1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910812565703321

Autore

Tuhkanen Mikko <1967->

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Albany, : State University of New York Press, c2009

ISBN

1-4384-2773-5

1-4416-2407-4

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (259 p.)

Collana

SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture

Disciplina

308.800973

Soggetti

Racism - United States - History

Race awareness - United States - History

Psychoanalysis - United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

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.