Overview

Nineteenth-century French writers and travelers imagined Muslim colonies in North Africa to be realms of savage violence, lurid sexuality, and primitive madness. Colonial Madness traces the genealogy and development of this idea from the beginnings of colonial expansion to the present, revealing the ways in which psychiatry has been at once a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism, an innovative branch of medical science, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship. Drawing from extensive archival research and fieldwork in France and North Africa, Richard Keller offers much more than a history of colonial psychology. Colonial Madness explores the notion of what French thinkers saw as an inherent mental, intellectual, and behavioral rift marked by the Mediterranean, as well as the idea of the colonies as an experimental space freed from the limitations of metropolitan society and reason. These ideas have modern relevance, Keller argues, reflected in French thought about race and debates over immigration and France's postcolonial legacy.

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9780226429731

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Reviews

Keller's command of the relevant historiographies is impeccable. To produce Colonial Madness, the author had to read deeply in the literatures of modern France, modern medicine, psychiatry, colonial science, African medical history, the history and ethnography of the Maghreb, and postcolonial theory. Many less accomplished authors might have mastered one or two of these, but Keller has learned them all to an extent that is really formidable, and the payoff is substantial. - Jonathan Sadowsky, Case Western Reserve University

Author Information

Richard C. Keller is assistant professor of medical history and the history of science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

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