Thursday 4 February
6:30-9pm
Join us for the launch of Mothering in the Colonies: Intimacy, Race and Psychoanalysis by Diana Caine
This book offers an unexpected take on colonial life, reflecting on the intimate yet forbidden relation between settler children and the enslaved or indigenous women who cared for them. The 'black' mother, erased from personal, family and public histories, notwithstanding the importance claimed for early attachment in the West. The unconscious, unspoken traces left with those children in the wake of her care.
Its theoretical thread-line is Rita Segato's Black Oedipus, a re-working of the Western Oedipal triad into the relation between two mothers - the 'White' birth mother, transmitter of the law, and the 'black' mother of care, forbidden love object - and the settler infant. A relation that inscribed the settler child into a racialised social order and the installation of the law of the colonialist state.
Each chapter is a meditation on a photograph or painting, exploring the complexities of this vital but 'forgotten' intimacy in the settings of colonial South Africa, Mexico, Australia, Brazil and India, each with its own culture, traditions and colonial history. The book makes use throughout of little known contemporary indigenous and First Nations scholarship and writing to reflect on what was lost and ruptured, and on the work of these writers and scholars to recover and sometimes re-create a narrative, a history and a culture.
Diana Caine worked for a number of years as consultant neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst. Her research drew on psychoanalytic theory to re-think the implications of neurological damage for human subjectivity. More recently she has turned her interest in psychoanalysis and her critical attention to aspects of coloniality, particularly to this relation between settler colonial infants and the enslaved or indentured women who cared for them. An article on this subject appeared as ‘Apartheid’s paradox: Impossible borders, unspeakable intimacies’ in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2023), a version of which appears in her book Mothering in the Colonies: Intimacy, Race & Psychoanalysis.