Sheldon George, PhD
Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Race and Difference
April 17-18, 2027
1132 S. Wabash Ave., Suite 502, Chicago
& ZOOM
Sheldon George is Chair and Professor of Africana Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston. George’s scholarship focuses on race and racism through a study of culture, literature, and theory. His book Trauma and Race, published in 2016, was the first to offer an extended Lacanian analysis of African American identity. George is coeditor of Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers (2020). His publications include the pioneering collection of essays Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory (2021). His most recent book, published in 2024, is the collection Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women’s Writing: Race and Narrative Innovation. George is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society who has coedited two special issues of that journal and two special issues of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. He is a former Chair of the Executive Committee of the Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Literature forum of the MLA, and he holds the title of Extraordinary Professor of English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Seminar Title: Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Race and Difference
Seminar Description:Though Lacanian theory speaks of difference and the role of the Other in the psyche, Lacanian theorists have only recently begun to imagined this other as raced and gendered. This seminar will engage Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explore what it teaches us of the psyche’s relation to race and difference. The seminar will start with a basic overview of Lacan’s rethinking of psychoanalytic theory through his use of linguistics, reading early works by Lacan like “The Agency of the Letter” and “The Mirror Stage” alongside of the writing of Structural Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. It will then engage works by Lacan and his student, Jacques Alain-Miller, to talk about the role of difference and aggression in psychoanalysis. Finally, the seminar will focus on the writing of contemporary Lacanian theories who deploy the theory in analyses of difference based on race and sexuality. Moving through Lacan’s theories on language and difference, we will explore how Lacan’s nuanced understanding of the psyche has lent itself to sophisticated elaborations of the psychic motivations that guide our contemporary relations to differences of race, sex, and gender.
Readings:
Saturday Morning
Saussure, Ferdinand de. “Nature of the Linguistic Sign” and “[Binary Oppositions]”
Lacan, Jacques. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud”
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits Ch.1 “The Mirror Stage as Formative”
Saturday Afternoon
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits Ch 2. “Agressivity in Psychoanalysis”
O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
Sunday
George, Sheldon. Trauma and Race. “Introduction: Race Today”
Baldwin, James. “Going to Meet the Man”
Miller, Jacques, Alain. “Extimité.”
George, Sheldon. “The Sublimation of Race: From the Courtly Lady to the Derelict White Body.