Expanding black subjectivities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Deploying the call-and-response mode as the artistic premise of her fiction, foremost African-American author, Toni Morrison, has persistently called in her criticism for a participatory, intellectual and political, engagement with her position on and concerns around blackness. Morrison’s ideas are being critiqued and expanded to reflect contemporary ‘African’ attitudes and perspectives within the contemporary Afrodiasporic writing of critically acclaimed emergent author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In particular, Adichie has, in conversation and in her most recent fiction, suggested that Africans (in the diaspora) articulate themselves differently from African-Americans. Problematized and politicized thus as contested, rather than universally accepted, subjective terrain, blackness more significantly points to the diversity and dynamism of black culture and testifies, in the current socio-political/-historical moment, to recognition of the enduring complexity of black subjectivity. In a close, comparative reading of Morrison’s celebrated novel, Song of Solomon (1977), and Adichie’s popular text, Americanah (2013) – both recipients of the National Book Critics Circle award, this essay offers a fresh, specifically transatlantic and transnational, analysis of Morrison’s African-American views on blackness through the contemporary, Afrodiasporic lens of Adichie. Guided by the dialogic call-and-response mode, and underpinned by cultural, race and diaspora theory, the essay suggests and explores the ways in which Americanah speaks (back) to Morrison’s Song of Solomon, interrogating ontologies of race, particularly blackness, through an ‘Africanness’ that takes cognizance of culturally specific and context-responsive, globalized configurations of female subjectivity in particular. In this way, this essay seeks to expand understandings of, and discussions around, black issues and black life in order not just to resituate the relevance of black cultural ontologies but, through comparative engagement with the ‘politics’ of blackness, to revive in the political consciousness and imagination their crucial significance.     

Curative fictions: The ‘narrative cure’ in Judith Herman's trauma and recovery and Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir

Abstract

The possibility of a so‐called ‘narrative cure’, whereby a survivor of traumatic experience can begin to deal with her past through integrating it into narrative, has become central both to psychotherapy and to literary criticism on writings of trauma as a means of ethical, ‘truthful’ testimony and of healing. This article seeks to question the correlation between testimony and ‘cure’ through analysing the function of the ‘narrative cure’ in a psychotherapeutic text and in a literary text. This highlights how any notion of ‘truthful’ testimony is always underwritten by fiction, which raises crucial ethical questions about the relation between fiction and ‘truth’, testimony and ‘cure’ and psychotherapy and literature. I argue that the ‘narrative cure’ is not a privileged space of curative ‘truth’, but a point of tension between memory and amnesia and between ‘truth’ and fiction; it is precisely this tension, I suggest, which should characterize and structure interdisciplinary responses to trauma.     

Masculinity,Complex: A Historical Take

The author recapitulates the history of the changes in second-wave feminist psychoanalytic thinking regarding masculinity, beginning with the critique of the Freudian-Lacanian position of phallic monism adumbrated by Juliet Mitchell. It traces the reversal brought about by the North American position, represented by Stoller and Chodorow, that emphasized the boy’s problem in breaking his primary identification with the mother. Continuing, the author summarizes her own critique of the oedipal model and have-have-not binary that it dictated as well as her own outline of preoedipal “homoerotic identificatory love” and the overinclusive nature of early identifications. In addition, she includes her understanding of the Oedipus as founded in the repudiation of passivity and its projection into the female “Other,” the daughter position. Along the way she points to how a number of other feminist psychoanalytic thinkers took the idea of postoedipal and overinclusive thinking further and in a more critical direction.     

Helen Keller: rethinking the problematic icon

More than 30 years after her death, Helen Keller is still known internationally as the little deaf blind girl, the 'miracle child' who triumphed over adversity. However, behind the image, hidden from the public gaze, was a flesh-and-blood woman, writer and radical activist, suffragette and Socialist. She was a woman who lived to old age, yet is fixed in the public imagination as an eternal child. This paper charts the creation of Keller's popular image and enduring iconic status, analysing their purpose and the implications they hold for us as disabled people. It then examines the truth of her life, revealing how contemporary are the issues which determined it. Finally, it explores the value of retelling her biography and the relevance it holds in the building of disability culture.     

Amnesia: Cultural Memory,Reconciliation, and Communal Accountability in the Americas

Contributing to debates on the status of comparison in transnational American studies, this essay offers a morphologically comparative approach to memory’s cultural politics in conflict resolution, juxtaposing two histo-ries — one ‘geo-political’ (nation-state, transatlantic) and the other ‘micro-history’ (small-town, regional) — whose ensuing negotiations unsettle paradigms of silencing and forgetting, especially as these pertain to ‘reconciliation’. Offering an alternative to predominantly psychoanalytic treatments of cultural memory and power, this essay employs morphological analysis and queer theory to explore cultural amnesia through blending ethnographic and media sources on the politics of it in the assignment of accountability and belonging.     

Affective Ankylosis and the Body in Fanon and Capécia

Frantz Fanon examines the function of affect to describe colonization as a mode of the production of the body. His idiosyncratic analysis adjusts prevailing conceptions of the body in affect theory, the psychoanalytic study of narcissism, and non-psychoanalytic theories of racialization. This article focuses on the temporality of retroaction that characterizes what he describes as “affective ankylosis,” and links this notion of affect to the process of racialization that organizes a body in the Lacanian mirror stage. Affect under colonial conditions detemporalizes the subject and petrifies a racial schema into a non-binary dual narcissism—leading to the conclusion that the black body is a version of, or name for, the white body. In the same clinical vein inaugurated by Fanon’s literary analysis, I contrast the affective ankylosis and one of its phenomenological manifestations, a neurotic “affective erethism,” to the imaginary exchange that the black Martinican novelist Mayotte Capécia recounts in her semi-autobiographical I Am a Martinican Woman, prefiguring therein the desire of the woman of color as excessive to those politics of the body that colonization renders unsubversive.     

I'm in the Milk and the Milk Is in Me Writing from the Night Kitchen

Although psychoanalysts have used psychoanalytic concepts to understand issues of writer's block as it affects the work of artists and writers, we have largely neglected the process of psychoanalytic writing per se. The author's personal relationship between self, text, and community is used as an initial contribution to the development of clinically near imaginative theory as well as to facilitate the generative authorship of others. The difficulty inherent in the arrogance of a creative thought—embodies one's envy, competitiveness, and destructiveness with her forebears and contemporaries—is considered.     

Disintegrating chronology

This paper utilises the rhetorical device of chronology, a device which helps to instantiate the ‘modern’ world, in order to demonstrate the “reversible imminence” of that world. It seeks to build upon other attempts at ‘postmodern’ writing which have relied on flouting modernist conventions to signify themselves as ‘innovative’. But rather than constructing another new ‘style’ that cuts across conventions in writing, the paper seeks to complement such ‘innovation’ through intensifying its reliance on one of these conventions. The paper illustrates how a diligent and detailed application of the demands of chronology can result in a history that deconstructs itself, or to put it another way, how a faithful adherence to one of the demands of ‘modernist’ writing can itself create a text that fragments into ‘postmodernist’ writing.

The author examined participants’ accounts of the emergence of refinery based computerised oil management systems. These accounts sought to instantiate at least partially enduring organisational and self identities through rhetorics of progress in the face of disorder. However, much of this disorder may be seen to be an effect of extended ordering practices. The chief threat to the maintenance of identities thus turns out to be the ordering practices upon which these identities depend. An impression of progress was seen to rely upon a re-presentation of reflexive process as discrete events, as innumerable black boxes, enabling a (re)integration through separation. But when the author brought these boxes and their contents back together, ‘progress’ disintegrated.

Who makes up real things, dad?

Nobody and everybody; they make themselves up. The thing is that because the real stories just happen, they don’t always tell you very much. Sometimes they do, but usually they’re too . . . messy.’

Iain Banks, The Crow Road.     

Hakim Revisited: Preference,Choice and the Postfeminist Gender Regime

We revisit Hakim's influential preference theory to demonstrate how it is both reflective of postfeminism and generative of its values and practices. We differentiate between two interpretations of postfeminism — first a surface‐level ‘successful but obsolete’ version articulated by Hakim and second a multilayered account of postfeminism as a discursive formation connected to a set of discourses around gender, feminism and femininity. Drawing on this latter version we make visible the embeddedness of postfeminism in preference theory, highlighting its connection to the creation of a new postfeminist subjectivity based on an agentic and ‘choosing’ femininity. We show how a consideration of preference theory in terms of the emergence and constitution of ‘the female chooser’ opens up aspects of Hakim's thesis that to date have been overlooked. In addition, our postfeminist reading of preference theory draws out aspects of Hakim's account that she herself understated. Specifically, within a contemporary context where equivalent priority is afforded to wage work and care work, it is Hakim's ‘adaptive’ woman who exemplifies the new postfeminist subject required to perform well simultaneously in both the work and domestic domains.     

The Suffering Mother and the Miserable Son: Organizing Women and Organizing Women's Writing

This paper examines the contribution of the writing of Julia Kristeva (1941– ) to post‐structuralist ideas about gender in organizations. In particular, it deals with the relationship between her writing and the disciplining of text and, by a parallel movement, with her writings about the body and the regulation of the body. However, it must be said that her writings are ‘extremely difficult and complex, and certainly intimidating and inaccessible to the non‐specialist’ (Lechte 1990, p. 2) but, despite this, Kristeva has come to be considered one of the foremost contemporary French thinkers and her writings have exerted a significant influence on both feminism and postmodernist ideas. Ironically, Kristeva is neither French by birth nor a feminist in the sense that the term is generally understood. Indeed, she has been highly critical of those feminists whom she regards as seeking ‘phallic power’ (Kristeva 1980, p. 208).     

The couch and the clinic The cultural authority of popular psychiatry and psychoanalysis

This paper examines the discourse produced by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who wrote for non-professional audiences. As professionals who reached out beyond their professions, their writing raises questions about the authority they invoked. The two factions in this popular psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, staked out cultural authority using systematically different types of appeals. The psychiatric approach involved a ‘pure’ professionalism, invoking psychiatry’s similarities to medicine. The psychoanalytic approach involved an explicit dissociation from medical authority, and claimed a difference from medical expertise as a mark of intellectual transcendence. What becomes clear is that these standpoints were constructed through discourse as types of strategic positionings. Concluding notes address the idea that Antonio Gramsci’s labels of ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ are not only types of intellectuals; they are also stakes in the game amongst competitors for cultural authority. This insight is then applied to broader considerations regarding public intellectuals.     

A painful labour: responsibility and photography

This paper considers the tension between photography and responsibility despite the avalanche of objections regarding documentary's false promise to awaken social conscience. By examining the encounter with images of suffering through a psychoanalytic register, the paper tries to articulate what Barthes describes as the ‘painful labour’ of responding to the photographic other – an encounter that illuminates the limit of the spectator's ability to respond. Photographs provide an occasion to register this limit, which, I argue, opens up the spectator's traditional notions of responsibility from a set of moral duties towards a questioning of the ethical relation.     

What is a complex?

This essay evaluates the question of the ‘complex’ in a range of scientific, political and psychoanalytic contexts, asking not only where lines of connection and demarcation occur among specific distributions of meaning, value, theory and practice; but also probing the psychoanalytic corpus, notably Freud’s writings on the notion of a ‘complex’, in order to reframe various implications of the idea that this term tends to resist its own utilisation as both an object and form of analysis.     

‘Intercultural Training’ in exchange situations for experts and management: a critical reflection

In this paper, developments in the area of ‘intercultural communication’ are described to shed light on the pitfalls that the author has discovered in her analysis of some of the more popular intercultural training programs, through practical applications of communication training programs and through her own personal experiences in exchange situations. Recommendations are given for the creation of more appropriate intercultural training programs.     

The Codex,the Codicil and the Codpiece: Some Thoughts on Diminution and Elaboration in Identity Formation

This article is about the way in which the processes of diminution and elaboration can be detected in gendered accounts of identity formation. Firstly, it considers the ways in which power is denied to women through a series of reductions, restrictions and controls, and looks at the ways in which men, in contrast, elaborate their identities via a range of enlargements and extensions. The codex of the title refers to the role of the ‘Law’, in Kristeva's sense of the term, in authorizing such arrangements. The codpiece offers a metaphor for elaboration and extension: a male form of extension and elaboration. The codicil, an appendage to a last will and testament, is intended to convey the position of women as appendages, afterthoughts, marginal notes. The article is an example of what Pullen and Rhodes have called ‘dirty writing’, that is to say, it is written with the purpose of allowing the intrusion of the author into the text: with a deliberate confusion of the authorial standpoint and the content. Dirty writing contaminates. This article is written with the intention of contaminating the regulatory mechanisms of the production of the codex, to reveal the enormity of the codpiece and to permit the codicil to assume a role within the codex rather than simply occupying the position of appendage to it. The article is not auto‐ethnographic, although it has elements of autobiography. Rather this article seeks to ‘undo’ gender by fragmenting the coherence of the codex. More tentatively, it seeks to lay bare the male erection which is concealed by the codpiece and to expose it for what it is: an elaborate construction — an elaborate creation masking a less adequate membership. And so this piece of writing attempts to undermine the extravagance of masculine forms of writing; of writing to produce the codpiece, writing as conceit; writing which is antagonistic to fragmented experience. It will not satisfy some, it will irritate others. The article is unbalanced, unresolved: like life itself. It is about stories, illustrations, asides, observations. It is also, with all its attempts to subvert, (with all its attempts to make it ‘dirty’), a piece of male writing.     

A ‘Lost Crowd’: Reconfiguring the Harlem Renaissance as a Post-War ‘Lost Generation’

Abstract

Traditionally for black Americans, World War I did not signify the traumatic removal of traditional Victorian ideals, the end of any romantic notions of battle, or, as it would for white American literature, the disillusionment and alienation of a literary ‘Lost Generation’. Although experiencing continued racism upon their return, the recognition that black Americans had received in wartime France came to characterize a budding enthusiasm for the social prospects of the post-war era. Yet many novels of the Harlem Renaissance certainly resonate with the disillusionment of the Lost Generation and similarly grapple with notions of war trauma and traumatic post-war (re)integration into a chaotic American society. This article considers the endeavour to reconcile feelings of post-war national unity with the African-American struggle for racial equality in the early twentieth century. By evaluating the analogous themes of alienation, masculinity, and place represented by both the Lost Generation and Harlem Renaissance, this article seeks to highlight traumatic parallels between post-war literatures of two divergent ‘lost’ generations.     

Letters from the future: an exercise with child welfare predictions

Abstract

The article presents an empirical exercise about predictions in child welfare. In the exercise, social workers imagined letters which they could receive from a child and his/her parents in five years’ time. The children had been in care for one year at the moment of letter-writing. When the social workers wrote the imaginary letters, they used their professional imagination, based on practice knowledge and experience, and were involved in a role-play. The analysis of the letters (34 from ‘children’ and 33 letters from ‘parents’) demonstrates four themes shared by the letters: ordinary life, family contacts and return home, social problems as shadows and assessment of the placement. Two narratives were performed: the narrative of future of ordinary life and that of the troubles. It is suggested that imaginary letters are helpful in highlighting practitioners’ sense of the future, professional imagination as well as the empowering and critical points in practice.     

Gay-Friendly Psychoanalysis and the Abiding Pleasures of Prejudice

ABSTRACT

Psychoanalysts in North America have mostly rejected the theory that homosexuality in men is “caused” by developmental arrest. Most have also rejected the belief that the Oedipus Complex is the main determinant of adult sexuality (a belief that used to be the very foundation of psychoanalytic thinking). Today’s “gay-friendly” psychoanalysts deplore the mid-20th-century analysts who, in the name of bedrock Freudian principles, pathologized homosexuality and believed they could “cure” it. However, the author argues, this wholesale expulsion of a giant body of mainstream theory has two downsides: It pressures us to fudge our clinical perception when we encounter that rare patient who actually does fit the profile of the “sick” homosexual of the past. And it lets us elide the likelihood that fashionable moralism and self-interest may still be distorting our clinical judgment today.     

Gendered practices in institutions of hegemonic masculinity

Vital knowledge about gender relations can be gained through the study of military and defense organizations. Such institutions of hegemonic masculinity tend to represent and reify specific notions of masculinity in ways that make it the norm. The article suggests that such institutions can be approached through feminist methodology, for example, by using critical analysis to question what appears ‘normal’ in institutional practice and by listening to the voices of women who challenge the norms of hegemonic masculinity by engaging in daily institutional practice. The article relates ‘women's voices’ and this ‘site’ of knowledge to feminist methodology by developing the standpoint perspective. It is argued that the notion of struggle formulated in standpoint theory is a useful way to understand the knowledge gained by women engaging with institutions of hegemonic masculinity, and an important contribution to the understanding of gender dynamics. Furthermore, it proposes that this ‘site’ of knowledge production will become increasingly relevant as women in rising numbers are taking positions within defense and military institutions and challenging historically embedded norms of hegemonic masculinity.     

Questioning the Phallus: Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic function is the “anchor”’ from and around which the symbolic works and ties the discussion to the question of sexual difference by explaining that men and women are positioned differently in relation to it. Butler charges that Lacan’s schema is heteronormative—because it is limited to the male/female schema—and patriarchal because within that heteronormative framework it affirms the masculine perspective. Rather than follow the usual route taken by recent Lacanian scholarship on this issue and focus on Lacan’s later works, especially Seminar XX on female sexuality, I appeal to the contents of two works written in the same year (1958) as “The Signification of the Phallus”—Seminar V and “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”—to offer a qualified defense of Lacan that accepts that his early framework is heteronormative but questions the patriarchal charge by showing that within these pre-Seminar XX texts he explicitly works to undermine that logic.