Blindness is a theme that pervades the story of Oedipus and the Oedipus Complex. Anthropologist Rita Segato’s seminal intervention into the field of psychoanalysis shows up its practice’s and theory’s historic blindspots, in relation to race, gender, and class. Drawing on the Brazilian context, Segato writes an at-once personal and scholarly, incisive and accessible testimonial to the erasure of the figure of the Black nanny from the Oedipal triangle. Presented with prefatory materials from Maria Ribeiro and Pascale Molinier, and in a revised translation by Ramsey McGlazer, this is the definitive edition of a classic text in psychoanalysis and anthropology.

---

Rita Segato’s Black Oedipus provides the reader with an elaborate analysis of maternity that thoroughly revises our understanding of this ancient human feature: the Brazilian nanny, or wet nurse, now enters our grammars of social arrangements that must be taken into account in reaching more definitive conclusions about gender and its uses in the world order; this work is not to be missed.

— Hortense Spillers

Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair of English and Research Professor Emerita at Vanderbilt University

---

In this landmark text, Rita Segato brings her remarkable analytic clarity to offer a sustained meditation on the racialised splitting of the maternal function, as the enslaved figure of the Black wetnurse under Brazilian colonialism gives way to the dry nurse of neocolonial modernity. A radical rethinking of the triangular structure of Oedipus in psychic and social life that names and grammaticalizes the mother in her doubled and racialised form.

— Lisa Baraitser

Psychoanalyst, British Psychoanalytical Society, and Professor of Psychosocial Theory, Birkbeck College, London

---

Support 1968 Press

1968 makes our eBooks available for free download. However, each publication takes considerable time and money to produce. If you would like to help us out, please consider donating.

£3.00 helps cover ongoing expenses

£9.00 supports further publications

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/1968PressLondon

thank you,

1968 Press

---