Psychiatric Contours

“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

“Nancy Rose Hunt and Hubertus Büschel’s edited volume provides clues on locating madness in African history. . . . The authors help us appreciate the values inherent in a very subjective source of historical writing.”

“As each chapter highlights new approaches, sources and perspectives, they offer an excellent snapshot of what remains to be done—and, perhaps, what should be undone—by historians of psychiatry today.”

"Full of arresting historical cases from different parts of Africa, sutured through imaginative theoretical threads, . . . Psychiatric Contours is an inspiring source for scholars across geographic as well as disciplinary fields." - Kutlug han Soyubol, Isis