Making a primal scene: Race, psychoanalysis, and representation.

摘要

Literary texts on race frequently present dramatic, specular scenes involving photographs, mirrors, or traumatic acts of witnessing that precipitate a character's "discovery" of race. Although these "stock scenes of racial discovery" depict a visual event, characters assume a racial identity not so much by seeing skin color as by learning its cultural significance. In such scenes, the self is simultaneously defamiliarized and reconstituted within the cultural discourse on race. In representing racial acculturation through such visual crises, these specular moments both parallel and complicate psychoanalytic claims that subjectivity forms in response to visual trauma. For Freud, gender identity arises from primal scenes and other anatomical sightings. Lacan locates the birth of self-perception in the mirror stage. This project juxtaposes American literary works by Frederick Douglass, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison with texts of psychoanalytic theory in order to examine how race and gender intersect in forming identity. I begin with a chapter on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, a text which provides a theoretical model for interrogating the intersections of racial subjectivity and social power.;Although psychoanalysis and the politics of racial difference have generally been considered incompatible, I argue that African American and psychoanalytic theories can be mutually informing. A modernist discourse of subjectivity, classic psychoanalysis emphasizes gender and sexuality as the determining factors of social organization and individual development. Furthermore, psychoanalytic theory has tended to describe psychology in terms of universal frameworks that ignore cultural and historical specificity. By considering the politics of race in psychic development, I aim to address psychoanalysis's historic inattention to race, to extend psychoanalysis beyond the scope of its early twentieth-century European origins, and to ground analysis of subjectivity in a material and social context. In turn, psychoanalysis provides African American theory with a vocabulary for articulating the construction of raced subjectivity. I appropriate this vocabulary to describe how individuals internalize, negotiate, and resist racial identities in particular cultural contexts.