Psychiatric Contours: New African Histories of Madness

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

Table of Contents:
List of Figures  ix Preface  xi 1. Introduction. Madness, the Psychopolitical, and the Vernacular: Rethinking Psychiatric Histories / Nancy Rose Hunt  1 Part I. Writing, Biography, and the Psychopolitics of Decolonization 1. Archives of False Prophets: Inventing the Future in a West African Psychiatric Hospital / Nana Osei Quarshie  43 2. Missionary Anxieties, Psychopathology, and Decolonization: A Biographical Approach / Richard Hölzl  68 3. Mr. Tanka and Voices: A Cameroonian Patient Writing about Schizophrenia / Hubertus Büschel  93 Part II. Patient Worlds Meet Diagnostic Categories 4. Delirious Words and Social Ambition in French Colonial Madagascar / Raphaël Gallien  135 5. Sickness and Symptoms as Cultural Capacities in Colonial Ideology / Jonathan Sadowsky  156 6. Rethinking Brain Fag Syndrome: Students, Symptoms, and a Late Colonial Survey in Nigeria / Matthew M. Heaton  179 Part III. Practices and Long Durations 7. Casting out Anger: Stress, Possession, and the Everyday in Taita, Kenya / Sloan Mahone  209 8. The Universal, the Particular, and Vernacular Resistance in Colonial Algeria / Richard C. Keller  234 Part IV. Unexpected Archives and Ethnographic Investigations 9. Precarious Families, “Danger,” and Psychiatric Internment in 1960s Dakar: An Archive of Kin Letters / Romain Tiquet  257 10. Lorry Dreams and Slave Ship Disintegrations: Motion, Madness, and Incongruent Planes in History / Nancy Rose Hunt  281 Coda. On the Importance of Suffering / Hubertus Büschel  311 Contributors  325 Index  329