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Reviewing a book when one is not fluent in its theoretical language runs the risk of missing or misunderstanding central aspects of the project and mischaracterizing its success or failure; it is also argues, perhaps, for the importance of trying to receive material outside our home territory. As the non-fluent reviewer of Robert K. Beshara’s work, Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies, I felt compelled to read a book that is presented as the “only critical psychological study on Islamophobia in the United States,” (back cover) as this work joins a strikingly slender body of work on Islamophobia in the psychoanalytic literature and therefore merits attention not only from those analysts who will be more familiar with the Lacanian ideas and interdisciplinary critical methods employed by the author. The double task is to comment on how well the book can communicate to a more general audience (a part, at least, of any book’s mission) and what degree of obligation we have to grapple with new work on an issue—prejudice—that is of critical importance.
The author works within a theoretical frame that uses Lacanian ideas in dialogue with a wealth of post-modern theories many readers will not be familiar with, but interviews are at the core of this project and the reason I was drawn to review this book. The author created a demographic questionnaire, which was sent to civil rights and advocacy groups: “My target research participant was any adult (18 years or older) US Muslim, who has experienced Islamophobia and is willing to talk about it” (p. 28). He then conducted semi-structured interviews with nineteen research participants over Skype (p. 29). Chapters 4 and 5 contain detailed excerpts from these interviews that are analyzed using
Lacanian Discourse Analysis. The author is interested in both Islamophobia as experienced by his subjects and theories about Islamophobia. The former is more accessible than the latter, and I would argue that enga