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Female Subjects in Black and White, an edited volume of sixteen essays, is in many ways a formidable piece of interdisciplinary scholarship. The
book is an outgrowth of a 1992 conference, “Psychoanalysis in African American Contexts,” held at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The authors—all professors in the humanities—bring together psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, and African American studies to interrogate female subjectivity in the context of race and racial politics.
A collection such as this affords the reader an extraordinary opportunity, as few forums exist in which psychoanalysis, gender, and race may engage in serious conversation. In clinical psychoanalysis, for example, the racialized subjectivity of African American women is an understudied topic, often neglected altogether. The editors are to be commended for their effort to generate a set of papers that they intend as an invitation to collaborative dialogue.
The problem is that few analysts are likely to use this book to join the colloquy. The reason is that Female Subjects is primarily a literary text. Most of the essays in the book employ an academic style of argumentation that is at best elliptical, at worst needlessly cryptic. The unfortunate result is that the book on first reading will probably be impenetrable to most clinical analysts. The authors also assume a reader who is conversant with Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as with French and American feminism. They take this understanding for granted where a bit of explanation would render their arguments less obscure. The essays draw on a range of literary texts, including many from the broad corpus of African American literature. Here most of the authors do provide an exegesis sufficient for those unfamiliar with the original works.
Despite these difficulties, the book usefully illustrates some of the ways in which psychoanalysis is applied within the academy and the different purposes to which it may be put. In this c