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Derek Hook Routledge, London, 2012, 264 pp., hardcover, £57.00/paper £19.99/digital £19.95, ISBN 9780415587563/9780415587570/9780203140529
The practice of critical psychology is usually defined in two ways: as the internal critique of the discipline of psychology, and as the various kinds of analytical work done by politically committed psychologists. Derek Hook's (2012) recent book, A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid addresses two notable gaps in the critical psychology literature, the first of which is postcolonial studies. The second gap, curious for a branch of psychology, is psychological forms of analysis. The influence of poststructuralism in this second gap should not be underplayed; under the influence of the work of Foucault amongst others, there has taken place in critical psychology, as in other disciplines, a shift towards a focus on the sociohistorical constitution of the subject, as well as a cultivation of suspicion over deployments of “psychological operations – as psychological operations,” (Hook, 2007, p. 60).
There are very good reasons for this second gap, chief among them the psychological reductionism that plagued many earlier forms of social psychology. But, as Hook (2012) argues, “warnings against the perils of psychological reductionism too often provide the excuse to dismiss from serious consideration the psychological dimension of colonial power” (p. 97). If subjectivities are not merely the effect of colonial and neocolonial distributions of power, but are also its conduits, its channels of transmission, then how, Hook asks – mindful of the risk of psychological reductionism – might “the radical potential of types of psychological critique” (p. 15) be set to work in addressing social problems like racism? In this regard the focus point of the book is South Africa, and the bulk of the examples to which Hook refers come from the Apartheid Archive (AA), a research project that aims to amass a series of personal n