Dark Continents

Khanna Ranjana Khanna

Description

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 howbringing 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 andpostcolonial 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, Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, Rene Menil, 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 ofdecolonization and postcoloniality.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 22 avril 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384588
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A John Hope Franklin Center Book

Post-Contemporary

Interventions

Series Editors:

Stanley Fish and

Fredric Jameson

DA R K C ON T I N EN T S

Psychoanalysis and Colonialism

        

Duke University Press

Durham and London 

© Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper 

Typeset in Bembo by Tseng

Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

For my parents Shyam Krishna Khanna and Prem Khanna (–)

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Worlding Psychoanalysis

G E N E A L O G I E S . Psychoanalysis and Archaeology . Freud in the Sacred Grove 

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C O L O N I A L R E S C R I P T I N G S . War, Decolonization, Psychoanalysis . Colonial Melancholy 

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H AU N T I N G A N D T H E F U T U R E . The Ethical Ambiguities of Transnational Feminism . Hamlet in the Colonial Archive  Coda: The Lament 

Notes Index

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

Contents

Preface

[As] the mute outside that sustains all systematicity; as a maternal and still silent ground that nourishes all foundations—she does not have to conform to the codes theory has set up for itself.—Luce Irigaray,Speculum of the Other Woman

Freud infamously referred to women’s sexuality as a ‘‘dark continent’’ for psychoanalysis. Within the continent of psychoanalysis made present by Freud lay this other continent that remained concealed. The map of it was yet to be drawn, or at least a sketchy map needed to be filled in. Not quite absent, it was present only in concealment and mysteriousness. This study takes Henry Morton Stanley’s metaphor for Africa and Freud’s metaphor for women’s sexuality and considers what it means to make colonialism and women the starting point of an investigation of psychoanalysis.Dark Continentsmakes use of psychoanalytic theory to perform this examination. What is at stake here is the status of psycho- analysis. While at times it is the object of investigation, it is also the pre- ferred theoretical mode of analysis. Reading psychoanalysis symptomati- cally allows me to understand it as a masculinist and colonialist discipline that promoted an idea of Western subjectivity in opposition to a colo- nized, feminine, and primitive other. Placing psychoanalysis in the world, and understanding the problematic differentiations that psychoanalysis fails to acknowledge, allows me to reconfigure its politics. If psychoanaly- sis at its Freudian inception and in various other incarnations presents the reader with a story of subjectivity in Western Europe, as I argue, placing