Mad as a Nation: Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag

Chapter 5 is centred on the continued entanglement in Scotland between categories of ‘Black’ and ‘Asian’. Psychoraag positions itself explicitly in the terrain of New Labour multiculturalist discourse, between the contradictory poles of post-racial ‘culturalism’ and the continuation of racialised inequality and racist abuse. In the novel, this contradiction provokes a literary ‘madness’, which is at once the psychopathology of race channelled through Frantz Fanon, and a counter-rational lyricism familiar from Michel Foucault, and aimed at the constraining ‘logic’ of British multicultural governmentality. Ultimately, Psychoraag testifies to the persistence of race and racism in opposition to a state-led narrative of resolved multiculturalism.