Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism

by Ranjana Khanna

Sigmund Freud infamously referred to women's sexuality as a “dark continent” for psychoanalysis, drawing on colonial explorer Henry Morton Stanley’s use of the same phrase to refer to Africa. While the problematic universalism of psychoanalysis led theorists to reject its relevance for postcolonial critique, Ranjana Khanna boldly shows how
bringing psychoanalysis, colonialism, and women together can become the starting point of a postcolonial feminist theory. Psychoanalysis brings to light, Khanna argues, how nation-statehood for the former colonies of Europe institutes the violence of European imperialist history. Far from rejecting psychoanalysis, Dark Continents reveals its importance as a reading practice that makes visible the psychical strife of colonial and
postcolonial modernity. Assessing the merits of various models of nationalism, psychoanalysis, and colonialism, it refashions colonial melancholy as a transnational feminist ethics. Khanna traces the colonial backgrounds of psychoanalysis from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century up to the present. Illuminating Freud’s debt to the languages of archaeology and anthropology throughout his career, Khanna describes how Freud altered his theories of the ego as his own political status shifted from Habsburg loyalist to Nazi victim. Dark Continents explores how psychoanalytic theory was taken up in Europe and its colonies in the period of decolonization following World War II, focusing on its use by a range of writers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Octave Mannoni, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Wulf Sachs, and Ellen Hellman. Given the multiple gendered and colonial contexts of many of these writings, Khanna argues for the necessity of a postcolonial, feminist critique of
decolonization and postcoloniality.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Psychology, Philosophy

328 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003

About the author

Ranjana Khanna is a literary critic and theorist recognized for her interdisciplinary, feminist and internationalist contributions to the fields of post-colonial studies, feminist theory, literature and political philosophy.

Reviews

[Micah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Surprisingly often, it happens that arguments from someone claiming to work in a deconstructive, "queer" etc. vein, supposedly rejecting any essentialism, reductionism, or binaries, present us with a good vs. evil fairy tale, lacking all nuance, throwing out all kinds of babies with the bathwater and reveling in simplistic black-and-white dogmas and taboos, hectoring people from a very high horse and indulging in psychobabble. I was relieved that this book wasn't in that vein, and though it takes Freud to task for having an interest in archaeology and anthropology, it's a fairly sophisticated account. There is something to the idea that the Freudian unconscious is a bit of a "primitive Other."

Dark Continents also looks at Sartrean "existential psychoanalysis" in the context of post-WW2 decolonization, and writers like Fanon, Memmi, and Mannoni. Then it goes on to propose a transnational postcolonial feminism, which seemed a little light on substance to me. "It is only with categories as abstract as those of justice that feminist transnational politics can take place." The discussion becomes so abstract that it's hard to know where the author stands, however.

The book uses psychoanalytic/deconstructive concepts like melancholia, introjection and incorporation, affect, trauma and memory, haunting and spectrality etc., to analyze postcoloniality and its critical, melancholic attitude to the nation-state, which comes across as similar to a lost object, an incorporated ego-ideal that is mourned and hated. Some of it works, some seems a bit of a stretch. But it's all interesting enough if this is your kind of thing.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This took me forever to come back to. I think it’s fine, I’m not convinced of the tracing of thought back through Europe, even for critique.