Listening with Black Lives Matter

“Listening with Black Lives Matter” is a series of Lacanian-adjacent responses to/analyses of the current Black Lives Matter moment. Psychoanalysis and Lacanian analysis has a mixed history with respect to race, colonialism, and anti-black racism (one that Sheldon George and Derek Hook address with the new Lacan and Race collection forthcoming from Palgrave), so this might be an opportunity to demonstrate what a political-critical theory approach related to psychoanalysis might offer in the present moment. Indeed, even the rubric of “listening to…” could be questioned, for the very modus operandi of psychoanalysis, the talking cure, proximate as it is to the demands that non-racialized people, non-black people, listen, suggests that listening itself can be a power move, is imbricated with desire and misrecognition. We are intentionally beginning by reaching out to racialized and Indigenous critics, mindful that it should not be incumbent upon them/yourselves to (yet again) explain racism or colonialism to white audiences, but also to create space for your/their voices and viewpoints. 

Zahi Zalloua: “Black Lives Matter and the End of Identity Politics”

Patricia Barkaskas & Clint Burnham: “Decolonizing Paranoia: The Michael Nehass Case”

S. Alfonso Williams: “The accosted and the aggressor”

Robert K. Beshara: “Not All Lives Matter”

by Samir Gandesha: “Post-Colonial Policing” (first appeared on openDemocracy.net, Splinters: July)

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino: “Familiar Foreigners”

Charles Athanasopoulos: “On White Rioters & Black Liberals”

* All images ceded by Hilda Fernandez, from her personal archive taken during trip to Brasil. Graffiti taken at the community Pedra do Sal, Rio de Janeiro, RJ.