Madness, Psychiatry, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature

Madness, Psychiatry, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature provides a comparatist interrogation of empire through archives of history, science, and literature. The book analyzes Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism to shed light on Césaire’s critique of psychological and medical discourses of the colonized’s mind. The book argues that the discourse of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis has erased the context of power in global histories of empire. Through the book’s chapters, Chi analyzes Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary,” Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions to assert that the misapprehension of madness should not automatically be accepted as the history of an isolated Western culture but rather that of the history of imperialism—a globalizing process that silences alternative cultural conceptions of the mind, of madness, and of behavior, as well as different interpretations of madness. Chienyn Chi received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, and is working on her second book, The Colony and The City.