Psychiatric Contours

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