Unit information: Madness and Empire in 2012/13

Unit name	Madness and Empire
Unit code	HISTM0004
Credit points	20
Level of study	M/7
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12)
Unit director	Dr. Cervantes
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None
Co-requisites	None
School/department	Department of History (Historical Studies)
Faculty	Faculty of Arts

Description including Unit Aims

Psychiatry emerged as an institutionalised profession in Europe during the nineteenth century at the same time as the European empires went through their greatest spell of expansion and consolidation. Colonial territories swelled in tandem with the populations of metropolitan asylums. In this course we will explore the history of psychiatry in Empire through to decolonisation, examining how psychiatric discourses interacted with colonial notions of race and gender. We will study how the insane were diagnosed and treated across the colonial world, and the apparent threats to the sanity of Europeans posed by these alien environments. Using primary documents we will think about whether we can recover the voices of the insane in our histories. But we will also look beyond the colonial uses of psychiatry by considering the ways in which the related disciplines of psychoanalysis and psychology have informed critiques of imperialism, asking whether Western mental sciences can provide useful concepts for understanding colonial history.

The unit aims:

• To explore the history of madness in colonial polities
• To place students in direct contact with the current research interests of the academic tutor and to enable them to explore the issues surrounding the state of research in the field.
• To develop students’ ability to work with primary sources relating to this field
• To develop students’ abilities to integrate primary source material into a wider historical analysis
• To develop students’ ability to learn independently within a small-group context.

Intended Learning Outcomes

By the end of the unit students should have:

• an understanding of the history of madness in colonial polities
• improved their ability to scrutinise and treat critically historical documents.
• become more adept at contributing to and learning from a small-group environment.

Teaching Information

10 x 1.5 hour seminars

Assessment Information

5000 word summative essay

Reading and References

• Sloane Mahone and Megan Vaughan (eds) Psychiatry and Empire.
• Richard Keller, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa.
• Jonathan Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria.
• Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and ‘the African Mind’.
• Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj: The European Insane in British India 1800-1858.
• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.