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Badia Sahar Ahad University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2010, 216pp., hardcover, $40.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03566-1
Most scholars of African-American literature view psychoanalytic theory as anathema. At best, black intellectuals dismiss psychoanalysis as irrelevant to their interests; at worst, many view it as an exclusively Western field designed to colonize or pathologize black cultural productions. Thus, a nuanced and productive integration of psychoanalysis and African American literary criticism remains, like race itself, an elusive task.
I am interested neither in disparaging scholars who have traditionally been hostile to psychoanalytic ideas nor in presenting myself as an apologist for racism or the misuses to which psychoanalysis has been put throughout the twentieth century and into our own day. Rather, I wish to insist here on the potential of psychoanalysis to generate useful criticism within African-American literary and cultural contexts, and, more to the point, to draw attention to the originality of Badia Sahar Ahad's study, Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture. As a black literary critic whose primary methodology is psychoanalysis (in particular Freudian and Lacanian), I welcome Ahad's intervention. Regrettably, her book stands as only the second major work (besides Claudia Tate's Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race, published over ten years ago) seriously to consider the possibilities for African-American literature latent in psychoanalytic theory. Whereas Tate (1998) focused on desire and its articulation outside of racially inflected or revolution-oriented confines, Ahad moves both deeper within African-American literature and farther outside it. She skillfully merges author biography with racial textual analysis to recover the underappreciated tradition of black authors and critics who not only knew about psychoanalysis, or who simply referred to it in their works, but also who saw its