Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90(2), 2000, p. 215–255 © 2000 by Association of American Geographers Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK. Mapping the “Unconscious”: Racism and the Oedipal Family Heidi J. Nast International Studies, DePaul University This paper argues that modern constructions of “race” are inherent in specifically modern con- structions of heterosexuality and that both of them inform the normative familial quadrad: Mother, Father, Son, and the Repressed (Bestial). These mythic familial categories constitute the basis of the “oedipal” family and are instrumentally interconnected. Here the oedipal triad of Mother-Son-Father is ideationally encoded as white, the repressed bestial being “colored”— typically “black.” I argue racism’s immanence to oedipal familial constructions by spatially re- working Fredric Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious. In so doing, I develop ways for thinking through how the psyche can be understood as a structured and libidinized spatial effect , a repository of colonial violences of body and place, unspoken and hence repressed (“uncon- scious”). I propose the term racist-oedipalization (after Deleuze and Guattari’s oedipalization) to connote the processual ways in which racist thinking and practices are integral to white oedipal family structures and norms. In so doing, I explore how racist-oedipal configurations have worked variably, in the interests of contemporary and past colonialisms, to great embodied geographical effect. The paper begins by theoretically linking blackness to incestuousness and colonization to productions of the psychical “unconscious.” The core of the paper threads the theory through par- ticular racialized geographies in the U.S. These include, on the one hand, southern plantation slave and post-Reconstruction settings, and, on the other hand, urban segregationary practices impelled by the University of Chicago, culminating in their racialized plans for urban renewal in the 1950s. Key Words: family, racist-oedipal hysteria, slavery, unconscious, urban renewal, white supremacy. his paper draws upon the work of Hay- den White (1972) and others to argue that the psyche, within which the psy- choanalytic “unconscious” reposes, emerged as an embodied spatial effect unevenly across place and time in tandem with European colonialisms across the world. Unlike White, however, this paper concentrates on how the psyche was shaped through colonial sociospatial violence, desire, and repression. The psyche was, in this sense, an interiorized repository within which the violent acts and desires of colonization were secreted or made legitimately secret and unspeak- able. The “truth” of colonial devastations was spatially displaced or repressed in two ways. First, the memories and actions associated with colonial violences were incorporated into the body-space of the “psyche,” an “unconscious” domain outside language. Accordingly, the se- questering and torture of colonized bodies and the burning down of cities and towns was simply asserted, with the particularities of the violence as violence in various sociospatial ways being ig- nored, suppressed, or elided. Second, certain “unconscious” colonial violences were sexual- ized, the colonized used “unconsciously” and collectively as a libidinous foil against which the white oedipal family anxiously defended itself. In this way, the psyche was a doubly secretive place — of colonial conquests asserted to be out- side certain lines of questioning and of con- quests unconsciously sexualized. Freud’s early twentieth-century work on in- cest and Levi-Strauss’s anthropological theories of sexual taboos are key indicators of how the making of the “unconscious” occurred. 1 To- gether, their works suture ideas about how prop- erly sexualized family dynamics are linked to and produce cultural vitality and civilization. More important, their theories are here regarded as unwittingly informed by, and instrumental to, “white” colonial desires for lands and laborers. T