Rethinking Freud and Marx through Afro-Atlantic Religions

Abstract

Matory’s The Fetish Revisited relates lacunae in Freudian and Marxist theory to Afro- Atlantic spiritual and commercial life. Build-ing on a long tradition of critique of the “fetish- as- concept,” Matory resituates the fetish in a matrix of economic, ideational, and geopolitical relations. Beginning with the erotic life of middle- class, white Amer-ica, he demonstrates that fetish play, bondage, and sadomasochism and master/servant play disclose fantasies of denigrated Blackness— a literal embodiment of “kink” (2018, xii– xiii)— in which racialized and eroticized power may be negotiated and transacted. Matory is inter-ested not only in the imaginative dimensions of such play but also in the material objects that reside and circulate within its ritualized practice. As he moves into his introduction to Freud and Marx, Matory claims that “Freud knew as well as Marx and the Afro- Atlantic priests that things and the value attributed to them powerfully mediate human relationships” (xix). Social rivalries produce the fetish as a site of contested social meaning (xix– xx), powerfully recalling Pietz’s seminal article series on “The Problem of the Fetish” (1985, 1987, 1988). and hence cross-