ABSTRACT
The Black Consciousness psychology of the South African theorist and clinician Chabani Manganyi provides an important resource for developing Fanon’s conceptualization of the disturbed dialectic between the body and the world that exists within conditions of anti-Black racism. Manganyi’s distinctive theorization of racializing (and, indeed, racist) forms of embodiment, draws on facets of both phenomenology and psychoanalysis to consider how a form of racial ontologizing occurs through the body. This chapter builds on Manganyi’s ideas to posit two modes of racializing embodiment. The first concerns the idea of an imposed embodiment which involves the transposition of a discursive frame of ideological symbolic values upon the realm of bodily experiences. This conceptualization, as exemplified in Manganyi’s work, is supplemented by the idea of an expressive mode of embodiment which emphasizes somatic sensation in which – as in Fanon’s harrowing account of corporeal malediction – the body serves as a vessel of lived experience.
