Oedipal Empire: psychoanalysis, Indigenous Peoples, and the Oedipus Complex in colonial context

This chapter gives a psychoanalytic critique of the (so-called) “Indian legislations” of settler-states. From a psychoanalytic perspective, such legislation can be viewed as entrenching an Oedipalized relationship in which the settler-state ossifies Indigenous Peoples as children or wards in need of civilizational development and settler-patronizing. The chapter’s intervention is to integrate insights from Frantz Fanon’s polemic against ethno-psychiatry, Jacques Lacan’s late seminar on James Joyce, and Achille Mbembe’s recent work on the phallocracy in order to critically reflect on the Oedipus Complex in colonial context. In addition to providing a new and incisive frame for timely questions of colonialism, Indigeneity, and Blackness, this chapter provides grounds for questioning the Oedipal foundations of psychoanalysis itself.