Transition 115

Iu Press Journals

Description

Published three times per year by Indiana University Press for the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. This issue of Transition focuses on "Mad." The editors look at connections between blackness and psychology, examining Richard Wright's attempts to bring clinical psychotherapy to Harlem and revealing the links between schizophrenia and fears of black "psychos." As Ferguson, Missouri becomes the latest community to rage against the state-sanctioned murder of unarmed black men, we ask what James Baldwin and Stokely Carmichael might have to tell us about why African Americans continue to be pushed to the margins of American society. The editors also examine the marginalized community of black Palestinians, doubly imperiled by Israeli slaughter and internal racism. And finally, on a lighter note, discover music and art that we're "mad" about—from Otis Redding and Vijay Iyer to Kara Walker and Christopher Cozier.

Sujets

• Popular Culture
• African
• History of art
• African people
• ART

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253018564
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

TRANSITION
Transition was founded in 1961 in Uganda by the late Rajat Neogy and quickly established itself as a leading forum for intellectual debate. The first series of issues developed a reputation for tough-minded, far-reaching criticism, both cultural and political, and this series carries on the tradition .
TRANSITION 115
AN INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
Editors
Tommie Shelby
Glenda Carpio
Vincent Brown
Visual Arts Editor
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Managing Editor
Sara Bruya
Acting Managing Editor
Adam McGee
Image Assistant
Amanda Lanham
Publishers
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Henry Louis Gates, Jr .
Senior Advisory Editor
F. Abiola Irele
Advisory Editors
Laurie Calhoun
Brent Hayes Edwards
Henry Finder
Michael C. Vazquez
Chairman of the Editorial Board
Wole Soyinka
Editorial Board
Elizabeth Alexander
Houston A. Baker, Jr .
Suzanne Preston Blier
Laurent Dubois
bell hooks
Paulin Hountondji
Biodun Jeyifo
Jamaica Kincaid
Achille Mbembe
Toni Morrison
Micere M. Githae Mugo
Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Eve Troutt Powell
Cornel West
William Julius Wilson
CONTENTS
Race and Psychology Transition seeks the intersection between blackness and the world of clinical psychology .
Introduction
by Carina del Valle Schorske
An Underground Extension of Democracy
Before he became infamous for his crusade against comic books, Dr. Fredric Wertham collaborated with Richard Wright to found Harlem s Lafargue Clinic. Gabriel Mendes recounts the history and successes of this early attempt to provide accessible psychological care to the black community
Controllin the Planet
Tying it to the trope of madness in rap music, Jonathan Metzl details how schizophrenia came to be defined as a mental illness, and how it was never far from folk notions of race-based pathology
Breaking the Chains of Stigma
Celebrated photojournalist Robin Hammond shares photos from his project Condemned, which documents human rights abuses against mentally ill Africans, often by their families, caregivers, and those entrusted with their healing
Insights from Black Psychoanalysts Speak
In Carina del Valle Schorske s reflection on two major conferences, nearly a dozen leading black psychoanalysts share how being African American has-or hasn t-shaped their clinical practices and approaches to psychoanalysis
James Baldwin, 1963, and the House that Race Built
Although the activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X continues to receive the most attention, Fredrick Harris argues that James Baldwin is better situated to explain why black Americans continue to be pressed to the margins of American society
Related Somehow to Africa
Women s rights activist jewel bush shares insights about global blackness gained through her friendship with Samra, a member of the marginalized and oft-mistreated community of black Palestinians
Black Power Beyond the Slogan
Yohuru Williams interviews Peniel Joseph about his new book Stokely: A Life and his decision to focus his recent scholarship on Stokely Carmichael, the elusive and controversial Prime Minister of the Black Panthers
The Enigma of Arrival Fiction
by Kabu Okai-Davies
Docking Time
Undertaking a detailed exegesis of (Sittin On) The Dock of the Bay, Irene Yoon speculates about why Otis Redding s last song was such a crossover success, and what it might tell us about a great talent whose life was cut tragically short
Spellbound and Sacrosanct
The celebrated jazz musician, composer, and professor of music Vijay Iyer talks with Krishna Lewis about his musical influences and the implications of being an Indian American adept of a black American musical genre
The Sweet Tooth of Slavery
Finding links between Tarantino s Django Unchained and Kara Walker s A Subtlety, Catherine Keyser looks at how metaphors of sweetness and delectability shaped white understanding of black bodies in the slave economy of the South s Sugar Kingdom
Put your hand in the air
Lara Stein Pardo reviews artist Christopher Cozier s recent Art Basel Miami exhibition , The Arrest, exploring how it comments on themes of mass incarceration and the tension between the real Caribbean and the imagined Caribbean of touristic fantasies
Cover : Illuminary Luminating (detail). Mixed media collage on paper. 50 50 in. Courtesy of Derrick Adams and Hales Gallery, London. 2013 Derrick Adams.
Race Psychology
guest edited by Carina del Valle Schorske

Illuminary Luminating (detail). Mixed media collage on paper. 50 x 50 in. Courtesy of Derrick Adams and Hales Gallery, London. 2013 Derrick Adams.
Introduction
Carina del Valle Schorske
I N HIS EXCAVATION of the history of the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, Gabriel Mendes enters into the paradox of a world in which the mental health of African Americans was either an invisible, underground absence or something over which many professionals in the human sciences obsessed. He is describing the United States of the midcentury, but this paradox has proven remarkably durable both in the Americas and in other historically colonial cultures. Both perspectives deny the connection between mind and world that is the ground zero of mental health.
But even when this connection is denied or attacked, it continues to communicate a powerful charge. Jonathan Metzl s deep reading of the trope of schizophrenia in rap music elaborates this wisdom: if racism is, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, a mass psychosis, then black madness-whether inborn or bred, clinical or metaphorical-is not only a natural response to this psychosis, but an argument about the natural responsiveness between self and society, minority and majority.
Robin Hammond exposes the nightmarish side of this feedback loop in his documentation of the lives of the mentally ill in South Sudan and Somalia. It is always a risk to disseminate images of this nature, reinforcing, as they seem to, notions of African abjection. But the inhumanity he witnesses is not just an African problem. In the United States, the prison of Rikers Island has the notorious distinction of being the largest psychiatric institution in the nation; 4,000 of its 11,000 inmates have been diagnosed with a mental illness. In July of this year, the New York Times published an investigative report on the rampant guard-on-inmate violence that takes place at Rikers, aimed disproportionately at those suffering from psychological conditions: brutal punishments for suicide attempts and stomach-turning incidents like the following, in which correctional officers handcuffed [inmate Andre Lane] to a gurney and transported him to a clinic examination room beyond the range of video cameras where, witnesses say, several guards beat him as members of the medical staff begged for them to stop. Accounts like this dispel any defensive instinct to say that the people shackled to the ground in Hammond s photographs are an African anomaly. In the absence of activist institutions like the Lafargue Clinic, imprisonment steps in as the most primitive-and most ubiquitous-method of responding to populations that inconveniently express or fail to tolerate conditions of war, poverty, and oppression.
Against the worst case scenario of Hammond s photographs and the broader abuse they represent, the questions raised by practicing mental health clinicians in this section s final round table acquire special urgency. Psychoanalysis might seem ill-equipped to respond to the wartime traumas of South Sudan, or the suicidal thoughts of Rikers Island inmates held in solitary confinement. Institutionally, it is. But methodologically, expanding access to clinical practices that emphasize the complex interiority of the individual can serve as an indispensable corrective to psychiatric practices that continue to view black people struggling with mental health as specimens to be catalogued, manipulated, analyzed, and incarcerated. As the founders of the Lafargue Clinic advised their clinicians in training, [The patient s] own formulations-rather than yours-can be very enlightening. The genre of the testimonial both confirms and cultivates the agency necessary to work for broader change. The round table summarized here can serve as an example. The only demand made by the organizers of Black Psychoanalysts Speak was that black psychoanalysts, well, speak about their personal experiences in the profession. But personal testimony turns quickly to political critique and possibilities for reform where personhood is acknowledged to be a communal collaboration.

Fredric Wertham, M.D., April 1954 . Photo Credit: Gordon Parks. 2014 The Gordon Parks Foundation.
An Underground Extension of Democracy
The Lafargue Clinic and the promise of antiracist psychiatry
Gabriel Mendes
I N N ATIVE S ON (1940), Richard Wright told the story of Bigger Thomas and changed the way a vast swathe of white Americans saw the black men in their midst. Bigger Thomas is, of course, well known: he is a young product of urbanization, resulting from the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the cities of the North. An aimless, poor, petty criminal, he takes a job as a chauffeur for one of the wealthiest families in Chicago, the Daltons. One night, Bigger must escort Mary, the drunken daughter of his boss, to her bedroom. When Mary s blind mother appears in the bedroom, Bigger becomes so fearful of being caught in the white girl s bedroom that he accidentally smothers Mary to stifle her possible screams. To dispose of