Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties

Warwick Anderson

4.1/5 ( ratings)

By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European and North American ideas about the colonial world and the character and potential of native cultures. Psychoanalytic discourse, from Freud’s description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” to his conceptualization of primitive societies and the origins of civilization, became inextricable from the ideologies underlying European expansionism. But as it was adapted in the colonies and then the postcolonies, psychoanalysis proved surprisingly useful for theorizing anticolonialism and postcolonial trauma. Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is colonial and psychoanalytic, but, until now, this intersection has scarcely been explored, much less examined in comparative perspective. Taking on that project, Unconscious Dominions assembles essays based on research in Australia, Brazil, France, Haiti, and Indonesia, as well as India, North Africa, and West Africa. Even as they reveal the modern psychoanalytic subject as constitutively colonial, they shed new light on how that subject went global: how people around the world came to recognize the hybrid configuration of unconscious, ego, and superego in themselves and others.

Contributors
Warwick Anderson
Alice Bullard
John Cash
Joy Damousi
Didier Fassin
Christiane Hartnack
Deborah Jenson
Richard C. Keller
Ranjana Khanna
Mariano Plotkin
Hans Pols

Language: English

Pages: 328

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Duke University Press Books

Release: October 03, 2011

ISBN: 0822349795

ISBN 13: 9780822349792

Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties

Warwick Anderson

4.1/5 ( ratings)

By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European and North American ideas about the colonial world and the character and potential of native cultures. Psychoanalytic discourse, from Freud’s description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” to his conceptualization of primitive societies and the origins of civilization, became inextricable from the ideologies underlying European expansionism. But as it was adapted in the colonies and then the postcolonies, psychoanalysis proved surprisingly useful for theorizing anticolonialism and postcolonial trauma. Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is colonial and psychoanalytic, but, until now, this intersection has scarcely been explored, much less examined in comparative perspective. Taking on that project, Unconscious Dominions assembles essays based on research in Australia, Brazil, France, Haiti, and Indonesia, as well as India, North Africa, and West Africa. Even as they reveal the modern psychoanalytic subject as constitutively colonial, they shed new light on how that subject went global: how people around the world came to recognize the hybrid configuration of unconscious, ego, and superego in themselves and others.

Contributors
Warwick Anderson
Alice Bullard
John Cash
Joy Damousi
Didier Fassin
Christiane Hartnack
Deborah Jenson
Richard C. Keller
Ranjana Khanna
Mariano Plotkin
Hans Pols

Language: English

Pages: 328

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Duke University Press Books

Release: October 03, 2011

ISBN: 0822349795

ISBN 13: 9780822349792

More books from Warwick Anderson

Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings

3.4/5 ( ratings)

Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia

Pacific Futures: Past and Present

Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia

The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen

Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century

Spectacles of Waste

The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen

Spectacles of Waste

Rate this book!

Write a review?