Buried alive: the psychoanalysis of racial absence in preparedness/education

Abstract

Based on extracts from an ethnography produced during the ESRC 2009–10 research project, ‘Preparedness Pedagogies’ and Race: An Interdisciplinary Approach, this article explores the racialized culture of civil defence in the UK whilst also critiquing the world of higher education. The ethnographic artefacts of interviews, observations of preparedness role play around fictional character, and of professionals’ live reminiscence of emergency, are explored through the lens of the psychoanalytical construction of being buried alive; Critical Race Theory (CRT) conceptions of policy constitution of a social world that imprisons the non-white citizen and the other are seen, in this article, as enshrined in this construction. Freud’s The Uncanny encompasses the psychology of being ‘buried alive,’ and one conception of this is seen as a state akin to life in the womb, a strange place of safety. In contrast I use two CRT narratives of resilience auto-education as a way of beginning to analyse different presentations of being buried alive. I refer, following Royle, to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial and his introductory conception of being buried alive as being something that happens to others, about the affective act of burial; in contrast I draw on the chapter entitled ‘Buried Alive,’ in the sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret, a useful metaphor for the eternal live imprisonment of the other facilitated by legal means, ensuring the security of a racially pure, class secure, hetero-normative status quo: the burial of race. This burial within policy is double edged: the shadow character buried alive within preparedness and within education haunts the work and is thus more likely to return as evoked by the events of 9/11.