Black Oedipus

Blindness is a theme that pervades the story of Oedipus and the Oedipus complex itself. Anthropologist Rita Segato's seminal intervention into the field of psychoanalytic studies of Oedipal relations shows up blindspots left open in it since Sigmund Freud's day—in relation to race, gender, and class—which have resulted from the outsourcing of responsibilities for the raising and rearing of children, often by parents unwilling to relinquish their lordship over them, even in the face of the profound attachments children form with their caregivers.Drawing on the Brazilian context, Segato writes an at-once personal and scholarly, critically incisive and accessibly inviting, testimonial to the neglected figure of the Black nanny, whose fate it so often was to be abruptly foreclosed from the infant's lifeworld, by the severance of employment. A chance meeting with a painting that significantly features in her analysis, and within the pages of this book, jogged an expansive chain of memories, and gives Black Oedipus its impetus as a powerful excavation of the force of colonial foreclosure, and an evocation of the women that would lose to it so much of their own autonomy in the world, whilst their work laid foundations for children of wealthy families to maintain their positions as little iterations of Oedipus the King (or Her Majesty the Baby) in their own worlds and futures.Presented with prefatory and explanatory materials from a range of anticolonial scholars and commentators, and in a revised translation by Ramsey McGlazer, this is the definitive edition of a classic text in psychoanalysis and anthropology.