(Post)Apartheid Conditions ― Psychoanalysis and Social Formation

What are the psychical mechanisms that underlie a given social formation? (Post)apartheid Conditions investigates this question by exploring a series of psychosocial topics – the body, space-identity, whiteness, racism and nostalgia - within a specific socio-historical context. The South African situation, one of both social transformation and historical stasis, provides the opportunity to explore how a number of psychoanalytic concepts - the uncanny, fantasy, melancholia, working through, retroaction – function at a societal level, at turns impeding and facilitating political change. Drawing on material collected by the Apartheid Archive Project, and the writings of Sara Ahmed, Steve Biko, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan and Slavoj ?i?ek, this book is of interest both to a general Psychosocial Studies audience and to readers interested in the cultural history of South Africa.

Derek Hook is a Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He is the author of Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power and A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial. He is a research fellow of the Independent Social Research Foundation and a lead researcher in the Apartheid Archive Project.