New Books in Critical Theory David L. Eng, "Reparations and the Human" (Duke UP, 2025)
Mar 4, 2026
David L. Eng, a scholar blending law, psychoanalysis, Asian American studies, and critical theory, explores reparations across the Transpacific. He traces how colonial and Enlightenment concepts shaped who counts as human. Topics include Locke and colonial reparations, Hiroshima’s contested recognition, uranium’s transnational harms, and rethinking the human through interdependence.
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Psychoanalysis Connects Personal and Political Reparation
- David L. Eng links psychoanalytic reparation (Kleinian object relations) to political reparations, showing both manage love, guilt, and restoration at different scales.
- He traces this from a Korean adoptee's split idealization to a broader theory of racial reparation that shaped his book's genealogy.
Locke's Twofold Logic Makes Reparation a Colonial Tool
- Eng reveals reparations as a dual concept in Locke: a European check on absolute power and a colonial rationale for dispossession and extermination of indigenous peoples.
- He reads Locke as both social theorist and colonial administrator tied to Carolina and the slave trade, where 'reparation' justifies land seizure.
Colonial Object Relations Turn Perpetrators Into Victims
- Eng formulates 'colonial object relations' where reparative fantasies make the colonizer both perpetrator and victim while erasing the colonized from deserving repair.
- He reads Klein's colonist example: restoration meant repopulating with one's own image, not repairing the Native.
