Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory

Originally broadcast: 23 July, 2021. Total length of recording: 1 hr 3 mins.

The Freud Museum is honoured to welcome scholars Sheldon George and Derek Hook to discuss their groundbreaking co-edited publication, Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory (2021).

In the past year, racism and identity have been at the forefront of socio-political debates and demonstrations worldwide. It has led many of us to address uncomfortable truths about inequality in contemporary society as well as colonial histories of our ancestors and nations.

Drawing upon some of the themes of their book, this talk will introduce how psychoanalytic theory has been used to examine the conscious and unconscious forces underlying race as a social formation, conceptualizing race, racial identity, and racism in ways that go beyond traditional modes of psychoanalytic thought.

Speakers

Sheldon George is Professor of English and Chair of the English department at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts. His scholarship centres most directly on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and applies cultural and literary theory to analyses of American and African American literature and culture.  He is author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (2016) and co-editor of Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (2020)

Derek Hook is an Associate Professor in Psychology at Duquesne University and Extraordinary Professor in Psychology at the University of Pretoria. A former lecturer at the London School of Economics and Birkbeck College, he is the author of A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial and (Post)apartheid Conditions (2012), Six Moments in Lacan (2017), and co-editor of Reading Lacan’s Écrits series.

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