Abstract

This paper discusses Wright’s travel narrative of the Gold Coast/Ghana, and particularly the politicized psychology it develops as an analytic tool. Paying close attention to the effects of colonial economic control on daily life, Wright discusses such classically psychoanalytic concepts as the return of the repressed, the Oedipal conflict, and anal eroticism in terms of West African daily life, often considerably revising both Freudian concepts and his own notion of black identity in the process. While the African American tradition gave him the means to articulate psychic life with historical realities, the Freudian intervention gave him license to focus on sexual and scatological topics that had yet, in 1954, to receive serious consideration as political matters. Hence, Black Power is an enormous resource for contemporary critical efforts towards reading psychoanalysis, African American culture, and political struggles of the global South in combination.

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