Maureen Sioh – författare

Colonial Trauma and Postcolonial Anxieties argues that economic decisions reflect unconscious anxieties about survival and dignity experienced in a cycle of repeat trauma tracing back to the original trauma of loss in colonialism.Readers will understand how emerging economies evaluate the costs and benefits of key economic policies in the postcolonial era using a psychoanalytical framework.While there are psychoanalytic studies of the economy and finance from a western perspective, there have been no sustained psychoanalytic studies from the perspective of East Asian economies, the fastest growing in the world. Scholars will also find the methodology combining archival research with and field studies, including rare interviews with senior decision-makers useful in their own research since it is rare to find studies of social theory that are empirically rich.This book will be of interest to policymakers and scholars of political economy, international development, human geography, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and area studies (Southeast and East Asia). The book can also be used as a text for graduate and upper level university courses.

Colonial Trauma and Postcolonial Anxieties argues that economic decisions reflect unconscious anxieties about survival and dignity experienced in a cycle of repeat trauma tracing back to the original trauma of loss in colonialism.Readers will understand how emerging economies evaluate the costs and benefits of key economic policies in the postcolonial era using a psychoanalytical framework.While there are psychoanalytic studies of the economy and finance from a western perspective, there have been no sustained psychoanalytic studies from the perspective of East Asian economies, the fastest growing in the world. Scholars will also find the methodology combining archival research with and field studies, including rare interviews with senior decision-makers useful in their own research since it is rare to find studies of social theory that are empirically rich.This book will be of interest to policymakers and scholars of political economy, international development, human geography, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and area studies (Southeast and East Asia). The book can also be used as a text for graduate and upper level university courses.

Claims unconscious desire plays a constitutive role in global political economy.This is the first book to examine global political economy from a psychoanalytic perspective. It claims that the libidinal-the site of unconscious desire-plays not a supplementary or trivial, but a constitutive role in global political economy. Consumption, for example, is not simply a way of satisfying a material or biological need but a doomed attempt at soothing our deeply held sense of loss; and capital is not just a means to material growth and prosperity but is invested with "drive" that seduces, beguiles, and manipulates in the service of unending accumulation. Thus, in contrast to political economy, which assumes a rational subject, libidinal economy is founded on the notion of a desiring subject, who obeys a logic not of good sense or self-interest but profligacy and irrationality. By applying a psychoanalytic lens, Global Libidinal Economy thereby seeks to uncover the unconscious excesses and antagonisms emergent in such key political economy categories as "production," "trade," and "ecology," while also bringing out significant contemporary themes relating to "gender" and "race."