15 February: Eurowhiteness, Imperial Amnesia and “Post-Colonial Melancholy”
This is the next instalment in the series of seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists. The series has intended to open up conversations about psychoanalysis by initiating dialogues between academics and psychotherapists, bringing clinical responses to the academic decolonial work. This seminar focuses on the racial politics at the heart of the post war European project, and the psychological impact this socio-political history may have in the consulting room.
Hans Kundnani
and in discussion with Anshu Srivastava
Saturday 15th February 2025
3:00pm - 5:00pm GMT
Online seminar £12 - £24 Book here
About this seminar
Hans Kundnani writes: "My book Eurowhiteness (2023) was not written with psychoanalysis in mind. But its analysis of European history, especially the recent period of EU enlargement and Brexit, raises issues of imperial amnesia, "postcolonial melancholy" and the return of a partially repressed civilisationalism. I argue that throughout the long history of ideas of Europe from the medieval period to the EU, there has been a complex interaction between ethnic/cultural and civic ideas of Europe – and that ethnic/cultural ideas of Europe connected to Christianity and whiteness did not disappear after 1945 but rather persisted and influenced the postwar European project. Drawing on the last chapter of the book, which focuses on the UK, I will discuss Paul Gilroy’s idea of “postcolonial melancholia” and suggest that Brexit provides an opportunity for the UK to deepen its engagement with its colonial past. Finally, I will discuss how central and eastern Europe fits into the global history of race and argue that joining the EU can be understood in terms of a transition from what József Böröcz has called “dirty whiteness” to full whiteness or Eurowhiteness.”
Speakers’ Biographies
Hans Kundnani is an adjunct professor at New York University and a visiting professor in practice at the London School of Economics. He was previously the director of the Europe programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London, a senior Transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He has also been a visiting fellow at the Remarque Institute at New York York University and a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, D.C. and has taught at the Collège d’Europe in Natolin, Poland.
Hans is the author of three books: Eurowhiteness. Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (London: Hurst, 2023); The Paradox of German Power (London/New York: Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2014), which has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish; and Utopia or Auschwitz. Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (London/New York: Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2009). He studied German and philosophy at Oxford University and journalism at Columbia University in New York, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He tweets @hanskundnani.
Anshu Srivastava is a member of The Guild of Psychotherapists, London, and holds an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London. His work as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist includes seeing people privately, at the Guild of Psychotherapists reduced-fee clinic and as a student counsellor at London Business School. He has also worked as an honorary psychotherapist within NHS Forensic Psychiatry Services.
As an active member of the Race & Culture Committee at the Guild, Anshu is co-organiser of the committee’s seminar programme ‘Decolonising Psychoanalysis’.
Anshu has also been a practising architect for over 25 years, founding and running an international creative studio with offices in London and Paris.
Bursary tickets
A limited number of bursary tickets are available on a pay-what-you-can basis to people who would not be able to attend the seminar without financial support. To apply for a bursary ticket please email ivan_talks@guildofpsychotherapists.org.uk.
A recording will be available for ticket buyers for a month after the event.
Image caption
The image above shows Morroccan police stopping migrants from entering the Spanish enclave of Ceuta - 16/09/24