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The Racist Fantasy: Unconscious Roots of Hatred

Author(s) : Todd McGowan

Reviews and Endorsements

"We confront the world these days with increasing perplexity as old problems resurface from a distant and, we presumed, superseded past. How is this so? Facing squarely one such problem Todd McGowan lucidly explains why racism is so recalcitrant and how it exposes the naivete of prevailing theories of the phenomenon, while offering an extended account of its complex phantasmatic structure. A timely and thorough book." - Joan Copjec, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, USA.

"Rarely is theory elucidated with such clarity or applied with such historical range. By foregrounding fantasy as the frame that structures our enjoyment, McGowan's The Racist Fantasy baldly positions psychic enjoyment as the unconscious source for varieties of racism, from anti-blackness to antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism. This is a capacious study, able to unveil the function of the racist fantasy not only at the heart of our contemporary capitalist society but also at the root of the Enlightenment thinking that gave birth to our modern world. The Racist Fantasy is a needed corrective to contemporary anti-racist thinking that only nominally invoke the unconscious or that completely ignore its role in structuring the enjoyment that binds us to racism." - Sheldon George, Professor and Chair of Literature and Writing, Simmons University, USA and coeditor of Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalysis