A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial

The Mind of Apartheid

Derek Hook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136495656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

An oft-neglected element of postcolonial thought is the explicitly psychological dimension of many of its foundational texts. This unprecedented volume explores the relation between these two disciplines by treating the work of a variety of anti-colonial authors as serious psychological contributions to the theorization of racism and oppression.

This approach demonstrates the pertinence of postcolonial thought for critical social psychology and opens up novel perspectives on a variety of key topics in social psychology. These include:

• the psychology of embodiment and racialization
• resistance strategies to oppression
• 'extra-discursive' facets of racism
• the unconscious dimension of stereotypes
• the intersection of psychological and symbolic modalities of power.

In addition, the book makes a distinctive contribution to the field of postcolonial studies by virtue of its eclectic combination of authors drawn from anti-apartheid, psychoanalytic and critical social theory traditions, including Homi Bhabha, Steve Biko, J.M. Coetzee, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, Chabani Manganyi and Slavoj ?i?ek. The South African focus serves to emphasize the ongoing historical importance of the anti-apartheid struggle for today's globalized world.

A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial is an invaluable text for social psychology and sociology students enrolled in courses on racism or cultural studies. It will also appeal to postgraduates, academics and anyone interested in psychoanalysis in relation to societal and political issues.

Chapter 1

The postcolonial, the Psychopolitical, Black Consciousness and Vernacular Psychology

There were often bits of black hair scattered around this … dusty section of ground … bodily scraps that connoted moral inferiority, a closeness to thingness …

(Apartheid Archive Project, N59)

[T]he most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

(Biko, 1978, p. 92)

The intervention on the level of consciousness – and consciousness was a key concept in his political approach and vocabulary – was at the essence of Biko’s strategic brilliance.

(Mandela, 2009, p. 75)

To ask the right questions, to encourage a new consciousness, and to suggest new forms which express it, are the basic purposes of our new direction … Black Consciousness constitutes a revolution of ideas, of values and of standards.

(Pityana, cited in Gibson, 2008, p. 145)

Toward a (Postcolonial) Psychology of Critique

Of the theoretical resources taken as the underlying foundations of critical social psychology, elements, typically, each of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and, perhaps chiefly, the ‘turn to text’ characteristic of post-structuralism one particular mode of critique remains notably absent, that of postcolonial theory. What makes this omission so conspicuous is that much postcolonial theory is explicitly psychological both in its concerns and its resources. Fanon’s (1952/1986) Black Skin, White Masks, for example, makes ample reference to various psychological and psychoanalytic formulations as a means of grappling with the vicissitudes of colonial power as a way of articulating the intensity and tenacity of the psychical components of racism. Homi Bhabha (1983) likewise cross-references a series of psychoanalytic notions in his reformulation of that classic social-psychological concept, the stereotype. While the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis is absent from the writings of Steve Biko (1978), his approach to Black Consciousness draws on the themes and language of psychology in articulating the aims of the liberation movement. J.M. Coetzee’s (1991) diagnosis of apartheid racism, furthermore, makes extensive references to Freud, just as the work of his countryman, the psychologist Chabani Manganyi (1973, 1977), makes recourse to a phenomenological variety of psychology in describing the processes of apartheid racialization.

Each of the above sets of critical formulations provides powerful ways of thinking about the conjunction of the psychological and the political, the affective and the structural, the psychical and the societal. We have, as such, a powerfully critical combination of registers that one would take to lie at the centre of critical psychology’s ostensibly socio-political concerns (Hayes, 1989; Hook, 2004a). Why then have such post- or anti-colonial thinkers not featured more strongly in the conceptual resources of critical social psychology?¹ How might their work, and their characteristic concerns – the mechanisms of racist objectification and fantasy, the stereotypes of colonial discourse, the damage of cultural dispossession and the prospect of effective psychical resistance, and so on – alert us to gaps in the growing orthodoxy of critical psychology? To approach the question from another direction: what might be said to be the ‘critical psychology’ of each of these theorists, particularly perhaps that of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko? How might their use of the register of the psychological within the political, and their focus on the cultural dynamics of colonization alert us to the possibilities of psychology as a vocabulary of resistance? Furthermore, what do these critics have to tell us about the dominant problematic of the colonial and postcolonial condition, that of racism, a phenomenon that is as psychical as it is political, structural as it is psychological in nature? Further yet, how might these contributions urge us to reconsider the epistemological frame of psychology along the lines of a materialist psychology, more worldly, ‘secular’ in its concerns, and that plays its part in a wider vernacular of political critique? Before turning to a brief discussion of the work of Fanon and Biko, it will be necessary to underline what I mean when I refer both to ‘critical social psychology’ and ‘postcolonial criticism’.

Critical Social Psychology and the Political

Critical social psychology has been defined in multiple ways. Gough and McFadden (2001), for example, speak of a critical social psychology that ‘challenges social institutions and practices – including the discipline of psychology – that contribute to forms of inequality and oppression’ (p. 2). This is a version of social psychology, they suggest, in which practitioners situate themselves within society and its problems, a social psychology that ‘gets involved, which adopts particular positions in important debates on … issues such as prejudice, violence … crime, etc.’ (p. 2). Valerie Walkerdine (2002a) has similarly suggested a move away from the academy to politics, an understanding of a critical psychology that expresses a pronounced commitment to the theories of post-structuralism, and that stresses the importance ‘not of psychology per se, but … of the subject and conceptions of subjectivity for politics’ (p. 1). Critical psychology, she claims, is hence ‘an umbrella term which describes a number of politically radical responses to and differences from mainstream psychology … [including] perspectives of … feminism, ethnic and anti-racist politics’ (p. 2). Tellingly, however, Walkerdine (2002a) comments on how the political commitment that has generated such anti-racist, feminist, gay liberation changes seems largely ‘to have been lost’ (p. 2)

Hepburn (2003) thinks of critical social psychology as focused on issues of politics, morality and social change, and as being predominantly concerned with issues of oppression, exploitation and human well-being. Critical social psychology though is also ‘critical of psychology itself … its assumptions, its practices’ (p. 1). However, she notes (2003), this dual task of criticizing society and criticizing the discipline sometimes leads to these two factors working against one another. Parker (2002) understands critical psychology as the systematic examination of how dominant accounts of psychology operate ideologically, and in the services of power. Importantly though, this ‘heterogeneous process of critique’ should ideally spread to forms of social action (Goodley and Parker, 2000). A tension again seems apparent here between intellectual undertakings against psychology, and the broader sphere of political activism.

This split between these two aspects of critical psychology is likewise evident in the preface to Fox, Prilleltensky and Austin’s (2009a) Critical Psychology, which speaks of ‘the struggle to make psychology a tool for emancipation and social justice’ (p. xx). The definition offered in the first chapter however turns the focus more towards the critique of psychology itself: ‘[C]ritical psychology [is] a variety of approaches that challenge assumptions, values, and practices within mainstream psychology that … maintain an unjust … status quo’ (Fox, Prilleltensky and Austin, 2009b, p. 18). It is only later in the text, apropos a description of critical community psychology, that the broader societal political role of critical psychology again comes to light:

[Critical] community psychology offers a framework for those marginalized by the social system that leads to self-aware social change with an emphasis on value-based participatory work and the forging of alliances.

(Burton et al., cited in Prilleltensky and Nelson, 2009, p. 130)

The juxtaposition of these definitions makes my point clearly enough: despite the radical potential of critical psychology as a means of engaging various social modalities of power, its agendas of political activity remain all too often delimited, narrowed by the preoccupation with the critique of psychology itself.

My argument is that there is room to develop an element of critical psychology that is often only tacitly eluded (if at all) by many of the above approaches: the radical potential of types of psychological critique. Critical psychology should thus be concerned both with the analysis of oppressive uses of psychology and with enabling potentially transformative psychological forms that disrupt imbalances of power and have social equality as their goal.

Postcolonial Criticism

Having identified an area of concern within the general domain of critical psychology, we should now turn our attention to introducing the ‘postcolonial’. In this connection, it is helpful to turn to Homi Bhabha (1994) who provides an adroit summary of both the concerns and the scope of postcolonial criticism. Postcolonial criticism, he writes, ‘bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world’ (p. 171). Furthermore:

Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South … [Their aim is to] intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the ‘rationalizations’ of modernity … the postcolonial project, at the most general theoretical level, seeks to explore those social pathologies ‘loss of meaning, conditions of anomie’ – that no longer simply ‘cluster around class antagonism, [but] break up into widely scattered historical contingencies’.

(p. 171)

Bhabha (1994) adds two further vital points to this commentary. Firstly, ‘[I]t is from those who have suffered the sentence of history – subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement – that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking …’ (p. 172). Furthermore:

[T]he affective experience of social marginality – as it emerges in noncanonical cultural forms – transforms our critical strategies. It forces us to … engage with culture as an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and practices, produced in the act of social survival.

(p. 172)

With these points in mind – the revitalization of critique by those who have suffered the subjugation of colonialism, and culture as a tactic of ‘social survival’ – we turn our attentions to Frantz Fanon and to those aspects of his more psychological writings that hold the greatest rejuvenating potential for critical psychology.

Fanon, Psychopolitics

One way of grasping the importance of the inaugural moment of Fanon’s critique in Black Skin, White Masks is by appreciating the extent to which Fanon was generating a new and hybrid mode of critical analysis where no pre-existing forms were sufficient.² If there is a fact that Fanon’s writings impress upon us, it is that the colonial encounter is unprecedented; the epistemic, cultural, psychic and physical violence of colonialism makes for a unique type of historical trauma. Bhabha (1986) puts this well when he suggests that the force of Fanon’s vision comes from the language of revolutionary awareness, noting furthermore that ‘there is no master narrative or realist perspective that provides a background of social and historical facts against which emerge the problems of the individual or collective psyche [in the colonial encounter]’ (1986, p. ii). The argument is that a psychological register is indispensable both in properly formulating these forms of violence – grasping them conceptually, analytically – and in providing a rudimentary basis for the critique of such dispossessions. Fanon (1952/1986) opens Black Skin, White Masks by insisting on the necessity of a psychoanalytic account of the racist colonial sphere, even if such a conceptualization needs ultimately to take its place alongside, and in conjunction with, analyses of the socio-political and economic factors.

Perhaps Fanon’s greatest source of originality as a theorist, as McCulloch (1983) has argued, is to be found in his combination of psychology and politics, his attempts, to approach the problems of national liberation and social revolution from the perspective of psychopathology, and the problems of personal identity through a sustained focus on the violence of the colonial encounter. McCulloch (1983) says:

All of Fanon’s work falls into that category where the sciences of personality and the sciences of society converge … [in an attempt] to traverse the distance between an analysis of the consciousness of the individual and the analysis of social institutions.

(pp. 206–207)

Lebeau (1998) has discussed Fanon’s work in view of the notion of a ‘psychopolitics’ that I understand, building on McCulloch’s conceptualization, as a kind of to- and fro- movement, whereby the political is continually brought into the register of the psychological, and the psychological into the political. In this vein we might think of the project of psychopolitics as a means of highlighting this two-way movement, as a means of stressing on the one hand the political nature of the psychological and on the other hand emphasizing how power is conducted psychologically.³ This idea provides us with a useful frame to understand the implicit ‘psychology of critique’ that emerges within Fanon, Biko and Bhabha. Such a politicization can take at least three related forms. Firstly, it may refer to the critical process whereby we place a series of ostensibly private psychological concerns and concepts within the register of the political. We are thereby able to show up the extent to which human psychology is intimately linked to, conditioned by, the socio-political and historical forces of its situation. Fanon’s work is certainly emblematic of this trend; his refutation of Mannoni’s orthodox psychoanalytic interpretation of the dreams of colonized Malagasy subjects is a case in point.⁴ Secondly, such a politicization may refer to the critical process whereby psychological concepts, explanations and even modes of experience are employed to describe and illustrate the workings of power. Fanon’s work again makes for a benchmark here, although Bhabha’s work perhaps extends this analytical strategy by means of the extensive psychoanalytic and theoretical vocabulary that he brings to bear in his scrutiny of unconscious aspects of colonial power. The critical hope here is that by being able to analyse the political in such a way, one might be able to think strategically about how best to intervene within the ‘psychic life of colonial power’. Lastly, extending this idea, one might suggest that we can put certain forms of psychology to actual political work, that we can use both the concepts and understandings of psychology, and the actual terms of psychological experience, as a means of consolidating resistances to power. This, in many ways, is the Black Consciousness strategy: the utilization of rudimentary psychological notions to enable forms of radical humanist critique, as an experiential basis for solidarity and resistance to power, indeed as a means of giving form and focus to the liberation struggle. By examining the psychical effects of the colonized subjects’ attempts to know themselves within the terms of an antagonistic (white European) colonial system of values – the phenomena of a ‘white mask psychology’, socially induced ‘inferiority complexes’ – Fanon shows how what might otherwise be understood within a purely psychological framework is far better explained in political terms; that is, with reference to understandings of racialized power, colonial violence and cultural subordination. In this respect one witnesses in Fanon an astonishing blend of theoretical figures, a kind of lateral movement across psychoanalytic, Marxist, existential, psychiatric and literary modes of conceptualization, all put to use as means of expressing something of the identity-violence of colonial dispossession. A key problematic that Fanon is concerned with here is that of being the subject of cultural oppression/...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Introduction: Why a Psychology of the Postcolonial?
• 1. The postcolonial, the psychopolitical, Black Consciousness and vernacular psychology
• 2. Abjection as a political factor: Racism and the ‘extra-discursive’
• 3. Postcolonial psychoanalysis: Fanon, desire, fantasy and libidinal economy
• 4. The stereotype, colonial discourse, fetishism and racism
• 5. The ‘real’ of racializing embodiment
• References
• Index