Department of English

My dissertation, titled “Psychoanalytics: Towards A Black Object Study” asks how blackness materializes in the U.S. imaginary as an object to be recognized, registered, or apprehended. Psychoanalytics is a term coined by Hortense Spillers to describe the “missing layer” of methodology in African American criticism which would work towards “a more carefully modulated reading.” Using psychoanalytic object theory alongside canonical texts of African American women’s writing, I theorize blackness’s conceptual coalescence vis a vis its passing as the matter of intersubjective reading. I argue that how blackness becomes an object of
meaning, is constitutive of what blackness becomes. Further, I demonstrate how the discursivity of black object-ness is a site of formative difficulty to which black feminist literary studies is accountable. A secondary concern of my project then is the relationship between blackness as an object of meaning and blackness as an object of literary scholarly intervention. Across four chapters, I offer original readings of the works of Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Zora Neale Hurston as aesthetic demonstrations of how blackness is read into meaning using the work of D.W. Winnicott. My study of Caribbean literature and anticolonial thinking informs my deconstruction of U.S. based racial symbology.