Despite emancipation from the evils of enslavement in 1838, most people of African origin in the British West Indian colonies continued to suffer serious material deprivation and racial oppression. This book examines the management and treatment of those who became insane, in the period until the Great War.

Despite emancipation from the evils of enslavement in 1838, most people of African origin in the British West Indian colonies continued to suffer serious material deprivation and racial oppression. This book examines the management and treatment of those who became insane, in the period until the Great War.

In Colonizing Madness Jacqueline Leckie tells a forgotten story of silence, suffering, and transgressions in the colonial Pacific. It offers new insights into a history of Fiji by entering the Pacific Islands’ most enduring psychiatric institution—St Giles Psychiatric Hospital—established as Fiji’s Public Lunatic Asylum in 1884. Her nuanced study reveals a microcosm of Fiji’s indigenous, migrant, and colonial communities and examines how individuals and communities lived with the label of madness in an ethnically complex island society. Tracking longitudinal change from the 1880s to the present in the construction and treatment of mental disorder in Fiji, the book emphasizes the colonization of madness across and within the divides of culture, ethnicity, religion, gender, economics, and power. Colonization of madness in Fiji was forged by the entanglement of colonial institutions and cultures that reflected tensions and prejudices within homes, villages, workplaces, and churches. Mental despair was equally an outcome of the destruction and displacement wrought by migration and colonialism. Madness was further cast within the wider world of colonial psychiatry, Western biomedicine, and asylum building. One of the chapters explores medical discourse and diagnoses within colonial worlds and practices. The “community within” the asylum is a feature in Leckie’s study, with attention to patient agency to show how those labeled insane resisted diagnoses of their minds, confinement, and constraints—ranging from straitjackets to electric shock treatments to drug therapies. She argues that madness in colonial Fiji reflects dynamics between the asylum and the community, and that “reading” asylum archives sheds new light on race/ethnicity, gender, and power in colonial Fiji. Exploring the meaning of madness in Fiji, the author does not shy away from asking controversial questions about how Pacific cultures define normality and abnormality and also how communities respond. Carefully researched and clearly written, Colonizing Madness offers an engaging narrative, a superb example of an intersectional history with a broad appeal to understanding global developments in mental health. Her theses address the contradictions of current efforts to discard the asylum model and to make mental health a reality for all in postcolonial societies.

Racism is ever present today, and it has become common now to refer to a variety of racisms, from biological to cultural, colour-blind, and structural racisms. Ali Rattansi explores the history of racism and illuminates contemporary issues in this controversial subject, from intersectionality to cultural racism, to the debate over whiteness.

Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.

First published in 1937, "Black Hamlet" is a chronicle of physician Wulf Sachs' experiences psychoanalysing a man from a Johannesburg slum for two-and-a-half years. Originally an attempt to learn whether psychoanalysis was applicable across different cultures, Sachs' findings became so much more. "Black Hamlet" is a narrative reconstruction of one black South African's life as two worlds collide. Critically acclaimed when first published, this fascinating book will appeal to those with an interest in psychology and psychoanalysis, and it is not to be missed by collectors of related literature. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in a modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork.

This book represents the first systematic study of the certification of lunacy in the British Empire. Considering a variety of legal, archival, and published sources, it traces the origins and dissemination of a peculiar method for determining mental unsoundness defined as the ‘Victorian system’. Shaped by the dynamics surrounding the clandestine committal of wealthy Londoners in private madhouses, this system featured three distinctive tenets: standardized forms, independent medical examinations, and written facts of insanity. Despite their complexity, Victorian certificates achieved a remarkable success. Not only did they survive in the UK for more than a century, but they also served as a model for the development of mental health laws around the world. By the start of the Second World War, more than seventy colonial and non-colonial jurisdictions adopted the Victorian formula for making lunacy official with some countries still relying on it to this very day. Using case studies from Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific, this book charts the temporal and geographical trajectory of an imperial technology used to determine a person’s destiny. Shifting the focus from metropolitan policies to colonial dynamics, and from macro developments to micro histories, it explores the perspectives of families, doctors, and public officials as they began to deal with the delicate business of certification. This book will be of interest to scholars working on mental health policy, the history of medicine, disability studies, and the British Empire.