Lacan and Race - Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory with Derek Hook and Sheldon George

In this video Andrew Fremont-Smith and Enda Deburca will be in a discussion with Derek Hook and Sheldon George on their ground-breaking book - ‘Lacan and Race - Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory’. George and Hook are co-editors and contributors of the ground breaking collection of essays, Lacan and Race. The book Lacan and Race have contributions by Lacanian scholars from diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts, chapters span a wide breadth of topics, including white nationalism and contemporary debates over confederate monuments; emergent theories of race rooted in Afropessimism and postcolonialism; analyses of racism in apartheid and American slavery; clinical reflections on Latinx and other racialized patients; and applications of Lacan’s concepts of the lamella, drive and sexuation to processes of racialization. The collection both reorients readers’ understandings of race through its deployment of Lacanian theory and redefines the Lacanian subject through its theorizing of subjectivity in relation to race, racism and racial identification. Lacan and Race will be a definitive text for psychoanalytic theorists and contemporary scholars of race, appealing to readers across the fields of psychology, cultural studies, humanities, politics, and sociology. - Routledge Derek Hook is an associate professor of Psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and an extraordinary professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Before joining the faculty at Duquesne University he taught at the London School of Economics and the University of London. He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan (2017, Routledge) and A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial (2011, Routledge), in addition to being – alongside Calum Neill—a co-editor of the Lacan Palgrave Series. He is also (with Stijn Vanheule and Calum Neill) one of three editors on the landmark 'Reading Lacan’s Ecrits' series. In addition to his scholarly work, he serves as a clinical supervisor. Sheldon George is professor and chair of English at Simmons University, Boston, Massachusetts. Prior publications intersecting Lacan and race include two coedited special issues of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society: “African Americans and Inequality” (Dec. 2014) and “Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Interventions into Culture and Politics” (Sept. 2018). George is co-editor of Reading Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (Routledge 2020) and author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (Baylor UP 2016).