Against White Interiority: A Racial Critique of Therapeutic Reason

Description

This book presents a bold critique of the new racial sensibility that has attained global prominence following the police murder of George Floyd.  Through a set of managerial and therapeutic discourses, this new sensibility describes the inner racial life of white subjects, inducing them to adopt a therapeutic attitude toward deeply interiorized white emotions and conflicts.  In so doing, the new racial sensibility promises to remake whiteness in the image of the self-aware racial ally.  However, such an appeal, it is argued, serves the subtle function of the preservation of white racial dispositions, and the reproduction of the very racism it sets out to transform. Adopting a critical lens derived from Michel Foucault’s analysis of sexuality, together with an engagement with sociological, psychoanalytic and phenomenological reflections on shame as a racial affect, a critique of white interiority considers alternative frames through which white anti-racist subjection might be imagined. Preface Contents Chapter 1: White Secrets: An Uncomfortable Introduction 1 Interiority and the Racial Dispositif 2 Toward an Ambivalent Anti-Racism References Chapter 2: The New Racial Sensibility 1 A White Awakening 2 Governing the Racial Subject 3 Woke Reading and the Speechifying Effect 4 The White Toothache References Chapter 3: White Shame and Racial Abandonment 1 Exposure 2 On the Other Side of Time 3 A Paranoid Episteme 4 The Master of Racial Truth References Chapter 4: Guilt’s Capture 1 Privilege and the Road to Recovery 2 Therapeutic Alchemy 3 Otherness and the Privatization of Shame 4 Subaltern Governmentality? References Chapter 5: Beyond the Confessing Animal References Index