Black Hamlet by Wulf Sachs Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996,  xi + 340 pp., $45.00; $15.95 paper

The elevation of identity politics as a topic worthy of publication did not begin in this decade. Black Hamlet, originally published in England in 1937 and now reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press, is an account of the psychological and political transformation of John Chavafambria, a black Rhodesian and “nganga,” or spiritual healer, who was befriended by the author, himself an expatriate Lithuanian Jew and the first psychoanalyst in South Africa. Sachs's account charts their complex relationship as it developed in Johannesburg during the 1930s, when racial segregation and colonial policies made intimate black-white relations a controversial and dangerous undertaking. This edition of the book is accompanied by two impressive essays, written by Saul Dubow and Jacqueline Rose, who, respectively, place Sachs's effort in historical and anthropological context and mark the epistemological and linguistic boundaries within which psychoanalysis can operate as theory and treatment. The inclusion of these essays makes the book more accessible and valuable for readers interested in how therapeutic knowledge and personal identity were jointly constructed in the early decades of this century.

The book's title was deliberately borrowed by Sachs from Shakespeare's tragedy. Sachs views the principle character's life as