The American optic : psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and Richard Wright / Mikko Tuhkanen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tuhkanen, Mikko, 1967-

Series:

SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Racism--United States--History.

Racism.

Race awareness--United States--History.

Race awareness.

Psychoanalysis--United States.

Psychoanalysis.

Wright, Richard, 1908-1960.

Wright, Richard.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (259 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The American Optic charts new territory in the relationship of psychoanalysis to critical race studies. Focusing on the work of Richard Wright and Jacques Lacan, it explore the political and ethical implications of psychoanalysis for African American and other diasporic African cultural texts. Mikko Tuhkanen develops a theory of "racialization" that recasts the genealogy of the Western concept of racial difference as outlined by critical race theory, through the theory of the real, which Lacan developed in his later work. By engaging a wide array of resources—including the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Frantz Fanon, as well as nineteenth-century slave narratives and studies of blackface minstrelsy—Tuhkanen not only illuminates the unexpectedly rich connections between Lacanian psychoanalysis and black literary and cultural studies, but also demonstrates the ways in which the artistic and political traditions of the African diaspora allow us to reinvent the Lacanian ethics of becoming.

Contents:

A (b)igger's place : the 'racial' subject in the white symbolic order

The grimace of the real : of paranoid knowledge and Black(face) magic

Unforeseeable tragedies : symbolic change in Wright, Fanon, and Lacan

The optical trade : through southern spectacles

Avian alienation : writing and flying in Wright and Lacan.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781438427737

1438427735

9781441624079

1441624074

OCLC:

456071084