Between Fanon and Lacan: Rupturing Spaces for the Return of the Oppressed

Race is something about which we would rather not speak. Yet it speaks through our everyday enactments structured through our modes of looking. Black Lives Matter and Me Too have shown that something continues to speak in the place where it has been repressed/oppressed. How do we engage with these ruptures in a critical-empathic manner? Can Lacanian psychoanalysis, aligned with a Fanonian sociogeny, offer a dual lens to make sense of intersubjective racialized enactments, to inform possibilities for decolonial engagement? In this article, I explore the unconscious ruptures between myself (a South African Asian-Chinese woman) coming to recognize my Whiteness performed on a go-along and residents of “the township” historically designated “Black.” Blackness and Whiteness are situationally performed, arising in moments of attunement/misrecognition. Reconstituting the oppressive gaze involves a “working through” (within and without) to look toward ourselves for recognition so that we can witness the self/other without rupturing apart.