Delivered by Ingenta IP : 83.142.52.87 On: Fri, 10 Apr 2020 10:47:07 Copyright The Policy Press 35 Journal of Psychosocial Studies • vol 13 • no 1 • 35–48 • © Policy Press 2020 Online ISSN 1478-6737 • https://doi.org/10.1332/147867320X15803492699268 SPECIAL ISSUE • The American tradition of psychosocial studies article Clad in mourning: psychoanalysis and race in contemporary America David W. McIvor, David.McIvor@colostate.edu Colorado State University, USA What is the value of psychoanalysis for the theorising of race in our contemporary moment? This article explores this question by engaging with theories of Afropessimism, which criticise the therapeutic ethic that traverses the wide variety of psychoanalytic approaches. Afropessimists accuse psychoanalysis of perpetuating a racialised partition in the social order complicit with ‘anti-Blackness’. While stopping short of these conclusions, I argue that psychoanalysts and social theorists need to countenance the possibilities that even their ‘race-conscious’ work might carry assumptions that are ‘anti-Black’. In doing so I will argue that attempts to mourn the traumas and losses associated with race have to fnd ways to account for the structural positioning of particular racialised bodies. Key words Afropessimism • Melanie Klein • mourning • melancholia • race To cite this article: McIvor, D.W. (2020) Clad in mourning: psychoanalysis and race in contemporary America, Journal of Psychosocial Studies, vol 13, no 1, 35–48, DOI: 10.1332/147867320X15803492699268 I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help build it together … yet my body was given back to me … clad in mourning. (Fanon, 2008) This article asks the question: What is the value of psychoanalysis for the theorising of race in our contemporary moment – a moment when social awareness of systemic racism is broader than ever, yet disturbing incidents of racial violence and vulnerability persist alongside stubborn (if not intensifying) patterns of inequality and segregation? The manic ‘post-racial’ moment that dawned with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 has shifted into a ‘most racial’ period of racialised political polarisation (Tesler, 2018). Continued patterns of precarity and abuse are scattered across the racial divide in the United States (US), fuelling both novel social movements for change and intellectual movements counselling pessimism and withdrawal. Can psychoanalysis provide a conceptual framework or insights adequate for this situation? As many scholars have pointed out, to develop psychoanalytic concepts for the study of race can require reading into an absence, given the specifc lack of attention to questions of racial identifcation or stigma in the foundational texts of Freud, Klein