The Unconscious and Antiblackness

This seminar will provide participants with an overview of psychoanalytic cultural studies, with primary attention paid toward antiblack racism. Moving through and beyond its overt occurrences as stereotypes and explicit biases, the central inquiry is: What makes antiblackness enduring, so uniquely reconfigured, and uncontrollable as an unconscious process? This course begins by establishing key conceptual frameworks in psychoanalysis such as fantasy, projection, repression, and sexuality—engaging the work of Jacques Lacan, David Marriott, Hortense Spillers, and Frantz Fanon. We will also engage Black literature and film as well as queer and feminist thought that approach the antiblack unconscious in a different tune, yet no less attentive to the enigmatic effects of antiblackness. Students will develop the skills to engage with discourses on the unconscious and antiblackness and analyze the racialized undercurrents of contemporary culture. WRIT course, no prerequisites.