Dr Andrew Asibong is Reader in Film and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London

My research is concerned with the emotional and political metamorphoses of the relational self, via engagement with film and the moving image (although I have also published widely on [mainly French] literature). I am especially interested in blankness and splitting as responses to trauma, and draw on pseudo-fantastical or ‘weird’ cinema, psychoanalytic theory and practice, and the politics of class, ‘race’, gender and stigma in my attempt to build a dynamic theory and practice of integrated psychosocial transformation. I am currently editing a special issue of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies, based on a symposium I recently organised entitled ‘Sanity, Madness and the Family: An Urgent Retrospective’. (The audio podcast is available to listen to below.) I am in the early stages of a book project at the intersection of film studies, psychoanalysis and community action, provisionally entitled Something to Watch Over Me: Trauma, Aliveness and the Half-Moving Image. Other current projects include a video-essay on internal objects (using Cronenberg) and another video-essay on dissociation (using Sissy Spacek). I currently convene the Birkbeck Psychoanalysis Working Group (BISR) and am a Co-Editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality. I am also a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Studies in French Cinema.

Recent psychoanalytically-inflected publications:

Monograph:

Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013)

Articles:

‘”Then look!”: un-born attachments and the half-moving image’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality (16:2), 2015.
‘Terreur ou thérapie? Arnaud Desplechin et les métamorphoses de la lettre brûlante’ in Risques et regrets: les dangers de la lettre (eds. Margot Irvine, Geneviève De Viveiros et Karin Schwerdtner, Quebec: Nota Bene, 2015)
‘(Not) seeing things: Marie NDiaye, negative hallucination and “blank” métissage’ in Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-century France (eds. Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye, University of Wales Press, 2013).
‘Marie NDiaye, the half-self and the white “dead” mother’ (c. 9000 words), in The Postcolonial Human, special issue of International Journal of Francophone Studies (ed. Jane Hiddleston, 2013).

Podcast:

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2015/04/sanity-madness-and-the-family-family-life-an-urgent-retrospective/

Blog post:

https://psychoanalyticdialoguesblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/by-andrew-asibong-4st-7lb/