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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY
Freud and Said
Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis
as Liberation Praxis
Robert K. Beshara
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of Psychology
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Department of Psychology
York University
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Robert K. Beshara
Freud and Said

Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis
as Liberation Praxis
Robert K. Beshara
Northern New Mexico College
Española, NM, USA
Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology

ISBN 978-3-030-56742-2 ISBN 978-3-030-56743-9 (eBook)
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In memory of my grandmother Teta Aida Youssef (1927 –2018)
Preface
On May 20th, 2020, my wife and I received a direct death threat that
was addressed to me personally by a David P. on Zoom chat during my
moderation of Theodore Richards’s Q & A after his keynote speech.
The context was a ten-day virtual conference titled The Psychology of
Global Crises, of which I was one of the co-organizers. I reported the
death threat to the Santa Fe Police Department and to the FBI. David P.
hacked into the Zoom meeting without leaving a digital trace; he or she
is clearly a professional Zoombomber. Some of my relatives and friends
tried to comfort me by saying that it is probably a troll, but do trolls send
direct death threats to particular individuals or do they engage in general
trolling? Others told me that I must have been doing something right
with my antiracist research if I am upsetting right-wingers, but that does
not comfort me as a measure of my work’s success. I cannot deny the
traumatic effect of this threat on my psyche; it has changed my horizon.
I currently live with this implicit awareness that someone out there in the
world knows where I live and wants to kill my wife and me.
On May 25th, 2020, in Minneapolis, George Floyd was killed
by police officer Derek Chauvin, a Trump-supporter who was once
vii
viii Preface
photographed wearing a “Make America White Again” red cap. Chauvin

murdered Floyd by taking a knee on his neck and choking him to
death. Many activists on social media juxtaposed the NFL’s, and the
wider (white) public’s, ostracization of Colin Kaepernick for taking a
knee during the national anthem as a gesture of solidarity against police
violence with the police’s lethal form of taking a knee, which seems to be
more ideologically acceptable. One of Floyd’s final words were, “I can’t
breathe!” These words echo the words of Eric Garner, who, in 2014, was
also chocked to death by the police in New York. They are the words of
countless other Black victims of police violence.
The killing of George Floyd was not only a manifestation of personal
violence, but also of structural violence. Without the eradication of
the structural violence of racism, there can never be positive peace or
social justice. For this reason, the murder of George Floyd, as a tipping
point, instigated nationwide protests, on the next day, against police
violence. Reading about, and seeing videos of, these protests on social
media are on my mind as I write this preface. One of the central topics
of my book is racialized capitalism, which is also the context for this
current moment of revolt: “Colonial domination via police power inau-
gurated an explicitly racial capitalism in which Black, Brown and Indige-
nous suffering and death [serves] ruling class interests” (Correia & Wall,
2018, Location No. 177).
The spectralization of anti-Black police violence is problematic on
many fronts. Amateur videos of Black men being murdered by the
police engage their viewers through a perverse enjoyment, which ideolog-
ically position the viewers as peeping toms and Black men as disposable.
The positioning of Black men as disposable erases Black men ontologi-
cally, for living Black men are only comprehended in relation to these
hyper-mediated images of dead and dying Black men. These videos,
which Killer Mike characterized as “murder porn,” provide enjoyment
for conservative racists (i.e., segregationists) and are also a show of force
for everyone else, that is, liberals who think they are non-racists (i.e.,
assimilationists).
It is worth mentioning here that the ongoing militarization of the
police in the United States is a direct function of the training that
they receive from the Israeli Defense Forces. In other words, US
Preface ix
police officers are receiving a specific form of tactical training, that

is, apartheid policing, which can be understood through the lens of
Paul Virilio’s (1983/2008) concept of “endo-colonization.” For example,
Ajamu Baraka (2020) reads the deployment of the National Guard as
endo-colonization: “The U.S. government is deploying the army (that
is what the national guard is) against its own citizens. Isn’t that now
when someone calls for regime change if that was happening in another
nation?” Apartheid policing affords a framing of police violence as
structural violence:
these exchanges with the Israeli military, police, and intelligence agencies
reinforce American law enforcement practices of: Expanding surveillance:
Including comprehensive visual monitoring in public places and online,
and the heightened infiltration of social movements and entire commu-
nities; Justifying racial profiling: Marking Black and Brown people as
suspect, particularly Arabs and Muslims, and refining the policies, tactics,
and technologies that target communities and social movements that
seek racial justice; Suppressing public protests through use of force: Treating
protestors as enemy combatants and controlling media coverage of state
violence. (RAIA & JVP, 2018, p. 2, emphasis in original)
Slavoj Žižek’s (2008) term for structural violence is objective violence,

which for him has two dimensions: symbolic violence and systemic
violence. These two dimensions can help us make sense of the widespread
phenomenon of police violence, which also has two dimensions. We
all experience the symbolic violence of policing through these horrific
videos that are virally shared on social media, so we can also think of
symbolic violence as virtual violence. However, those who are rendered
sub-human, within the apparatus of racialized capitalism, are the only
ones who directly experience the systemic violence of policing, which for
them is actual violence.
More than fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) uttered the
following words, which resonate today and testify to the importance of
our continuing struggle for social justice:
a riot is the language of the unheard . And what is it that America has
failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has
x Preface
worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises
of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that
large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and
the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real
sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of
delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position
of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.
Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
(emphasis added)
Seventeen years ago, this is what one of the chief architects of the Iraq
War, Donald Rumsfeld (2003), said about looting during the first year of
the war; it is interesting to juxtapose his words about Iraqis to the current
US opposition to endo-colonization:
while no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the
pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who
have had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking
their feelings out on that regime …Think what’s happened in our cities
when we’ve had riots, and problems, and looting. Stuff happens! But in
terms of what’s going on in that country [Iraq], it is a fundamental misun-
derstanding to see those images over, and over, and over again of some
boy walking out with a vase and say, “Oh, my goodness, you didn’t have a
plan.” That’s nonsense. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing
a terrific job. Andm [sic] it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people
are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also
free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that’s what’s going to
happen here. (emphasis added)
On May 29th 2020, this is what US president, Donald Trump,

tweeted about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors: “These THUGS
are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that
happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military
is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but,
when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” (emphasis added)
Trump (2020) characterized BLM protestors as “THUGS,” which
according to John McWhorter “is a polite way of using the ‘N-word’” (as
Preface xi
cited in Eubanks, 2020). Also, with the phrase “when the looking states,
the shooting starts,” Trump (2020) was indexing Walter Headley’s (police
chief of Miami) 1967 very same words, who further added during a press
conference that he did not mind “being accused of police brutality” (as
cited in Eubanks, 2020).
BLM—the largest movement in US history (Buchanan, Bui, & Patel,
2020)—is a movement with a pluriversal dimension, particularly when
we see international solidarity among Indigenous, Black, and Brown
subjects. The clearest example of this is the 2015 Black Statement on
Solidarity with Palestine, which is echoed by Nick Estes (2019) who
writes, on behalf of the Red Nation: “Palestine is the moral barometer
of Indigenous North America.” In this book, I explore the pluriversality
of BLM in contrast to the provincial logic of All Lives Matter.
Another context informing the writing of my book is being under
lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has dispropor-
tionally impacted Indigenous, Black, and Brown folks in the US as a
function of structural racism (Sequist, 2020). What is crystal clear in this
political moment of revolt is the difference between freedom and liber-
ation. For instance, many (if not most) conservatives are against phys-
ical distancing guidelines and lockdown measures claiming that they are
authoritarian in nature and that perhaps COVID-19 is exaggerated (if
not a hoax), but these same people who feel oppressed by guidelines that
are there to keep them safe are ambivalent about the freedom of non-
whites in the face of police violence. All of this is, of course, unfolding
amid the 2020 US presidential non-election, wherein the nationalist Law
and Order discourse is on full display to unify Trump’s base. I say non-
election because Joe Biden does not offer a real (read: antiracist) alterna-
tive to Trump from the Democratic side when he tells his followers: “if
you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then
you ain’t black” (as cited in Bradner, Mucha, & Saenz, 2020). Other
relevant contextual moments include: the US leaving the World Health
Organization and Trump designating ANTIFA as a terrorist organiza-
tion. What is the logical implication of the US State designating an
anti-fascist, anarchist movement as a terrorist organization?
xii Preface
Another significant aspect of this difficult period is the racialization

and politicization of COVID-19 as a way of smearing China’s reputa-
tion, which, of course, results in anti-Asian racism here in the US: “1500
reports of incidents of racism, hate speech, discrimination, and physical
attacks against Asians and Asian-Americans” have been documented by
Human Rights Watch (2020). Calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus”
is similar to characterizing the 1918 flu pandemic as the “Spanish flu,”
which was a function of how “wartime censors minimized reports of the
illness while the Spanish press did not” (Brown, 2020). Here is how the
racializing and politicizing rhetoric of COVID-19 works:
The expressions “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus” personify the threat.
Personification is metaphorical: its purpose is to help understand some-
thing unfamiliar and abstract (i.e., the virus) by using terms that are
familiar and embodied (i.e., a location, a nationality or a person). But
as cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have long shown,
metaphors are not just poetic tools, they are used constantly and shape
our world view. The adjective “Chinese” is particularly problematic as
it associates the infection with an ethnicity. Talking about group iden-
tities withan [sic] explicitly medical language is a recognized process of
Othering (here and here), historically used in anti-immigrant rhetoric and
policy, including toward Chinese immigrants in North America. This type
of language stokes anxiety, resentment, fear, and disgust toward people
associated with that group. (Viala-Gaudefroy & Lindaman, 2020)
In addition to anti-Asian racism, we are witnessing a new class config-

uration, wherein essential workers are the new proletariat and those
working from home are the new bourgeoisie. We are additionally seeing
a rise in the targeting of reporters in the US, which is yet another sign
for anti-democratic forces being on the rise:
Across the country journalists have been targeted by police, facing arrest,
detention, and violence, including being pepper sprayed and shot by
rubber bullets. Journalists were targeted by police in the Ferguson protests
in 2015 and during the civil rights era, and that pattern of violence and
arrests continued into this weekend’s protests”. (Burns, 2020)
Preface xiii
Property rights over human rights (Kovel, 1970/1984, p. 16) is the

logic driving mythic violence under racialized capitalism. Divine violence
follows the obverse logic: human rights over property rights. This is the
struggle, which is unfolding before our very eyes. I write this book, as a
form of scholar-activism, in this context and on the basis of these experi-
ences, as a small contribution to the slow but inevitable actualization of
social justice.
Española, USA Robert K. Beshara
Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible if it were

not for the support of: Thomas Teo, Ian Parker, Hatem Bazian, María-
Constanza Garrido Sierralta (Cony), Grace Jackson, Beth Farrow, Jo O’Neill,
Zobariya Jidda, Alberto Hernandez-Lemus, Michael Kim, Tommy J. Curry,
and Northern New Mexico College.
References
Baraka, A. [@ajamubaraka]. (2020, May 30). Twitter [Tweet]. Retrieved from
https://twitter.com/ajamubaraka/status/1266945898384416770.
Black for Palestine. (2015). Black statement of solidarity with Palestine. Retrieved
from https://www.blackforpalestine.com/read-the-statement.html.
Bradner, E., Mucha, S., & Saenz, A. (2020, May 22). Biden: ‘If you have a
problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black’.
CNN [Atlanta]. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/politics/
biden-charlamagne-tha-god-you-aint-black/index.html.
Brown, M. (2020, March 23). Fact check: Why is the 1918 influenza virus
called ‘Spanish flu’? USA Today. Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/
story/news/factcheck/2020/03/23/fact-check-how-did-1918-pandemic-get-
name-spanish-flu/2895617001/.
Buchanan, L., Bui, Q., & Patel, J. K. (2020, July 3). Black Lives Matter may
be the largest movement in US history. The New York Times. Retrieved
from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-pro
tests-crowd-size.html.
xiv Preface
Burns, K. (2020, May 31). Police targeted journalists covering the George
Floyd protests. Vox [New York]. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/identi
ties/2020/5/31/21276013/police-targeted-journalists-covering-george-floyd-
protests.
Correia, D., & Wall, T. (2018). Police: A field guide. New York, NY: Verso.
Estes, N. (2019, September 7). The liberation of Palestine represents an alterna-
tive path for native nations. Retrieved from https://therednation.org/2019/
09/07/the-liberation-of-palestine-represents-an-alternative-path-for-native-
nations/.
Eubanks, O. (2020, May 29). The history of the phrase ‘when the looting
starts, the shooting starts’ used by Trump. ABC News [New York].
Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/history-phrase-looting-sta
rts-shooting-starts-trump/story?id=70950935.
Human Rights Watch. (2020, May 12). COVID-19 fueling anti-Asian racism
and xenophobia worldwide. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/
05/13/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide#.
King, M. L. (1968, March 14). The other America. Retrieved from https://www.
gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/.
Kovel, J. (1970/1984). White racism: A psychohistory. New York, NY: Columbia
University Press.
RAIA, & JVP. (2018). Deadly exchange: The dangerous consequences of American
law enforcement trainings in Israel . Retrieved from https://deadlyexchange.
org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Deadly-Exchange-Report.pdf.
Rumsfeld, D. (2003, April 11). DoD news briefing—Secretary Rumsfeld and
Gen. Myers. Retrieved June 29, 2020, from https://archive.defense.gov/Tra
nscripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2367.
Sequist, T. D. (2020). The disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communi-
ties of color. NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery, 1(4).
Trump, D. J. [@realDonaldTrump]. (2020, May 28). Twitter [Tweet]. Retrieved
from https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1266231100780744704.
Viala-Gaudefroy, J., & Lindaman, D. (2020, April 21). Donald Trump’s ‘Chinese
virus’: The politics of naming. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/
donald-trumps-chinese-virus-the-politics-of-naming-136796.
Virilio, P. (1983/2008). Pure war (M. Polizzotti, Trans.). S. Lotringer (Ed.).
Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Žižek, S. (2008). Violence: Six sideways reflections. New York, NY: Picador.
Contents
1 Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis: Critical Border

Psychology 1
2 Beginnings 89
3 Orientalism 113
4 Freud and the Non-European 131
5 Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis 149
Index 203
xv
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 The semiotic square 19

Fig. 1.2 The four discourses 73
Fig. 5.1 Horizontal semiosis 191
xvii
1
Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis: Critical
Border Psychology
Critical psychologists draw on a number of theoretical resources (e.g.,

feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, etc.) in their
critiques of mainstream (Euro-American) psychology. The central debate
in critical psychology is whether critical psychology is providing a vision
of a more ethical way of doing psychology, one that is grounded in
history, philosophy, theory, qualitative methodology, etc.; or is critical
psychology the negation of psychology proper? I live on both sides of the
debate, but my preference on most days is for the latter position because
I am a transdisciplinarian at heart—being not only a scholar-activist,
but also a fine artist. In my approach, which I am calling critical border
psychology (cf. Mignolo, 2007), I draw on postcolonialism/decoloniality
along with Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis in an effort to imagine a
pluriversal psychology grounded in liberation praxis (Beshara, 2019a);
contrapuntal psychoanalysis is one such an attempt. Some of the crit-
ical psychologists who have paved the way for this kind of work include:
Ian Parker (Parker & Siddiqui, 2019), Thomas Teo (2005), Tod Sloan
(1996), Sunil Bhatia (2018), Erica Burman (2019), and Derek Hook
(2008).
© The Author(s) 2021 1

R. Beshara, Freud and Said, Palgrave Studies
in the Theory and History of Psychology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9_1
2 R. K. Beshara
From Decolonial Psychoanalysis

to Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis
This book is a sequel to Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islam-
ophobia Studies (Beshara, 2019b). In Decolonial Psychoanalysis, I analyzed
the ideology of (counter)terrorism-Islamophobia/Islamophilia through
the lens of critical psychology, while drawing in particular on psycho-
analysis and decoloniality (Mignolo, 2007) as theoretico-methodological
tools. I ended Decolonial Psychoanalysis with the question of liberation
praxis, which I aspire to explore further in this book through what
I will be describing as contrapuntal psychoanalysis, which is a kind of
psychoanalysis as liberation praxis that accounts for both (post)colonial
psychoanalysis and decolonial psychoanalysis in an effort to theorize
oppressor/oppressed subjectivities in order to practice liberatory subjec-
tivities. The challenge of liberation praxis is whether it is possible to
theorize and practice psychoanalysis exterior to ideology? Or, even,
whether it is possible to imagine a world without psychoanalysis (Spivak,
1994)?
In this book, while I will not be revisiting my analysis of
the specific ideology of (counter)terrorism-Islamophobia/Islamophilia
per se, I continue to be concerned, however, with the overall
ideology of (post)modernity-(post)coloniality; or how the violent logic
of (post)coloniality (e.g., Islamophobia/Islamophilia) fantasmatically
sustains the oppressive rhetoric of (post)modern discourses (e.g., the War
on Terror). Another name for this ideology is racialized capitalism, which
as a modern world-system explains everything, in the case of the US,
from the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the transatlantic slave trade
to Jim Crow and New Jim Crow. Liberation praxis is the attempt to think
and act exterior to racialized capitalism; contrapuntal psychoanalysis is
one such attempt.
Racialized Capitalism
Racialized capitalism (Cole, 2016), however, is more than a modern
ideology; it is equally a colonial materiality. For this reason, I conceive
1 Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis … 3
of racialized capitalism as a dispositif , or an apparatus, in Michel

Foucault’s (1980) sense of the term: “a thoroughly heterogeneous
ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regu-
latory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements,
philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said
as much as the unsaid” (p. 194). This apparatus goes by other names,
such as “racial capitalism” (Burden-Stelly, 2020; Gilmore, 2020; Kelley,
2017; Robinson, 1983) and “racist capitalism” (Desmond, 2019). For
Cedric J. Robinson (1983):
Racism, I maintain, was not simply a convention for ordering the rela-
tions of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the
“internal” relations of European peoples. As part of the inventory of
Western civilization it would reverberate within and without, transfer-
ring its toll from the past to the present. In contradistinction to Marx’s
and Engels’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social
relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The
development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued
essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force,
then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the
social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term “racial
capitalism” to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure
as a historical agency. (p. 2)
The racial axis is the central feature of racialized capitalism, which is

a European modern/colonial project that can be traced back to 1492
(Dussel, 1995, p. 12). Here’s Aníbal Quijano’s (2000) explication of the
racial axis in the coloniality of power:
What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began

with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capi-
talism as a new global power. One of the fundamental axes of this model
of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the
idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience
of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of
global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. (p. 533)
4 R. K. Beshara
In racialized capitalism, racism is certainly the most oppressive struc-

tural element of the apparatus, but it often intersects with two other
axes: labor and sex. Quijano (2000) argues that the “idea of race,
in its modern meaning, does not have a known history before the
colonization of America” (p. 533). However, Geraldine Heng (2018)
asserts that England is the first racial state in premodernity with its
1290 Edict of Expulsion, which was a royal decree expelling all Jews
from the Kingdom of England. Colonialism and racism did undoubt-
edly exist in the premodern world (Heng, 2018), but the novelty of
racialized capitalism, as a modern world-system, was and continues to
be its accelerated global systematization of imperialism, colonialism,
racism/classism/sexism, and capitalism in the name of civilization. Civi-
lization is savage, but it projects its savagery onto the Other as a defense
mechanism:
The civilized white man retains an irrational nostalgia for the extraor-
dinary times of sexual licentiousness, orgies, unpunished rapes, and
unrepressed incest. In a sense, these fantasies correspond to Freud’s life
instinct. Projecting his desires onto the black man, the white man behaves
as if the black man actually had them. (Fanon, 1952/2008, pp. 142–143)
The signifier ‘race’ can be traced back to the Arabic word ra’s (‫)رأس‬,
which means head, beginning, or origin. James Sweet (1997) even makes
the following argument: “The racist ideologies of fifteenth-century Iberia
grew out of the development of African slavery in the Islamic world as
far back as the eighth century” (p. 145). This is a fair critique, which will
necessitate an analysis of the Aristotelian notion of natural slavery:
For the slave the result was a state of social death in which all rights
and sense of personhood were denied. The appearance of this form of
slavery [i.e., chattel slavery] in the ancient Mediterranean has led to the
dominant modern view that Greece and Rome offer the first examples in
world history of what can be called genuine slave societies. (Bradley &
Cartledge, 2011, p. 1)
However, my focus is not on the premodern world, for the politico-

economic configuration of the world today (e.g., US hegemony) is a
function of the longue-durée of (Spanish, Portuguese, British, French,
and/or Dutch) Euro-colonialism, which began in 1492 and came to a
mild halt between 1945 and 1960 with the decolonization of Asia and
Africa. I cautiously use the expression “mild halt” for three reasons: (1)
As Jacques Derrida argues, the Cold War has not ended (as cited in
Borradori, 2003, p. 92); in fact, the War on Terror is a continuation
of the Cold War by another name. (2) While classical colonialism is
less frequent or visible today, neocolonialism (Nkrumah, 1965), human-
itarian imperialism (Bricmont, 2006), coloniality (Quijano, 2000),
auto-colonialism (Bulhan, 1985, p. 44), and endo-colonization (Virilio,
1983/2008) are all highly frequent and visible phenomena. (3) The
majority of former franchise colonies have not truly decolonized them-
selves but instead are now postcolonies (cf. Mbembe, 2001) because the
oppressive colonizers have been replaced by colonized sub-oppressors,
which is akin to a sado-masochistic game of musical chairs.
To be evenhanded, we must consider the contributions of the Islamic
world (i.e., modernity’s alterity), particularly the Golden Age (800–
1258), while holding the colonial history of the Islamic Caliphates
(632–1924) accountable:
Popular accounts of the history of science typically show a timeline in

which no major scientific advances seem to have taken place during the
period between the ancient Greeks and the European Renaissance. In
between, so we are told, Western Europe and, by extrapolation, the rest
of the world, languished in the Dark Ages for a thousand years.
In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the interna-
tional language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the
Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast
Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India
to Spain. (Al-Khalili, 2011, pp. 29–30)
Therefore, even though the Kingdom of Spain was not the first racial
state, “Spain initiated modernity” (Dussel, 1995, p. 90). Quijano (2000)
shows us the link between modernity and coloniality since 1492 through
an analysis of the two main axes of power (race and labor):
6 R. K. Beshara
America was constituted as the first space/time of a new model of power

of global vocation, and both in this way and by it became the first identity
of modernity. Two historical processes associated in the production of that
space/time converged and established the two fundamental axes of the
new model of power. One was the codification of the differences between
conquerors and conquered in the idea of “race,” a supposedly different
biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority
to the others. The conquistadors assumed this idea as the constitu-
tive, founding element of the relations of domination that the conquest
imposed. On this basis, the population of America, and later the world,
was classified within the new model of power. The other process was the
constitution of a new structure of control of labor and its resources and
products. This new structure was an articulation of all historically known
previous structures of control of labor, slavery, serfdom, small indepen-
dent commodity production and reciprocity, together around and upon
the basis of capital and the world market. (pp. 533–534)
Sex is the third axis of power in the apparatus of racialized capi-

talism (cf. Lugones, 2010). The subaltern are not only racialized and
over-exploited, they are also violently sexualized (Curry, 2017). The most
oppressed in any given society tends to be the racialized, or politicized,
male. There is ample empirical evidence for this paradoxical position
(that the racialized male is the most oppressed subject under patriarchy)
as supported by the subordinate-male target hypothesis in social domi-
nance theory, which “argues that group-based social hierarchy is driven
by three proximal processes: aggregated individual discrimination, aggre-
gated institutional discrimination, and behavioral asymmetry” (Sidanius &
Pratto, 1999, p. 39, emphasis in original). For instance, in the US, Black
men suffer from the highest unemployment rate (9.1) according to the
Department of Labor (2016), the highest risk (1 in 1,000) of being killed
by police use of force (Edwards, Lee, & Esposito, 2019), and the highest
incarceration rate (1 in 9) for those between the ages of 20 and 34 (PEW,
2008).
According to Tommy J. Curry (personal communication, May 14,
2020), the oppression of racialized males “has to do with how patriarchy
establishes kinship bonds to build racial hierarchy. Because it elimi-
nates other groups of [racialized/politicized] men for sexual access to all
women.” This suggests that racial-sexual violence against racialized, or

politicized, males may have an evolutionary basis, as Jim Sidanius claims,
which gets ideologically reinforced or is “simply the most historically effi-
cacious political strategy of racial management throughout the centuries”
(Curry, personal communication, May 14, 2020).
Racist violence is sexualized violence, and this is a key psychoanalytic
insight. As Enrique Dussel (1995) shows:
The modern ego of the conquistador reveals itself as also a phallic ego.
No amount of idyllic fantasizing about erotic relationships between the
conqueror and the conquered can ever justify injustices such as occurred
in Tlaxcala. Such erotic violence simply illustrates the colonization of the
indigenous life-world. (p. 46, emphasis in original)
Curry (2017) also draws attention to the perverse sexual nature of

anti-Black racist violence, which is the unconscious of racist jouissance
or enjoyment (cf. Fanon, 1952/2008, pp. 134–135):
“racial hatred is carnal hatred … sexualized hatred”—a phallicism or

process that criminalizes Black males as sexual threats like the rapist,
while simultaneously constituting them as the carnal excesses and fetishes
of the white libido. Racism is a complex nexus, a cognitive architec-
ture used to invent, reimagine, and evolve the presumed political, social,
economic, sexual, and psychological superiority of the white races in
society, while materializing the imagined inferiority and hastening the
death of inferior races. Said differently, racism is the manifestation of the
social processes and concurrent logics that facilitate the death and dying
of racially subjugated peoples. (p. 4, emphasis added)
This is in line with Frantz Fanon’s (1952/2008) thesis: “If we want to

understand the racial situation psychoanalytically, not from a universal
viewpoint, but as it is experienced by individual consciousnesses, consid-
erable importance must be given to sexual phenomena” (p. 138,
emphasis added). Before I highlight some historico-empirical examples
of racialized capitalism in the US, I would like to include another defi-
nition of racism, which complements the previous one and the ones yet
8 R. K. Beshara
to come: “Racism is a global hierarchy of human superiority and inferi-

ority, politically, culturally and economically produced and reproduced
for centuries by the institutions of the ‘capitalist/patriarchal western-
centric/Christian-centric modern/colonial world-system’” (Grosfoguel,
Oso, & Christou, 2015, p. 636).
In other words, racialized capitalism is structured upon not only a
hierarchy of labor (bourgeois v. proletariat) and sex (male v. female), but
also, and more importantly, a hierarchy of race (being v. nonbeing). The
reason I explain the coloniality power in detail is because (post)modern
psychoanalysis operates within the (post)colonial logic of racialized capi-
talism, wherein the analyst is the oppressor and the analysand is the
oppressed, but that can change if psychoanalysis is decolonized and
becomes a liberation praxis; in other words, decolonial psychoanalysis
must be explicitly both antiracist and anti-capitalist (and certainly, anti-
sexist). Fanon (1952/2008), too, was aware of, wrote about, racialized
capitalism: “The black problem is not just about Blacks living among
Whites, but about the black man exploited, enslaved, and despised by a
colonialist and capitalist society that happens to be white” (p. 178).
Matthew Desmond (2019) calls racialized capitalism, in the context
of the US, “racist capitalism” (p. 40) because “historians have pointed
to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and
slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to
capitalism” (p. 32). Desmond (2019) then cites Sven Beckert and Seth
Rockman who wrote, “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the
DNA of American capitalism” (p. 33). Those who do not accept the
reality of white privilege today are consciously or unconsciously denying
how the US became the world’s largest economy since 1871 on the basis
of slavery. In Desmond’s (2019) words, “Cotton was to the 19th century
what oil was to the 20th: among the world’s most traded commodities”
(p. 33). He adds:
As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged.

By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton
crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it
harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did
their counterparts in the North. (p. 34)
Desmond (2019) states further, “The United States solved its land
shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often
with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida.
It then sold that land on the cheap — just $1.25 an acre in the early
1830s ($38 in today’s dollars) — to white settlers” (p. 33). Desmond
is deconstructing the American dream and other related myths, such as
social mobility or the idea that the US is a level playing field, wherein any
person can succeed if they work hard enough. While some theorists may
object to the phrase racialized capitalism as not specific enough, I would
argue that this Black Marxist phrase accurately describes the theoretico-
practical continuity from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism
and beyond (e.g., neoliberalism), and situates all iterations of capitalism
within the project of modernity/coloniality and its civilizational (i.e.,
dehumanizing) violence:
The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory,

an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the
course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America.
Fifty years later, there were five million. (Desmond, 2019, p. 34)
The other example of racialized capitalism that Desmond (2019)

points to is the mortgage. He writes, “Enslaved people were used as
collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became the
defining characteristic of middle America. In colonial times, when land
was not worth much and banks didn’t exist, most lending was based
on human property” (p. 37). This cruel fact is worth thinking about
in relation to the 2008 financial crisis, wherein many racialized home-
owners lost their homes while the banks were being bailed out by the
US government:
African-American and Latino borrowers have been particularly hard-hit

by the foreclosure crisis. Among owner-occupants, our estimates suggest
that 7.9% of African Americans and 7.7% of Latinos who received loans
to purchase or refinance their primary residence between 2005 and 2008
have lost their homes to foreclosure between 2007 and 2009, compared to
an estimated 4.5% of non-Hispanic whites. (Bocian, Li, & Ernst, 2010,
p. 8)
10 R. K. Beshara
Dehumanization
To ground capitalism exclusively in the Industrial Revolution is to deny
the colonial history of property (cf. Kovel, 1970/1984, p. 16): the theft
of Indigenous lands and the enslavement of Black bodies. Emphasizing
both capitalism as industrialism and the industrial worker as the site
of struggle is a Eurocentric critique of modernity, which does not take
into account the dehumanization experienced by non-Europeans, many
of whom would not even qualify as the proletariat. For this reason,
I invite us to think of oppression and violence under racialized capi-
talism not only in terms of exploitation or alienation, but also, and
more importantly, in terms of dehumanization (of the non-European
lumpenproletariat):
For a population to be dehumanized they have to be perceived as a race

(a natural human kind) with a unique racial essence. The racial essence
is then equated with a subhuman essence, leading to the belief that they
are subhuman animals. The function of dehumanization is to override
inhibitions against committing acts of violence. (Smith, 2011, pp. 447–
448)
Elsewhere in the book, David Livingstone Smith (2011) writes about

dehumanization as a way of thinking (cf. Teo, 2020 on subhumanism);
Joel Kovel (1970/1984, p. 91) argues that the process of dehumanization
(or thingification) is based upon the repulsive fantasy of dirt. Coloniality
is also a way of thinking, or a fantasy, powered by “the dehumanizing
impulse” (p. 15):
Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way

of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a
scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant,
dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such,
it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances,
be unthinkable. (p. 30)
Therefore, our liberation praxis entails thinking critically in Paulo

Freire’s (1970/2018) sense of conscientização (conscientization), but the
task is complicated in psychoanalysis because it becomes a question of
not only critical consciousness, but also critical unconsciousness. However,
given that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, this Other
must be liberated in order for the subject to also be liberated. This
is the radical humanist task of contrapuntal psychoanalysis. We must
also wrestle with the possibility that the unconscious is ipso facto racist
since it premised on the fantasy of dirt (Kovel, 1970/1984), or the
metaphoric condensation of black = evil or sin: “Deep down in the
European unconscious has been hollowed out an excessively black pit
where the most immoral instincts and unmentionable desires slumber”
(Fanon, 1952/2008, pp. 166–167). Fanon is certainly inspired by Carl
Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, but he has an even better take
on it than Jung: “the collective unconscious is quite simply the reposi-
tory of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes of a particular group”
(p. 165); “it is the consequence of…an impulsive cultural imposition”
(p. 167). Perhaps the end of racism is also the end of the unconscious,
or at least the end of racist cultures.
From Modernity/Coloniality
to Transmodernity/Decoloniality
My distinction between postcoloniality and decoloniality is not temporal
but spatial. Postcoloniality was the moment after decolonization but it
was not necessarily a decolonial moment. For this reason, I conceive of
postcoloniality as still housed within the neocolonial project of racialized
capitalism (cf. Bhabha, 1994, p. 9). Decoloniality, on the other hand,
is exterior to coloniality, which does not automatically mean that it is
outside of it. For example, even though Indigenous communities are
structurally exterior to the rhetoric/logic of modernity/coloniality, they
still exist within settler colonial nation-states in the Global North (e.g.,
the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, etc.).
What of postcolonialism as opposed to postcoloniality? Walter
Mignolo’s (2007) distinction between postcolonialism and decoloniality
12 R. K. Beshara
is an arbitrary one premised on ethnic difference (cf. Bhambra, 2014):

Afro-Asian theorists (e.g., Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi
Bhabha) v. Latin American theorists (e.g., Aníbal Quijano, Enrique
Dussel, and Walter Mignolo). Here is Mignolo’s (2007) statement on
the key distinction between postcolonial and decolonial theorists: “The
de-colonial shift, in other words, is a project of de-linking while post-
colonial criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation
within the academy” (p. 452). According to Mignolo’s (2007) reasoning,
Edward Said is merely a postcolonial critic albeit being a scholar-activist
in every sense of the word. Said was both a Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a member of the
Palestinian National Council.
Unlike Mignolo, I am concerned with the technical or theoret-
ical difference between postcolonialism and decoloniality, which also
acknowledges the difference between postcoloniality (the neocolonial
period after decolonization) and postcolonialism (the critical theoriza-
tion of this period in relation to colonialism). Consequently, even though
Said is typically credited for being the founder of postcolonialism, I
regard him as a decolonial scholar-activist on the basis of his transmodern
(Dussel, 1995) praxis of cultural resistance, or of counter-ideologically
delinking colonial discourses (e.g., Orientalism) from modern fantasies
of exceptionalism.
Egypt, for example, as a former franchise colony is the postcolo-
nial state par excellence because the kingdom of colonial oppres-
sors (i.e., the Muhammad Ali dynasty and the British Empire) was
replaced with a republic of postcolonial sub-oppressors (i.e., the Egyp-
tian Armed Forces). In other words, in the case of (post)modern
Egypt, decolonization took place but neither decoloniality nor libera-
tion, and as such, Egypt continues to operate within the framework of
neomodern/neocolonial racialized capitalism. In this case, contrapuntal
psychoanalysis as liberation praxis is the theorizing and practicing of a
decolonial (Egyptian) subjectivity vis-à-vis (or in spite of ) the apparatus
of racialized capitalism.
This book then is a reflexive application of contrapuntal psychoanal-
ysis given my positionality as an Egyptian scholar-activist situated in
the Global North on Turtle Island in proximity to twenty-three Indige-

nous tribes: nineteen Pueblos (Acoma, Cochiti, Isleta, Jemez, Laguna,
Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh, Picuris, Pojoaque, Sandia, San Felipe, San
Ildefonso, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, Taos, Tesuque, Zuni,
and Zia); three Apache tribes (the Fort Sill Apache Tribe, the Jicar-
illa Apache Nation, and the Mescalero Apache Tribe), and the Navajo
Nation. Contrapuntal psychoanalysis not only informs my subjectivity
(as a psychosocial site of political resistance and liberation ethics), but
also informs the aesthesis of my critical pedagogy given that I work
at a college dedicated to underserved (Hispanic and Native American)
students.
Freud and Said

So far I have been addressing the subtitle of the book (Contrapuntal
Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis) and not the actual title (Freud and
Said). This book is not a dual biography of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
and Edward Said (1935–2003), for that I recommend Adam Phillips’s
(2014) or Elisabeth Roudinesco’s (2016) biographies of Freud and Said’s
(1999) own memoir, Out of Place. Rather, this book is about the theo-
retical linkages between Freud and Said, who are undoubtedly two of the
most important theorists in the twentieth century, which is not merely
an opinion. Their importance as theorists is corroborated by the fact that
they both were on the Times Higher Education (2009) list of most cited
authors of books in the humanities. In 2007 alone, Freud was cited 903
times and Said was cited 694 times. These results speak of not only their
importance as theorists but also the continued practical relevance of their
ideas in the twenty-first century as public intellectuals.
Both Freud and Said were founders of original fields of study, the
former being the inventor of psychoanalysis and the latter being the
originator of postcolonialism. Both critical theorists wrote from the
perspective of exilic marginality with the (explicit or implicit) awareness
of being out of place: Freud being a non-European (atheist Jew) and
Said being an non-American (secular Palestinian). Toward the end of his
life, Freud had to flee from Austria to the UK after Vienna was annexed
14 R. K. Beshara
by Nazi Germany in 1938. From the beginning of his life, Said had to
contend with living in exile in Egypt after the nakba (catastrophe), or
the 1948 Palestinian exodus.
Freud produced a powerful theory of subjectivity being divided
between ego and unconscious, and Said produced an equally influential
theory of the (Oriental) Other being in a dialectical relationship with the
(Occidental) subject. Put together, these two theories help us explain the
psychosocial distress, which manifests itself through the subject-Other
dialectic in the form of clinical structures (i.e., neurosis, perversion, and
psychosis) and their symptoms. In other words, Said links the repres-
sion that Freud encountered in the clinic with the oppression existing
outside the clinic in society (cf. Levy, 1996), particularly in the context
of imperialism and colonialism, or the apparatus of racialized capitalism.
Here is Said’s (1993) distinction between imperialism and colonialism:
“‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a
dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; ‘colonialism,’
which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting
of settlements on distant territory” (p. 9).
Freud was born and grew up in Freiberg in Mähren, the Austrian
Empire (now: Příbor, Czech Republic); regarding Said’s formative years,
in both Palestine and Egypt as franchise colonies, there were two over-
lapping contexts: the Ottoman and British Empires. This emphasis on
psychosocial distress and the link between repression (inside the clinic)
and oppression (outside the clinic), or the personal and the political,
is what contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis is principally
concerned with.
Said had great admiration for Freud as both a theorist and a writer,
and while some scholars (e.g., Barghouti, 2010; Esonwanne, 2005; Field,
2016) have addressed this connection in their essays, the topic has
never been addressed in book-length form. Therefore, in highlighting
the influence of Freud (and subsequently, psychoanalysis) on Said, I
hope to achieve two things: (1) to decolonize Freud in order to theorize
decolonial subjectivity—the kind of subjectivity at the heart of libera-
tion praxis—and (2) to psychoanalyze Said as a means to articulate the
transmodern Other—as a counterpoint to the (post)modern Other.
It is worth adding, in this context, two more things: (1) Freud iden-
tified with the conquistadors, as is evident in this letter he wrote to
Wilhelm Fliess on February 1, 1900: “I am by temperament nothing
but a conquistador –an adventurer, if you want it translated–with all the
curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort” (as
cited in Masson, 1985, p. 398, emphasis added); (2) Said (1999) was
not just inspired by psychoanalysis, he was actually in analysis (p. 261);
hence, what Jacqueline Rose (2017) terms his “psychoanalytic passion”
(p. 10).
Overview
In the remainder of this chapter, I will review the non-Saidian theoretical
links between psychoanalysis and postcolonialism/decoloniality begin-
ning with the contributions of Freudo-Marxists, particularly Wilhelm
Reich’s (1933/1970) publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, all
the way to my publication: Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b).
Along the way, I will survey some of classic literatures: Octave Mannoni’s
(1950/1990) Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization,
Frantz Fanon’s (1952/2008) Black Skin, White Masks, Albert Memmi’s
(1957/1965) The Colonizer and the Colonized , and Ashis Nandy’s (1983)
The Intimate Enemy among others.
In Chapter 2, I will closely read Said’s (1975/1985) second
book, Beginnings: Intention and Method , wherein he discusses Freud’s
(1899/2010) magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams among other
texts to investigate Freud’s intentions and methods not as a psychoana-
lyst but as a writer. For Said (1975/1985), The Interpretations of Dreams
is a “text whose intention is to begin a discourse one of whose principal
purposes is to the conscious avoidance of certain specific textual conven-
tions” (p. 162). Is that Said’s way of downplaying the scientific status of
psychoanalysis and elevating Freud’s contributions to the humanities?
In Chapter 3, I will engage with Said’s (1978/2003) third and
most influential book, Orientalism, which inaugurated postcolonialism
as a field of study. In Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) distinguishes
between latent (unconscious) Orientalism and manifest (conscious)
16 R. K. Beshara
Orientalism—an important distinction, which he would not have been

able to make without Freud’s categories for dream interpretation.
Strangely, Freud’s name is cited three times in Orientalism, but these cita-
tions are in passing, and they are never in relation to the latent/manifest
distinction. In other words, Freud is repressed in the text. Why is that?
In Chapter 4, I will concentrate on Freud and the Non-European,
which is Said’s (2003) final book before losing his life to leukemia.
The book is a transcription of a talk Said gave at the Freud Museum
London in 2001. The talk was incidentally banned (disavowed?) by the
Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. In the book, Said (2003) pays close
attention to Freud’s (1939/1967) final book, Moses and Monotheism.
The crux of the book is that identity, something which most of us
strongly cling to, is based upon non-identity. This is the point that
Freud makes when he argues that Moses was an Egyptian; in other
words, the first Jew was a non-Jew. By extension, Said argues that Freud
is a non-European—and Said a non-American? In the spirit of praxis,
Said elaborates this powerful theoretical reflection in an effort to apply
it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Said, Freud’s insight has the
potential for helping us envision a world not divided along the lines of
identity politics—something that Freud theorized but could not himself
avoid. Finally, it is worth noting the obvious: that Said’s final book deals
with Freud’s final book—not mentioning that both men battled cancer.
What is the significance of their late styles for both psychoanalysis and
postcolonialism/decoloniality?
In Chapter 5, I will unpack contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation
praxis. I will do this by way of the following concepts: the two Others,
double-unconsciousness, and colonial difference. As liberation praxis, I
will elaborate on contrapuntal psychoanalysis qua border methodology.
Furthermore, contrapuntal psychoanalysis can be read along the lines of
not only power/knowledge/being but also politics/aesthetics/ethics. In
the concluding chapter, I will be demonstrating these features through
concrete examples. Finally, I aspire to contribute to a general theory of
oppression (and violence) in the context of racialized capitalism. In the
next section, I will discuss the difference between ‘race,’ racialization, and
racism because racism is the most salient form of oppression.
I will argue that while ‘race’ is a social construction, racism is a mate-

rial reality mediated through racialization, which is the perception of
race. The perception of race is a function of our schemas, which are
unconscious, because we internalize them from the culture in which
we are situated. Therefore, antiracism can only be the product of an
antiracist culture. Ultimately, we need a new language for talking about
human difference without resorting to the problematic category of race.
We are not there yet because such a long-term project entails undoing the
history of modern colonialism, which may take us around five hundred
years.
‘Race,’ Racialization, and Racism

Throughout this book, I will heuristically use signifiers like ‘white,’
‘Brown,’ and ‘Black’ to refer to different human groups with the aware-
ness that ‘race’ is not only a social construction (cf. Spivak, 1987,
p. 205 on strategic essentialism), but also a master category or “a funda-
mental concept that has profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the
history, polity, economic structure, and culture of the United States”
(Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 106). Henceforth, I will drop the use of
inverted commas. Race is also a transcendent category: “something that
stands above or apart from class, gender, or other axes of inequality and
difference” (p. 106). Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2015) add:
Race is a fundamental organizing principle of social stratification. It has

influenced the definition of rights and privileges, the distribution of
resources, and the ideologies and practices of subordination and oppres-
sion. The concept of race as a marker of difference has permeated all
forms of social relations. It is a template for the processes of marginal-
ization that continue to shape social structures as well as collective and
individual psyches. (p. 107)
Because race is “a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts

and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (Omi &
Winant, p. 110, emphasis in original), racism is Real, and it is for this
18 R. K. Beshara
reason that the concept of race, while a social construction, is still of

great value in antiracist struggle. Also: “While race is a template for the
subordination and oppression of different social groups, we emphasize
that it is also a template for resistance to many forms of marginal-
ization and domination” (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 108). Omi and
Winant’s (2015) racial formation theory comprises a constellation of
concepts, which are worth unpacking: race making, racialization, racial
projects, racism, and antiracism. They define race making “as a process
of ‘othering’” (p. 105), which is based on any perceived distinction. They
add: “Gender, class, sexuality, religion, culture, language, nationality, and
age, among other perceived distinctions, are frequently evoked to justify
structures of inequality, differential treatment, subordinate status, and in
some cases violent conflict and war” (p. 105).
I appreciate the conception of othering because it explains not only
racism, but also other forms of oppression. Othering, as Omi and
Winant (2015) point out, is “a global and world-historical process of
‘making up people’” (p. 106), a form of categorization premised on not
only difference (us v. them), but also hierarchy (superior v. inferior).
Now, we can map the coordinates of subject-positions in the apparatus
of racialized capitalism (see Fig. 1.1) using the semiotic square (Greimas,
1968; cf. Kovel, 1970/1984, p. 75) and Curry’s (2017) Man-Not theory.
Here is Curry’s (personal communication, June 28, 2020) response
to my formalization of his theory, “the Man-Not however creates the
stratification because he is outside civility. The woman-not (savage) is
civilized in contact and through rape (she can produce babies for rule
over the native)…he is only eliminated.” Curry (personal communica-
tion, August 7, 2020) clarifies, “even when he [the Man-Not] is raped,
it serves no function besides accelerating his dehumanization and ulti-
mate death.” Curry (personal communication, June 28, 2020) adds,
“class stratification and group distinctions in civil society emerge from
the distance they have from the savage. This nuances Wynter’s point in
No Humans Involved.”
Racial formation is “the sociohistorical process by which racial identi-
ties are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed ” (Omi & Winant,
2015, p. 109, emphasis in original). Racialization is “the extension of
Fig. 1.1 The semiotic square

20 R. K. Beshara
racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social prac-

tice, or group” (p. 111, emphasis in original). Here is the definition of
the next element (i.e., racial project) in Omi and Winant’s (2015) racial
formation theory:
A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or expla-

nation of racial identities and meanings, and an effort to organize and
distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along particular racial lines.
(p. 125, emphasis in original)
So what is racism according to Omi and Winant (2015)? “A racial

project can be defined as racist if it creates or reproduces structures of
domination based on racial significations and identities” (p. 128, emphasis
in original). Conversely, antiracist projects are “those that undo or
resist structures of domination based on racial significations and identities”
(p. 129, emphasis in original).
In Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi (2016) names three
subject-positions vis-à-vis the question of race: segregationists, assimi-
lationists, and antiracists. I find that these positions map perfectly onto
the “trinity of ideologies that emerged in the wake of the French Revolu-
tion–conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism” (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 52).
Whereas segregationists are conservatives who are consciously racist,
assimilationists are liberals who are unconsciously racist, which is epit-
omized by the phrase: “I’m not racist, but…” Non-racism, or racial
moderation, is still a form of liberal (or centrist) racism. Kendi (2016)
defines radical antiracism as follows: “there is nothing wrong with Black
people as a group, or with any other racial group. That is what it truly
means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with
Black people, to think that racial groups are equal” (p. 11, emphasis in
original).
Not only is race a social construction, racism is a dangerous racial
project that is founded upon myths:
Curse theorists were the first known segregationists. They believed that
Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally inca-
pable of becoming White. Climate theorists were the first known assimi-
lationists, believing Black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a
temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming White if they moved
to a cooler climate. (Kendi, 2016, p. 32, emphasis added)
However, undoing racist myths entails racial justice, not color blind-
ness; in other words, radical antiracism entails both “oppositional race
consciousness and racial resistance” (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 131,
emphasis in original). It is unfortunate that we must define a project of
social justice and positive peace using a negative term (antiracism); never-
theless, antiracism is the negation of the negation, for during 468 years
of Euro-colonialism racism has negated the being of the non-European,
non-white, non-Christian, etc. It will perhaps take another 468 years to
undo this legacy of modern colonialism.
Color blindness is not tenable in the foreseeable future because it
is impossible not to racialize (i.e., not to perceive race); however, it is
possible to racialize and also be antiracist. Racialization will cease to exist
with the collapse of racialized capitalism. As Marxist theorist Mike Cole
(2016) puts it, racialization is “a process that serves ruling-class interests
by dividing the working class, promoting conflict among that class – the
class with least access to power and wealth – and forcing down labour
costs” (pp. 1–2). Cole is on the right track; however, while Marxism
provides us with the most powerful critical analysis of capitalism, the
Eurocentric category of class (i.e., the white industrial worker) fails to
account for those below the proletarian threshold: the non-European
lumpenproletariat or underclass.
The most obvious historical example is the slave; today’s equivalent, at
least in the US, is the incarcerated. The Thirteenth Amendment to the
US Constitution states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except
as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted ,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their juris-
diction” (emphasis added). The highlighted exception means that the
incarcerated are the new slaves, and this colonial logic confirms Giorgio
Agamben’s (1998) thesis about the state of exception being a structurally
22 R. K. Beshara
inherent feature of European politics, whether democracy or totalitari-

anism. The incarcerated, or the new slave, is the homo sacer (sacred man)
“who may be killed and yet not sacrificed ” (p. 8, emphasis in original).
Agamben (1998) does not address the racialization of the homo sacer,
which is the limit of his analysis, but extending Curry (2017) one can
characterize him as the sacred man-not. The incarcerated (e.g., the enemy
combatant in Guantánamo Bay) is outside the law, an exception, and
hence, he is also outside politics; therefore, he neither has the right to
vote nor can he enjoy the Aristotelian bios (good life) that most of us
take for granted. As a sacred man-not, the incarcerated is reduced to zoē
(bare life).
The end of racism (or any other form of oppression) depends not only
on the end of racialized capitalism, but also on the end of any politics
based on the state of exception. The gendering is intentional for the
most oppressed in any given society tends to be the homo sacer. It is
also true that man is the oppressor par excellence. Whereas in the Global
North, the primary oppressor tends to be a bourgeois white man, in the
Global South, the primary sub-oppressor tends to be a bourgeois Brown
or Black man. Within the apparatus of racialized capitalism, patriarchy
explains the sexist oppression of women, but it fails to explain the oppres-
sion of the homo sacer, who tends to be oppressed on the basis of race
in the Global North and on the basis of politics in the Global South.
Signifiers that have been used by the state to characterize the homo sacer
include: superpredator, terrorist, enemy combatant, criminal, n-word,
thug, extremist, radical, fundamentalist, etc.
The homo sacer functions as a scapegoat for the state, this scapegoating
ideologically interpellates civilians to support, or at least to not critically
think about, the violence of the state itself, which Asaf Jalata (2013), in
the case of Europe, characterizes as “colonial terrorism.” Jalata (2013)
argues that European colonial terrorism against Africa occurred in two
waves over a period of five hundred years:
The first wave started in the late fifteenth century with merchandising
some young and able-bodied Africans at gunpoint and colonizing some
limited coastal islands or territories (about 10 percent of Africa). The
second wave emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century and
consolidated with the partition and colonization of the remaining 90

percent of the continent in the late nineteenth century. (p. 3)
Jalata (2013) then defines terrorism as follows, which challenges the

facile understanding of modern terrorism as political violence perpe-
trated exclusively by non-state actors:
a systematic governmental or organizational policy through which lethal

violence is practiced openly or covertly to impose terror on a given popula-
tion group and their institutions or symbols or their representative members to
change their behavior of political resistance to domination or their behavior of
domination for political and economic gains or other reasons. (p. 3, emphasis
in original)
What Is Psychoanalysis?
According to the co-founder, and first major theorist, of psychoanalysis:
Psycho-analysis is seeking to bring to conscious recognition the things in

mental life which are repressed ; and everyone who forms a judgement on
it is himself a human being, who possesses similar repressions and may
perhaps be maintaining them with difficulty. They are therefore bound
to call up the same resistance in him as in our patients; and that resistance
finds it easy to disguise itself is an intellectual rejection and to bring up
arguments like those which we ward off in our patients by means of
the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis. We often become aware in our
opponents, just as we do in our patients, that their power of judgement
is very noticeably influenced affectively in the sense of being diminished.
The arrogance of consciousness (in rejecting dreams with such contempt,
for instance) is one of the most powerful of the devices with which we
are provided as a universal protection against the incursion of unconscious
complexes. That is why it is so hard to convince people of the reality of
the unconscious and to teach them to recognize something new which is
in contradiction to their conscious knowledge. (Freud, 1909/1961, p. 41,
emphasis added)
24 R. K. Beshara
I emphasized through italicization some of the key technical terms

used by Freud in these closing remarks to his third lecture at Clark
University, such as repression, resistance, consciousness, dreams, protec-
tion (i.e., defense mechanism), and the unconscious. Elsewhere he
describes psychoanalysis as “the science of the unconscious” (Freud,
1923/1955, p. 251, emphasis in original) and as “a method of research”
(Freud, 1927/1961, p. 36). However, Freud (1909/1961) gives the credit
to Bertha Pappenheim (pseudonym: Anna O.), Joseph Breuer’s hysteric
analysand, for characterizing psychoanalysis as the “talking cure” or, more
jokingly, as “chimney-sweeping” (p. 8). For a succinct definition, see this
encyclopedia entry from Freud (1923/1955):
Psycho-analysis is the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of

mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of
a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic
disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained
along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new
scientific discipline. (p. 234)
In other words, psychoanalysis, as a science of the unconscious, is a

research method that is concerned with what is repressed. As subjects
of the signifier, we are divided between our egotistical wishes (what
Freud terms “conscious knowledge”) and our unconscious desires (e.g.,
dreams), which we defensively repress in an effort to avoid the trauma
of anxiety. Because we unconsciously repress our (the Other’s) desires,
we develop neurotic symptoms. This brief account excludes the psychic
structures of psychosis and perversion not only because they are less
common in most societies when compared with neurosis, but also
because my interest in psychoanalysis is more theoretico-political and
less clinical.
In contrast to the extremes of biological essentialism and cultural
constructionism, the divided subject, or speaking being (parlêtre), is
psychosocially structured, from the perspective of Freudo-Lacanian
psychoanalysis, by the singular and irreducible materiality of the signi-
fier. This question of materiality is worth emphasizing if we are serious
about using psychoanalysis not only as a form of contrapuntal critique
but also, and more importantly, as one of many tools for changing the
world.
Another way of restating how the divided subject is neither a human
animal nor a cultured person is through the Lacanian formula: demand
- need = desire. The formula is based on this statement from Écrits:
“desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for
love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first
from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung )”
(Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 580, emphasis in original). Generally, govern-
ments address the biological needs and/or the cultural demands of their
citizens, but a psychoanalytically-informed politics is attuned to our
unconscious desires as subjects: What do we want? What is our collective
fantasy? And is it enjoyable for us to be on this journey together as we
traverse this fantasy? Therefore, desiring is an ethico-political question
that has to do with jouissance (enjoyment); we enjoy desiring more than
realizing our desires through acquiring objects. Desire is our fantasmatic
relation to the objet petit a, a lost or impossible object-cause of desire
that we presume is in the Other, which is “the dimension required by the
fact that speech affirms itself as truth” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 712). The
Other, of course, does not exist or is barred, and this is why radical polit-
ical projects are important: Together we create the Other, which informs
how we speak and act.
What Is Postcolonialism?
In The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen
Tiffin (1989/2000) use the signifier ‘post-colonial’ to refer to “all the
culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of coloniza-
tion to the present day” (p. 2) and “all that cultural production which
engages, in one way or another, with the enduring reality of colonial
power (including its newer manifestations)” (p. 195). Elsewhere, they
have written that postcolonialism “deals with the effects of colonization
on cultures and societies” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2002, p. 186).
They also acknowledge “the implications involved in the signifying
hyphen [i.e., post-colonial] or its absence [i.e., postcolonial]” (p. 187).
26 R. K. Beshara
According to them, the high theorists (Said, Bhabha, and Spivak) “insist
on the hyphen to distinguish post-colonial studies as a field from colo-
nial discourse theory per se” (p. 187, emphasis in original). Leela Gandhi
(1998), on the other hand, asserts that “the unbroken term ‘postcolo-
nialism’ is more sensitive to the long history of colonial consequences”
(p. 3).
For me, whereas postcolonialism “as the contestation of colonial domi-
nation and the legacies of colonialism” (Loomba, 1998, p. 12) is the field,
(post)colonional/ity, or (post)colonization, is the object of study to be
acted upon and transformed in the spirit of praxis. I include the prefix
‘post’ in parentheses to recognize that many societies today are not post-
colonial, but are rather settler colonial or franchise neocolonies. Also, as
Ania Loomba (1998) shows: “A country [e.g., Egypt] may be both post-
colonial (in the sense of being formally independent) and neo-colonial
(in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependent) at
the same time” (p. 7).
In terms of postcolonial studies as “a term for a body of diverse and
often contesting formulations of the cultural production of colonized
people rather than a discipline or methodology per se” (p. 199, emphasis
in original), Ashcroft et al. (1989/2000) acknowledge the critical debates
surrounding the field (p. 194); they respond to these debates by making
an analytic distinction between postcolonial societies or countries, post-
colonial literature or writing, and postcolonial theory or criticism (cf.
Moore-Gilbert, 1997).
As Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1994) argue in their excel-
lent reader: “It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Edward Said’s
Orientalism, published in 1978, single-handedly inaugurates a new
area of academic inquiry: colonial discourse, also referred to as colo-
nial discourse theory or colonial discourse analysis” (p. 5, emphasis in
original). They then situate postcolonialism within a specific intellec-
tual tradition (to which we can add the names of Giambattista Vico,
Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Anouar Abdel-Malek to signal
other intellectual traditions that have influenced Said’s development of
postcolonialism):
it must be pointed out that it [Orientalism] was preceded by a number

of academic texts from a German intellectual tradition [e.g., Theodor
Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt]
which shared Said’s concerns with the historical and theoretical relations
between Western economic/political global domination and Western
intellectual production. (pp. 6–7)
Further, Williams and Chrisman (1994) contend that while “the era
of formal colonial control is over…we have not fully transcended the
colonial [which is a way of maintaining an unequal international relation
of economic and political power]” (pp. 3–4). Nevertheless, the closest
they come to a definition of postcolonialism is this: “Colonial discourse
analysis and post-colonial critique are thus critiques of the process of
production of knowledge about the Other. As such, they produce forms
of knowledge themselves, but other knowledge, better knowledge” (p. 8).
In his historical introduction to postcolonialism, Robert Young (2001)
writes:
If colonial history, particularly in the nineteenth century, was the history

of the imperial appropriation of the world, the history of the twen-
tieth century has witnessed the peoples of the world taking power and
control back for themselves: Postcolonial theory is itself a product of that
dialectical process. (p. 4)
For Young (2001), postcolonial theory is “a political discourse, the

position from which it is enunciated (wherever literally spoken, or
published) is located on the three continents of the South [i.e., Latin
America, Africa, and Asia]” (p. 4). To the tricontinental, I add decolonial
communities, and comrades (Dean, 2019), in the Global North, such
as Indigenous peoples, the descendants of slaves, immigrants, forcibly
dispersed people, political radicals, and persecuted (sexual, religious,
ethnic, etc.) minorities of all kinds.
28 R. K. Beshara
The (Proto)Theorists of Post-/De-colonial

Psychoanalysis
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, who was

one of the pioneers of Freudo-Marxism (cf. Balibar, 1994, pp. 177–189)
and somatic psychology, but unfortunately today he is often overlooked
or dismissed. Perhaps the following dramatic, and perhaps even tragic,
events shed light on his dismissal: Reich was excommunicated from both
the International Psychoanalytical Association (founded by Freud) and
the Communist Party of Germany (co-founded by Rosa Luxemburg),
and he died in prison after a crackdown on his Orgone Institute by the
federal government of the US.
I begin my literature review with his important book, The Mass
Psychology of Fascism, which was originally published in German in
1933—the year Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany—
because it is the first psychoanalytic reading of the imperial/colonial
dimensions of fascism. The third edition of the book was translated to
English in 1942 and published in the US by Orgone Institute Press
in 1946. The version I had access to was published in 1970 by Farrar,
Strauss, and Giroux, and it is based on a new translation from the revised
German manuscript, which was co-edited by Marry Higgins and Chester
Raphael.
As an exemplar of the first wave of Freudo-Marxism, The Mass
Psychology Fascism really stands out because in contrast to the more
popular second wave (i.e., the Frankfurt School), Reich (1933/1970)
underlined the interconnection between fascism and race ideology—an
analysis that is clearly missing from the works of Frankfurt School critical
theorists (Baum, 2015). Bruce Baum (2015) makes the case for decolo-
nizing critical theory because in his view: “Horkheimer and Adorno [two
of the Frankfurt School’s leading figures] offered no sustained analysis
of anti-Black racism, colonialism, and other forms of racism” (p. 423).
Decolonizing critical theory means grounding the analyses conducted
by Frankfurt School researchers in a critique of racialized capitalism:
“modern racism can be comprehended adequately only through a critical
examination of modern capitalist society, and modern society itself can be

adequately understood only through a critical analysis of modern racism”
(Baum, 2015, p. 427, emphasis added).
In contrast to the Frankfurt School’s shortcomings, Reich
(1933/1970) clearly makes the following argument in the preface
to the third edition of The Mass Psychology of Fascism: “The racial
theory is not a product of fascism. On the contrary: it is fascism that
is a product of racial hatred and is its politically organized expression”
(p. 16). In fact, Reich (1933/1970) dedicates the third chapter of his
book to debunking “race theory.” This is not to say that every aspect of
Reich’s analysis is correct, for he places too much emphasis on sex(uality)
when explaining how a fascistic tendency manifests itself in the structure
of one’s character. However, I shall highlight the passages, which support
my thesis that Reich was ahead of his time in terms of his psychoanalytic
reading of the imperialist/colonialist and racist dimensions of fascism.
For example, in the following passage, Reich (1933/1970) under-
scores not only the politico-economic but also, and more importantly,
the psychopolitical driver of German imperialism:
To be sure, the economic interests of German imperialism were the imme-

diate decisive factors, but we also have to put into proper perspective the
mass psychological basis of world wars; we have to ask how the psychological
structure of the masses was capable of absorbing the imperialistic ideology,
to translate the imperialistic slogans into deeds that were diametrically
opposed to the peaceful, politically disinterested attitude of the German
population. (p. 75, emphasis in original)
He then concludes that “imperialistic ideology concretely changed the

structures of the working masses to suit imperialism” (Reich, 1933/1970,
p. 76, emphasis in original).
In addition to writing about Nazi Germany’s nationalistic and patri-
archal imperialism, Reich (1933/1970) juxtaposes, in his analysis, two
forms of imperialism through ideology critique to highlight their dialec-
tical relationship:
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Suppressing Mormonism.
Polygamy, justly denounced as “the true relic of barbarism” while

slavery existed, has ever since the settlement of the Mormons in
Utah, been one of the vexed questions in American politics. Laws
passed for its suppression have proved, thus far, unavailing; troops
could not crush it out, or did not at a time when battles were fought
and won; United States Courts were powerless where juries could not
be found to convict. Latterly a new and promising effort has been
made for its suppression. This was begun in the Senate in the session
of 1882. On the 16th of February a vote was taken by sections on
Senator Edmunds’ bill, which like the law of 1862 is penal in its
provisions, but directly aimed against the crime of polygamy.
President Arthur signed the Edmunds anti-polygamy bill on the
23d of March, 1882.
Delegate Cannon of Utah, was on the floor of the Senate
electioneering against the bill, and he pled with some success, for
several Democratic Senators made speeches against it. The
Republicans were unanimously for the bill, and the Democrats were
not solidly against it, though the general tenor of the debate on this
side was against it.
Senator Vest (Democrat) of Missouri, said that never in the
darkest days of the rule of the Tudors and Stuarts had any measure
been advocated which came so near a bill of attainder as this one. It
was monstrous to contend that the people of the United States were
at the mercy of Congress without any appeal. If this bill passed it
would establish a precedent that would come home to plague us for
all time to come. The pressure against polygamy to-day might exist
to-morrow against any church, institution or class in this broad land,
and when the crested waves of prejudice and passion mounted high
they would be told that the Congress of the United States had
trampled upon the Constitution. In conclusion, he said: “I am
prepared for the abuse and calumny that will follow any man who
dares to criticise any bill against polygamy, and yet, if my official life
had to terminate to-morrow, I would not give my vote for the
unconstitutional principles contained in this bill.” Other speeches
were made by Messrs. Morgan, Brown, Jones, of Florida, Saulsbury,
Call, Pendleton, Sherman, and Lamar, and the debate was closed by
Mr. Edmunds in an eloquent fifteen-minutes’ speech, in which he
carefully reviewed and controverted the objections urged against the
bill of the committee.
He showed great anxiety to have the measure disposed of at once
and met a request from the Democratic side for a postponement till
other features should be embodied in the bills with the remark that
this was the policy that had hitherto proven a hindrance to
legislation on this subject and that he was tired of it. In the bill as
amended the following section provoked more opposition than any
other, although the Senators refrained from making any particular
mention of it: “That if any male person in a Territory or other place
over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction hereafter
cohabits with more than one woman he shall be deemed guilty of a
misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof he shall be punished by a
fine of not more than $300 or by imprisonment for not more than six
months, or by both said punishments in the discretion of the court.”
The bill passed viva voce vote after a re-arrangement of its sections,
one of the changes being that not more than three of the
commissioners shall be members of the same party. The fact that the
yeas and nays were not called, shows that there is no general desire
on either side to make the bill a partisan measure.
The Edmunds Bill passed the House March 14, 1882, without
material amendment, the Republican majority, refusing to allow the
time asked by the Democrats for discussion. The vote was 193 for to
only 45 against, all of the negative votes being Democratic save one,
that of Jones, Greenbacker from Texas.
The only question was whether the bill, as passed by the Senate,
would accomplish that object, and whether certain provisions of this
bill did not provide a remedy which was worse than the disease.
Many Democrats thought that the precedent of interfering with the
right of suffrage at the polls, when the voter had not been tried and
convicted of any crime, was so dangerous that they could not bring
themselves to vote for the measure. Among these democrats were
Belmont and Hewitt, of New York, and a number of others equally
prominent. But they all professed their readiness to vote for any
measure which would affect the abolition of polygamy without
impairing the fundamental rights of citizens in other parts of the
country.
THE TEXT OF THE BILL.
Be it enacted, &c., That section 5,352 of the Revised Statutes of the

United States be, and the same is hereby amended so as to read as
follows, namely:
“Every person who has a husband or wife living who, in a Territory
or other place over which the United States have exclusive
jurisdiction, hereafter marries another, whether married or single,
and any man who hereafter simultaneously, or on the same day,
marries more than one woman; in a Territory or other place over
which the United States has exclusive jurisdiction, is guilty of
polygamy, and shall be punished by a fine of not more than $500
and by imprisonment for a term of not more than five years; but this
section shall not extend to any person by reason of any former
marriage whose husband or wife by such marriage shall have been
absent for five successive years, and is not known to such person to
be living, and is believed by such person to be dead, nor to any
person by reason of any former marriage which shall have been
dissolved by a valid decree of a competent court, nor to any person
by reason of any former marriage which shall have been pronounced
void by a valid decree of a competent court, on the ground of nullity
of the marriage contract.”
Sec. 2. That the foregoing provisions shall not affect the
prosecution or punishment of any offence already committed against
the section amended by the first section of this act.
Sec. 3. That if any male person, in a Territory or other place over
which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction, hereafter
cohabits with more than one woman, he shall be deemed guilty of a
misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine
of not more than $300, or by imprisonment for not more than six
months, or by both said punishments in the discretion of the court.
Sec. 4. That counts for any or all of the offences named in sections
1 and 3 of this act may be joined in the same information or
indictment.
Sec. 5. That in any prosecution for bigamy, polygamy or unlawful
cohabitation under any statute of the United States, it shall be
sufficient cause of challenge to any person drawn or summoned as a
juryman or talesman, first, that he is or has been living in the
practice of bigamy, polygamy, or unlawful cohabitation with more
than one woman, or that he is or has been guilty of an offence
punishable by either of the foregoing sections or by section 5352 of
the Revised Statutes of the United States or the act of July 1, 1862,
entitled “An act to punish and prevent the practice of polygamy in
the Territories of the United States and other places, and
disapproving and annulling certain acts of the Legislative Assembly
of the Territory of Utah;” or, second, that he believes it right for a
man to have more than one living and undivorced wife at the same
time, or to live in the practice of cohabiting with more than one
woman, and any person appearing or offered as a juror or talesman
and challenged on either of the foregoing grounds may be questioned
on his oath as to the existence of any such cause of challenge, and
other evidence may be introduced bearing upon the question raised
by such challenge, and this question shall be tried by the court. But
as to the first ground of challenge before mentioned the person
challenged shall be bound to answer if he shall say upon his oath that
he declines on the ground that his answer may tend to criminate
himself, and if he shall answer to said first ground his answer shall
not be given in evidence in any criminal prosecution against him for
any offense named in sections 1 or 3 of this act, but if he declines to
answer on any ground he shall be rejected as incompetent.
Sec. 6. That the President is hereby authorized to grant amnesty to
such classes of offenders guilty before the passage of this act of
bigamy, polygamy, or unlawful cohabitation before the passage of
this act, on such conditions and under such limitations as he shall
think proper; but no such amnesty shall have effect unless the
conditions thereof shall be complied with.
Sec. 7. That the issue of bigamous or polygamous marriages
known as Mormon marriages, in cases in which such marriages have
been solemnized according to the ceremonies of the Mormon sect, in
any Territory of the United States, and such issue shall have been
born before the 1st day of January, A. D. 1883, are hereby
legitimated.
Sec. 8. That no polygamist, bigamist, or any person cohabiting
with more than one woman, and no woman cohabiting with any of
the persons described as aforesaid in this section, in any Territory or
other place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction,
shall be entitled to vote at any election held in any such Territory or
other place, or be eligible for election or appointment to or be
entitled to hold any office or place of public trust, honor or
emolument in, under, or for such Territory or place, or under the
United States.
Sec. 9. That all the registration and election offices of every
description in the Territory of Utah are hereby declared vacant, and
each and every duty relating to the registration of voters, the conduct
of elections, the receiving or rejection of votes, and the canvassing
and returning of the same, and the issuing of certificates or other
evidence of election in said Territory, shall, until other provision be
made by the Legislative Assembly of said Territory as is hereinafter
by this section provided, be performed under the existing laws of the
United States and of said Territory by proper persons, who shall be
appointed to execute such offices and perform such duties by a board
of five persons, to be appointed by the President, by and with the
advice and consent of the Senate, and not more than three of whom
shall be members of one political party, and a majority of whom shall
constitute a quorum. The members of said board so appointed by the
President shall each receive a salary at the rate of $3,000 per annum,
and shall continue in office until the Legislative Assembly of said
Territory shall make provision for filling said offices as herein
authorized. The secretary of the Territory shall be the secretary of
said board, and keep a journal of its proceedings, and attest the
action of said board under this section. The canvass and return of all
the votes at elections in said Territory for members of the Legislative
Assembly thereof shall also be returned to said board, which shall
canvass all such returns and issue certificates of election to those
persons who, being eligible for such election, shall appear to have
been lawfully elected, which certificate shall be the only evidence of
the right of such persons to sit in such Assembly: Provided, That said
board of five persons shall not exclude any person otherwise eligible
to vote from the polls on account of any opinion such person may
entertain on the subject of bigamy or polygamy, nor shall they refuse
to count any such vote on account of the opinion of the person
casting it on the subject of bigamy or polygamy; but each house of
such Assembly, after its organization, shall have power to decide
upon the elections and qualifications of its members. And at or after
the first meeting of said Legislative Assembly whose members shall
have been elected and returned according to the provisions of this
act, said Legislative Assembly may make such laws, conformable to
the organic act of said Territory and not inconsistent with other laws
of the United States, as it shall deem proper concerning the filling of
the offices in said Territory declared vacant by this act.
John R. McBride writing in the February number (1882) of The
International Review, gives an interesting and correct view of the
obstacles which the Mormons have erected against the enforcement
of United States laws in the Territory. It requires acquaintance with
these facts to fully comprehend the difficulties in the way of what
seems to most minds a very plain and easy task. Mr. McBride says:
Their first care on arriving in Utah was to erect a “free and
Independent State,” called the “State of Deseret.” It included in its
nominal limits, not only all of Utah as it now is, but one-half of
California, all of Nevada, part of Colorado, and a large portion of four
other Territories now organized. Brigham Young was elected
Governor, and its departments, legislative and judicial, were fully
organized and put into operation. Its legislative acts were styled
“ordinances,” and when Congress, disregarding the State
organization, instituted a Territorial Government for Utah, the
legislative body chosen by the Mormons adopted the ordinances of
the “State of Deseret.” Many of these are yet on the statute book of
Utah. They show conclusively the domination of the ecclesiastical
idea, and how utterly insignificant in comparison was the power of
the civil authority. They incorporated the Mormon Church into a
body politic and corporate, and by the third section of the act gave it
supreme authority over its members in everything temporal and
spiritual, and assigned as a reason for so doing that it was because
the powers confirmed were in “support of morality and virtue, and
were founded on the revelations of the Lord.” Under this power to
make laws and punish and forgive offenses, to hear and determine
between brethren, the civil law was superseded. The decrees of the
courts of this church, certified under seal, have been examined by the
writer, and he found them exercising a jurisdiction without limit
except that of appeal to the President of the church. That the
assassinations of apostates, the massacres of the Morrisites at Morris
Fort and of the Arkansas emigrants at Mountain Meadows, were all
in pursuance of church decrees, more or less formal, no one
acquainted with the system doubts. This act of incorporation was
passed February 8, 1851, and is found in the latest compilation of
Utah statutes. It is proper also to observe that, for many years after
the erection of the Territorial Government by Congress, the “State of
Deseret” organization was maintained by the Mormons, and collision
was only prevented because Brigham was Governor of both, and
found it unnecessary for his purpose to antagonize either. His church
organization made both a shadow, while that was the substance of all
authority. One of the earliest of their legislative acts was to organise a
Surveyor-General’s Department,[41] and title to land was declared to
be in the persons who held a certificate from that office.[42] Having
instituted their own system of government and taken possession of
the land, and assumed to distribute that in a system of their own, the
next step was to vest certain leading men with the control of the
timbers and waters of the country. By a series of acts granting lands,
waters and timber to individuals, the twelve apostles became the
practical proprietors of the better and more desirable portions of the
country. By an ordinance dated October 4, 1851, there was granted to
Brigham Young the “sole control of City Creek and Cañon for the
sum of five hundred dollars.” By an ordinance dated January 9, 1850,
the “waters of North Mill Creek and the waters of the Cañon next
north” were granted to Heber C. Kimball. On the same day was
granted to George A. Smith the “sole control of the cañons and
timber of the east side of the ‘West Mountains’.” On the 18th of
January, 1851, the North Cottonwood Cañon was granted exclusively
to Williard Richards. On the 15th of January, 1851, the waters of the
“main channel” of Mill Creek were donated to Brigham Young. On
the 9th of December, 1850, there was granted to Ezra T. Benson the
exclusive control of the waters of Twin Springs and Rock Springs, in
Tooelle Valley; and on the 14th of January, 1851, to the same person
was granted the control of all the cañons of the “West Mountain” and
the timber therein. By the ordinance of September 14, 1850, a
“general conference of the Church of Latter Day Saints” was
authorized to elect thirteen men to become a corporation, to be
called the Emigration Company; and to this company, elected
exclusively by the church, was secured and appropriated the two
islands in Salt Lake known as Antelope and Stansberry Islands, to be
under the exclusive control of President Brigham Young. These
examples are given to show that the right of the United States to the
lands of Utah met no recognition by these people. They appropriated
them, not only in a way to make the people slaves, but indicated their
claim of sovereignty as superior to any. Young, Smith, Benson and
Kimball were apostles. Richards was Brigham Young’s counselor. By
an act of December 28, 1855, there was granted to the “University of
the State of Deseret” a tract of land amounting to about five hundred
acres, inside the city limits of Salt Lake City, without any reservation
to the occupants whatever; and everywhere was the authority of the
United States over the country and its soil and people utterly
ignored.
Not satisfied with making the grants referred to, the Legislative
Assembly entered upon a system of municipal incorporations, by
which the fertile lands of the Territory were withdrawn from the
operation of the preëmptive laws of Congress; and thus while they
occupied these without title, non-Mormons were unable to make
settlement on them, and they were thus engrossed to Mormon use.
From a report made by the Commissioner of the General Land Office
to the United States Senate,[43] it appears that the municipal
corporations covered over 400,000 acres of the public lands, and
over 600 square miles of territory. These lands[44] are not subject to
either the Homestead or Preëmption laws, and thus the non-
Mormon settler was prevented from attempting, except in rare
instances, to secure any lands in Utah. The spirit which prompted
this course is well illustrated by an instance which was the subject of
an investigation in the Land Department, and the proofs are found in
the document just referred to. George Q. Cannon, the late Mormon
delegate in Congress, was called to exercise his duties as an apostle to
the Tooelle “Stake” at the city of Grantville. In a discourse on
Sunday, the 20th day of July, 1875, Mr. Cannon said:[45] “God has
given us (meaning the Mormon people) this land, and, if any
outsider shall come in to take land which we claim, a piece six feet by
two is all they are entitled to, and that will last them to all eternity.”
By measures and threats like these have the Mormons unlawfully
controlled the agricultural lands of the Territory and excluded
therefrom the dissenting settler. The attempt of the United States to
establish a Surveyor-General’s office in Utah in 1855, and to survey
the lands in view of disposing of them according to law, was met by
such opposition that Mr. Burr, the Surveyor-General, was compelled
to fly for life. The monuments of surveys made by his order were
destroyed, and the records were supposed to have met a like fate, but
were afterwards restored by Brigham Young to the Government. The
report of his experience by Mr. Burr was instrumental in causing
troops to be sent in 1857 to assert the authority of the Government.
When this army, consisting of regular troops, was on the way to
Utah, Brigham Young, as Governor, issued a proclamation, dated
September 15, 1857, declaring martial law and ordering the people of
the Territory to hold themselves in readiness to march to repel the
invaders, and on the 29th of September following addressed the
commander of United States forces an order forbidding him to enter
the Territory, and directing him to retire from it by the same route he
had come. Further evidence of the Mormon claim that they were
independent is perhaps unnecessary. The treasonable character of
the local organization is manifest. It is this organization that
controls, not only the people who belong to it, but the 30,000 non-
Mormons who now reside in Utah.
Every member of the territorial Legislature is a Mormon. Every
county officer is a Mormon. Every territorial officer is a Mormon,
except such as are appointive. The schools provided by law and
supported by taxation are Mormon. The teachers are Mormon, and
the sectarian catechism affirming the revelations of Joseph Smith is
regularly taught therein. The municipal corporations are under the
control of Mormons. In the hands of this bigoted class all the
material interests of the Territory are left, subject only to such checks
as a Federal Governor and a Federal judiciary can impose. From
beyond the sea they import some thousands of ignorant converts
annually, and, while the non-Mormons are increasing, they are
overwhelmed by the muddy tide of fanaticism shipped in upon them.
The suffrage has been bestowed upon all classes by a statute so
general that the ballot-box is filled with a mass of votes which repels
the free citizen from the exercise of that right. If a Gentile is chosen
to the Legislature (two or three such instances have occurred), he is
not admitted to the seat, although the act of Congress (June 23,
1874) requires the Territory to pay all the expenses of the
enforcement of the laws of the Territory, and of the care of persons
convicted of offenses against the laws of the Territory. Provision is
made for jurors’ fees in criminal cases only, and none is made for the
care of criminals.[46] While Congress pays the legislative expenses,
amounting to $20,000 per session, the Legislature defiantly refuses
to comply with the laws which its members are sworn to support.
And the same body, though failing to protect the marriage bond by
any law whatever requiring any solemnities for entering it, provided
a divorce act which practically allowed marriages to be annulled at
will.[47] Neither seduction, adultery nor incest find penalty or
recognition in its legal code. The purity of home is destroyed by the
beastly practice of plural marriage, and the brows of innocent
children are branded with the stain of bastardy to gratify the lust
which cares naught for its victims. Twenty-eight of the thirty-six
members of the present Legislature of Utah are reported as having
from two to seven wives each. While the Government of the United
States is paying these men their mileage and per diem as law-makers
in Utah, those guilty of the same offense outside of Utah are leading
the lives of felons in convict cells. For eight years a Mormon delegate
has sat in the capitol at Washington having four living wives in his
harem in Utah, and at the same time, under the shadow of that
capitol, lingers in a felon’s prison a man who had been guilty of
marrying a woman while another wife was still living.
For thirty years have the Mormons been trusted to correct these
evils and put themselves in harmony with the balance of civilized
mankind. This they have refused to do. Planting themselves in the
heart of the continent, they have persistently defied the laws of the
land, the laws of modern society, and the teachings of a common
humanity. They degrade woman to the office of a breeding animal,
and, after depriving her of all property rights in her husband’s estate,
[48]
all control of her children,[49] they, with ostentation, bestow upon
her the ballot in a way that makes it a nullity if contested, and
compels her to use it to perpetuate her own degradation if she avails
herself of it.
No power has been given to the Mormon Hierarchy that has not
been abused. The right of representation in the legislative councils
has been violated in the apportionment of members so as to
disfranchise the non-Mormon class.[50] The system of revenue and
taxation was for twenty-five years a system of confiscation and
extortion.[51] The courts were so organized and controlled that they
were but the organs of the church oppressions and ministers of its
vengeance.[52] The legal profession was abolished by a statute that
prohibited a lawyer from recovering on any contract for service, and
allowed every person to appear as an attorney in any court.[53] The
attorney was compelled to present “all the facts in the case,” whether
for or against his client, and a refusal to disclose the confidential
communications of the latter subjected the attorney to fine and
imprisonment.[54] No law book except the statutes of Utah and of the
United States, “when applicable,” was permitted to be read in any
court by an attorney, and the citation of a decision of the Supreme
Court of the United States, or even a quotation from the Bible, in the
trial of any cause, subjected a lawyer to fine and imprisonment.[55]
The practitioners of medicine were equally assailed by legislation.
The use of the most important remedies known to modern medical
science, including all anæsthetics, was prohibited except under
conditions which made their use impossible, “and if death followed”
the administration of these remedies, the person administering them
was declared guilty of manslaughter or murder.[56] The Legislative
Assembly is but an organized conspiracy against the national law,
and an obstacle in the way of the advancement of its own people. For
sixteen years it refused to lay its enactments before Congress, and
they were only obtained by a joint resolution demanding them. Once
in armed rebellion against the authority of the nation, the Mormons
have always secretly struggled for, as they have openly prophesied,
its entire overthrow. Standing thus in the pathway of the material
growth and development of the Territory, a disgrace to the balance of
the country, with no redeeming virtue to plead for further
indulgence, this travesty of a local government demands radical and
speedy reform.
The South American Question.
If it was not shrewdly surmised before it is now known that had

President Garfield lived he intended to make his administration
brilliant at home and abroad—a view confirmed by the policy
conceived by Secretary Blaine and sanctioned, it must be presumed,
by President Garfield. This policy looked to closer commercial and
political relations with all of the Republics on this Hemisphere, as
developed in the following quotations from a correspondence, the
publication of which lacks completeness because of delays in
transmitting all of it to Congress.
Ex-Secretary Blaine on the 3d of January sent the following letter
to President Arthur:
“The suggestion of a congress of all the American nations to assemble in the city
of Washington for the purpose of agreeing on such a basis of arbitration for
international troubles as would remove all possibility of war in the Western
hemisphere was warmly approved by your predecessor. The assassination of July 2
prevented his issuing the invitations to the American States. After your accession
to the Presidency I acquainted you with the project and submitted to you a draft
for such an invitation. You received the suggestion with the most appreciative
consideration, and after carefully examining the form of the invitation directed
that it be sent. It was accordingly dispatched in November to the independent
governments of America North and South, including all, from the Empire of Brazil
to the smallest republic. In a communication addressed by the present Secretary of
State on January 9, to Mr. Trescot and recently sent to the Senate I was greatly
surprised to find a proposition looking to the annulment of these invitations, and I
was still more surprised when I read the reasons assigned. If I correctly apprehend
the meaning of his words it is that we might offend some European powers if we
should hold in the United States a congress of the “selected nationalities” of
America.
“This is certainly a new position for the United States to assume, and one which I
earnestly beg you will not permit this government to occupy. The European powers
assemble in congress whenever an object seems to them of sufficient importance to
justify it. I have never heard of their consulting the government of the United
States in regard to the propriety of their so assembling, nor have I ever known of
their inviting an American representative to be present. Nor would there, in my
judgment, be any good reason for their so doing. Two Presidents of the United
States in the year 1881 adjudged it to be expedient that the American powers
should meet in congress for the sole purpose of agreeing upon some basis for
arbitration of differences that may arise between them and for the prevention, as
far as possible, of war in the future. If that movement is now to be arrested for fear
that it may give offense in Europe, the voluntary humiliation of this government
could not be more complete, unless we should press the European governments for
the privilege of holding the congress. I cannot conceive how the United States
could be placed in a less enviable position than would be secured by sending in
November a cordial invitation to all the American governments to meet in
Washington for the sole purpose of concerting measures of peace and in January
recalling the invitation for fear that it might create “jealousy and ill will” on the
part of monarchical governments in Europe. It would be difficult to devise a more
effective mode for making enemies of the American Government and it would
certainly not add to our prestige in the European world. Nor can I see, Mr.
President, how European governments should feel “jealousy and ill will” towards
the United States because of an effort on our own part to assure lasting peace
between the nations of America, unless, indeed, it be to the interest of European
power that American nations should at intervals fall into war and bring reproach
on republican government. But from that very circumstance I see an additional
and powerful motive for the American Governments to be at peace among
themselves.
“The United States is indeed at peace with all the world, as Mr. Frelinghuysen
well says, but there are and have been serious troubles between other American
nations. Peru, Chili and Bolivia have been for more than two years engaged in a
desperate conflict. It was the fortunate intervention of the United States last spring
that averted war between Chili and the Argentine Republic. Guatemala is at this
moment asking the United States to interpose its good offices with Mexico to keep
off war. These important facts were all communicated in your late message to
Congress. It is the existence or the menace of these wars that influenced President
Garfield, and as I supposed influenced yourself, to desire a friendly conference of
all the nations of America to devise methods of permanent peace and consequent
prosperity for all. Shall the United States now turn back, hold aloof and refuse to
exert its great moral power for the advantage of its weaker neighbors?
If you have not formally and finally recalled the invitations to the Peace
Congress, Mr. President, I beg you to consider well the effect of so doing. The
invitation was not mine. It was yours. I performed only the part of the Secretary—
to advise and to draft. You spoke in the name of the United States to each of the
independent nations of America. To revoke that invitation for any cause would be
embarrassing; to revoke it for the avowed fear of “jealousy and ill will” on the part
of European powers would appeal as little to American pride as to American
hospitality. Those you have invited may decline, and having now cause to doubt
their welcome will, perhaps, do so. This would break up the congress, but it would
not touch our dignity.
“Beyond the philanthropic and Christian ends to be obtained by an American
conference devoted to peace and good will among men, we might well hope for
material advantages, as the result of a better understanding and closer friendship
with the nation of America. At present the condition of trade between the United
States and its American neighbors is unsatisfactory to us, and even deplorable.
According to the official statistics of our own Treasury Department, the balance
against us in that trade last year was $120,000,000—a sum greater than the yearly
product of all the gold and silver mines in the United States. This vast balance was
paid by us in foreign exchange, and a very large proportion of it went to England,
where shipments of cotton, provisions and breadstuffs supplied the money. If
anything should change or check the balance in our favor in European trade our
commercial exchanges with Spanish America would drain us of our reserve of gold
at a rate exceeding $100,000,000 per annum, and would probably precipitate a
suspension of specie payment in this country. Such a result at home might be
worse than a little jealousy and ill-will abroad. I do not say, Mr. President, that the
holding of a peace congress will necessarily change the currents of trade, but it will
bring us into kindly relations with all the American nations; it will promote the
reign of peace and law and order; it will increase production and consumption and
will stimulate the demand for articles which American manufacturers can furnish
with profit. It will at all events be a friendly and auspicious beginning in the
direction of American influence and American trade in a large field which we have
hitherto greatly neglected and which has been practically monopolized by our
commercial rivals in Europe.
As Mr. Frelinghuysen’s dispatch, foreshadowing the abandonment of the peace
congress, has been made public, I deem it a matter of propriety and justice to give
this letter to the press.
Jas. G. Blaine.
The above well presents the Blaine view of the proposition to have
a Congress of the Republics of America at Washington, and under
the patronage of this government, with a view to settle all difficulties
by arbitration, to promote trade, and it is presumed to form alliances
ready to suit a new and advanced application of the Monroe doctrine.
The following is the letter proposing a conference of North and
South American Republics sent to the U. S. Ministers in Central and
South America:
Sir: The attitude of the United States with respect to the question of general
peace on the American Continent is well known through its persistent efforts for
years past to avert the evils of warfare, or, these efforts failing, to bring positive
conflicts to an end through pacific counsels or the advocacy of impartial
arbitration. This attitude has been consistently maintained, and always with such
fairness as to leave no room for imputing to our Government any motive except the
humane and disinterested one of saving the kindred States of the American
Continent from the burdens of war. The position of the United States, as the
leading power of the new world, might well give to its Government a claim to
authoritative utterance for the purpose of quieting discord among its neighbors,
with all of whom the most friendly relations exist. Nevertheless the good offices of
this Government are not, and have not at any time, been tendered with a show of
dictation or compulsion, but only as exhibiting the solicitous good will of a
common friend.
THE CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICAN STATES.
For some years past a growing disposition has been manifested by certain States
of Central and South America to refer disputes affecting grave questions of
international relationship and boundaries to arbitration rather than to the sword.
It has been on several occasions a source of profound satisfaction to the
Government of the United States to see that this country is in a large measure
looked to by all the American powers as their friend and mediator. The just and
impartial counsel of the President in such cases, has never been withheld, and his
efforts have been rewarded by the prevention of sanguinary strife or angry
contentions between peoples whom we regard as brethren. The existence of this
growing tendency convinces the President that the time is ripe for a proposal that
shall enlist the good will and active co-operation of all the States of the Western
Hemisphere both North and South, in the interest of humanity and for the
common weal of nations.
He conceives that none of the Governments of America can be less alive than our
own to the dangers and horrors of a state of war, and especially of war between
kinsmen. He is sure that none of the chiefs of Government on the Continent can be
less sensitive than he is to the sacred duty of making every endeavor to do away
with the chances of fratricidal strife, and he looks with hopeful confidence to such
active assistance from them as will serve to show the broadness of our common
humanity, the strength of the ties which bind us all together as a great and
harmonious system of American Commonwealths.
A GENERAL CONGRESS PROPOSED.
Impressed by these views, the President extends to all the independent countries
of North and South America an earnest invitation to participate in a general
Congress, to be held in the city of Washington, on the 22d of November, 1882, for
the purpose of considering and discussing the methods of preventing war between
the nations of America. He desires that the attention of the Congress shall be
strictly confined to this one great object; and its sole aim shall be to seek a way of
permanently averting the horrors of a cruel and bloody contest between countries
oftenest of one blood and speech, or the even worse calamity of internal
commotion and civil strife; that it shall regard the burdensome and far-reaching
consequences of such a struggle, the legacies of exhausted finances, of oppressive
debt, of onerous taxation, of ruined cities, of paralyzed industries, of devastated
fields, of ruthless conscriptions, of the slaughter of men, of the grief of the widow
and orphan, of embittered resentments that long survive those who provoked them
and heavily afflict the innocent generations that come after.
THE MISSION OF THE CONGRESS.
The President is especially desirous to have it understood that in putting forth

this invitation the United States does not assume the position of counseling or
attempting, through the voice of the Congress, to counsel any determinate solution
of existing questions which may now divide any of the countries. Such questions
cannot properly come before the Congress. Its mission is higher. It is to provide for
the interests of all in the future, not to settle the individual differences of the
present. For this reason especially the President has indicated a day for the
assembling of the Congress so far in the future as to leave good ground for the hope
that by the time named the present situation on the South Pacific coast will be
happily terminated, and that those engaged in the contest may take peaceable part
in the discussion and solution of the general question affecting in an equal degree
the well-being of all.
It seems also desirable to disclaim in advance any purpose on the part of the
United States to prejudge the issues to be presented to the Congress. It is far from
the intent of this Government to appear before the Congress as in any sense the
protector of its neighbors or the predestined and necessary arbitrator of their
disputes. The United States will enter into the deliberations of the Congress on the
same footing as other powers represented, and with the loyal determination to
approach any proposed solution, not merely in its own interest, or with a view to
asserting its own power, but as a single member among many co-ordinate and co-
equal States. So far as the influence of this Government may be potential, it will be
exerted in the direction of conciliating whatever conflicting interests of blood, or
government, or historical tradition that may necessarily come together in response
to a call embracing such vast and diverse elements.
INSTRUCTIONS TO THE MINISTERS.
You will present these views to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Costa Rica,
enlarging, if need be, in such terms as will readily occur to you upon the great
mission which it is within the power of the proposed Congress to accomplish in the
interest of humanity, and the firm purpose of the United States of America to
maintain a position of the most absolute and impartial friendship toward all. You
will, therefore, in the name of the President of the United States, tender to his
Excellency, the President of ——, a formal invitation to send two commissioners to
the Congress, provided with such powers and instructions on behalf of their
Government as will enable them to consider the questions brought before that
body within the limit of submission contemplated by this invitation.
The United States, as well as the other powers, will in like manner be
represented by two commissioners, so that equality and impartiality will be amply
secured in the proceedings of the Congress.
In delivering this invitation through the Minister of Foreign Affairs, you will
read this despatch to him and leave with him a copy, intimating that an answer is
desired by this Government as promptly as the just consideration of so important a
proposition will permit.
I am, sir, your obedient servant,
James G. Blaine.
Minister Logan’s Reply.
The following is an abstract of the reply of Minister Logan to the

above.
“From a full review of the situation, as heretofore detailed to you, I
am not clear as to being able to obtain the genuine co-operation of all
the States of Central America in the proposed congress.—Each, I
have no doubt, will ultimately agree to send the specified number of
commissioners and assume, outwardly, an appearance of sincere co-
operation, but, as you will perceive from your knowledge of the
posture of affairs, all hope of effecting a union of these States except
upon a basis the leaders will never permit—that of a free choice of
the whole people—will be at an end. The obligation to keep the peace,
imposed by the congress, will bind the United States as well as all
others, and thus prevent any efforts to bring about the desired union
other than those based upon a simple tender of good offices—this
means until the years shall bring about a radical change—must be as
inefficient in the future as in the past. The situation, as it appears to
me, is a difficult one. As a means of restraining the aggressive
tendency of Mexico in the direction of Central America, the congress
would be attended by the happiest results, should a full agreement be
reached. But as the Central American States are now in a chaotic
condition, politically considered, with their future status wholly
undefined, and as a final settlement can only be reached, as it now
appears, through the operation of military forces, the hope of a
Federal union in Central America would be crushed, at least in the
immediate present. Wiser heads than my own may devise a method
to harmonize these difficulties when the congress is actually in
session, but it must be constantly remembered that so far as the
Central American commissioners are concerned they will represent
the interests and positive mandates of their respective government
chiefs in the strictest and most absolute sense. While all will
probably send commissioners, through motives of expediency, they
may possibly be instructed to secretly defeat the ends of the
convention. I make these suggestions that you may have the whole
field under view.
“I may mention in this connection that I have received information
that up to the tenth of the present month only two members of the
proposed convention at Panama had arrived and that it was
considered as having failed.”
Contemporaneous with these movements or suggestions was
another on the part of Mr. Blaine to secure from England a
modification or abrogation of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, with the
object of giving to the United States, rather to the Republics of North
and South America, full supervision of the Isthmus and Panama
Canal when constructed. This branch of the correspondence was sent
to the Senate on the 17th of February. Lord Granville, in his despatch
of January 7th to Minister West in reference to the Clayton-Bulwer
Treaty controversy, denies any analogy between the cases of the
Panama and Suez Canals. He cordially concurs in Mr. Blaine’s
statement in regard to the unexampled development of the Pacific
Coast, but denies that it was unexpected.
He says the declaration of President Monroe anterior to the treaty
show that he and his Cabinet had a clear prevision of the great future
of that region. The development of the interests of the British
possessions also continued, though possibly less rapidly. The
Government are of the opinion that the canal, as a water way
between the two great oceans and Europe and Eastern Asia, is a work
which concerns not only the American Continent, but the whole
civilized world. With all deference to the considerations which
prompted Mr. Blaine he cannot believe that his proposals will be
even beneficial in themselves. He can conceive a no more melancholy
spectacle than competition between nations in the construction of
fortifications to command the canal. He cannot believe that any
South American States would like to admit a foreign power to erect
fortifications on its territory, when the claim to do so is accompanied
by the declaration that the canal is to be regarded as a part of the
American coast line. It is difficult to believe, he says, that the
territory between it and the United States could retain its present
independence. Lord Granville believes that an invitation to all the
maritime states to participate in an agreement based on the
stipulations of the Convention of 1850, would make the Convention
adequate for the purposes for which it was designed. Her Majesty’s
Government would gladly see the United States take the initiative
towards such a convention, and will be prepared to endorse and
support such action in any way, provided it does not conflict with the
Clayton-Bulwer treaty.
Lord Granville, in a subsequent despatch, draws attention to the
fact that Mr. Blaine, in using the argument that the treaty has been a
source of continual difficulties, omits to state that the questions in
dispute which related to points occupied by the British in Central
America were removed in 1860 by the voluntary action of Great
Britain in certain treaties concluded with Honduras and Nicaragua,
the settlement being recognized as perfectly satisfactory by President
Buchanan. Lord Granville says, further, that during this controversy
America disclaimed any desire to have the exclusive control of the
canal.
The Earl contends that in cases where the details of an
international agreement have given rise to difficulties and
discussions to such an extent as to cause the contracting parties at
one time to contemplate its abrogation or modification as one of
several possible alternatives, and where it has yet been found
preferable to arrive at a solution as to those details rather than to
sacrifice the general bases of the engagement, it must surely be
allowed that such a fact, far from being an argument against that
engagement, is an argument distinctly in its favor. It is equally plain
that either of the contracting parties which had abandoned its own
contention for the purpose of preserving the agreement in its entirety
would have reason to complain if the differences which had been
settled by its concessions were afterwards urged as a reason for
essentially modifying those other provisions which it had made this
sacrifice to maintain. In order to strengthen these arguments, the
Earl reviews the correspondence, quotes the historical points made
by Mr. Blaine and in many instances introduces additional data as
contradicting the inferences drawn by Mr. Blaine and supporting his
own position.
The point on which Mr. Blaine laid particular stress in his
despatch to Earl Granville, is the objection made by the government
of the United States to any concerted action of the European powers

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Freud and Said: Contrapuntal

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Freud and Said

Series Editorial Board

More information about this series at

Freud and Said

Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology

photographed wearing a “Make America White Again” red cap. Chauvin

police officers are receiving a specific form of tactical training, that

Slavoj Žižek’s (2008) term for structural violence is objective violence,

On May 29th 2020, this is what US president, Donald Trump,

Another significant aspect of this difficult period is the racialization

In addition to anti-Asian racism, we are witnessing a new class config-

Property rights over human rights (Kovel, 1970/1984, p. 16) is the

Española, USA Robert K. Beshara

Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible if it were

1 Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis: Critical Border

4 Freud and the Non-European 131

5 Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis 149

Fig. 1.1 The semiotic square 19

Critical psychologists draw on a number of theoretical resources (e.g.,

© The Author(s) 2021 1

From Decolonial Psychoanalysis

of racialized capitalism as a dispositif , or an apparatus, in Michel

The racial axis is the central feature of racialized capitalism, which is

What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began

In racialized capitalism, racism is certainly the most oppressive struc-

However, my focus is not on the premodern world, for the politico-

Popular accounts of the history of science typically show a timeline in

America was constituted as the first space/time of a new model of power

Sex is the third axis of power in the apparatus of racialized capi-

women.” This suggests that racial-sexual violence against racialized, or

Curry (2017) also draws attention to the perverse sexual nature of

“racial hatred is carnal hatred … sexualized hatred”—a phallicism or

This is in line with Frantz Fanon’s (1952/2008) thesis: “If we want to

to come: “Racism is a global hierarchy of human superiority and inferi-

As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged.

The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory,

The other example of racialized capitalism that Desmond (2019)

African-American and Latino borrowers have been particularly hard-hit

For a population to be dehumanized they have to be perceived as a race

Elsewhere in the book, David Livingstone Smith (2011) writes about

Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way

Therefore, our liberation praxis entails thinking critically in Paulo

is an arbitrary one premised on ethnic difference (cf. Bhambra, 2014):

the Global North on Turtle Island in proximity to twenty-three Indige-

Freud and Said

Orientalism—an important distinction, which he would not have been

I will argue that while ‘race’ is a social construction, racism is a mate-

‘Race,’ Racialization, and Racism