The MLA’s Forum on Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Literature solicits abstracts for a non-guaranteed panel at the 2024 MLA Convention in Philadelphia on psychoanalysis and decolonization. Psychoanalysis is often critiqued for its silence on the phenomena of colonialism and its legacies in the present and decoloniality as discourse and praxis. In recent years there have been calls as well to decolonize psychoanalysis and/or resurrect psychoanalysis for the people, the collective, the subaltern, and those without economic or social advantages for accessing the clinic. With these past and current discussions in mind, we seek abstracts which will contribute to, expand on, or reimagine the chequered relationship between psychoanalysis and decolonization/decoloniality for our global present.

Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to:  

• · Psychoanalysis’ potential contributions to theories and praxis of decolonization.
• · Application of psychoanalytic theory for analyzing decoloniality and postcolonial cultures and/or literature.
• · Decolonizing psychoanalysis; or, what this means and what are its implications for the present.
• Reimagining psychoanalysis as theory and clinical work in the contexts of the histories of colonialism, post-/de-coloniality, and the cultures of our neoliberal global twenty-first century.
• · Psychoanalysis for the Margins/Marginalized and the Margins of Psychoanalysis.

Submit 300-word abstracts and one-page CV to Gautam Basu Thakur (gautambasuthakur@boisestate.edu) and Sheldon George (sheldon.george@simmons.edu) by March 24.