ENGL 320
Race and Psychoanalysis: Slavery and the Psyche Fall 2022
Division I Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed AFR 365 / GBST 365 / AMST 365
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Class Details

This course explores slavery and the psyche through a constellation of Black diasporic literary, visual, and theoretical texts from the US, Caribbean, and Africa. Unwieldy and generative, the opacity of race within the field (and practice) of psychoanalysis shares a fraught intimacy with the co-constitutive terrains of violence and race that form the unconscious. Querying what escapes the hermeneutics of psychoanalysis and aesthetics in the fantasies race engenders, we will examine modernity’s articulation of racialization through conceptualizations–both fantasmatic and real–of self, world, knowledge, and possibility. Course texts may include: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, Arthur Jafa’s APEX and Love is the Message and the Message is Death, Conceição Evaristo’s Ponciá Vicêncio, Lars von Trier’s Manderlay, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, Derek Walcott’s “Laventille”; and, selections from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, David Marriott, Kathleen Pogue White, Franz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, Nathan Gorelick, Jaqueline Rose, Jared Sexton, Melanie Klein, Jacques-Alain Miller, Melanie Suchet, and Jean Laplanche. Note: This course will reflect the Continental tradition in philosophy. Student should be familiar with the basic interventions of psychoanalysis.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 15
Expected: 15
Class#: 1988
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: Weekly discussion posts and questions, 2 Papers, 10-12 pages, Research presentation
Prerequisites: One Writing Skills or writing intensive course; one intro course in one of following: American Studies, Africana Studies, Comparative Literature, English, Global Studies, Philosophy, Psychology, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Enrollment Preferences: Juniors or Seniors with majors or concentrations in any of the areas: American Studies, Africana Studies, Comparative Literature, English, Global Studies, Philosophy, Psychology, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Distributions: Division I Difference, Power, and Equity
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
AFR 365 Division II ENGL 320 Division I GBST 365 Division II AMST 365 Division II
DPE Notes: This course examines racialization as it relates to the racial violence of slavery on the psyche. Racialization as a process will be connected to concepts of self, world, and knowledge. Black diasporic literary, visual, and theoretical texts from the US, Caribbean, and Africa will be at the forefront of the course.
Attributes: AMST Critical and Cultural Theory Electives

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