Buried alive: the psychoanalysis of racial absence in preparedness/education

Abstract

Based on extracts from an ethnography produced during the ESRC 2009–10 research project, ‘Preparedness Pedagogies’ and Race: An Interdisciplinary Approach, this article explores the racialized culture of civil defence in the UK whilst also critiquing the world of higher education. The ethnographic artefacts of interviews, observations of preparedness role play around fictional character, and of professionals’ live reminiscence of emergency, are explored through the lens of the psychoanalytical construction of being buried alive; Critical Race Theory (CRT) conceptions of policy constitution of a social world that imprisons the non-white citizen and the other are seen, in this article, as enshrined in this construction. Freud’s The Uncanny encompasses the psychology of being ‘buried alive,’ and one conception of this is seen as a state akin to life in the womb, a strange place of safety. In contrast I use two CRT narratives of resilience auto-education as a way of beginning to analyse different presentations of being buried alive. I refer, following Royle, to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial and his introductory conception of being buried alive as being something that happens to others, about the affective act of burial; in contrast I draw on the chapter entitled ‘Buried Alive,’ in the sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret, a useful metaphor for the eternal live imprisonment of the other facilitated by legal means, ensuring the security of a racially pure, class secure, hetero-normative status quo: the burial of race. This burial within policy is double edged: the shadow character buried alive within preparedness and within education haunts the work and is thus more likely to return as evoked by the events of 9/11.

Keywords:

• buried alive
• psychoanalysis
• education
• race
• CRT
• resilience
• preparedness

Notes

1. The names of the professionals and others interviewed or observed in the ESRC study, and reported on in this article, are masked by the technical term ‘Professional’ or ‘Participant,’ and numbered; this is due to the confidential nature of their work. Generally academic writers rename participants in their work, however my personal feeling about this is that rather than renaming real people with bland names I would rather highlight the fact that I am extracting their words and using them in another context; by numbering participants the meta-fictional aspects of academic writing are brought to the fore. The real person behind the study is thus buried alive; and the theme of this article is recreated, mise en abyme.

2. A number of terms are used to describe this work: preparedness, civil defence, disaster education, and resilience.

3. Names and places have been changed to preserve the confidentiality of participants in both the CRT counter-narratives; I reversed my general feelings about this issue of naming participants when I came to what appear to be stories. It is as if, like inside the womb or the nuclear bunker of a text, a character can be named and is safe within the confines of what appears to have a beginning, middle and an end.

4. This was known only afterwards; at the time there were reports of power failures being behind the initial events.