Psychiatric Contours

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.

“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)

• List of Figures  ixPreface  xi1. Introduction. Madness, the Psychopolitical, and the Vernacular: Rethinking Psychiatric Histories / Nancy Rose Hunt  1Part I. Writing, Biography, and the Psychopolitics of Decolonization1. Archives of False Prophets: Inventing the Future in a West African Psychiatric Hospital / Nana Osei Quarshie  432. Missionary Anxieties, Psychopathology, and Decolonization: A Biographical Approach / Richard HÖlzl  683. Mr. Tanka and Voices: A Cameroonian Patient Writing about Schizophrenia / Hubertus BÜschel  93Part II. Patient Worlds Meet Diagnostic Categories4. Delirious Words and Social Ambition in French Colonial Madagascar / RaphaËl Gallien  1355. Sickness and Symptoms as Cultural Capacities in Colonial Ideology / Jonathan Sadowsky  1566. Rethinking Brain Fag Syndrome: Students, Symptoms, and a Late Colonial Survey in Nigeria / Matthew M. Heaton  179Part III. Practices and Long Durations7. Casting out Anger: Stress, Possession, and the Everyday in Taita, Kenya / Sloan Mahone  2098. The Universal, the Particular, and Vernacular Resistance in Colonial Algeria / Richard C. Keller  234Part IV. Unexpected Archives and Ethnographic Investigations9. Precarious Families, “Danger,” and Psychiatric Internment in 1960s Dakar: An Archive of Kin Letters / Romain Tiquet  25710. Lorry Dreams and Slave Ship Disintegrations: Motion, Madness, and Incongruent Planes in History / Nancy Rose Hunt  281Coda. On the Importance of Suffering / Hubertus BÜschel  311Contributors  325Index  329