Overview

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, far beyond the psychiatric. Many chapters detect the mad or the psychiatric in unhinged persons, frantic collectives, and distraught situations. Others investigate individuals suffering from miscategorization. A key Foucauldian word, vivacity, allows seeing 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, and 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 Africa, Psychiatric Contours attends to the words, autobiographies, and hallucinations of the stigmatized, afflicted, and also the powerful. Expatriate psychiatrists with cameras, prying authorities, fearful missionaries, and colonial anthropologists enter these readings beside patients, asylums, and boarding schools, with research on possession ""hysteria"" and schizophrenia. In brief, this book demonstrates novel ways of writing not only medical but all subaltern and global histories. Contributors. Hubertus Bueschel, Raphael Gallien, Matthew M. Heaton, Richard Hoelzl, Nancy Rose Hunt, Richard C. Keller, Sloan Mahone, Nana Osei Quarshie, Jonathan Sadowsky, Romain Tiquet

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9781478026112

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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) ""The strength of this book is how the authors skillfully navigate the historiography of psychiatry to craft space for a history that is not beholden to its faulted tradition. They overcome methodological problems to reveal patient voices, writings, and records, and patient-lens inversions of psychiatric notes as valuable historical sources, and the authors skillfully and convincingly contextualize the cases."" - Oluwatoyin Oduntan (H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews) ""Psychiatric Contours is not just a valuable addition to the existing scholarly literature but a volume that presages new ways of conceptualising what madness in Africa might involve and how scholars might articulate its lived experience, cultural expression, and archival forms. All of the writers have thought deeply about madness, psychopolitics, and the vernacular – the three organising concepts that Hunt sets out in her introduction."" - Will Jackson (Medical History)

"""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"""

Author Information

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.

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