Can Black Folk Dream—in Theory? Psychoanalysis and/of/in Coloniality— Anamnesis of a Failed Encounter

Abstract

The relation between (social-)psychological accounts of colonial racialization and psychoanalytic theory is a problematic one. This is partly due to the dominance of a philosophy of consciousness in the history and theory of the colonial encounter, and of decolonization. This chapter interrogates the notion of (self-)consciousness mediated through the reception of Hegel in (Africana) existentialism and phenomenology, and in decolonial theorizing. The (self-)consciousness in question is here confronted with the question of the ‘colonial unconscious’.