Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism

By Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen

This landmark collaboration between African American and white feminists goes to the heart of problems that have troubled feminist thinking for decades. Putting the racial dynamics of feminist interpretation center stage, these essays question such issues as the primacy of sexual difference, the universal nature of psychoanalytic categories, and the role of race in the formation of identity. They offer new ways of approaching African American texts and reframe our thinking about the contexts, discourses, and traditions of the American cultural landscape. Calling for the racialization of whiteness and claiming that psychoanalytic theory should make room for competing discourses of spirituality and diasporic consciousness, these essays give shape to the many stubborn incompatibilities—as well as the transformative possibilities—between white feminist and African American cultural formations.

Bringing into conversation a range of psychoanalytic, feminist, and African-derived spiritual perspectives, these essays enact an inclusive politics of reading. Often explosive and always provocative, Female Subjects in Black and White models a new cross-racial feminism.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
This landmark collaboration between African American and white feminists goes to the heart of problems that have troubled feminist thinking for decades. Putting the racial dynamics of feminist interpretation center stage, these essays question such issues

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520918153

Book preview

Female Subjects in Black and White

Female Subjects

in Black and White

Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism

EDITED BY

Elizabeth Abel

Barbara Christian

Helene Moglen

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1997 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Female subjects in black and white: race, psychoanalysis, feminism / [edited by] Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, Helene Moglen.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-520-20629-0 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-520-20630-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. American Literature—Afro-American authors—History and criticism. 2. American Literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Psychoanalysis and literature— United States. 4. Feminism and literature—United States. 5. Women and literature— United States. 6. Afro-American women in literature. 7. Afro-Americans in literature. 8. Race relations in literature. 9. Psychology in literature. 10. Race in literature.

I. Abel, Elizabeth. II. Christian, Barbara. III. Moglen, Helene.

PS153.N5F45 1997

810.9'9287'08996073—DC20 96-23683

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

The photographs in Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye are reprinted courtesy of the Cook Collection, Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION The Dream of a Common Language

The Occult of True Black Womanhood Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies

Doing Justice to the Subjects Mimetic Art in a Multicultural Society: The Work of Anna Deavere Smith

Racial Composition Metaphor and the Body in the Writing of Race

Black Writing, White Reading Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation

All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother Psychoanalysis and Race

Seeing Sentiment Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye

Beyond Mortal Vision Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig and the American Racial Dream-Text

Redeeming History Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse Founding Narratives of Feminism

The Quicksands of the Self Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut

Passing, Queering Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge

The Stories of O (Dessa) Stories of Complicity and Resistance

Pauline Hopkins and William James The New Psychology and the Politics of Race

Channeling the Ancestral Muse Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrick

The Poetics of Identity Questioning Spiritualism in African American Contexts

Fixing Methodologies Beloved

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection of essays originated with a conference, Psychoanalysis in African American Contexts: Feminist Reconfigurations, which was held in October 1992 at the University of California at Santa Cruz. We wish particularly to thank for his generous support James Clifford, then the director of the UCSC Center for Cultural Studies. We are also grateful for funds granted to us by the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine and—at Santa Cruz— the Division of Humanities, the feminist studies research group, Oakes College, and Kresge College. Our thanks as well to Saidiya V. Hartman, Har- reyette Mullen, Carla Freccero, Susan Gilman, and Sylvia Winter for their active participation, which helped make the conference a success.

We have had superb help with the production of this book. Cheryl Van De Veer, the supervisor of the UCSC Word Processing Center, did an extraordinaryjob in preparing the original manuscript for us. We have been especially fortunate in the editorial staff of UC Press. The skill and dedication of William Murphy, Dore Brown, and Carolyn Hill were invaluable at all stages of the book’s production. We are indebted to them for their thoroughness and professionalism.

Finally, Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen particularly wish to thank Elizabeth Abel for her unflagging commitment to this project. Without her persistence and intelligence, this volume would never have been completed.

INTRODUCTION

The Dream of a Common Language

Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen

The narrative into which life seems to cast itself surfaces most forcefully in certain kinds of psychoanalysis.

TONI MORRISON, PLAYING IN THE DARK

Psychoanalysis can … be seen as a quite elaborate form of ethnography— as a writing of the ethnicity of the white western psyche.

MARY ANN DOANE, FEMMES FATALES

This anthology has been a site of challenge, frustration, and revelation. Soliciting, editing, and organizing these essays has made us painfully aware that the encounter between a predominantly white psychoanalytic feminism and African American cultural formations reveals as many stubborn incompatibilities as it does transformative possibilities. Although two of us had originally hoped that a revised psychoanalytic discourse could provide a common set of terms for coordinating race, gender, and subjectivity, the three of us came to envisage this collection as a series of dialogues, rather than reconciliations, between feminist psychoanalysis and African American representations of female subjectivity.

Of course, even to invoke female subjectivity is already to inhabit a certain discursive terrain; dialogue does not ensure discursive parity. Concern about unequally authoritative discourses has been an issue throughout the organization of this volume. Although some of the contributors have consistently endorsed this project, others have consistently resisted it, and still others have endorsed it in principle and resisted it in practice, testimony to the unarticulatable nature of the anxieties it triggers. Rather than trying to synthesize our contributors’ perspectives, we have represented the disjunctions, as well as the intersections, among their disparate critical agendas. Although we insisted on approximately equal numbers of black and white contributors, we did not contrive a racial balance within each section, but allowed the racial fault lines, where they did occur, to indicate a current discursive geography.

What has made this endeavor difficult is also what gives it value—for it is the first of its kind. There has never to our knowledge been a collaborative effort between black and white feminists to generate a text on race and female subjectivity. Our point of departure here is perhaps best defined by the conclusion of our first essay: Ann duCille’s rather wistful call for a practice of black and white complementary theorizing, in which black and white feminists think with, rather than across, one another about the intersections of racial and gender differences.

As an interrogation of the racial boundaries of psychoanalysis, our project had multiple points of origin. One was involvement with a text. Two of the editors—Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen—were invited to speak on Beloved at the Humanities Institute at Irvine in 1991. For both of them, writing and presenting their papers were more emotionally charged than such activities tend to be. Having taught Beloved in a graduate seminar the previous spring, Helene, a white psychoanalytic feminist critic, had come to feel about the novel as she imagined confirmed believers feel about their sacred texts. The novel seemed to her not only to address the American experience as no other American fiction had before, but also to speak about the formation of female subjectivities with a power that she urgently wished to understand. But because her work has been on the tradition of the English novel, she had not written previously about an African American text, and because she was scheduled to speak publicly about Morrison’s novel with Barbara Christian—an African American feminist critic who had interrogated the use of theory—she felt enormous anxiety about the nature and extent of her authority to speak.

For Barbara, the presentation was also fraught with emotion. It seemed to her that in Beloved Morrison not only had recuperated the subjectivity of black female slaves, but had done so by creating a healing ritual, a fixing ceremony drawn from West African cosmologies that were radically different from Western epistemologies. Why then did the majority of pieces that Barbara was reading in literary and feminist journals approach the novel primarily from a psychoanalytic (and sometimes a Marxist) perspective? Though not opposed to these approaches, Barbara wondered whether the academy acknowledged only methodologies that fell within the Western intellectual tradition. Having previously spoken at Irvine about her essay, The Race for Theory, which questioned the Western philosophical appropriation of theory and upset many theoretically oriented students and faculty, she was not looking forward to presenting a paper that advocated reading Beloved from an African cosmological perspective.

Ironically, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that Helene’s orientation was psychoanalytic and Barbara’s was concerned with African spiritual systems, their pieces spoke in extremely interesting ways to one another. Clearly, it was not accidental that Beloved was the text that enabled their conversation. Having inspired both critics, Beloved provided the ground of their connection by bringing into dialogue different cultural ways of knowing and healing: West African practices of ancestor worship, for example, with the psychodynamics of the mother-daughter bond. Through its narrative evo- cation of spirituality, history, and social relations, and through its presentation of communal and personal memory and desire as overlapping and complementary structures of experience, the novel challenges its readers to create similar conversations among less allusive and accommodating theoretical perspectives. Vaguely aware of this challenge, although certainly not able then to have stated it explicitly, Helene and Barbara agreed to continue their discussion, perhaps by presenting their papers together at Santa Cruz.

At the same time, Elizabeth, another white psychoanalytic feminist, was engaged in her own struggle with Beloved. For her too it was a kind of ultimate text. Yet precisely because it was the African American text that white feminists had embraced most eagerly, the text catalyzed for her a concern about the current white feminist investment in representations of African American women’s subjectivity. Which novels are privileged, through their solicitation of recognizable psychoanalytic models, by white feminist critics’ obsession with African American women’s texts? Does reading this obsession psychoanalytically unmask or reentrench racial stereotypes and hierarchies? Does the conceptual apparatus of projection, identification, and mirroring that works so well to theorize the cross-racial operations of white women’s subjectivity help to explain, or does it simply appropriate, aspects of black women’s subjectivity? Does psychoanalytic criticism, rarely practiced by black feminists, entail conscription to dominant cultural discourses? Elizabeth’s initial desire to write psychoanalytically on Beloved evolved into a desire, which she shared with Barbara and Helene, to question what it would mean to revise feminist psychoanalysis as a discourse on the subjectivity of women of color. The prospect of bringing together at a conference several black and white feminist critics—to present work, to brainstorm, and, if necessary, to work through painful disagreements—seemed promising, as well as challenging, to all three.

Not surprisingly, there were problems built into this conception from the start. As the only African American organizer of the conference from which this collection of essays derives, Barbara bore the familiar burden of representing women of color. Even more serious was the way the project reproduced the dominant black-white binary that erases the far more variegated spectrum of racialized female subjectivities. Yet because it seemed impossible to do justice to the complexities of every cultural formation, we decided to structure this discussion by foregrounding two. The exceptionally charged, enduring, and complicated history of black and white women in this country constitutes, we hope, a plausible and productive point of departure for a dialogue on race, psychoanalysis, and female subjectivity that we encourage other voices to disrupt and dispute.

By focusing attention on African American texts and contexts, the conference was designed to force a rethinking of psychoanalytic theory comparable to, yet potentially more disruptive than, the transformations that (white) feminism had produced by centering women in a revised developmental story, foregrounding the differential construction of gendered subjectivities, and revaluing the preoedipal as psychic register. Recognizing that despite these substantial achievements white feminists had unwittingly reaffirmed the determining structure of the middle-class family in their work and had reproduced the dynamic of white self and racialized other, we hoped that the introduction of African American criticism, theory, and fiction would broaden the terms for a collaborative feminist critique.

The conference title, we thought, was clear: Psychoanalysis in African American Contexts: Feminist Reconfigurations. The invited lecturers all professed more than passing interest in the announced subject, and their lecture titles indicated that our perception of the conference was generally shared. But the conference that took place was not the conference that had been advertised or planned. Rather than the object of interrogation, psychoanalysis proved to be the resisted term. Some papers never mentioned it; others made passing reference to it before proceeding to other concerns. What was of importance to many of the white participants was the range of ways in which they could engage with African American women’s texts, whereas for many of the black scholars, the conference provided a space within which they could present critical approaches that had not been easily allowed at conventional literary conferences. In different ways—and for different reasons having to do with race, training, and generation—the participants were testing assumptions about the three prominent words and phrases in the conference title: psychoanalysis, feminism, and African American contexts.

The tone of the conference was subdued until the Saturday afternoon session (significantly entitled, as it proved, Spirituality/Psychoanalysis: Cultural Encounters). In her paper, Channeling the Ancestral Muse: Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrick, Akasha (Gloria) Hull emphasized the well-known fact that Clifton and Kendrick, like any number of African American women writers, foregrounded spirituality in their themes and accounts of poetic inspiration. What made her paper so provocative was that she asked the question, Where in the current theorizing about poetic form and politics is there space to situate such matters? What ignited the audience was that Hull introduced a different subject of intellectual inquiry into an academic conference about race and psychoanalysis. This affirmation of African American women’s spirituality signaled the return of the repressed.

There were few women of color nonparticipants at the conference. Most of those who were there had come not because they were particularly concerned about the revamping of psychoanalysis, but because they were interested in seeing so many black women scholars in the flesh. Hull’s paper brought home to them the extent to which they felt that metaphoric systems from which they might derive original ways of reading had been suppressed or denigrated by the academy. Like the African American women writers who were their counterparts, many of these critics thought (whether they believed in these systems or not) that spirituality could provide new access to certain African American texts. But unlike their writing sisters, they did not feel free to examine spiritual discourses and practices within the university. Hull’s paper offered them a way to come out of the closet and question the languages available for representing unconscious processes, modes of healing, and the social formation of the female subject. Was psychoanalysis just another cultural narrative whose self-bestowed claim to universality had been fortified by the interest of literary critics in the academy?

The ensuing debate sharply highlighted the consequences of differently disseminated and institutionalized cultural perspectives. Since African belief systems for negotiating the inexplicable were transmitted orally among, and often guarded carefully within, denigrated New World cultural groups, these systems have typically been ignored or dismissed as superstition by humanistic academic disciplineswilling to grant psychoanalysis the status of (at least) a powerful representational system. The institutionalization of psychoanalysis as a theory of textuality (in effect, the legitimation of particular psychoanalytic perspectives) allows us to distinguish between an interpretive method (which we came at the conference to call psychoanalytics)—a practice of reading for repressions, contradictions, repetitions, and displacements —and a more culturally specific psychoanalytic thematics drawn from the Western family romance. But whatever distinctions we make, these interpretive strategies derive from and reinforce a particular construction of the unconscious more useful in exposing fissures in the dominant cultural texts than in interrogating the discourse of the dominated. Filtering texts by subjugated groups through a psychoanalytic hermeneutics of suspicion tends to subvert their specific kinds of social knowledge and authority.

If psychoanalysis has entered and been reconstituted within the academy under the aegis of the humanities, race has been institutionally positioned as an object of primarily sociological inquiry. Most visibly manifested through reactive practices such as social movements, race has been most thoroughly examined in terms of domination and agency rather than subjectivity. As is vividly exemplified by the contrast in Stuart Hall’s foundational essay, Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies, between the restrained account of the profound theoretical struggle required to put race on the agenda of cultural studies and the near-hysterical narrative of the violent disruption produced by feminism—As the thief in the night, it broke in; interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies—the discourse of social theory has been better able to assimilate race, perceived as a (masculine) political formation, than to accommodate the feminist ‘re-opening’ of the closed frontier between social theory and the theory of the unconscious—psychoanalysis.¹ Although cultural studies has proved increasingly capable of incorporating gender and psychoanaly- sis, Hall’s split between an implicitly white psychoanalytic feminism and an implicitly masculine discourse on race points to a more stubborn difficulty: the lack of discursive ground for the black female subject who stands at the crossroads of these terrains.

This anthology cannot by itself remedy this lack. Rather than attempting to construct a metalanguage that might mediate among—at the cost of flattening—the discourses of spirituality, psychoanalysis, gender, and race, we hope these essays provide richer accounts of each discourse’s possibilities, limitations, and internal heterogeneity. Instead of proposing a grand design, we generate multiple opportunities for particular local exchanges. For as the concluding conference session made clear, each discourse is itself a site of contestation: rather than the summing up we envisaged, this final event erupted into a heated exchange about the politics of self-naming. Yet the disputes between the advocates of Black versus African American were no more intense than the controversies between the Lacanians and object relations theorists. Members of all discursive camps, themselves multiply and shiftingly determined by specific incidents and debates, frequently felt embattled or suppressed. Far from perceiving themselves privileged as purveyors of theory, many of the white psychoanalytic feminists felt under attack from materialist critics, as well as from adherents of competing psychoanalytic schools; African American psychoanalytic feminists felt as marginalized within their own cultural cohort as critics who wanted to examine spirituality felt within the academy at large; senior feminists, black and white, felt threatened (and thereby ideologically reunified) by a younger generation, black and white, who were astonished to discover their power to intimidate established scholars; and all of us were at least fleetingly allied by the racist treatment inflicted on African American participants by a local hotel manager. The anthology, we realized, had to complicate substantially the vision of the conference represented by its poster, which foregrounded an African American woman whose quizzical gaze at the viewer partially eclipsed yet nevertheless was framed by the shadowy outline of Freud. Each term needed to be problematized: Freud could not stand for psychoanalysis, an anonymous black woman could not stand for race, and the invisible but shaping presence of the white feminism that had positioned these two figures against each other needed to be overtly thematized.

On the last night of the conference, Helene held a party for the participants at her house. At some point in the evening, Barbara went out on the deck to have a cigarette. Hortense Spillers and Mae Henderson drifted out to continue talking with her. As they discussed the situations at their different campuses, as well as their ideas about where black feminism might be going, they were joined by younger scholars who were also concerned about directions and trends in the profession. Suddenly, Helene and Elizabeth looked at one another in a moment of guilty and nervous recognition: the party had split along racial lines; the black women were all out on the deck; the white women had either gone home or were sitting indoors in the living room. To those on the inside, which now appeared an outside, it seemed the inevitable had happened; they had been found out and excluded from the inner circle that the margin had now become.

After a period of anxious waiting, Elizabeth went outside to ask if the group in the living room could join the group on the deck. In a little while, she was told; a critical discussion was just underway. After waiting another half an hour, the white women could stand it no longer and burst out on the deck with their paranoia, their wounded feelings, their sense of just but nonetheless painful exclusion. But no: the black feminists on the deck said they had not been talking about or consciously excluding them; indeed, they had not registered their absence, or had not read it in racialized terms. Intensely engaged in debating complex theoretical and political differences and power relations among themselves, they were protecting their discussion against interruption. Although the white feminists had believed their black colleagues to be part of a closed but close community, few of the black women at the conference had actually known one another in the past. Though each of them had often been invited to represent black feminism at one or another conference over the years, they had generally been invited as individuals, alone. Perceived from the outside as part of an exclusive community, each felt her isolation painfully. This meant that younger black academics had rarely met those who had acted, in a crucial sense, as mentors, both through their work and by virtue of their active professional presence. Ironically, Helene’s deck—and the larger conference—represented a landmark occasion: an opportunity for intra- and intergenerational bonding that had everything to do with the black scholars themselves and nothing to do with their white counterparts.

Retrospectively, this incident made clear that the subtext of cross-racial anxieties and fantasies that pervaded the public and private spaces of the conference needed to be specifically theorized in the anthology, as did the racially charged division between spiritual and psychoanalytic discourses. It is for this reason that we frame the anthology with two sections that are in implicit dialogue with one another: an opening section on the racial politics of reading, Crossdressing, Crossreading, or Complementary Theorizing? which foregrounds the motives for and problems with the current white feminist investment in black women’s texts; and a concluding section, Healing Narratives, which features essays primarily by black feminists on African- derived alternatives to and interconnections with the European discourse of psychoanalysis. Within this frame, the two middle sections explore ways that questions of racial difference engage and challenge diverse schools of psychoanalytic theory. Representing the Unrepresentable: The Symbolic and the Real examines the problems and possibilities of representing race within a primarily Lacanian frame; Race, Psychoanalysis, and Female Desire probes the racial dimensions of the female desires posited by Freudian and object relations theory. These middle sections, although unavoidably selective in their coverage, together address both the dominant psychoanalytic metadiscourse on representation and the prevailing thematic focus of psychoanalytic feminism.

Our first section opens with Ann duCille’s essay, The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies, which decries the status of black women as the quintessential site of difference and fetishized object of contemporary critical inquiry. Placing the Victorian cult of true womanhood, denounced by white feminists, against the postmodern exoticizing of black women’s textual bodies, in which white feminists are deeply complicit, the essay uncovers the primitivizing critical fantasies that motivate and shape white and masculine readings of black women’s textual bodies, readings that occult and consequently maintain power relations in the academy. Dwelling on white feminists (while including representative white and black male critics), duCille dissects the construction of black women’s literary and critical texts as mammies who initiate, nurture, and legitimate the aspiring critic by teaching her or him the secrets and values of endurance. Their conscious intentions notwithstanding, white feminists repeatedly demonstrate an unacknowledged sense of racial entitlement. They treat the field of black feminist studies not like a discipline with a history and a body of rigorous scholarship and distinguished scholars underpinning it, but like an anybody-can-play pick-up game performed on a wide-open, un trammeled field, or like a bridge that is walked on over and over and over again by critics seeking solid ground. As an antidote to the critic who views the objectified [black feminist] subject from a position of unrelinquished authority, duCille tentatively proposes the strategy of black and white women working together on intellectual projects, the complementary theorizing we have borrowed as the utopian name for the critical essays that initiate this volume

Tania Modleski’s essay, Doingjustice to the Subjects: Mimetic Art in a Multicultural Society: The Work of Anna Deavere Smith, might be considered a response to duCille’s call. Thinking with and through Anna Deavere Smith’s strategies of mimetic identification in Fires in the Mirror and Twilight, Mod- leski works along with Smith to unfix the racial definitions that generate territorial strife and mimetic rivalry. By bringing together such theorists as Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin and Cornel West to articulate Smith’s commitment to deterritorialization and diasporic consciousness, sharing space with others, devoid of exclusivist and dominating power, Modleski reenacts at the level of theory Smith’s performative unsettling of cultural oppositions between Jews and blacks. Modleski does not, however, merely imitate or celebrate Smith; she also criticizes what she sees as Smith’s subordination of gender to racial oppression, her failure to engage the historic rivalries and partnerships between black and white women (as she does between blacks and Jews), and her scapegoating of white women as the voice of racism. If Smith wasn’t going to acknowledge my oppression as a woman, Modleski remarks in a decidedly nonfetishizing moment, I would not recognize hers as an African American. By reflecting on, rather than merely enacting or denying, the mimetic rivalry between them, Modleski, like Smith, refuses to be fixed, opening instead an exchange as mobile as Smith’s own location, ‘on the road,’ in a kind of permanent exile, hammering out justice.

Whereas Modleski challenges Smith’s subordination of gender to race, Margaret Homans strives to produce a gender alliance across race in her essay, ‘Racial Composition’: Metaphor and the Body in the Writing of Race. Seeking to further a mutually instructive relation between feminisms engaged with the ways the body, black or white, tends to be derogatively troped as female, Homans highlights the gender dimensions of critical debates in the late 1980s between African American feminists and prominent male African American theorists, especially Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker, concerning the figurative versus the literal or embodied character of race. Pointing to the masculinist assumptions of the poststructuralist theory of language on which Gates and Baker rely (assumptions deriving most centrally from Lacan’s positioning of the mother’s body as the absence that makes language’s substitutions possible and necessary), Homans joins those black feminists who refuse simply to repudiate the claims of the literal, the body, and the female. Tracing the sustained though deeply ambivalent interest in the racially marked body through several 1980s fictional and autobiographical texts by Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, she examines the interplay between relatively literal and conspicuously figurative language in order to reveal the tension that exists between race as body and race as metaphor. She demonstrates that a revision of the fall as a story of interdependent racial and sexual division recurs in these texts, suggesting the failure of embodiment adequately to represent a prior condition of wholeness. As narratives of embodiment, stories of the fall explain why the literal is always accompanied by its opposite: figuration names the gap that embodiment seeks but fails to close. Body and figuration are inextricable, yet only the women writers affirm the body and the literal. In the two 1994 memoirs with which Homans’s essay concludes, however, both sides of the debate have come to coexist, as the maternal body shifts for both the male and female author from a unified, originary, and consequently unrepresentable black materiality to the source of the knowledge of division.

Responding to Homans’s discussion (among others), the final essay in this section returns to the questions raised by Ann duCille. In Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation, Elizabeth Abel examines the desires and fantasies that mark recent white feminist readings of black women’s texts. She argues, in agreement with duCille, that despite their wide range of critical strategies, these readings emerge from a desire to share the cultural authority produced in part by black women’s enforced experience of embodiment. The essay begins by teasing out the fantasies evoked by Toni Morrison’s story Récitatif, in which the race of the two female protagonists is at once strongly marked and deeply ambiguous. After contrasting her own reading of embodiedness as a signifier of blackness with a black feminist identification of race through political and cultural signifiers, Abel analyses the rhetoric of race in three contemporary critical discourses frequently deployed in white feminist readings of black women’s texts. Proceeding from deconstruction to psychoanalysis and then to cultural criticism, she concludes that however interwoven with and ruptured by other differences, race remains a salient source of the fantasies and allegiances that shape our ways of reading. Nevertheless, she endorses crossing racial boundaries in reading because our inability to avoid inscribing racially inflected investments and agendas contributes, however inadvertently, to the racialization of whiteness. As masculinity takes shape in part through its constructions of femininity, whiteness—that elusive color that seems not to be one—gains materiality through the desires and fantasies played out in its interpretations of blackness, interpretations that, by making the unconscious conscious, supplement articulated ideologies of whiteness with less accessible assumptions.

The essays in Crossdressing, Crossreading, or Complementary Theorizing? work variously with the Imaginary processes of dyadic mirroring, of constantly renegotiated boundaries between two imperfectly yet insistendy differentiated terms. Yet despite its status as the central trope for the production of subordinate and dominant racial identities in the heavily masculine tradition of postcolonial psychoanalysis extending from Franz Fanon through Homi Bhabha, the cross-racial mirror operates in these essays consistently in only one direction. Positioned in contemporary cultural politics as the object more often than the agent of imitation, African American feminists, two and a half decades after Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, rarely invoke the ahistorical apparatus of the mirror stage. The essays in the next section, Representing the Unrepresentable: The Symbolic and the Real, engage the full range of Lacanian registers in an attempt to open psychoanalysis to history. Shifting from recent reading relations between white and black feminists to the challenges of theorizing African American subjectivity, this section also marks a shift from the fantasmatic and repetitive cycles of the Imaginary to the ways that the Symbolic engages and refuses history. Haunting this section is the elusive Lacanian category of the Real, associated here with the burden of a negated history.

The section opens with Hortense Spillers’s meditation on the intersections through which the discourses of race and psychoanalysis, each traditionally structured through the other’s exclusion, destabilize each other’s certitudes and conceptual boundaries. Her project is to displace the African American community, traversed in her account by the dominant culture and consequently riddled with ambivalence, from its stable position as an object of social science inquiry to a more uncertain locus as the subject of a psychoanalytic culture criticism. All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race initiates a shift from a familiar historical narrative of collective progress from slavery to liberation, to a less transparent emancipatory story. That story focuses not on the collective but on the one that, constituted through intersubjective symbolic matrices and consequently different from the singular, self-determined individual, is possessed nevertheless of particularity and some degree of agency. As a discipline in self-reflection, psychoanalysis for Spillers helps articulate the interior intersubjectivity of an African American subject formed through deeply social symbolic processes. By insisting on the processes of negation that found the Symbolic register, psychoanalysis posits a subject re-presented beyond the fixed corporeality that the dominant culture assigns to race. A psychoanalytic culture criticism propels racial subjectivity from the historically given, the always already known, and consequently the perfect affliction … destiny in the world we have made, to a shifting effect of complex mediations between imposed meanings and cultural self-reflexivity. Reconceptualizing agency for African Americans as selfconsciously assertive reflexivity constitutes for Spillers a project that is inextricably psychoanalytic and political.

It is possible to understand Spillers’s goal as shifting the subject of race from the register of the Real, understood as the status quo of psychic immobility, to the mediations and modulations of the Symbolic. In Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye, Laura Wexler argues, in contrast, that the Real offers interpretive leverage by exceeding both the endless repetitions of the Imaginary and the structures of the Symbolic. Rather than the racist immobilization of history, the Real is "the violent, unsustainable, unthinkable possibility that nonetheless is, has happened, and must be endured … a kind of wounding that opens Freud to history. Consequently, it is the wounding that we must seek in a psychoanalysis of the Real, so as to know it, so as to touch it, so as to set ourselves free." Utilizing Roland Barthes’s notion of the photographic punctum as this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me … this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument, Wexler tries to induce a rupture of the Real by penetrating the sentimental visual rhetoric of George Cook’s 1865 photograph of an African American nursemaid holding a white child. By following the subliminal message of the nursemaid’s striped dress to read between the lines of the white photographer’s sub- jugating gaze, Wexler detects signs of the nursemaid’s resistance to her assigned function: enhancing by contrast the white mother’s sentimental authority. Rather than pursuing the impossible project of recovering the nursemaid’s voice or interiority (perhaps a more familiar version of the psychoanalytic project), Wexler furthers what she calls the cognitive appropriation of the Real by examining the historical circumstances under which the nursemaid’s image, and photographic images more generally, circulate and determine how social relations of race, gender, and class are envisioned and rendered invisible.

Wexler reads through the image of a black nursemaid the historical wounds that photography conceals and reinflicts; Spillers reads the substitutions of the Symbolic register as a reprieve from the givens of history. In "‘Beyond Mortal Vision’: Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig and the American Racial Dream-Text, Katherine Clay Bassard negotiates between these positions through her reading of the first novel by an African American woman novelist. Choosing as her governing metaphor the shadows" of slavery that according to Wilson fall even in the north, Bassard reads Our Nig as both an expose of white American culture’s repressed relation to what Toni Morrison has called American Africanism and as an exploration of the particular challenges and possibilities of cultural production for the African Americans who inhabit those cultural shadows. For Frado, the novel’s mulatta narrator, indentured as a child to an abusive white family, these shadows become a privileged interpretive locus from which to read the racial and gender power relations incorporated into the double stories of the Two-Story White House, North, whose social margins she inhabits and disturbs. Although Frado’s position recalls that of the nursemaid photographed six years later by George Cook, she is endowed with interpretive authority. Through her eyes, we as readers "see what is supposed to remain unseen … race as the underside of the American dream or nightmare, the Real story glimpsed in the gaps, displacements, and silences of the national social narrative. Like Joseph, the Biblical prototype that Wilson invokes, Frado becomes an interpreter of dreams: here, the American dream-text of color, black, white and yeller, not an individual but a social text that both encodes and represses the violence of race. As the child of a white mother and black father, a reversal of the normative structure of racialized sex in antebellum America, Frado, constructed as a Nig" and used as a slave by the white family she serves, implicitly calls into question the 1662 Virginia law of partus sequitir ventrera. In Bassard’s interpretation, this law—that children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother—constitutes a peculiarly twisted myth of origins through which the black woman becomes the origin of the ‘fall’ of millions of black children (male and female) into perpetual slavery. Bassard argues that, by splitting servitude from the black maternal body, Wilson destabilizes the equation of race and condition, severs the social symbolic from the biology it claims as ground, and fissures white America’s image of itself as coherent, legitimate, and whole. Reading the American social dream against the political unconscious it generates, Bassard suggests how to put into practice Spillers’s conception of psychoanalytics.

For both Wexler and Bassard, the racially fractured mother-child relation is the site at which we can glimpse the wounds of history. Similarly, in the final essay in this section, Helene Moglen reads the narrative of a black woman forced by the violence of slavery to assume the mythic function of primal mother as an exposure of the ways that seemingly timeless modes of psychic functioning are constructed and enacted in history. Continuing the gesture toward the Real initiated by the two preceding essays, "Redeeming History: Toni Morrison’s Beloved" directs our attention to the psychic register evoked and obscured by the hallucinatory delusions of the Imaginary and the shared psychosis of the cultural Symbolic. To travel back through the mirror of the Imaginary toward that primal space of the Real, Moglen argues, is to claim another dimension of self-formation that underlies and resists the dynamic of othering which propels Imaginary fantasies of gender and racial opposition that are given social shape in the Symbolic. From the vantage point of the Imaginary, whose narrative mode is the fantastic, the feared and desired moment prior to differentiation is identified ambivalently with the primal mother, who is thought to mark all difference that is the absence of differentiation, who holds the promise of all meaning that is also the threat of meaninglessness. … Asocial, she is outside of history. Apolitical, she neither changes nor can she be responsible for change. Beloved, in Moglen’s reading, removes this omnipotent and yet powerless mother from the place before desire and brings her into history in the figure of the black woman whose children are born into the alienated relations of slavery. By radically interrogating the fantastic tradition within which she also writes, Morrison undoes the conventional oppositions between fantastic and realist narrative modes, and between psychoanalysis and history.

The essays in Representing the Unrepresentable: The Symbolic and the Real interrogate and extend a Lacanian discourse on representation by forcing a confrontation with the historical crisis of slavery. Those in Race, Psychoanalysis, and Female Desire draw upon and revise Freudian and object relations theory by placing the psychoanalytic narratives of (white) femininity that emerged in the 1920s against mostly contemporaneous black women’s texts that show how the desiring female subject is culturally embedded and socially produced. Explicitly rejecting the exclusivity or dominance of gender difference in the construction of subjectivity, these essays track the elaborate dynamic through which categories of race, class, and sexuality interact with those of gender to constitute complex representational systems. Centrally, they reveal the extent to which racial specificities, while overtly absent from, have also been powerfully influential in, the construction of the psychoanalytic subject. Hence, both the unspoken whiteness of the (heterosexual, narcissistic, masochistic) female subject of psychoanalysis, and alternative constructions of femininity, come newly into focus. Eroding the boundaries between theory and fiction, this section brings to the surface hidden assumptions of both, demonstrating how a historicized psychoanalytic discourse can enrich and be enriched by a revisionary reading of literary texts.

The section opens with Jean Walton’s Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism, an essay that enables us to see how the assumptions that have limited the revisionary project of contemporary white feminists also shaped the interpretive work of early women analysts and their patients, who ignored the decisive influence of race in the construction of women’s sexual and gender identities. Participating in a racialized discourse that overlooked the desires, identifications, and experiences of women who are not white, they all assumed whiteness to be fundamentally constitutive of female subjectivity. For example, although Joan Riviere deconstructed the essentialist notion of femininity in her influential essay, Womanliness as Masquerade, she ignored the fact that the female subjectivity on which her essay’s reconceptualization is based is specifically white and depends for its coherence on the figuration of black men and the elision of black women. In a similar vein, Walton shows that Melanie Klein’s theorization of a female creativity that makes reparation for aggressive wishes directed at the mother relies on the evocation and dismissal of a black woman in the fantasy of a female analysand. In making visible the racialized aspect of psychoanalytic discourse itself—specifically the psychoanalytic discourse of white feminists—Walton significantly opens that discourse to further interventions that take race as their central analytic term.

Shifting to a fictional narrative by an African American woman who was a contemporary of the early white female analysts, Barbara Johnson insists, in The Quicksands of the Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut, that a focus on intrapsychic structures can provide insight into the intersecting relations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Using Kohut’s theory of narcissism to analyze Larsen’s protagonist, Helga, whose desires are represented as contradictory and self-destructive, Johnson also deploys her reading of Helga to force a reconsideration of Kohut’s selfpsychology. In her view, Kohut’s definition of narcissistic personality disorder does not merely reflect entrapment in a fiction of the autonomous self generated by the mirror stage, as Laca- nians have maintained, but offers a richer exploration of complex structures of mirroring, of which the mirror stage is only one example. To explain Helga’s recurrent inconsistency and ultimate paralysis, Johnson applies and extends Kohut’s theory, suggesting how the mirroring environment of the nuclear family interacts with that of the larger society to influence the construction of the self. Because the narcissistic psychic formation is also a so- cial, economic and political structure in the world, race can serve as a selfobject from which the self derives positive and negative mirroring, often simultaneously—as in the case of Larsen’s biracial protagonist. Finally, by showing how the frameworks that both Larsen and Kohut employ are themselves artifacts of a middle-class consciousness that commodifies and fetishizes the decontextualized self, Johnson emphasizes how class complicates racial difference and shapes the assumptions of theory as well as those of fiction.

Through an intricate close reading of Larsen’s other novel, Passing, Judith Butler explicitly challenges two assumptions that have marked psychoanalytic feminism (and Freudian theory generally) as white: that sexual difference is more basic than other differences in the constitution of the subject and that some forms of sexual difference are not tinged by race. In Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge, Buder shows that sexual and racializing norms not only coexist in the social field but also are articulated in relation to and through one another. She argues that in Passing, cultural prohibitions against miscegenation and homosexuality converge in order to produce a normative heterosexuality (with its gender differences) that guarantees the reproduction of racial purity. In her reading, the complex nodes of power in the fiction are mediated by Clare, the passing mulatta who rejects sexual and racial taboos. For her white husband, Bellew, Clare is the necessary and impossible object of desire … the fetish in regard to which his own whiteness is anxiously and persistently secured. For Irene, Clare’s rediscovered mulatta childhood friend who clings to the passionless bourgeois identity that secures her social position, Clare is the desired, feared, and even hated Other. Though the revealed impossibility of Clare’s situation ultimately enables the consolidation of racist, homophobic, and elitist values, the muted homosexuality within the text functions as a persistent excess: a political promise that Butler herself attempts to keep, not only through her interpretation of Passing, but also in her use of Larsen’s novel to produce a revisionary reading of the psychic economy of Freud.

The final essay in this section both advances the historical frame and returns it to the context of slavery in order to examine the interrelations among violence, enslavement, and sexuality. In The Stories of O (Dessa): Stories of Complicity and Resistance, Mae G. Henderson explores the intertextual relations between Sherley Anne Williams’s contemporary rendition of a slave narrative, Dessa Rose, and two precursor texts: William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner and Pauline Réage’s Story of O. Williams’s revision of Styron’s historical novel about the slave insurrection led by Nat Turner protests the racial masquerade through which the white male author articulates his own subjectivity rather than that of his black male subject, who is consequently dispossessed of political agency and transformed into a spectacle of black emasculation. In her more extended engagement with The Story of O, Williams reconstructs Réage’s infamous narrative of female erotic submis- sion as an allegory of white female complicity with patriarchy … a hazardous alliance in which the patriarchy is further institutionalized by the integration of the white woman into its fundamental structures. By having Dessa Rose refuse to cooperate with her white male would-be captors and repudiate the 0 (sign of emptiness, openness, and self-negation) with which her white interrogators repeatedly attempt to preface her name, Williams both invokes and rewrites the story of white feminine pleasure in surrender as a narrative of black feminist resistance to that masochistic scenario. Exposing (along with Williams) the pornographic subtext of slavery, Henderson also exposes the racial assumptions underlying discussions of female masochism. To reveal, without reproducing, the power dynamics that produce ideologies of desire is the critical challenge that Henderson detects in Williams’s text. Shifting at the conclusion of her essay from scenes of writing to scenes of reading, Henderson proposes a critical practice that resists the positions of submission and conquest in our engagement with literary and critical texts.

Henderson decenters the white woman as the representative figure of a psychoanalytic discourse on female sexuality. Our final section, Healing Narratives, completes that decentering by examining the status of African spiritual and cultural systems in theorizing diasporic subjectivities. The section begins by returning to a critical turn-of-the-century moment in American culture, in which spirituality and psychology could still be perceived as two interconnected discourses of the unconscious. In Pauline Hopkins and William James: The New Psychology and the Politics of Race, Cynthia D. Schräger examines the ways in which Pauline Hopkins used late-nineteenth- century discourses of the unconscious (particularly the writings of William James) to explore the political situation and complex subjectivity of African Americans in post-Reconstruction America. Focusing on Of One Blood, Or the Hidden Self, Schräger traces the development of two contradictory positions in Hopkins’s fiction, contradictions that the title itself implies. On the one hand, as Schräger demonstrates, Hopkins employs an intrapsychic model in shaping her three protagonists: white characters whose hidden selves are revealed, in the course of the story, to be black. Emphasizing the pervasiveness of miscegenation, this model asserts the inevitable indeterminacy of racial identity. On the other hand (perhaps, as Schräger suggests, because the depth model lends itself to appropriation by a white racializing discourse), Hopkins introduces a Pan-African perspective in the second half of her story. Transferring the concept of the hidden self from an intrapsychic to a social field, she affirms the essentialism of an African identity that underlies and redeems oppressed blackness.

Defining unconscious states broadly enough to include spiritistic possession (now called channeling), James was among the most extreme of the new psychologists in his refusal to distinguish between the rational and the irrational, the secular and the mystical, the transpersonal and the personal.

As Schräger demonstrates, James’s approach was particularly valuable to W. E. B. Du Bois, who was attempting to define a form of subjectivity that reflected the particular experience of African Americans. Drawing simultaneously on a religious discourse of spiritual possession and a psychological discourse of multiple personality, Du Bois characterized African American subjectivity as an experience of double-consciousness: a state marked both by interior struggle and by privileged access to the spiritual domain. Whereas most of the essays in this collection employ or at least assume the discourse of the unconscious that, aligned with Freud, ultimately emerged as dominant, the final three essays return to or examine the validity of the perspective shaped by Du Bois and James. They implicitly suggest that if the revisionary project initiated by our conference is to be successful, we must directly engage the debate that the new psychologists began and that psychoanalytic theory subsequently suppressed.

In her essay, Channeling the Ancestral Muse: Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrick, Akasha (Gloria) Hull considers the ways in which the work—and lives—of two African American women poets have been shaped by a form of spiritual receptivity that, rooted in African practice and belief, provides significant continuity for the African American community. For her, the creative sensibility made possible by channeling is validated by New Age awareness but remains unrecognized and untheorized within the academy. Following the lead of Clifton and Kendrick—and many other African American women writers—Hull insists on breaking the silence that has surrounded spiritualism, denying its validity as a mode of knowledge and expression. By affirming the transmission of female ancestral energy as a vital force in the lives and poetry of these and other writers, she makes a critical contribution toward defining an African American poetics.

Carolyn Martin Shaw engages Hull’s argument from the perspective of an anthropologist, insisting that spiritualism does not connect African Americans with an ancestral past but unites them with others—especially New Age religionists—who identify differently. In her essay, The Poetics of Identity: Questioning Spiritualism in African American Contexts, she links spiritualism and Africanity to identity politics, examining them all as postmodern phenomena that reflect a need for origin stories and celebrate local knowledges. Specifically considering how spirit mediumship functions in contemporary Zimbabwe, she distinguishes the separate paths that African and African American spirituality have taken. She proposes that in most African contexts, ancestors’ messages are not inevitably positive for women, nor are women who serve as mediums for spirits necessarily honored in their everyday lives: In African societies, spirit mediumship may be a form of social control, means of self-aggrandizement, or an affirmation of group solidarity. From Shaw’s perspective, the value of the spirituality that Hull celebrates finally derives from the fact that the racial trauma that connects African Amer icans is symbolically summoned by its message: creating a kinship of blood but not in blood.

It is the story of shared trauma that Barbara Christian finds at the heart of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and the argument of her essay, "Fixing Methodologies: Beloved" is located somewhere between the position occupied by Hull and the one finally advanced by Shaw. For Christian, Morrison’s unique accomplishment derives from her focus on the actual and symbolic meaning of the Middle Passage, the historical moment that divided the condition of being African from that of being African American. In order to understand the trauma of that disjunction, Christian reads Morrison’s novel from the perspective of an African cosmology that affirms the continuity of past and present in the naming and nurturing of embodied spirits. For her, Beloved serves as a fixing ceremony: an act of remembrance that initiates the healing of a psychic wound that was originally inflicted by an enforced and collective act of forgetting. In acknowledging and naming our holocaust, we feed, remember, and respect those forgotten, raging spirits whom we call the past, whose bodies and blood fed, and continue to feed, the ground on which we walk. In its emphasis upon the trauma of forgetting and the healing nature of memory, Christian’s argument suggests a definition of the unconscious in which the spiritual and the psychoanalytic once again converge.

Barbara Christian’s essay returns us,