Too Loud, Too Reckless, Too Ghetto: Fanon, Lamar, and the Racial Unconscious of American Spectacle

• In Event: Pushing the Curriculum Boundaries in Authoritarian Educational Times

Abstract

This paper explores how psychoanalytic theory—particularly Lacanian concepts of desire and the symptom, and Fanon’s theorization of racialized subjectivity—can productively complicate qualitative inquiry. Arguing that desire undergirds all acts of knowing, we analyzed the 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show, interpreting symbolic performances by Kendrick Lamar and Samuel L. Jackson through a psychoanalytic lens. By foregrounding desire’s role in personal,intersubjective, and cultural sites, we show how racial meaning is produced, regulated, and contested. We contend that psychoanalysis offers a complex, ethical framework for reading cultural performances, revealing the hidden colonial and racial logics that persist in knowledge production. This approach ultimately calls for more reflexive, discomforting, and interpretive qualitative practices.

Authors

• Jake Burdick, Purdue University

• Janelle Grant-Ashbaugh, Grand Valley State University