Postcolonial psychoanalytic theory builds ideal types detached from empirical reality of racism
Evidence
One of the main criticisms that can be leveled at this body of work is that it is highly normative. It posits an ideal typical racial, colonial, or postcolonial encounter with the Other, which is illustrated only indirectly, usually through the citation of literary texts or films, but in a way which bears only the flimsiest relation to the empirical complexities of real positions and practices within cultures of racism. Kristeva’s figures of The Exile or The Orphan are metaphorical constructions, not recognizable social beings. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1402
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- SEED: Article angle: the gap between high postcolonial theory and the empirical study of actual racist practices.
Related
- Race is psychoanalysis’s constitutive but disavowed foundation (similarity 0.85)
- Psychoanalysis-offers-social-science division of labor produces no real theory of racism. (similarity 0.82)
- Psychoanalytic readings of racism are hunches, not explanations, until tested (similarity 0.81)
- Psychoanalytic racism theory should target institutional practice, not treat racist individuals (similarity 0.81)
- Psychoanalytic accounts of racism cannot reduce it to a single psychological principle. (similarity 0.80)
- Psychoanalytic accounts of racism reduce structural inequality to individual unconscious dynamics (similarity 0.80)
- Psychoanalytic accounts of racism displace rather than escape reductionism (similarity 0.79)
- Psychoanalytic readings reduced Southern anti-black racism to displaced oedipal anxieties (similarity 0.79)
- Psychoanalytic theories read racism as unconscious projection onto blacks, not as response to them. (similarity 0.79)
- Psychoanalysis infers causality from mere association to yield absurd racism theories. (similarity 0.78)
- Psychoanalysis claims objectivity while psychodynamically dismissing those who raise institutional racism (similarity 0.78)