The uncanny in racism arises from the Other within the self

Evidence

However, for her what evokes the characteristic figures of the unheimlich is not so much the Other (class, race, nation, sex) in the external world but the Other Within - in the words of the title to her book “the stranger we are to ourselves.” This sense of the foreign in the midst of the familiar she relates to the death drive (Bion, 1991). The diffuse narcissistic anxiety experienced in the face of what cannot be symbolically represented in and by the self is linked by Kristeva to a state of abjection. By this she means the sense of self-abandonment habitually associated with what is repudiated about bodily needs and their satisfaction, and which comes to be socially anchored to habits or habitats of those living on the margins of society, on the other side of the race, class, or sex tracks. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1397

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Kristeva’s concept of abjection — the repudiated bodily self that gets projected onto marginal social groups.
• XREF: connects to: The racial gaze subjects the observed to a humiliating double-consciousness — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 878; Racialization recruits deep psychic structures of feeling, not only beliefs — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1241; Racist gazes can make colonized subjects become Other to themselves — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1344 (+3 more)