Mothering in the Colonies

Mothering in the Colonies uses a psychoanalytic lens to consider the ubiquitous, but little acknowledged or spoken, relationship between settler colonial children and colonised/indentured/slave-descended women, and the way in which it inaugurated racial identity. Diana Caine explores this relationship through seven images depicting children and caregivers in different contexts including Brazil, Mexico, India, Australia and South Africa. With reference to Freud and Lacan, Caine considers how this relationship at the heart of coloniality was impelled by socio-political and economic demands that collided with overt and covert interdictions against inter-racial intimacy. Mothering in the Colonies will be of interest to psychoanalysts and historians of psychoanalysis, and to scholars and students of postcolonial and decolonial studies, race, imperial and colonial history and the history and politics of motherhood. It will also interest a more general readership.