Beshara - Decolonial psychoanalysis : towards critical Islamophobia studies

DECOLONIAL PSYCHOANALYSIS

In this provocative and necessary book, Robert K. Beshara uses psychoanalytic discursive analysis to explore the possibility of a genuinely anti-colonial critical psychology. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial approaches to Islamophobia, this book enhances understandings of Critical Border Thinking and Lacanian Discourse Analysis, alongside other theoretico-methodological approaches.

Using a critical decolonial psychology approach to conceptualize everyday Islamophobia, the author examines theoretical resources situated within the discursive turn, such as decoloniality/transmodernity, and carries out an archeology of (counter)terrorism, a genealogy of the conceptual Muslim, and a iekian ideology critique. Conceiving of Decolonial Psychoanalysis as one theoretical resource for Critical Islamophobia Studies (CIS), the author also applies Lacanian Discourse Analysis to extracts from interviews conducted with US Muslims to theorize their ethico-political subjectivity and considers a politics of resistance, adversarial aesthetics, and ethics of liberation.

Essential to any attempt to come to terms with the legacy of racism in psychology, and the only critical psychological study on Islamophobia in the United States, this is a fascinating read for anyone interested in a critical approach to Islamophobia.

Robert K. Beshara is a critical psychologist, interested in theorizing subjectivity vis--vis ideology through radical qualitative research (e.g., discourse analysis). In addition to being a scholar-activist, he is a fine artist with a background in film, theater, and music. He holds two terminal degrees: a Ph.D. in Psychology: Consciousness and Society from the University of West Georgia and an M.F.A. in Independent Film and Digital Imaging from Governors State University, Illinois. He currently works as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Northern New Mexico College. For more information visit: www.robertbeshara.com

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DECOLONIAL PSYCHOANALYSIS

Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies

Robert K. Beshara

First published 2019

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2019 Robert K. Beshara

The right of Robert K. Beshara to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-17349-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-17413-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-05661-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo

by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

This book is dedicated to the memory of my uncle, Medhat Ghali Guirguis (19512017).

CONTENTS

I turned my dissertation (Beshara, 2018c) into this book: the outcome of prolonged theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between the War on Terror and Islamophobia. Over the years, I had the privilege of developing my research and sharing these developments with other scholars on a number of occasions. For example, I presented my research at the University of California, Berkeley three times: in 2015, 2016, and 2018. Hatem Bazianthe founder of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project and a member of my dissertation committeeorganizes the Annual International Conference on the Study of Islamophobia, and I am very grateful to him, because in 2015 I presented a draft of Beshara (2018a), which is the beginning of my discursive research into the topic. In 2016, I presented the next development of my worka Lacanian psychoanalytic readingat the Duquesne/UWG Human Science Symposium in Carrollton, Georgia. But the most significant development in my work took place in 2017 at the Islamic Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalytic Islam conference, which was co-organized by Ian Parker and Sabah Siddiqui on behalf of the College of Psychoanalysts and which took place at the University of Manchester, the UK. It was at that groundbreaking conference that I developed an original theoretico-methodological tool called decolonial psychoanalysis, (Beshara, 2018b) which I ended up developing further into my dissertation and eventually into this book.

Is psychoanalysis not part of the problem, antithetical to anything approaching critical psychology? And, worse, is psychoanalysis not the most insidious apparatus of psychologization, ensuring that people are not only monitored and disciplined by psychology, but also required to confess within its frame, required to really believe that psychological explanations for social phenomena are paramount? And, even worse, is psychoanalysis not the most arrogant aspect of Western psychology, enforcing a model of subjectivity that all those positioned as other to the West are trapped by, an intensely colonial theory and practice? All of these accusations against psychoanalysis must be encountered and answered in the affirmative if we are to take any steps forward to a genuinely anti-colonial critical psychology, and the surprising twist to the story told in this book is that psychoanalysis of some kind can then, if we are honest about how it usually functions, end up being a tool, not only of oppression, but also of liberation.

Robert K. Besharas psychoanalytic discursive analysis in this provocative and necessary book, essential to any attempt to come to terms with the legacy of racism in psychology, homes in on a new threat, a new other, marked by the signifier Islam. The twists and turns in the colonial heritage of the West now turn around an identitarian enemy, an enemy marked out by their identity rather than by their race. A series of linguistic devices attach this signifier to terrorism, and a variety of psycho-political strategies are used by those in power to then link the signifier to Muslims who dare to speak out about the way they are positioned within Islamophobic discourse. They are accused of cleaving to an identity that is actually constructed for them within dominant discourses of the War on Terror, counter-terrorism, and the increasing securitization of Western nation states. Is all this merely discursive? It is anything but. Islamophobia certainly is discursive, and here the book takes forward discourse-analytic work in critical psychology, but it is also, we come to see, material. The book elaborates, with the aid of psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity and power, an account of the centrality of so-called extra-discursive phenomena, a grounding of the analysis in a deeper theoretical understanding of what is going on when we appear to be merely describing the world and the people in it.