Unrootedness: a New Surface in the Lacanian Black Split Subject

Abstract

AbstractHow is the split black subject symbolized? The article attempts this question with its Lacanian-styled gap-filling (or -opening) method, using two clues — one from The Big Bang Theory sitcom, and the other from Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The split subject comes before the imaginary, the mirror stage, which begins with the child’s experience of the Parental Other. Colonization and civil rights then become a later stage in the growth process of the black race, where the white acted as a Parental or Significant Other. Amy Farrell Fowler and Sheldon Cooper from CBS’ The Big Bang Theory (Season 6, Episode 21, first aired on April 25, 2013) both symbolically portray the colonial condition of Africa. After several failed attempts to attain gratification from his Significant Other, Cooper’s revolutionary attention to his “split subject’s needs” without Amy offers a new lens to theorize colonization as a “halfway error” to be corrected and transcended to reach where Okonkwo, in Things Fall Apart, fails. The unrootedness of being black would then polish the new surface to which the entire black race globally can behold and do something not done before.