Ilan Kapoor, professor of environmental studies at York University, has edited a book which is the first of its kind to examine globalization from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Psychoanalysis and the GlObal is about the hole at the heart of the “glObal,” meaning the instability and indecipherability that lies at the hub of globalization.
The book brings together 13 established and emerging academics from across the globe who are doing work in the new and emerging field of psychoanalytic geographies.
Psychoanalysis and the GlObal adopts a psychoanalytic lens to highlight the unconscious circuits of enjoyment, racism and anxiety that trouble, if not undermine, globalization’s economic, cultural and environmental goals or gains.
The contributors interrogate how unconscious desires and drives are externalized in our increasingly globalizing world: the ways in which traumas and emotional conflicts are integral to the disjunctures, homogeneities and contingencies of global interactions; how social passions are manifested and materialized in political economy as much as in climate change, urban architecture, refugee and gender politics, or the growth of neo-populism; and how the unconscious serves as a basis for the rise and breakdown of popular movements against authoritarianism and neoliberal globalization.
Psychoanalysis and the GlObal represents a major step forward in understanding globalization and also in extending the range and power of psychoanalytic critiques in, and of, geography.
Kapoor is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. His teaching and research focus is on critical development studies, postcolonial studies, participatory development, democracy, celebrity studies and psychoanalytic theory. His geographic areas of interest include South Asia (especially India and Pakistan). He is the author of The Postcolonial Politics of Development (Routledge, 2008) and Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity (Routledge, 2013).