A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial

Abstract

Of the theoretical resources typically taken as the underlying foundations of critical social psychology, elements, typically, each of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, one particular mode of critique remains notably absent: postcolonial theory. What might be the most crucial contributions that postcolonial critique can make to the project of critical psychology? One answer is that of a reciprocal form of critique, the retrieval of a ‘psychopolitics’ in which not only is the psychological placed within the register of the political, but—perhaps more challengingly—the political is also, strategically, approached through the register of the psychological. What the writings of Fanon and Biko make plain in this connection is the degree to which the narratives and concepts of the social psychological may be reformulated so as to fashion a novel discourse of resistance, one that opens up new avenues for critique for critical psychology, on the one hand, and that affords an innovative set of opportunities for the psychological investigation of the vicissitudes of the postcolonial, on the other.