The American Optic charts new territory in the relationship of psychoanalysis to critical race studies by exploring the political and ethical implications of Lacanian psychoanalysis for African American and other diasporic African cultural production. Focusing on texts by Richard Wright and Jacques Lacan, Mikko Tuhkanen develops a theory of "racialization" that recasts the genealogy of the Western concept of racial difference in critical race theory in terms of the Lacanian argument about the role of the scopic drive in constituting the human subject. By engaging a wide array of resources--including the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Frantz Fanon, narratives of nineteenth-century slaves, and studies of blackface minstrelsy--Tuhkanen not only illuminates unexpectedly rich connections between Lacanian psychoanalysis and black literary and cultural studies, but also demonstrates the ways in which the artistic and political traditions of the African diaspora allow us to rethink and even reinvent the Lacanian ethics of becoming.