A Psychoanalytic Approach to the History of Racial Capitalism

This essay is a study of Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024) and reflects on Hall’s use of the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal to analyze the construction of racist ideas by the enslaver and historian Edward Long, whose three-volume book, The History of Jamaica, first published in 1774, has remained among the most definitive texts on the history of slavery, Jamaica, and Black people. The essay brings Long’s mother, Mary Tate, into the same analytic frame as the enslaved woman Queen Cubah and shows how the details of Cubah’s life that Long chose to narrate through caricature bear a striking resemblance to pivotal but painful aspects of Long’s mother’s life. The author shows how Hall connected the personal and family dramas of White people to how they viewed and wrote about Black people. The tone of Long’s racialism, particularly its rigid morality and acridity, was refined and sustained by things tragically rooted in his own family heartbreak and loss. The essay also contemplates the role of the unconscious in history, including historical production as a site of disavowal.