Colonialism & Psychology

And who can affirm that vertigo does not haunt the whole of existence?

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Description

This is an advanced seminar designed primarily for history majors that entails intensive reading, discussion, and writing. Our course 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.