Psychiatric Contours: New African Histories of Madness (Theory in Forms)

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 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 psychiatrys 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 Bschel, Raphal Gallien, Matthew M. Heaton, Richard Hlzl, Nancy Rose Hunt, Richard C. Keller, Sloan Mahone, Nana Osei Quarshie, Jonathan Sadowsky, Romain Tiquet Cover Contents List of Figures Preface Introduction: Madness, the Psychopolitical, and the Vernacular: Rethinking Psychiatric Histories Part I: Writing, Biography, and thePsychopolitics of Decolonization 1. Archives of False Prophets: Inventing the Futurein a West African Psychiatric Hospital 2. Missionary Anxieties,Psychopathology, and Decolonization: A Biographical Approach 3. Mr. Tanka and Voices: A Cameroonian Patient Writing about Schizophrenia Part II: Patient Words Meet Diagnostic Categories 4. Delirious Words and Social Ambition in French Colonial Madagascar 5. Sickness and Symptoms as Cultural Capacities in Colonial Ideology 6. Rethinking Brain Fag Syndrome: Students, Symptoms, and a Late Colonial Survey in Nigeria Part: III Practices and Long Durations 7. Casting out Anger: Stress, Possession, and the Everyday in Taita, Kenya 8. The Universal, the Particular,and Vernacular Resistancein Colonial Algeria Part: IV Unexpected Archives and Ethnographic Investigations 9. Precarious Families, “Danger,” and Psychiatric Internment in 1960s Dakar: An Archive of Kin Letters 10. Lorry Dreams and Slave Ship Disintegrations: Motion, Madness, and Incongruent Planes in History Coda: On the Importance of Suffering Contributors Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z Summary:"Psychiatric Contours investigates the history of madness and psychiatry in Africa, focusing on the colonial and early postcolonial periods. The objects of study are varied, but they circle around a few key terms: madness, the psychopolitical, and the vernacular. While Foucault demonstrated that psychiatric practices or internment marked a clear shift in the relationship to madness in Europe in the seventeenth century, African histories are less sharply delineated. Most psychiatric patients were white colonialists, but madness has both residual and emergent vernacular histories outside of the clinic that become entangled with colonial notions, and the African remaking of colonial concepts provides a key aspect of global histories of psychiatry and psychopolitics. The essays in Psychiatric Contours aim is to inspire further discussions and research regarding histories of madness derived from everyday perceptions and experiences of madness and psychiatry in the Global South"-- Provided by publisher