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Race, Fantasy & Enjoyment, Edwin Owusu

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Why has the institution of race remained resilient given what we know about its detrimental impacts? Why do we enjoy race and who has access to that enjoyment? Is black trauma endemic to this enjoyment and can blackness be divorced from it? I hypothesize that we live in an episteme that has transitioned from physiological need to surplus enjoyment. This enjoyment has allowed humans to conceptualize their relations beyond the physical and necessary. Racial enjoyment is psychical because it involves how we enjoy and not how we know (enjoyment v. knowledge). There is a collective investment in race that subtends …