Abstract
Whilst postcolonial modes of analysis have become an established part of the critical management and organization studies field over the last decade or so, organizational scholars have been selective in borrowing from the complex terrain of postcolonial theory in its parent disciplines in the humanities. In the editorial essay to the recent special issue of this journal on postcolonialism, we noted inter alia the popularity of discursive analyses of Othering and neo-colonial representational strategies in extant organizational research, and the relative lack of analysis of the continuing psychological impact and affective nature of neo-colonial relations (Jack et al., 2011). We called for a broadening and deepening of the postcolonial interrogative space in organization studies, a necessary component of which is the study of a greater variety of formerly colonized countries, regions and continents. With notable exceptions (see, for instance, Jackson, 2013, Nkomo, 2011), Africa is one continent that might be considered overlooked by organizational scholars.
Against this background, Derek Hook’s largely theoretical exposition of a critical psychoanalytic, postcolonial theory of colonial racism in apartheid South Africa is an enticing and important read that speaks to these gaps in postcolonial organizational scholarship. Organized into an introduction, and five substantive chapters, this book offers organizational scholars an in-depth and insightful, but also sometimes difficult to read, ‘psychopolitical approach’ for understanding the nature and perpetuation of racism in postcolonial settings. He defines a psychopolitical theory of racism as: ‘a form of critique in which we not only place the psychological within the register of the political, but, perhaps more challengingly, in which the political is also—although strategically—approached through the register of the psychological’ (p. 40). He thus sets out to articulate the psychological/psychical/subjective domains of human experience, with the social/structural/ideological domains, illustrating the political nature of the psychological, and the manner in which power operates in the psychical domain.
Each chapter begins with excerpts taken from a selected number of the over 5000 personal accounts that form the Apartheid Archive Project (www.apartheidarchive.org). The Archive is the outcome of a research project that ‘collects experiences of racism under the old apartheid order and their continuing [traumatic] effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa’ (www.apartheidarchive.org). These compelling, yet disturbing, accounts bear witness to the manifold nature of colonial racism in Apartheid South Africa. Hook’s particular interest lies in the embodied and contradictory psychical and affective relations between whites and blacks expressed in these accounts. Desire and disgust, love and hate, intense bodily repugnance and repressed sexual desire, are competing components of visceral responses to and imaginaries of the Other. Hook refers to these components as essential ‘extra-discursive’ elements of racism and as embodied and affective features of colonial power, overlooked by dominant representational accounts of racism in critical psychology. His goal is to draw together interlinked extra-discursive and discursive formations in his psychopolitical theory of colonial racism.
Hook writes as a psychoanalyst from within the discipline of psychology. He states that there is much to be gained in his discipline from a conceptual dialogue between psychoanalysis and postcolonialism in theorizing the tenacity of racism in postcolonial settings. To enable this dialogue, Hook draws on psychoanalytic theories and concepts (notably the Lacanian ‘real’, Zizek’s work on fantasy and ideology, and Kristeva’s concept of the abject) and a range of anticolonial and postcolonial authors (notably Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko and Chabani Manganyi). He turns to these authors as they exemplify his psychopolitical interests in so far as they: locate ‘a series of ostensibly private psychological concerns and concepts within the register of the political’ (for instance, through Fanon); employ ‘psychological concepts, explanations and even modes of experience […] to describe and illustrate the workings of power’ (as illustrated, again, through Fanon) and demonstrate how ‘certain forms of psychology [can be put to] actual political work’ and ‘consolidate resistances to power’ (as in the Black Consciousness Movement) (Hook, 2012: 18).
Each of the substantive chapters 1 to 4 focuses principally on one of these writers: Steve Biko (chapter 1); Frantz Fanon (chapters 2 and 3); Homi Bhabha (chapter 4); Chabani Manganyi (chapter 5). Hook supplements and critically develops their core ideas with the assistance of key psychoanalytic concepts (for instance, Lacan’s concept of the real and Kristeva’s writing on the abject in chapter 2, and Zizek’s work on fantasy in chapter 5) to carve out a psychopolitical terrain for analysis. Chapter 1 focuses on Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement which Hook regards as a form of vernacular psychology that had political aims. Specifically, the movement sought to transform black consciousness away from the negative self-evaluations associated with apartheid, towards positive self-images that could then form a psychological basis for struggles for political emancipation. In chapters 2 and 3, Hook focuses on the early psychoanalytic thinking about colonial racism of Frantz Fanon, whose book Black Skin White Masks (1952/1986) is crucial for the development of Hook’s approach. Fanon wrote movingly about the psychological trauma of colonialism (he had been a psychiatrist before taking up anticolonial struggle), and specifically the divided self of colonized subjectivities. Hook addresses the concept of the ‘real’ in Fanon’s writing about racism; that is to say, the ‘disjunctures [experienced by the colonized subject] of a phenomenology of the body overwritten by the various materialities and mentalities of colonialism’ (p. 7). Hook deploys Kristeva’s concept of the abject ‘as a political factor’ to illustrate a theory of racism as a linked series of corporeal, psychological and symbolic expulsions of the real.
In chapter 3, Hook furthers his use of psychoanalysis, presenting ideas of desire, political fantasy and the libidinal economy as articulating concepts of the psychical and the political. Whilst he turns to fantasy as a concept to link subjectivity and structure, the dynamics of the libidinal economy assist Hook in explaining the patterns of repetition associated with colonial discourse. With reference to the paranoid-schizoid and neurotic structure of colonialism, Hook synthesizes Fanon’s description of the consequences of the positioning of the Negro, and the black body, as phobic objects that trigger subjective insecurity for the white body. Such insecurities prompt ego-responses amongst the white man (sic)/colonizer that disavow any potential recognition of similarity, and exaggerate racial differences. For the black man (sic), the consequences that Fanon describes of colonialism involve ‘lactification’ (the neurotic desire to be white) and ‘epidermalization’ (internalized assumptions of interiority).
In chapters 4 and 5, Hook continues to expand his resources for a critical psychology of the postcolonial with reference to leading postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha (chapter 4) and South African psychologist Chabani Manganyi (chapter 5). Bhabha’s work is notoriously complex and sometimes inaccessible (in terms of writing style); perhaps nowhere more obviously than in his famous essay ‘The Other Question’ (Bhabha, 1983). In chapter 4, Hook provides an accessible explanation of this essay, in which Bhabha offers a radical re-interpretation of the concept of the stereotype, drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalysis and poststructuralist theory of discourse. Bhabha argues that ambivalence and anxiety (the simultaneous fear and desire for the Other experienced by the colonizer) is the constitutive condition of the stereotype. The stereotype—and colonial discourse more broadly—serves to ‘fix’ this ambivalence by normalizing difference. Given the irresolvable ambivalence of colonial relations, the stereotype is constantly re-iterated. Bhabha employs other psychoanalytic concepts including the fetish (which he uses analogously to explain how stereotypes work), condensation and replacement (which he uses to explain the unconscious underpinnings of discursive processes of essentialization and reification) in his essay. In this chapter, Hook very ably clarifies the need to theorize racism in terms of both discourse and identification (i.e. the psychical and affective operations that elude discourse).
Hook’s outline of Manganyi’s (early) phenomenologically-inspired work on the racial body in chapter 5 returns the reader to the question of the ‘real’. Manganyi’s interest lies in psychological aspects of the incommensurability of ego-body relations and the role played by colonial discourse in stabilizing or ‘managing’ the real by disavowing it. Following Zizek, Hook ends this chapter, and ultimately his book, by explaining that the incommensurabilities that characterize the relationships between the different registers of colonial experience (corporeal, psychical, symbolic) should provide the starting point for analyses of (post-)colonial racism. They are the generative mechanism of colonial racism, and the basis for a fuller and thus better understanding of racism as contained in the narratives of the Apartheid Archive Project than discourse approaches alone.
There are many aspects of this book that commend it to readers of Organization, and to postcolonial organizational scholars in particular. First, the book is explicitly focused on the psychological experience of colonialism, and provides a thoroughly-developed psychoanalytic framework for analysis. For postcolonial organizational scholars, it reminds us of the crucial importance of studying the psychical domain of colonial experience, and of extending the reception of postcolonialism more fully through psychoanalysis. Just as Hook is critically supportive of discourse analyses of racism, he recognizes its limitations and the need to supplement it through psychoanalysis. In postcolonial organizational analysis, we should consider this an invitation to move with, but also beyond Edward Said’s work on colonial discourse in Orientalism, to other variants of postcolonial theory. By extension, it provides an invitation for psychoanalytic scholars of organization to engage with colleagues in postcolonial theory. The particular focus on (racializing) embodiment also offers a bridge between postcolonial scholars, and those working on the body and organization. As a book specifically dedicated to the theorization of racism, it provides an important impetus not only for more critical thinking about the under-explored topic of race and organization, but for placing the concept of racism more explicitly at the heart of postcolonial work.
Second, the book opens up the potential for a greater engagement with the work of Fanon, and debates the meaning and importance of his work. Fanon’s work is barely mentioned in organization studies; the same can be said of Manganyi, an important South African voice that organizational scholars might wish to listen to more closely. The book might inspire more work by and about African experiences of colonialism and neo-colonialism in general, and the South African experience (historical and contemporary) in particular. Hook is not uncritical of Fanon, and the psychoanalytic concepts he uses, and we can take much from this critical engagement. This is especially so in Hook’s response to criticisms that his, and Fanon’s use of a (universalizing?) Eurocentric theory like psychoanalysis as an explanatory framework for colonial racism might overlook the local specificities of the colonial experience. Furthermore, Hook takes great care to ensure that his psychopolitical framework articulates the psychological and the political domains in ways that retain their distinctiveness, irreducibility and interdependence when explaining racism.
In sum, this is a careful, detailed and reflexive exposition of a critical psychoanalytic, postcolonial theory of colonial racism. It is not an easy read at times, in part because it assumes a good prior knowledge of psychoanalysis, and in part because of the constant layering and theoretical qualifications of detailed conceptual points. That said, it is very much a book that rewards repeated reading, textual lingering and engaged struggle. For postcolonial organizational scholars, it is certainly a recommended read.