A Scattershot of Anticolonial Thought

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote “something was almost born” in the interwar years before war and fascism shattered everything. This talk reconstructs what was almost born by examining the byways that psychoanalysis opened up for midcentury anticolonial politics. It traces how this science of desire brought together Surrealist painters, Négritude poets, the birth of structural anthropology, and even anti-racist bureaucrats at Unesco after the war. These experiments pointed to a “new humanism” anchored in the global periphery that was overshadowed by decolonization’s subsequent failures.

Kevin Duong teaches political theory and intellectual history at the University of Virginia. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled Freud Against Empire: An Experimental History.