Rendering Unconscious welcomes Drs Sheldon George, Derek Hook, Sheila Cavanagh and Michelle Stephens to the podcast to discuss the groundbreaking new book 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. Be sure to check out Derek Hook’s YouTube channel
Sheila L. Cavanagh (PhD), Professor, York University, Toronto, Canada. Cavanagh’s scholarship lies in psychoanalytic sociology, queer theory and transgender studies. She is a former co-editor of the Somatechnics journal at Edinburgh University Press and past president of the Canadian Sexuality Studies Association.
Michelle Stephens, Ph.D., is a licensed psychoanalyst and Dean of the Humanities at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer (Duke, 2014).
Psychology and the Other 2021 conference
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Rendering Unconscious Podcast is hosted by psychoanalyst Dr. Vanessa Sinclair, who interviews psychoanalysts, psychologists, scholars, creative arts therapists, writers, poets, philosophers, artists & other intellectuals about their process, work, world events, the current state of mental health care, politics, culture, the arts & more.
Rendering Unconscious Podcast can be found at your favorite podcasting platforms, including: Spotify / iTunes / Soundcloud / Podbean
Rendering Unconscious is also a book! Rendering Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Politics & Poetry (Trapart 2019)
Dr. Sinclair is the author of The Pathways of the Heart (Trapart Books, 2021), Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art: the Cut in Creation (Routledge, 2020) and Switching Mirrors (Trapart Books, 2016).
Dr. Sinclair is the editor of Rendering Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Politics & Poetry (Trapart Books, 2019) Outsider Inpatient: Reflections on Art as Therapy (Trapart Books, 2021) with Dr. Elisabeth Punzi, On Psychoanalysis and Violence: Contemporary Lacanian Perspectives (Routledge, 2018) co-edited with Dr. Manya Steinkoler, and The Fenris Wolf, vol 9 (Trapart, 2017) co-edited with Carl Abrahamsson.
The song at the end of the episode is from the album LUNACY (OST) by Vanessa Sinclair and Carl Abrahamsson
Lunacy the film is available to view at Vimeo on Demand
Many thanks to Carl Abrahamsson, who created the intro and outro music for Rendering Unconscious podcast.
Image: cover of Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory
