‘The Royal Road to the Colonial Unconscious’: Psychoanalysis, Cannibalism, and the Libidinal Economy of Colonialism

In this article, I explore the libidinal economy of colonialism from the perspective of cannibalism (as Western fantasy about the exotic, subhuman other). To do that, I closely follow references to the cannibal in the arsenal of anti-colonial, literary tropes and, in two poems by Oswald de Andrade and Aimé Césaire. Although the anti-colonial identification with the cannibal engenders the potential of a threatening reappropriation of that which has been colonially stolen, I show that something is left unacknowledged in this melancholic identification. I then turn to the work of Octave Mannoni who views the cannibal as a metaphor for the overwhelming dependency complex of the colonised. Analysing the colonial dyad from the perspective of personality complexes, Mannoni fixes the coloniser and the colonised in a power dynamic, which although addresses the psychological dimension of colonialism this is reduced to the level of an interpersonal conflict. Finally, I turn to the work of Frantz Fanon to show what a psychoanalytic reading of the colonial, libidinal economy can offer: emphasising the sexual connotations enclosed in the cannibalistic fantasy, Fanon exposes the viscerality of colonial racism as a wish to devour and annihilate the colonised. In Fanon’s work, psychoanalysis emerges as a potent tool which exposes the unconscious dynamics of sexualised and racialfantasies and as such it appears to be an indispensable for decolonial thinking.