Colonial Madness Psychiatry In French North Afirca Richard C Keller by Richard C. Keller 9780226429724, 9780226429731, 0226429725, 0226429733 instant download after payment.

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.