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.

List of Figures  ix
Preface  xi
1. Introduction. Madness, the Psychopolitical, and the Vernacular: Rethinking Psychiatric Histories / Nancy Rose Hunt  1
Part I. Writing, Biography, and the Psychopolitics of Decolonization
1. Archives of False Prophets: Inventing the Future in a West African Psychiatric Hospital / Nana Osei Quarshie  43
2. Missionary Anxieties, Psychopathology, and Decolonization: A Biographical Approach / Richard Hölzl  68
3. Mr. Tanka and Voices: A Cameroonian Patient Writing about Schizophrenia / Hubertus Büschel  93
Part II. Patient Worlds Meet Diagnostic Categories
4. Delirious Words and Social Ambition in French Colonial Madagascar / Raphaël Gallien  135
5. Sickness and Symptoms as Cultural Capacities in Colonial Ideology / Jonathan Sadowsky  156
6. Rethinking Brain Fag Syndrome: Students, Symptoms, and a Late Colonial Survey in Nigeria / Matthew M. Heaton  179
Part III. Practices and Long Durations
7. Casting out Anger: Stress, Possession, and the Everyday in Taita, Kenya / Sloan Mahone  209
8. The Universal, the Particular, and Vernacular Resistance in Colonial Algeria / Richard C. Keller  234
Part IV. Unexpected Archives and Ethnographic Investigations
9. Precarious Families, “Danger,” and Psychiatric Internment in 1960s Dakar: An Archive of Kin Letters / Romain Tiquet  257
10. Lorry Dreams and Slave Ship Disintegrations: Motion, Madness, and Incongruent Planes in History / Nancy Rose Hunt  281
Coda. On the Importance of Suffering / Hubertus Büschel  311
Contributors  325
Index  329