| My dissertation addresses the curious omission of psychoanalytic interpretation from scholarship on the culture, politics, and historical icons of the civil rights era (1952-1977). This omission is compounded by the limited critical interest in the vast number of representations of blackness and black identity in the era's popular culture. In the few instances when popular fiction, films, and television programs that were invested in navigating the unique racial and social dynamics of the time period have been examined critically, attention to economics, the sociological, and the political has subordinated other points of inquiry. In my project I introduce a way of remaining historically and contextually specific while also making the case for thinking about popular constructions of blackness from this time period as laden with psychological and psychoanalytic tensions and paradoxes.;I argue that some of the most popular cultural products of the time---social problem films like Sidney Poitier's The Defiant Ones (1958), melodramas and passing narratives like Imitation of Life (1959), black-themed children's programming like Bill Cosby's Fat Albert (1972-1984), the 1970s black masculinist pulp fiction of Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim, and television mini-series such as Roots (1977)---expose a nation that was concerned with trying to diagnose and treat itself psychically around the issue of the changing status of black social and psychological subjects.;I further argue, in the process of challenging and synthesizing the psychoanalytical theories of Freud, D. W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, Jessica Benjamin, and Melanie Klein, that the civil rights era's popular culture has left us with three dominant metaphors of blackness as burning, that is, of black interiority as vacillating between poles of vitality and destruction. The first metaphorical lesson of the era that I examine is the black surviving object, or the attraction to and presentation of some black men (Sidney Poitier, Emmett Till, Martin Luther King) as being uniquely and exceptionally suited for participating in the recognition agenda of the era. With the second governing metaphor, the black engulfing vagina, I argue that black women and mothers were figured in the popular imagination as eviscerating and chronically devitalized figures who threatened to unhinge the whole of the civil rights psychosocial republic since they were expressed as being incapable of recognizing or being recognized as psychically integrated subjects themselves. Meanwhile, in other cultural spaces, the third metaphor, the psychic boundarylessness of the black phantasmagoric, surfaced as an alternative mode of relating that deprioritized recognition between subjects and represented both the nightmarish and creative potential of living as a racialized psychological subject during the time. |
