In The Transmission of Trauma, I draw from the fields of trauma studies, psychoanalysis, and critical race studies to theorize modes and effects of transmissions of traumatic psychic material, focusing in particular on experiences and representations of race and racism. The title of this project borrows the concept of “technology” from Michel Foucault’s notion of a “technology of sex” in his History of Sexuality and Teresa de Lauretis’ Technologies of Gender. For Foucault and de Lauretis, “technology” refers to a range of discourses, ideologies, and cultural texts that circulate and instantiate conventional notions of sex and gender. I take up the concept of technology in The Transmission of Trauma to encapsulate the networks of discourses and institutions that shape collective understandings and experiences of race and racism as trauma.

I begin the first half of the dissertation with a chapter entitled “Theorizing Cultural Fantasy: Sigmund Freud, Nineteenth-Century Biology, and the Heredity of Traumatic Experience.” In this chapter, I argue that Freud’s psychoanalysis was particularly invested in explaining the development of the psyche and the inheritance of psychical material through the biological concepts of phylogeny (the development of the species) and ontogeny (the development of the individual). In chapter two of the dissertation, “The Psychical Reality of Race: Cultural Trauma and Neurosis in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,” I argue that colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon offers a prescient analysis of the relationship between culture, racialization, and trauma that builds on Freud’s pseudo-biological theories of the inheritance of psychical material. Inventing the concept of “sociogeny,” Fanon suggests that racial stereotypes (more than biology or individual development) structure the social subject’s quotidian experience of racialization and racism. Thus he argues that any contact with the culture of a racist society is psychically traumatic. In this way, Fanon emphasizes that a theory of cultural (rather than individual) trauma and fantasy in psychoanalysis is crucial to understanding the very real, psychical effects of racism on all social subjects.

I continue my exploration of the cultural transmission of trauma in the second half of the dissertation by focusing on two particular sites: Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise (1998) and the notorious 1993 videotape of Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King. In chapter three, “The Origins of Paradise: Race, Gender, and Cultural Fantasies,” I contend that Morrison’s Paradise represents the effects of the psychical trauma of racism through a depiction of fantasies of racial purity and violence against women. Set in an all-black town, and beginning with a description of nine men murdering five women, Paradise explores the internal mechanisms of racial fantasy and violence in black subjectivity in ways that echo and move beyond Fanon’s Black Skin. The cultural impact of racialized violence is also the subject of chapter four, “Rodney King Is Being Beaten: Cultural Fantasies and Spectacles of Violence,” where I analyze the tape of police beating King as a site for examining the psychical effects of dominant cultural fantasies of black masculinity, violence, and subjection.

In each of these chapters, psychoanalytic theory offers a methodology to account for the transmission of trauma and for examining the traumatic effects of race and racism in social subjects. This dissertation presents an argument that contemporary scholars need not reproduce psychoanalysis as an ahistorical, universalist paradigm. I contend that psychoanalysis is a crucial site and apparatus for research on the histories of science, colonialism, race, gender, sex, and sexuality.