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BOOK REVIEW

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A CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE POSTCOLONIAL: The Mind of Apartheid, by


Derek Hook, London, UK: Routledge, 2012, 223 pp., $ (paper bound)
Reviewed by

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Mrinalini Greedharry

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Laurentian University
Those who have been subject to racial and colonial trauma deserve a considered and
thoughtful analysis of their condition, not only to acknowledge the constitutive role
colonialism has had in making modern subjects, but, hopefully, to allow them to go on
living through and past colonialism. Derek Hooks book is a serious and sustained attempt
to think about the possibilities of psychopolitical critique that might do this. It largely
succeeds in its task of demonstrating that because the psyche and sociopolitical are
produced through their relations with each other, social psychology needs to be able to
give a better account of racism as both embodied and affective.
As Hook notes, positivist psychology has long neglected matters of race and racism,
but the book is intended primarily as a contribution that can open up conversations with
those who already take a critical and discursive approach to social psychology. The
ground Hook chooses to stage this contribution upon is the strange terrain between
postcolonial theory and psychoanalytic theory, not only because these elds have, respectively, already addressed many of the questions Hook pursues (though often not in
conversation with each other), but also because it is by triangulating what is missing in
these two elds with psychology that he believes he can provide a means to work us past
the impasse of whether race and racism are, to paraphrase Paul Gilroy, a pre- or
postpolitical phenomenon.
Even in its most general outline the project is an ambitious one, but the scope of that
ambition becomes almost overwhelming as we are moved through the individual chapters
on vernacular social psychology, abjection, psychoanalytic postcolonial theory, colonial
stereotypes and the real of the racialized body. There are recurring themes and
touchstones throughout these chapters that keep the argument coherent at one level, such
as constant return to Fanons work, the reality of racism-as-embodied, and the irreducibility of racism to discursive representation, but there is also a lot of discussion of specic
concerns and questions that arise from the critical social psychology literature, which
organizes the argument along lines that might not always make immediate sense to a less
specialized reader. Nevertheless, I will begin with a brief tour through the ve substantive
chapters of the book.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mrinalini Greedharry, Laurentian


University, . E-mail: mgreedharry@laurentian.ca
Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2014, Vol. 32, No. 1, 000 000
2014 American Psychological Association, 0736-9735/14/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038312

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BOOK REVIEW

The rst chapter explores the importance of what Hook describes as a vernacular for
thinking about critical social psychology, meaning the work of anticolonial writers and
activists, such as Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon. In returning to the work of these kinds of
writers, Hook wants to balance the tendency of critical psychology to analyze the
oppressive uses of psychology with enabling potentially transformative psychological
forms that disrupt imbalances of power and have social equality as their goal (p. 16). It
is a signicant methodological move to begin the book from the work of these anticolonial
thinkers because it registers the importance of attending to what the racialized and
colonized subject knows about living in a racist and colonial society. The second chapter,
therefore, takes up the question of the dehumanizing and degrading experience of living
as an abject body.
The rst objective of the second chapter is to demonstrate the methodological
importance of attending to the body, embodiment, and the abject in response to the
tendency of critical psychology to rely on discursive and social constructionist approaches. He proposes to refocus critical psychology on the extradiscursive of race,
meaning not that which cannot be represented, but taking seriously the fact that there are
deadlocks within the ideological and fantasmatic domain of the colonial situation itself,
impasses of conceptualization that cannot effectively be thought (p. 63). For Hook,
what is vital is to remind us that what is extradiscursive, such as the body, should not be
conated with what is extrasymbolicwhich is what leads him to raise abjection as an
important conceptualization for thinking through the libidinal economy of racism. Abjection, far from being read as a reduction of racism to imaginary identications, is useful
precisely because it is an embodied experience of the collapse of the symbolic activity that
produces social structures. The body-in-racism, then, emerges neither as some kind of
instinctive reaction to Otherness, nor as production of language, but rather as the
incoherent assembly of disparate modalities of racism (somatic, psychological, symbolic),
all trying and failing to make sense of race through the body.
Having established why we require a critical psychology mediated through both
anticolonial accounts of the colony and psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the symbolic
body, the next two chapters concentrate in more detail on the question of how to carry out
psychopolitical critique without allowing it to devolve into a psychological reductionist
account of colonialism. These two chapters continue to demonstrate, through close
readings of the work of Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha, the particular value of a
psychoanalytic language for thinking about racism. In Hooks words, his aim here is to
demonstrate how racism is never merely a function of ignorance, objectication or
intergroup antagonismthree of the most commonly cited causes of racism but instead
presents a far more complex conjunction of desire, fantasy and libidinal investment (p.
95). The attentive reading that Hook gives Fanons work in the third chapter, Postcolonial Psychoanalysis, is worth noting. Fanons work is central to postcolonial research,
whether from a psychoanalytic, materialist, or historicist perspective, and his work has
been dissected and discussed in great detail. It is impressive, therefore, that Hook is able
to contribute a specialist reading (as a psychoanalytic psychologist) that further illuminates the value of Fanons work. The fourth chapter attempts to do the same for Homi
Bhabhas essay The Other Question.
The book concludes with a return to question of the body through discussion of the
work of South African psychologist Chabani Maganyi. Alert to the problems of tipping the
balance too far back toward embodiment, Hook notes, via Stuart Hall, that this tension
between the primacy of the experiential and an awareness of the overdetermining structures of language and materiality is not so easily overcome (p. 220). A reorientation

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BOOK REVIEW

toward embodiment, and abjection, has to proceed with the full acknowledgment and
acceptance that there is no sense in which we can, through our analytic activity, reconcile
the body and structures of representation to each other. In fact, to put it in even stronger
terms, it is in the ongoing and inescapable antagonism of this struggle between experience
and material structures that we can actually begin to understand how we become subjects
through the confused logic of racism.
Even a brief discussion of this book should give a sense of how skillfully Hook has
assembled this conversation between three different traditions that do not speak to each
other easily. Psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory are not easy bedfellows, and, according to Hook, psychoanalysis and critical psychology have also been moving past each
other, when not actively ignoring or contradicting each other. Nevertheless, it is a
particular pitfall of this kind of interdisciplinary work that it will inevitably seem either
ingenious to those who never imagined the connections between these scholarly literatures
or fragmented to those who continue to think inside the lines already drawn for them by
their discipline. Hook is careful to situate his work as a contribution to critical psychology
and psychosocial studies, bringing in psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory as resources
to a project he thinks needs to be undertaken by psychologistsnamely, potentially
transformative psychological forms that disrupt imbalances of power and have social
equality as their goal (p. 16). This is where my concerns with the book, reading as a
disciplinary outsider, begin.
Hook is clear at various points in the book that he is less interested in historical,
cultural, and epistemological critiques of psychology or psychoanalysis than he is with
how critical psychology can deal with the problem of the racist society we live in now. For
example, he notes that postcolonial scholars as well as critical race scholars have been
particularly concerned with the psychoanalytic as a universalizing conduit of particular
ideological values (p. 99). Though he has clearly read the literature, he more or less
dismisses this problem with the observation that the call for cultural specicity can also
lead to the reication of problematic notions of cultural difference (p. 99). For a
postcolonial studies scholar, this is a curious dismissal, not only because race, colonialism,
and postcolonialism cannot so easily, in a methodological sense, be separated from culture
and cultural difference but also because the epistemological struggle to provincialize
European knowledge has been a central objective of postcolonial critique. A postcolonial
critic legitimately asks, in what sense can we imagine forms that disrupt imbalances of
power and have social equality as their goal (p. 16) if we are not also willing to
investigate the historical claims of Western knowledge, such as psychology and psychoanalysis, to speak about the affective lives of racialized and colonized subjects with such
authority.
It might seem unreasonable to expect Hook to speak more to the postcolonial project,
especially when the task he has set himself is complex enough, but there are a few reasons
why his text invites such questions. First, the title claims a kind of universal authority (a
critical psychology of the postcolonial); and second, the work explicitly connects to and
values postcolonial theory, including key theorists such as Fanon, Said, and Bhabha. Why
refer to postcolonialism if, perhaps more properly speaking, Hook wants to help us think
mostly about the libidinal economy of racism in South African and the Anglophone
Western world? After all, Hook does intend to make some kind of contribution to
postcolonial studies, which he reads as not having taken the psychological seriously
enough. Furthermore, by grounding much of his discussions in the context of South
Africa, he proposes that the book may well provide a means of reinvigorating the eld
of postcolonial studies (p. 9). The question of how his project connects with postcolonial

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BOOK REVIEW

studies then becomes more serious, and it is not merely academic historicism or cultural
relativism but a profound and sincere epistemological query from the colonial subject to
the postcolonial world, to ask when will those differences cultural or historicalthat
mark off our knowledge from your Knowledge begin to be taken seriously?
Hooks book seems to take the position that these kinds of questions are not central to
the real problem of the encounter between psychoanalysis, psychology, racism, and the
subject. Here I must respectfully disagree. His work persuades me that it is possible for
critical psychology to do valuable and nuanced work on thinking about racism and subject
formation in ways that do not reduce the political to individual psychology. However, I am
genuinely troubled by the problems that follow from an attempt to provide another, a
better, a more critical, psychology, without fundamentally attending to questions of what
counts as a generalizable psychology and who such knowledge is for. In other words, who
is the subject and who is the object of a critical psychology of the postcolonial? Here,
an illustration from the book might be the best way to explain this question. The whole
study opens with two long quotes from the Apartheid Archive Project in which two people
narrate the vividly embodied and visceral ways in which they came to understanding
blackness and racism. As it happens, these accounts are by White men speaking about
their reading of, identications with, and rejections of Blackness in and through their own
bodies. Is a critical psychology, then, about thinking through the ways in which racism
comes to be lived in the body of those who are not the object of racism? And how will
this connect with transformative psychological forms that also work to heal and restore
those who are the object of racism?
In his discussion of abjection, Hook astutely notes that the discussion carries with it
the danger of staying focused on the dominant abjecting subject, rather than the one who
is abjected (p. 75). From the opening quote on White mens embodied experiences of
racism, through the possible pitfalls of abjection to a conclusion about the general logics
of racism, what happens to the colonized and racialized subject specically? I am not
suggesting, crudely, that Black bodies and Black subjects are not considered in the pages
of the bookthe extended and sensitive discussions of Fanon ensure that we also see the
psychopolitical trauma of being degraded by racism. Instead, my question is how will the
transformation Hook envisions become possible in critical psychology, if we can still give
an apparently general account of the psychology of the postcolonial?

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