Mothering in the Colonies

"Mothering in the Colonies: Intimacy, Race and Psychoanalysis is a powerful new analysis of domestic servitude, race and love in apartheid South Africa and elsewhere. Caine has produced a path-breaking, beautifully written, transdisciplinary history and theory. This brilliant and important text carves out new lines of research that stretch across transcontinental colonial history, histories of race and psychoanalytic and psychosocial theory."

Yasmeen Narayan, Postcolonial and Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

"Diana Caine’s Mothering in the Colonies breaks the colonial frame making appear for the reader the erased figures of the Black women who cared for White children. Resonating with Rita Segato’s important work Black Oedipus, her book takes us through several sites – from Brazil, to Australia, South Africa, India and Mexico – where the colonial ‘secret’ of who cares for the children is at the heart of settler domestic life. Attentive to the politics of representation, Caine starts from striking images where the hidden racialised matrix of mothering resurfaces. The book includes a stirring recounting of love and loss: the author’s grappling with her own ‘Black mother’. Written with subtlety, rigour, care and brilliant psychoanalytic insight, this book is an extraordinary gift to readers."

Raluca Soreanu, Psychoanalyst & Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK

"A critique of the ‘unitary figure of the mother’ enshrined in psychoanalysis and in settler colonialism, Diana Caine’s Mothering in the Colonies is itself a singular achievement. Like no other theorist I can think of, Caine combines rigour with vulnerability, insight with openness. Diana Caine has written an unflinching, unsentimental, important, and inspiring book."

Ramsey McGlazer, University of California, Berkeley, USA