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Those who have been subject to racial and colonial trauma deserve a considered and thoughtful analysis of their condition, not only to acknowledge the constitutive role colonialism has had in making modern subjects, but, hopefully, to allow them to go on living through and past colonialism. Derek Hook's book is a serious and sustained attempt to think about the possibilities of psychopolitical critique that might do this. It largely succeeds in its task of demonstrating that because the psyche and sociopolitical are produced through their relations with each other, social psychology needs to be able to give a better account of racism as both embodied and affective.
As Hook notes, positivist psychology has long neglected matters of race and racism, but the book is intended primarily as a contribution that can open up conversations with those who already take a critical and discursive approach to social psychology. The ground Hook chooses to stage this contribution upon is the strange terrain between postcolonial theory and psychoanalytic theory, not only because these fields have, respectively, already addressed many of the questions Hook pursues (though often not in conversation with each other), but also because it is by triangulating what is missing in these two fields with psychology that he believes he can provide a means to work us past the impasse of whether race and racism are, to paraphrase Paul Gilroy, a pre- or postpolitical phenomenon.
Even in its most general outline the project is an ambitious one, but the scope of that ambition becomes almost overwhelming as we are moved through the individual chapters on vernacular social psychology, abjection, psychoanalytic postcolonial theory, colonial stereotypes and the “real” of the racialized body. There are recurring themes and touchstones throughout these chapters that keep the argument coherent at one level, such as constant return to Fanon's work, the reality of racism-as-embodied, and the irreducibility of r