Jean-Paul Rocchi,"Queer Theory, the Meta-Psychoanalysis of Race, and the Politics of the South African Literary Subject"
Antje Schuhmann
"Queer Theory, the Meta-Psychoanalysis of Race, and the Politics of the South African Literary Subject"
by Jean-Paul Rocchi (Professeur des Universités en Littératures et Cultures Américaines
Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée)
Tuesday 28th of August,
Synopsis:
Starting from Frantz Fanon's insight that failure can be productive this presentation draws a genealogy of 1990s American queer theory and more particularly of the queer criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis. It intends to demonstrate that early queer theory has systematically circumvented the issue of race despite the common essentialist matrix from which the notion of race and sexuality emerge - thus reproducing what remains in Freud a non-thought and a lack, the inconceivable racial dimension of the subject's subjectivity. From theoretical this lack becomes political when the production of new knowledge is meant to refashion the Humanities and academic institutions. It also favors methodological shortcomings when psychoanalysis is used as a reading method, especially as applied to Black literatures. This presentation will thus venture to propose a new method which refrains from looking at Black literary texts through a disjunctive theoretical system and rather returns to the literary origins of psychoanalysis - where literature is considered as the crucible of new psychoanalytical tools and concepts that reconcile race and sex, desire and consciousness, the politics of identity and the subject's multiple identifications. For that purpose, this presentation will study several contemporary writers, both American and South African, including Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill and Rozena Maart. Intersecting fiction, poetry, non-fiction and politics their contemporary work is emblematic of the queer meta-psychoanalysis of race hereby called for and of the subject's ever-shifting subjectivity.
