The Transnational Palestinian Self: Toward Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Thought

Abstract

This discussion considers Palestinian subjectivity in a perpetual state of doubleness, commuting between a number of transnational political and cultural contexts and positions. Engaging Lama Khouri’s “Through Trump’s Looking Glass into Alice’s Wonderland: On Meeting the House Palestinian,” this paper reveals how, on one hand, Zionism is intricately and inextricably linked with and haunted by a Palestinian identity, which it fundamentally works to negate; on the other hand, it also engages the ideological aspects of Palestinian Arab identity when it is transplanted to the United States, interpolating all identities through its racialized social and class hierarchy. In examining the structures of these binary identity systems, I gesture toward a decolonializing psychoanalysis that adopts psychoanalytic tools to understand how alienating two-ness can become a productive mode of confronting and dismantling Zionist objectification and radicalized othering.

Keywords:

• decolonization
• Israel
• Palestine
• psychoanalysis
• Zionism

Notes

¹ A number of Jewish Israelis offer compelling studies and memoirs regarding the internal contradictions of Zionism. See, for example, Greenstein (2014), Svirsky (2014), Sand (2011, 2012), and Peled (2012).

² Gil Anijar (2003) and Udi Aloni (2011a) offered psychoanalytically inflected works that track the interlocking, intersubjective structure of Israeli identity with that of its Palestinian other/enemy/counterpart.

³Of all Arab Americans, 89% complete high school and 45% earn bachelor degrees (well above the national average), and 19% attain advanced graduate degrees. The median Arab American household income is 10% higher than the average American median household income, and the mean individual income is 27% higher than the national average. For the collated information taken from the U.S. Census, see Arab American Institute (2014).

⁴ See Nadine Naber (2012, pp. 63–109).

⁵ The re-racialization of Arab Americans particularly during the rise of globalization, global political Islam and takfiri violence, and 9/11 has been noted by a number of scholars. See, for example, Cankar (2006), Salaita (2006), Jamal and Naber (2008), and Abdulhadi et al. (2011).

⁶ Lara Sheehi discusses “collapsible psychic space” with any utterance of the word Palestine within psychoanalysis in “The Ideology of Apparitions” (forthcoming), initially presented at Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, October 15, 2015.

⁷ As noted earlier, Sarah Gualtieri (2009) provided history of how Arabs “become white” within relation to a larger overview of identity politics and the emergence of whiteness and blackness as clearly discrete racialized and hierarchized categories (Frye-Jacobson, 1994).

⁸ A growing body of work is reexploring the radical tradition within psychoanalysis that runs, arguably, from Freud to Fenichel, Reich, and Fromm to Lacan, Laing, Guattari, Fanon, and beyond, and in turn exploring the liberatory possibilities with psychoanalysis (e.g., Hollander, 2010; Holmes, 2006; Layton, 2002, 2006; Leary, 1997, 2000; Portuges, 2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Sheehi

Stephen Sheehi, PhD, is the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Chair of Middle East Studies at the College of William and Mary. His the author of three books: The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography 1850-1910 (Sheehi & Sheehi, 2016), Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (Sheehi, 2011), and Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (2004). He is also coauthoring a book on Palestinian photography with Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar titled Camera Palaestina (U California Press, 2019), as well as Psychoanalysis Under Occupation (Routledge, 2020) with Lara Sheehi.