Psychiatric contours : new African histories of madness / Nancy Rose Hunt & Hubertus Büschel, editors.

Date:
2024
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About this work

Description

"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.

Publication/Creation

Durham : Duke University Press, 2024.

Physical description

xii, 345 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: Madness, the psychopolitical, and the vernacular : rethinking psychiatric histories / Nancy Rose Hunt -- Archives of false prophets : inventing the future in a West African psychiatric hospital / Nana Osei Quarshie -- Missionary anxieties, psychopathology, and decolonization : a biographical approach / Richard Hölzl -- Mr. Tanka and voices : a Cameroonian patient writing about schizophrenia / Hubertus Büschel -- Delirious words and social ambition in French colonial Madagascar / Raphaël Gallien -- Sickness and symptoms as cultural capacities in colonial ideology / Jonathan Sadowsky -- Rethinking Brain Fag Syndrome : students, symptoms, and a late colonial survey in Nigeria / Matthew M. Heaton -- Casting out anger : stress, possession, and the everyday in Taita, Kenya / Sloan Mahone -- The universal, the particular, and vernacular resistance in colonial Algeria / Richard C. Keller -- Precarious families, "danger," and psychiatric internment in 1960s Dakar : an archive of kin letters / Romain Tiquet -- Lorry dreams and slave ship disintegrations : motion, madness, and the incongruent / Nancy Rose Hunt -- Coda: On the importance of suffering / Hubertus Büschel.

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Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    PP.U.1
    Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9781478030348
  • 1478030348