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J. Lorand Matory, Diretor de Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project, e Professor de Antropologia Cultural da Duke University, EUA, apresentou no congresso internacional de hodologia organizado pelo Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institute e pelo eikones NCCR Iconic Criticism da Universidade da Basileia, uma comunicação denominada At the Crossroads: Afro-Atlantic and Central European Ethics of Intersectionality.Eis o resumo da sua apresentação, em que ele frisou a abertura de espírito dos africanos escravizados:In religious traditions all over the world, roads are a metaphor of progress and reunion. The openness and closure of roads is indeed one of central metaphors in the language and the rituals of Haitian Vodou and the Yoruba-Atlantic religions, which include not only West African Yoruba religion but also Brazilian Candomble and Cuban Santeria/Regla de Ocha. Even more central in these Afro-Atlantic traditions is the image of the crossroads. But rivers, oceans and lightning, which also bridge the gap between worlds, hint at an overarching conception of personhood and society: people and polities are normally the crossroads of and site of negotiation among heterogeneous forces, many of them originating in faraway places. This Afro-Atlantic imagery of the roads and the connections between disparate worlds invites dialogical reflection upon Freud’s metaphor that dreams are the “golden road to the unconscious” and upon his own continually abbreviated journeys on the road to Rome. Like the Yoruba Atlantic religions, Freuds psychoanalysis is premised on the idea that the self is the crossroads of multiple and normally conflicting spirits — the id, the ego, the super-ego and various “demons”— from heterogeneous origins. In this paper, Matory argues that Freud’s generalized insights about human ambivalence are rooted not in the universalness o f the Œdipal drama but in the fact that Freud’s own roads were blocked by anti-Semitism and homophobia. It may come as a surprise to most post-Enlightenment Europeans that the Afro-Atlantic corollary to Freud’s “ambivalence” is “balance”, according to which another set of the West’s victims demonstrates its openness to the spirits of its oppressors.