Colonialism & Psychology
Spring 2024
©️ Omnia El Shakry
And who can affirm that vertigo does not haunt the whole of existence?
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Description
Our seminar will be a thematic exploration of colonialism as an historical, cultural, and, above all psychological experience. We will explore topics such as the relation between Self and Other (Colonizer and Colonized) in the colonial encounter; the psychoanalysis of race and racism; violence and decolonization; psychopolitics; gender, language, and the intimacy of the colonial encounter; and the psychic life of the postcolony.
We will follow the itineraries of the renowned Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) from the Antilles to metropolitan France, to colonial Algeria. We shall begin in the colony – ‘Albert Camus’s Algeria’ – and end in postcolonial Paris. We will mobilize a diverse array of primary and secondary sources, novels, and films in our exploration, traversing Europe, the Antilles, and North Africa, with a primary emphasis on French colonialism in Algeria and its aftermath in the postcolony. Much like the colonial and postcolonial subjects we will be studying, we may often experience vertigo, a spinning sensation that we are everywhere and nowhere – in the interstitial space between psychology and politics; war and revolution; and metropole and colony.
Required Texts
John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Indiana University Press, 2nd edition, 2005).
Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage, 1989).
Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. P. Powesland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, [1950] 2001).
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (New York Grove, [1952]1967).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, [1961] 1963).
David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).
Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993).
Stefania Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Katie Kilroy-Marac, An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a West African Clinic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
Additional Texts
Mouloud Feraoun, Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War, edited by James D. Le Sueur, trans. Mary Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
Henri Alleg, The Question, trans. John Calder (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
James LeSeur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria, second edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question, second edition (Routledge, 2018).
Leïla Sebbar, The Seine was Red, trans. Mildred Mortimer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
Required Films
Battle of Algiers, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo (1966, 2:02 minutes)
Black Skin, White Masks, dir. Isaac Julien (1996, 1:12 minutes)
Caché, dir. Michael Haneke (2005, 1:58 minutes).