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Is psychoanalysis always antithetical to the cultural study of race? With its emphasis on desire, the discourses of le grand Autre, and the méconnaissances of identity, psychoanalytic criticism would appear to be a rather unproductive model for historicist scholars who study particularized minority subject-positions. Indeed, many African-American critics have frequently exhibited a knee-jerk reaction once scholars attempt to apply the writings of Freud, Lacan, or Klein to black texts. And when a black critic utilizes psychoanalytic models for textual interpretation, the critical response can become even more acute. As Claudia Tate asked herself after one scholar of African-American literature skeptically derided her project, “Didn't I know that psychoanalysis is inappropriate and perhaps even detrimental to black agency?” (16). Her carefully crafted Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, however, radically departs from traditional black scholarship by writing against the standard modes of interpretation and canon-formation upheld by many African-American critics.
African-American critics, Tate notes in her introduction, often urge that the black literary text promotes social change; the black novel, they insist, must function as a public protest that both uplifts the race and troubles the pernicious social institutions that govern (and constrain) black agency. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels begins by querying this fetishization of “agency,” arguing that critics of the black novel must acknowledge the oftentimes destabilizing operations of desire—the metonymic and metaphoric signifiers of the unconscious—that also play a significant role in the construction of textual meaning and black subjectivity. In so doing, Tate shifts her critical lens away from the cultural production of race and concentrates instead on the exigencies of the psyche, the private wishes and personal desires of black authors and their literary creations. To be even more precise, Tate places the protoco