Unspeakable Intimacies: Settler Childhood, Colonial Forgetting
When: Friday, March 27, 2026, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Where: Scape Canalside Teaching Rooms (TR1)., Canalside rooms are north of campus; not on Mile End Road. Check the campus maps for directions. Canalside rooms are in building #65 in Purple.
Borderlines is thrilled to invite you to this reflexive session, a continuation of the conversation begun during our February panel on Mothering Across Borders: Ayahs, Migration, and Racialised Care. We’ll have tea, coffee, and some sweet snacks to make it a proper afternoon pause.
In this reflexive session, Diana Caine explores a personal memory from her settler-colonial childhood in South Africa: being carried on the back of the African woman who cared for her, a tenderness contrasted with apartheid’s violence.
This memory, later erased within her family, informs her book project examining settler infants’ relationships with enslaved or indentured maternal figures. She discusses ethical and narrative challenges: writing from a settler-colonial perspective, whose stories can be told, colonial sentimentalities and silences, costs to caregiving women, and Indigenous scholarship’s role in reimagining histories. The session will be chaired by Dr. S M A Moin, an interdisciplinary storytelling scholar and academic leader.
About the Session
In this reflexive session, Diana Caine explores a deeply personal and unsettling memory from her settler-colonial childhood in South Africa: being carried on the back of the African woman who cared for her, an intimacy that stands in stark contrast to the violence and brutality of apartheid.
This memory, and its later erasure within her family, forms the core of her current book project, in which she examines the treacherous, formative maternal relations between settler infants and the enslaved or indentured women who raised them. She invites discussion of the ethical, political, and narrative challenges embedded in this work:
- the difficulty of writing from a settler-colonial position while seeking to de-centre it
- the question of whose story can be told, and how
- the sentimentalities and silences surrounding colonial childhoods
- the profound costs borne by the women who provided maternal care
- the role of contemporary Indigenous scholarship and storytelling in re-imagining histories shaped by trauma and erasure
About the Speaker
Diana Caine is a former consultant neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst whose earlier research used psychoanalytic theory to rethink the implications of neurological damage for human subjectivity. Her current work turns this lens toward coloniality, focusing on settler-colonial infants and the women, enslaved or indentured, who cared for them.
Her article “Apartheid’s Paradox: Impossible Borders, Unspeakable Intimacies” appeared in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2023). A version of this work will appear in her forthcoming book, Mothering in the Colonies (Routledge, 2026).
About the Chair
Dr S M A Moin is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Storytelling and Brand Communications at Queen Mary University of London, and an interdisciplinary scholar specialising in brand storytelling, strategy, leadership, creativity, and innovation. He holds an MBA from the University of Strathclyde and a PhD from the University of Nottingham, alongside executive education from Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard.
Before entering academia, he worked across the military (Navy), media, publishing, financial services, and management consulting, and previously held senior academic leadership roles at Coventry University London. A Principal Fellow of Advance HE and Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute, he was recognised as a 2024 Top Scholar by ScholarGPS, ranking in the top 0.5% globally and #9 worldwide in Storytelling research over the past five years.