A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial

A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial
Author: Derek Hook
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1136495657

An oft-neglected element of postcolonial thought is the explicitly psychological dimension of many of its foundational texts. This unprecedented volume explores the relation between these two disciplines by treating the work of a variety of anti-colonial authors as serious psychological contributions to the theorization of racism and oppression. This approach demonstrates the pertinence of postcolonial thought for critical social psychology and opens up novel perspectives on a variety of key topics in social psychology. These include: the psychology of embodiment and racialization resistance strategies to oppression 'extra-discursive’ facets of racism the unconscious dimension of stereotypes the intersection of psychological and symbolic modalities of power. In addition, the book makes a distinctive contribution to the field of postcolonial studies by virtue of its eclectic combination of authors drawn from anti-apartheid, psychoanalytic and critical social theory traditions, including Homi Bhabha, Steve Biko, J.M. Coetzee, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, Chabani Manganyi and Slavoj Żiżek. The South African focus serves to emphasize the ongoing historical importance of the anti-apartheid struggle for today’s globalized world. A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial is an invaluable text for social psychology and sociology students enrolled in courses on racism or cultural studies. It will also appeal to postgraduates, academics and anyone interested in psychoanalysis in relation to societal and political issues.

Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist

Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist
Author: N. C. Manganyi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2016
Genre: Apartheid
ISBN: 9781868148653

"This intriguing memoir details in a quiet and restrained manner what it meant to be a committed black intellectual activist during the apartheid years and beyond. Few autobiographies exploring the 'life of the mind' and the 'history of ideas' have come out of South Africa, and N Chabani Manganyi's reflections on a life engaged with ideas, the psychological and philosophical workings of the mind and the act of writing are a refreshing addition to the genre of life writing. Starting with his rural upbringing in Mavambe in Limpopo province in the 1940s, Manganyi's life story unfolds at a gentle pace, tracing the twists and turns of his journey from humble beginnings to Yale University in the USA. The author details his work as a clinical practitioner and researcher, as a biographer, as an expert witness in defence of opponents of the apartheid regime and, finally, as a leading educationist in Mandela's Cabinet and in the South African academy. Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist is a book about relationships and the fruits of intellectual and creative labour. In it, Manganyi describes how he used his skills as a clinical psychologist to explore lives both those of the subjects of his biographies and those of the accused for whom he testified in mitigation; his aim always to find a higher purpose and a higher self."--Publisher description.

Being Black in the World

Being Black in the World
Author: N. Chabani Manganyi
Publisher: Wits University Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2019-09-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 177614368X

An annotated edition of a classic text by South Africa's first black psychologist, a collection of essays reflecting on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years Being-Black-in-the-World, one of N. Chabani Manganyi’s first publications, was written in 1973 at a time of global socio-political change and renewed resistance to the brutality of apartheid rule and the emergence of Black Consciousness in the mid-1960s. Manganyi is one of South Africa’s most eminent intellectuals and an astute social and political observer. He has written widely on subjects relating to ethno-psychiatry, autobiography, black artists and race. In 2018 Manganyi’s memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist was awarded the prestigious ASSAf (The Academy of Science of South Africa) Humanities Book Award. Publication of Being-Black-in-the-World was delayed until the young Manganyi had left the country to study at Yale University. His publishers feared that the apartheid censorship board and security forces would prohibit him from leaving the country, and perhaps even incarcerate him, for being a ‘radical revolutionary’. The book found a limited public circulation in South Africa due to this censorship and original copies were hard to come by. This new edition is an invitation to a younger generation of citizens to engage with early decolonialising thought by an eminent South African intellectual. While the essays in this book are clearly situated in the material and social conditions of that time, they also have a timelessness that speaks to our contemporary concerns regarding black subjectivity, affectivity and corporeality, the persistence of a racial (and racist) order and the possibilities of a renewed de-colonial project. Each of these short essays can be read as self-contained reflections on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years. Manganyi is a master of understatement, and yet this does not stop him from making incisive political criticisms of black subjugation under apartheid. The essays will reward close study for anyone trying to make sense of black subjectivity and the persistence of white insensitivity to black suffering. Ahead of its time, the ideas in this book are an exemplary demonstration of what a thoroughgoing and rigorous de-colonial critique should entail. The re-publication of this classic text is enriched by the inclusion of a foreword and annotation by respected scholars Garth Stevens and Grahame Hayes respectively, and an afterword by public intellectual Njabulo S. Ndebele.

Critical Psychology

Critical Psychology
Author: Derek Hook
Publisher: Juta and Company Ltd
Total Pages: 676
Release: 2004
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9781919713885

Offers a broad introduction to critical psychology and explores the socio-political contexts of post-apartheid South Africa. This title expands on the theoretical resources usually referred to in the field of critical psychology by providing substantive discussions on Black Consciousness, Post-colonialism and Africanist forms of critique.

Racial Encounter

Racial Encounter
Author: Kevin Durrheim
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1135648328

Very clearly written, making complex material really accessible This book offers a definitive analysis of desegregation. South Africa is an extremely important test case and a key area of interest for those interested in racial transformation. The book extends discursive research into a new domain, the social psychology of desegragation. Offering a new and interesting approach.

Psychological Assessment in South Africa

Psychological Assessment in South Africa
Author: Sumaya Laher
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 650
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1868149455

This book provides an overview of the research related to psychological assessment across South Africa. The thirty-six chapters provide a combination of psychometric theory and practical assessment applications in order to combine the currently disparate research that has been conducted locally in this field. Existing South African texts on psychological assessment are predominantly academic textbooks that explain psychometric theory and provide brief descriptions of a few testing instruments. Psychological Assessment in South Africa provides in-depth coverage of a range of areas within the broad field of psychological assessment, including research conducted with various psychological instruments. The chapters critically interrogate the current Eurocentric and Western cultural hegemonic practices that dominate the field of psychological assessment. The book therefore has the potential to function both as an academic text for graduate students, as well as a specialist resource for professionals, including psychologists, psychometrists, remedial teachers and human resource practitioners.

At Home with Apartheid

At Home with Apartheid
Author: Rebecca Ginsburg
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2011-08-30
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0813931649

Despite their peaceful, bucolic appearance, the tree-lined streets of South African suburbia were no refuge from the racial tensions and indignities of apartheid’s most repressive years. In At Home with Apartheid, Rebecca Ginsburg provides an intimate examination of the cultural landscapes of Johannesburg’s middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods during the height of apartheid (c. 1960–1975) and incorporates recent scholarship on gender, the home, and family. More subtly but no less significantly than factory floors, squatter camps, prisons, and courtrooms, the homes of white South Africans were sites of important contests between white privilege and black aspiration. Subtle negotiations within the domestic sphere between white, mostly female, householders and their black domestic workers, also primarily women, played out over and around this space. These seemingly mundane, private conflicts were part of larger contemporary struggles between whites and blacks over territory and power. Ginsburg gives special attention to the distinct social and racial geographies produced by the workers’ detached living quarters, designed by builders and architects as landscape complements to the main houses. Ranch houses, Italianate villas, modernist cubes, and Victorian bungalows filled Johannesburg’s suburbs. What distinguished these neighborhoods from their precedents in the United States or the United Kingdom was the presence of the ubiquitous back rooms and of the African women who inhabited them in these otherwise exclusively white areas. The author conducted more than seventy-five personal interviews for this book, an approach that sets it apart from other architectural histories. In addition to these oral accounts, Ginsburg draws from plans, drawings, and onsite analysis of the physical properties themselves. While the issues addressed span the disciplines of South African and architectural history, feminist studies, material culture studies, and psychology, the book’s strong narrative, powerful oral histories, and compelling subject matter bring the neighborhoods and residents it examines vividly to life.

Native Nostalgia

Native Nostalgia
Author: Jacob Dlamini
Publisher: Jacana Media
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1770097554

Challenging the stereotype that black people who lived under South African apartheid have no happy memories of the past, this examination into nostalgia carves out a path away from the archetypical musings. Even though apartheid itself had no virtue, the author, himself a young black man who spent his childhood under apartheid, insists that it was not a vast moral desert in the lives of those living in townships. In this deep meditation on the experiences of those who lived through apartheid, it points out that despite the poverty and crime, there was still art, literature, music, and morals that, when combined, determined the shape of black life during that era of repression.

African Psychology

African Psychology
Author: Augustine Nwoye
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 521
Release: 2022
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 019093249X

This book aims to serve as a foundational text in the emerging field of African psychology, which centers the knowledges and experience of continental African realities and postcolonial concerns in psychology. Drawing from the author's key essays as a leading thinker in the field, African Psychology: The Emergence of a Tradition describes this discipline's meaning and scope, as well as its epistemological and theoretical perspectives. Part I presents the theoretical context for the book, proposing the Madiban tradition as a framework of inclusion for the study of psychology in African universities. Part 2 focuses on the epistemological, methodological, and theoretical perspectives in African psychology. Part 3 of the book introduces the reader to the field of African therapeutics, and Part 4 highlights the healing rituals and practices provided to the traumatised in contemporary Africa. The ultimate objective of the book is to give postcolonial Africans a fresh vision of themselves and their psychology and culture.