Color (Un)conscious: Psychoanalysis, Resistance, and the Specter/Spectacle of Race

As visible as racial differences were, why did they appear invisible in the dawning moments of modern (western) democracy, invisible in the sense that the enslaved race was not even considered part of the socio-political order premised on equalitarianism? In light of psychoanalytic theory, this paper explores the curious phenomenon of the ostensible invisibility of race in historical junctures in which glaring racial difference was in various ways rendered a spectacle and proposes a Lacanian reading of the workings of race and of the modes and strategies of resistance organized around the category of race. Taking as my point of departure Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’ conception of race as a “regime of visibility,” I seek to engage psychoanalysis with other discourses on race, thereby addressing my aforementioned question and reflecting on the theoretical and political implications of each conceivable answer. Power which relies on the regime of visibility, I argue, can nevertheless be predicated on the invisibility of race even in those instances when it manifests itself through the staging of racial elements and/or the figurations of race. By means of discussion of a series of social, historical, and political examples that bring to the fore a problematic functioning of race and focusing particularly on the case of the blackface performances of the Caribbean-born black performer Bert Williams, I would point to and examine the propinquity of the specter and the spectacle of race—that is, how its visibility hinges on or is intertwined with, and might result in its invisibility. The highly incalculable cultural form of blackface masking emerges as a racial spectacle par excellence, yet it is also undergirded by a certain invisibility of race that results in the indistinguishable zone between strategies of resistance and forms of collaboration in wildly imbalanced power relations. The specter of race is conceived here as the traumatic kernel which is characterized by its resistance to becoming-conscious despite the efforts of “raising consciousness” by the official ideology and despite also the staging of racial difference as spectacle, as in blackface minstrelsy. The traumatic effects of such a specter can be instantiated by its persistent and recurrent haunting, even in the displaced and disguised form of spectacle.