The Phantasm of Black Studies

This article theorizes the collective unconscious of academia, developed by way of a symptomatic reading of Black studies’ uptake in York’s Social and Political Thought Programme (SPT). Interrogating the dual (negro-)phobic and philic responses revealed by SPT’s culture of anti-Black hostility, this article contends with how the academy mediates, restricts, and captures Black studies’ scale and the politics of its demands in service of liberal amalgamation and the capacitation of an anti-Black ensemble of questions. Thus, this article ultimately argues that, like “the Negro,” Black studies, in the collective unconscious of civil society and refracted through the prism of the academy, remains a stimulus for anxiety and the locus of the unthought—even and perhaps most especially as its institutional presence is avowed.