Dark Continents:
Psychoanalysis and Colonialism
by Ranjana Khanna
Duke University Press, Durham and London,
2003
328 pp. Trade: $64.95; paper, $21.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3055-5; ISBN: 0-8223-3067-9.
Reviewed by Coral Houtman
coral.houtman@newport.ac.uk
This well-written, intelligent and thoughtful
book is a symptomatic study of psychoanalysis
and its relationship to colonialism and
post-colonialism. Ranjana Khanna argues
that psychoanalysis together with its
sister discourses, ethnology and archaeology,
sprang from the same episteme as colonialism
and was contaminated with the same racism
and ethnocentricity. The subject of psychoanalysis,
Khanna argues, is the "Western Man"
——women and black men are the
"Dark Continent" of the unknowable
and the invisible. Yet psychoanalysis
has been adopted as a tool for the colonised
as well as the coloniser. How has psychoanalysis
spoken and failed to speak for the colonised
and post-colonial subject? Khanna looks
at the discourses of psychoanalysis and
post-colonialism and reads them against
the grain in order to find a theory of
the subject that does not occlude the
psychic, the particular, or the material
historical facts of oppression. Finally,
she arrives at a trans-national feminist
ethics as a tool in the continuing fight
for freedom and justice in the 21st
Century.
Khanna’s major thesis and the continuing
trope for the book is that colonization,
whether black, female, or created through
exile, is constituted by melancholia although
this is differently figured in different
situations and in different cultures.
Melancholia is the failure properly to
introject lost love objects and to internalise
values so that they contribute to the
formation of the ego structure, particularly
the super-ego. Khanna argues that the
colonized subject is unable to mourn the
loss of their culture or tribe as these
are made unknown and invisible to them
by Western hegemony. The loss of cultural
memory or inability to find signifiers
for themselves other than in Otherness
to the White Man causes the colonized
to incorporate their objects——to
swallow them whole. This situation results
in several symptoms: critical agency,
the failure to introject leads to splitting
within the ego, self-beratement and criticism
of the lost object; demetaphorization,
where objects prevail whole and language
is used iconically and concretely; and
haunting, where the object haunts
the subject in a hallucination or as a
trace. Khanna traces the manifestations
of melancholia first through Freud’s
own writings, showing that his exile and
his relationship to Germany as a Jew gave
his second topography the critical
agency that deconstructed the Western
subject and that could be subsequently
used by the colonial subject to critique
colonialism. She, then, looks at World
War II as the moment when the self "was
to be conceived ontologically so as to
allow for action". She explores the
existential psychoanalysis of Jean-Paul
Sartre and how this approach was parochialized
so that it could be adopted in struggles
for independence in the colonies. Looking
at the writing of Albert Memmi, Frantz
Fanon, and especially Aimé Cesaire,
Khanna discerns the growth of a discourse
around the nature of collective unconscious,
history, and memory and the articulation
of colonial repression as a force of liberation.
Thus, melancholia enables resistance and
the symptoms become the cure. Nevertheless,
in the work of Octave Mannoni, Fanon,
and Albert Memmi, melancholia still haunts
the post-colonial subject, and history,
memory and trauma are shown not to be
eliminated by state nationalism alone.
Khanna’s reading calls for a psychoanalysis
embracing both ethics and politics.
Simone de Beauvoir supplies Khanna with
the ethics and politics the author needs,
and Khanna resituates feminism within
a post-modern Derridean framework to argue
for a coalition politics that realises
Justice and Politics are the impossible
limits that enable us to think of both.
The way to emerge from the quagmire of
identity politics and the hostile projections
and binaries this produces is through
coalition and through an understanding
that the Other is Oneself, and an empathy
that takes account of specific struggles
and inequalities within the realm of Justice,
Politics, and Freedom as necessary and
absolute fantasies.
Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
are both hermeneutic disciplines through
which it is possible to encounter the
trace and the effect of melancholia. Khanna
finishes her challenging argument with
post-colonial readings of Hamlet
(particularly Black Hamlet by Wulf
Sachs) that illuminate both the original
and its traces. If I have any criticism
of this masterful book, it is that Khanna
does not analyse enough literature or
psychoanalysis by black women, as their
hauntings would surely be pertinent
to her argument and would create a critical
agency towards the hegemony of the
European/American Man and White Woman
of theory. Nevertheless, this book is
persuasive, impressive, and engaging and
is a must for anyone interested in psychoanalysis
or post-colonialism.
