The Psychic Landscape of Slavery: Modern Consciousness and Damning Attachments
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
American Studies
First Advisor
Hartman, Saidiya
Abstract
The Psychic Landscape of Slavery: Modern Consciousness and Damning Attachments examines the psycho-affective formations—in a sense, the feelings— engendered and sedimented by New World slavery and colonialism. The work is driven by a concern manifest in both the title and central question of W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Tracing the crucial predicate of DuBois’ question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” to the emergence of the modern world, this dissertation brings Black Studies, feminist psychoanalysis, and other critical theoretical works to bear on matters of existence and relation. As a history of present feeling, the project positions chattel slavery and colonialism as the landscape upon which dominant and enduring conceptions of being, knowledge, and relation were planted. From Europe’s perspective, the psychic exigencies of a globalizing mode of domination called for new sensibilities concerning the what and how of existence. In the attendant philosophical discourses, modern consciousness became the province of those revised sensibilities. This dissertation examines the historical unfolding of this process, exposing it as invention rather than discovery. I move against dominant Western formulations, which posit consciousness as the intrinsic and interior force mediating human sensory experience. Through a psycho-cultural reading of the texts and practices of key European intellectuals, explorers, settlers, and planters, I find that modern consciousness consolidated a psychic defense of slavery and colonialism. Thus, I argue that it can more productively be regarded as a set of psycho-affective attachments elaborated by intellectuals as varied as René Descartes and Sigmund Freud to reconcile the complex (of) feelings associated with slavery and colonialism and to sustain the racial hierarchy upon which it rested. The Psychic Landscape of Slavery demonstrates that from the seventeenth century onward, the qualities imputed to consciousness by key philosophical texts were, in effect, the repackaged anxieties, aspirations, desires, repressions, and projections of EuroAmericans enmeshed in the project of conquest. Notwithstanding their differential expressions, all of the notions of consciousness examined here conditioned the normalization and selective universalization of consciousness’ most pivotal attributes: the subject-object distinction, the repressed unconscious, and transparency (or, intrinsic self-evidence) and self-determination—or logic and will. Each chapter of the project takes up one of these attributes, demonstrating how the practices and circumstances of colonialism motivated its discursive formulation. In some instances even before their rhetorical formalization, these attributes came to constitute the terms of eligibility for slavery and freedom. Africans and their descendants were thus compelled to frame their pursuit of liberation according to these terms. Subjected to the violence of slavery and colonialism, black people were made to introject the sensibilities that fortified the racial order. Some, like enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, were led to stake the pursuit of freedom on mastery of rational thought and self-determination. After exposing modern consciousness as an alibi for the negative affects that attended conquest, The Psychic Landscape of Slavery demonstrates that the compulsion to embody this consciousness engendered a peculiar form of experience for the enslaved. That is, the paradox produced by enforced serviceability on the one hand, and the imperative to become the proper subject-of-consciousness on the other, was experienced as a sundering emotional pain. In a revision of W.E.B. DuBois’ well-known formulation, the project contends that this terrible and mundane mode of suffering is the effect of a double consciousness: the lived experience of “two warring ideals.” While modern consciousness came to overdetermine ordinary experience for all those conscripted to the modern world, the irreconcilability characteristic of the slave’s subjection produced an insidious sort of torment—insidious precisely because it was experienced as personal and particular. This examination of the slave’s psychic landscape is grounded in a range of key texts chronicling the experience of slavery from the vantage of black people—Cuban, Bermudian, and North American slave narratives, Haitian abolitionist literature, and contemporary criticism. I read these myriad accounts of slavery to locate historic and enduring instances of this vexed and grievous embodiment.
Recommended Citation
Louis, Ellen M., "The Psychic Landscape of Slavery: Modern Consciousness and Damning Attachments" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1185.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1185
