^{Featured photo credit: Paul Cuoco}

By: Lucia Sarmiento Verano

In my research, I am trying to understand racism and racialisation processes from perspectives that include the reality of colonialism. I want to go beyond the usual coloniser/colonised binaries and consider the experiences of people outside of fortress Europe. I’ve been reading the history of colonialism, present day coloniality, culinary cultures and theories of hybridisation, as well as alternative forms of identification and affect… navigating the complications of understanding the subject that is in the in-between, a liminal space, negotiating multiple vectors of identities. Subjects that occupy differing places in multiple hierarchies that they then have to navigate, internally and externally. 

For this, I’ve been intensely immersed in theory this summer to prepare my literature review and upgrade paper. I’d like to share some of what I’ve been learning about lately and offer some links to our profession.

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Racism and the body

I’ll start by one of my latest readings: the work of Noel Chabani Manganyi, a South African psychologist who theorised on the embodied experiences of racialisation. Like many, he followed Fanon’s ideas on the manichean structure of colonial racism and its binaries (white vs black, good vs bad, mind vs body) and on racism as a projection of what whiteness cannot accept. He also described this as a psycho-existential crisis, meaning that it is not only a material and structural issue, but it also creates a problem in peoples psyches and ontologies (their sense of being-in-the-world).

Manganyi helpfully describes the need for whiteness to reject the bodily and anything associated with it. He says it is not only about rejecting sexuality and drives as Fanon posits, but also, and mostly, about rejecting what reminds us of our finitude: the body will eventually die and decay, become waste-matter. The symbolic matrix that is created to support these rejections projects the bodily and its association with death onto the racialised, and associates whiteness with the ego, the mind, life, goodness, etc. (1981)

This also allows for over-valorisation of whiteness and white subjects and inferiorisation of racialised peoples. It serves whiteness by justifying the structural and material hierarchies put in place to ensure the exploitation and elimination of many for the benefit of the few, creating a context of Colonisation and Coloniality which is enduring and pervasive. Not only this, but this need to disavow, deny or reject the bodily also gave birth to ideals of purity as something to strive for and a fear of contamination or pollution (of our bodies, our lives or our social order).

Who or what constitutes a contaminating element is obviously defined by the existing symbolic order and what has been marked as abject in society. Who (usually marginalised communities) what (usually anything associated with them) is made abject is then marginalised, dehumanised, considered less than, and there are attempts to expel, eliminate, or invisibilise them. We can see this clearly in how migrants are treated, in historical policies of social hygiene against the working classes, or in the treatment of madness by locking people away from society.

Eugenics is a direct consequence of this, in its intention of “breeding out”, or outright eliminating the unwanted that “pollute” man and his society. This dehumanisation and the attempts at elimination that follow, place the colonised in proximity death, either facing it directly through the violence of the coloniser or by being placed in a space of non-being where denial and invisibilisation makes it difficult to develop a sense of self (Fanon, 1968).

In sum, racism can be understood in the systemic sphere and discourse, but also at an embodied level which deeply touches the lived experience of everyone involved. This blog is only a snippet into such reflection, but I do believe this is the starting point to ask ourselves many questions about our practices in the mental health field and how this can inform it.

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Embodied racialisation in Mental Health spaces

The symbolic matrix that associates whiteness and mind and blackness and body creates the basis for associating of whiteness with upward movement, superiority, and blackness with inferiority. This also points to the insistence of white western culture to see itself as always rational, scientific, positivistic, driven by efficiency, thus, MODERN. Placing the rest of the world in a deficit compared to this illusion whiteness has of itself. In this imaginary, the Other becomes primitive, backward, irrational, and more connected to the bodily and emotions.

This leads us to necessary reflections on the role of the mental health professions, and the theories we use. We know that, historically, psychiatry and psychology have served to reinforce this symbolic order by pathologising the colonised mind. Reactions to oppression and violence were and are seen as irrational, a problem to be solved, as the historical diagnosis of drapetomania demonstrate. Not only this, but these professions have contributed to assertion of colonised and racialised intellectual and emotional “deficiencies” and inferiority through their methods for measurement and categorisation of human “capacities”.

To this day studies show increased pathologisation of emotional reactions and attitudes coming from marginalised individuals and groups, and an inability of mental health systems to adapt their services to be culturally appropriate and to serve racialised people without increased risk of harm. We do know that these racial hierarchies have shaped the very origin of our theories and practices by influencing the thinking of theorists such as Freud and Jung.

For example, Jung’s archetypes reinforce his prejudices by relating darkness and possession by powerful emotions with people he describes as ‘primitive’. He sees them as having a lower level of personality and lacking moral judgment in comparison to the ‘civilised’ man. For a more in-depth analysis of the racism present in Jungian theory you might want to see Fanny Brewster’s work. From these origins stem deeply rooted ideas of how emotions are supposed to be experienced and expressed, creating right and ‘healthy’ ways to do so, as well as to relate to oneself and others, including ideas around boundaries and emotional safety.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by this. In his work about brownness, queer Cuban-American scholar José Esteban Muñoz speaks of how racial differences are not solely cultural but affective too (2020). There are ways to feel differently and navigate the world on a different emotional register. A dominant way of being is usually associated with the white middle-class experience and reads other ways to feel as inappropriate. From his experience, Muñoz cites Latine (or Latinx, in English) affect as often perceived as excessive. This “excess of affect” cannot be contained by the lack of emotional landscape of whiteness. It is then also turned into a stereotype projected onto Latine subjects, seen as “spicy”. From this also stem oppressive cultural diagnosis such as the “Puerto Rican syndrome”.

This is just one example of how the colonial white supremacist symbolic order problematises and pathologises the emotional lives of people who are racialised non-white, and places whiteness as superior because it is separated from embodied experience. The issue that whiteness has with embracing the bodily and its tendency to overidentify with the ego and the mind, also takes us to the prevalence (and prioritisation) of therapeutic spaces that are based on individualised ‘talking cures’, prioritising the verbalisation of clients’ experiences and exploration of their psychological and emotional experiences through one-to-one conversation. There is also a marked preference for keeping therapeutic spaces isolated and separated from the ‘outside world’ relegating the work of emotional expression and regulation, sometimes even considered shameful, to the most private of spaces and in disconnection with community and the collective.

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De-colonised experiences

Now coming back to the idea of racialisation as an embodied experience, contained within a symbolic order that is oppressive for many. The rejection and disavowal of the bodily can be a profound embodied experience manifest through abjection, shame and for the global majority, a sense of proximity to death. Not only relegating entire emotional lives to private, invisible, pathologising spaces can affect the sense of self of the colonised (and the coloniser!), but white disavowals of the bodily places the global majority in the realm of death ontologically speaking.

The colonised are dehumanised, abjected, exploited and at times, eliminated. As Fanon reminds us, the presence of death is a constant in the colonies: “All this gnawing at the existence of the colonized tends to make of life something resembling an incomplete death.” (Fanon, 1965, p.128). Similarly, Achile Mbembe talks about Necropolitics (politics of death) in colonial territories, as a response to what Foucault calls Biopolitics (politics of life) in Europe. However,

“The encounter with death always comes too late, as it were, since death is already beside them. For this reason, [decoloniality] emerge not through an encounter with one’s own mortality, but from a desire to evade death, one’s own but even more fundamentally that of others.” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 251)

Death is pervasive in the lives of the colonised, but resistance is too. In his piece on the Coloniality of Being, Maldonado-Torres speaks of the sub-ontological difference as a place of non-being and death, but he also mentions the counter-acts that the damnés (wretched) practice. The Coloniality of Being, he says, seeks to obliterate gift-giving and generous reception as fundamental ways of being-in-the-world. I would argue this is not too difficult to see in the workings of modernity: the reduction of the importance of givenness, hospitality, and justice, creating a world in which “exceptions to ethical relationships become the norm.” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 259)

Giving is about contact, connection and communication with the Other with whom we share the world.  It is the meaning of decolonization, which requires restoration of the logic of the gift. Maldonado-Torres is inspired by Chela Sandoval’s ideas on decolonial love. This also reminds me of the work of Yael Navaro on the affective lives of politically differentiated communities affected by war. She observes everyday expressions of affect that go against the grain of what dominant politics and hierarchies would have people feel for one another.

In a context of increasing political tensions, bonds of reciprocity, intimacy, affection and care endure in their mundanity, sometimes remnants of previous bonds, sometimes spontaneous emergence of new ones (2017). This, even between communities who were “supposed” to be in conflict or tension, challenging social reproduction. Navaro reminds us that affective life and community bonds may happen not only in the grand events and political gestures, but also in the interstices, gaps, creaks or crevices of mundane life.

This leads me to a question that I’d like to leave to readers, as a conclusion: where might be the gaps, the interstices in our lives in which we find decolonial love? And, how are we nurturing this giving and receiving against the grain of current politics?

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REFERENCES

Fanon, Frantz (1968) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, F. (1965) A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press.

Maldonado-Torres N. (2007), On the Coloniality of Being, Cultural Studies, 21:2, 240 – 270

Manganyi, N.C. (1981) Looking through the keyhole: Dissenting essays on the black experience. Johannesburg: Ravan.

Muñoz, J.E. (2020) The Sense of Brown. Durham: Duke University Press

Navaro, Y. (2017) Diversifying Affect. Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 32, Issue 2, pp. 209–214

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