Psychiatric Contours

Summary:"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