Psychiatric Contours

<i>Psychiatric Contours</i> investigates new histories of psychiatry derangement and agitated subjectivities in colonial and decolonizing Africa. The volume lets the multivalent term <i>madness</i> 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 <i>vivacity</i> 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 <i>Psychiatric Contours</i> 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.<br><br>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