ABSTRACT
Freud’s use of the term “dark continent” to signify female sexuality is a recurrent theme in feminist theory. The phrase transforms female sexuality into an unexplored territory, an enigmatic, unknowable place concealed from the theoretical gaze and hence the epistemological power of the psychoanalyst. Femininity confounds knowledge while male sexuality is its stable guarantee. Yet, the more pertinent question may not be “What is the dark continent?,” but “Where is it?” The fact that Freud himself borrowed the phrase from Victorian colonialist texts in which it was used to designate Africa is often forgotten. As Patrick Brantlinger points out, “Africa grew ‘dark’ as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light, because the light was refracted through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of ‘savage customs’ in the name of civilization.” 1 The term is the historical trace of Freud’s link to the nineteenth century colonialist imagination. In its textual travels from the colonialist image of Africa to Freud’s description of female sexuality as enigma to feminist theorists’ critique of psychoanalysis (particularly in Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman), the phrase has been largely stripped of its historicity. Something of Freud’s link to this colonialist imagination has been lost as well. For although Freud did not recapitulate “an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of ‘savage customs’ in the name of civilization,” the binary opposition between the savage and the civilized in their relation to sexuality was a formative element of his thinking, one often dismissed in Lacanian influenced accounts as a “pre-Freudian” aspect of the Freudian text.
