Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity

Review\nSheldon George has written a book of readable Lacanian complexity, a text that can be read as an elegant illustration of Lacanian theory. At the same time, the book illuminates the enormous complexity of living, being, thinking, speaking and existing with others in race. -- Angie Voela ― Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society\nSheldon George has done valuable work that lays a foundation for psychoanalysts to theorize racial injustice and to assist in constructing a counternarrative that can contribute to pushing back against the resurgence of White supremacy as a master signifier in the United States today. It is urgent work to which psychoanalysts should be prepared to contribute. -- Michael O'Loughlin ― Psychoanalytic Psychology\nAfrican American identity is racialized. And this racialized identity has animated and shaped political resistance to racism. Hidden, though, are the psychological implications of rooting identity in race, especially because American history is inseparable from the trauma of slavery.
In Trauma and Race author Sheldon George begins with the fact that African American racial identity is shaped by factors both historical and psychical. Employing the work of Jacques Lacan, George demonstrates how slavery is a psychic event repeated through the agencies of racism and inscribed in racial identity itself. The trauma of this past confronts the psychic lack that African American racial identity both conceals and traumatically unveils for the African American subject.
Trauma and Race investigates the vexed, ambivalent attachment of African Americans to their racial identity, exploring the ways in which such attachment is driven by traumatic, psychical urgencies that often compound or even exceed the political exigencies called forth by racism.