From the White Interior to an Exterior Blackness: A Lacanian Discourse Analysis of Apartheid Narratives

Abstract

In this chapter we examine some fragments of narratives from the Apartheid Archive Project (see www.apartheidarchive.org), and put to work ‘Lacanian Discourse Analysis’ recently propounded in the psychological domain (Parker, 2005; Pavon-Cuellar, 2010a; Pavon-Cuellar & Parker, 2012), following upon some quite distant and some immediate antecedents (e.g. Frosh, Phoenix & Pattman, 2003; Georgaca, 2005; Hook, 2003; Pecheux, 1969; Pecheux & Fuchs, 1975). We do this with a commitment to the project of critical psychosocial reflection on the symbolic apparatus of racism, and we know that we bring to the material the perspective of outsiders who are introducing a theoretical discourse that has, in different parts of the world, itself been complicit with colonialism. However, this theoretical discourse, while apparently so alien to this context, is uncannily implicated in it, and that is what can give it a sharp deconstructive edge. We will home in on some extracts to exacerbate contradictions and oppositions that are at work there, to make them explicit in order that they may be questioned. We will begin with some methodological reflections on the nature of ‘analysis’, and introduce the concept of the ‘imaginary’.