Race and the Unconscious: Freudianism in French Caribbean Thought by Celia Britton (review)

Abstract

MLRy 100.2, 2005 515 These are not so much faults as inevitable consequences of the high ambitions of this study, which is undoubtedly a major contribution to (French) Caribbean studies, a persuasive, subtle, and sensitive reading of an extremely rich body of writing. University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago Martin Munro Race and the Unconscious: Freudianismin French Caribbean Thought. By Celia Britton . Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre. 2002. 115 pp. ISBN 1900755 -68-8. Psychoanalysis occupies a highly unstable and contradictory position in the work of many Caribbean thinkers and writers. Although on the one hand they reject its Eurocentrism and its inability to differentiatebetween varying historical and geographical contexts, its figures, tropes, and persistent structures continue to haunt the pages of their work. Having criticized both Freud's resistance to communitarian thinking and the political inefhcacy of his work, they continue to use his reflections on fantasy and repression in order to articulate the problem of race. In this original, succinct, and highly relevant book, Celia Britton carefully unravels the nature of this contradiction and traces the various distortions and reformulations of Freudian thought within the Antillean context. First, she notes the intersection between psychoanalysis, surreal? ism, and anti-colonial thinking in the work ofthe contributors to the review Tropiques, founded in Martinique in 1941. Anti-colonial thinkers Aime Cesaire and Rene Menil use both Breton and Freud to enhance their attack on the (colonial) bourgeoisie, and argue that the liberation of the black man will occur through renewed connection with the spontaneous and the irrational?characteristics that are prominent in black culture and that imply closer links with the unconscious. The difficultywith this, however, is that it invokes images of the 'primitive' African; the writers are as a result torn between modelling their unconscious on that of European thinkers and promoting an ongoing opposition between the civilized and the primitive. In the second chapter Britton shows how Fanon, similarly, both rejects and relies on Freudian notions of the unconscious. Fanon's thesis is that black people have a white unconscious, but this unconscious is created by internalization rather than by repression. Furthermore, rather than being repressed, black people are divided between their body and their self-image; they sufferfrom 'quasi-psychotic disavowal rather than neurotic repres? sion' (p. 45). Having pinpointed the contradictions in Fanon's thought, Britton goes on to exam? ine the ways in which the psychologist Octave Mannoni and the poet-thinker Edouard Glissant manipulate the structures of Freudian psychoanalysis. Unlike Fanon, forex? ample, Glissant does conceive the colonial situation in terms of repression or blockage, so that the colonized does retain a collective unconscious. Britton's finalobject of ana? lysis is the Oedipus complex, which she locates as a trope in Fanon's thought, but in the form of an occasional disorder rather than as an underlying structure. Most importantly, Britton's series of analyses succeeds in refiningthe relation between fa? miliar figures and the Caribbean reworking of them, often turning expectations on their head and challenging the assumptions that we might be tempted to make about the transfer of psychoanalytic concepts to an unfamiliar setting. The book combines intricate close reading with in-depth knowledge of the psychoanalytic field, and this brief but punchy sequence of arguments successfully points the way towards further questioning and research in a rich and complex area. University of Warwick Jane Hiddleston ...