ABOUT THIS BOOK

Psychiatric Contours investigates new histories of psychiatry, derangement, and agitated subjectivities in colonial and decolonizing Africa. The volume lets the multivalent term madness broaden perception, well beyond the psychiatric. Many chapters detect the mad or the psychiatric in unhinged persons, frantic collectives, and distressing situations. Others investigate individuals suffering from miscategorization. A key Foucauldian word, vivacity, illuminates how madness aligns with pathology, creativity, turbulence, and psychopolitics. The archives, patient-authored or not, speak to furies and fantasies inside asylums, colonial institutions, decolonizing missions, and slave ships. The frayed edges of politicized deliria open up the senses and optics of psychiatry’s history in Africa far beyond clinical spaces and classification. The volume also proposes fresh concepts, notably the vernacular, to suggest how to work with emic clues in a granular fashion and telescope the psychiatric within histories of madness. With chapters stretching across much of ex-British and ex-French colonial Africa, Psychiatric Contours attends to the words, autobiographies, and hallucinations of the stigmatized and afflicted as well as of the powerful. Expatriate psychiatrists with cameras, prying authorities, fearful missionaries, and colonial anthropologists enter these readings beside patients, asylums, and boarding schools via research on possession “hysteria” and schizophrenia. In brief, this book demonstrates novel ways of writing not only medical history but all subaltern and global histories.

Contributors. Hubertus Büschel, Raphaël Gallien, Matthew M. Heaton, Richard Hölzl, Nancy Rose Hunt, Richard C. Keller, Sloan Mahone, Nana Osei Quarshie, Jonathan Sadowsky, Romain Tiquet

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Nancy Rose Hunt is Professor of History at the University of Florida and author of A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo, also published by Duke University Press.

Hubertus Büschel is Professor of History at the University of Kassel and author or editor of several books published in German.

REVIEWS

“The question of ‘madness’ in Africa stars at the intersection of many bodies of thought, including colonialism as a normative order, the question of reason or rationality in Western medicine, and the difference between folk psychiatry and professional medicine. Psychiatric Contours brilliantly illuminates all of them.”

-- Eli Zaretsky, author of Political Freud: A History

“Psychiatric Contours liberates the experience of madness from the familiar histories of confinement by accentuating its enigmatic presence in the movements of Africans. The essays collectively illuminate how the experience of madness in Africa remains an inexhaustible resource for exiting the paralyzing entrapments of modernity’s confinements. Psychiatric Contours discovers the unparalleled potential of transforming psychopathologies of colonial despair into a psychopolitics of care. We learn that the madness that Africa endured through the burdens of slavery, colonial racism, and sexual violence may yet have a bearing on how we imagine a world beyond the horizon of war and destruction.”

-- Premesh Lalu, author of Undoing Apartheid

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.