Shifting the geography of reason : psychology in black

Abstract

This study deploys a theoretical intervention in liberation psychology, from a black point of view, by proposing a different mode of engaging psychology. The intervention is called psychology in black, and its methodological construction is in critical fabulation. Psychology in black articulates a mode of studying that takes black studies as the backdrop of a psychological inquiry. This study is foregrounded in Sylvia Wynter’s theoretical framework as a basis to intercede with psychological phenomena. Psychology in black has three themes, viz. black geography, the black body, and the colonial unconscious. These three themes are used to demonstrate what psychology in black is, and how the psyche can be understood and articulated. They also synthesise and identify the signification model of colonial socialites and biologism that accounts for psychic realities. Furthermore, psychology in black is a praxis of investigation that gathers all intersecting modes to critique colonial power which attacks the psychology of black people. The study concludes that psychology in black is not a subdiscipline but a discursive tool that offers a different system of thought aimed at understanding the psychology of black people to chant and marshal discourses of liberation. The possibility of this lies in having to psychologise from a black point of view.