to expand the range of cultural analyses of the former and make the latter theoretically relevant to the demands of contemporary narratives of othering, exclusion, and cultural appropriation. Seeking to resolve the mutual suspicion between the disciplines, Gautam Basu Thakur draws out the connections existing between Lacan's teachings on subjectivity and otherness and writings of postcolonial and decolonial theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and Homi Bhabha. By developing new readings of the marginalized other as radical impasse and pushing the envelope on neoliberal identity politics, the book moves postcolonial studies away from the perennial topic of identity and difference and into examining the form and function of the other as excess--surplus and/or lack--in colonial and postcolonial literature, film, and social discourse. Looking at writings by Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, Leila Aboulela, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Katherine Boo, and films by Gillo Pontecorvo, Clint Eastwood, Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), and Tony Gatlif, Basu Thakur highlights a new set of ethical and political considerations emerging as a direct result of this shift and stakes a fundamental rethinking of postcoloniality through what he calls the "politics of ontological discordance."
Published twenty years ago, Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory was a landmark description of the field of postcolonial studies in theoretical terms that set its intellectual context alongside poststructuralism, postmodernism, Marxism, and feminism. Gandhi examined the contributions of major thinkers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and the subaltern historians. The book pointed to postcolonialism’s relationship with earlier anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and M. K. Gandhi and explained pertinent concepts and schools of thought—hybridity, Orientalism, humanism, Marxist dialectics, diaspora, nationalism, gendered subalternity, globalization, and postcolonial feminism. The revised edition of this classic work reaffirms its status as a useful starting point for readers new to the field and as a provocative account that opens up possibilities for debate. It includes substantial additions: A new preface and epilogue reposition postcolonial studies within evolving intellectual contexts and take stock of important critical developments. Gandhi examines recent alliances with critical race theory and Africanist postcolonialism, considers challenges from postsecular and postcritical perspectives, and takes into account the ontological, environmental, affective, and ethical turns in the changed landscape of critical theory. She describes what is enduring in postcolonial thinking—as a critical perspective within the academy and as an attitude to the world that extends beyond the discipline of postcolonial studies.
What can psychoanalysis offer contemporary arguments in the fields of feminism, queer theory and postcolonialism? Jan Campbell introduces and analyses the way that psychoanalysis has developed and made problematic models of subjectivity linked to issues of sexuality, ethnicity, gender and history. Via discussions of such influential and diverse figures as Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva, Dollimore, Bhabha, Morrison and Walker, Campbell uses psychoanalysis as a mediatory tool in a range of debates across the human sciences, whilst also arguing for a transformation of psychoanalytic theory itself. Alert to the issues at stake in either a wholesale acceptance of rejection of psychoanalysis, Campbell offers the possibility of a re-negotiated interpretation of the symbolic system as a necessary and valuable intervention in cultural theory.
Authors Salman Rushdie, Jamaica Kincaid, Darryl Pinckney, and Bharati Mukherjee report from the same No Man’s Land, the shadowland between the traditional worlds of colonizer and colonized and the 21st century’s global monoculture. In Regenerative Fictions, Alexandra W. Schultheis brings postcolonial and psychoanalytic theories together to explore this tumultuous zone, a place that is at once cutting edge, open wound, and sutured scar. This analysis of the authors’ political and aesthetic strategies reveals fissures in the ruling ideology of subject and nation as well as immanent resistance to it.
The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies applies developments in cognitive science to a wide range of literary texts that span multiple historical periods and numerous national literary traditions.
Closely paralleling the history of psychology is the history of its critics, their theories, and their contributions. The Critique of Psychology is the first book to trace this alternate history, from a unique perspective that complements the many existing empirical, theoretical, and social histories of the field. Thomas Teo cogently synthesizes major historical and theoretical narratives to describe two centuries of challenges to—and the reactions of—the mainstream. Some of these critiques of content, methodology, relevance, and philosophical worldview have actually influenced and become integrated into the canon; others pose moral questions still under debate. All are accessibly presented so that readers may judge their value for themselves: - Kant’s critique of rational and empirical psychology at the end of the 18th century - The natural-scientific critique of philosophical psychology in the 19th century - The human-scientific critique of natural-scientific psychology - The Marxist traditions of critique - Feminist and postmodern critiques and the contemporary mainstream - Postcolonial critiques and the shift from cross-cultural to multicultural psychology This is not a book of critique for critique’s sake: Teo defines the field as a work in progress with goals that are evolving yet constant. In emphasizing ethical and political questions faced by psychology as a discipline, this visionary book points students, academics, and practitioners toward new possibilities for their shared future.
