Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity

Amina Mama begins with an indictment of psychological knowledge. From colonial anthropology to intelligence testing and clinical stereotypes, supposedly scientific accounts repeatedly represented Black people as primitive, deficient, or oversexualized. Black women were made doubly illegible: racism generalized a masculine Black subject, while white-centered gender theory treated white femininity as the norm. Beyond the Masks reconstructs this history to show that psychology did not merely observe racial difference; it helped govern and naturalize it.

Mama refuses the alternative of treating identity as a private essence hidden beneath social masks. Drawing on interviews and the historical experience of Black women in Britain, she understands subjectivity as an active, unfinished relation between personal life, collective memory, and structures of power. People internalize dominant images, resist them, improvise around them, and build counter-knowledge with others. The self is neither freely invented nor mechanically determined.

This approach makes race and gender inseparable without collapsing one into the other. Migration, colonial history, family expectations, sexuality, class, and encounters with British institutions all shape what Black femininity can mean. The women in the study are not examples added to an existing psychological model; their accounts force a different model of agency, one capable of recognizing contradiction and historical consciousness.

The book belongs to an earlier moment in the language of race and identity, and its empirical field is primarily Black British rather than continental African life. Readers should therefore resist treating it as a total account of Black or African women. Its lasting contribution is methodological: knowledge about subjectivity must be situated, dialogic, and alert to the political history of its own concepts.

For contemporary readers navigating wellness culture and individualized accounts of resilience, Mama’s argument remains corrective. Psychological suffering cannot be separated from racialized institutions, and empowerment cannot be reduced to changing one’s attitude. Moving beyond the masks means changing both the representations through which people are seen and the material relations that make those representations powerful.