Lacan and Race : Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory

This edited volume draws upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory 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.

Featuring contributions by Lacanian scholars from diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts, chapters span a wide breadth of topics, including white nationalism and contemporary debates over confederate monuments; emergent theories of race rooted in Afropessimism and postcolonialism; analyses of racism in apartheid and American slavery; clinical reflections on Latinx and other racialized patients; and applications of Lacan’s concepts of the lamella, drive and sexuation to processes of racialization. The collection both reorients readers’ understandings of race through its deployment of Lacanian theory and redefines the Lacanian subject through its theorizing of subjectivity in relation to race, racism and racial identification.

Lacan and Race will be a definitive text for psychoanalytic theorists and contemporary scholars of race, appealing to readers across the fields of psychology, cultural studies, humanities, politics, and sociology.

Sheldon George is professor and chair of English at Simmons University, USA. He is the author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity.

Derek Hook is an associate professor of Psychology at Duquesne University, USA, and an extraordinary professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan.