Against White Interiority: A Racial Critique of Therapeutic Reason

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.

Author: Sam Binkley
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 07/05/2023
Pages: 146
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.27h x 5.83w x 0.44d
ISBN: 9783031318276
2023 Edition