Colonial Peripheries Research Articles

Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (review)

Reviewed by: Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa Julie Parle Richard C. Keller. Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xi + 294 pp. Ill. $70.00, £44.50 (cloth, ISBN-10: 0-226-42972-5; ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42972-4), $25.00, £16.00 (paperbound, ISBN-10: 0-226-42973-3; ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42973-1). There are many reasons why Richard C. Keller’s Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa is an important book: it adds considerably to our knowledge of the history of psychiatry in Africa through to the present; it does likewise for our understanding of the importance of North Africa in the history of psychiatry; and it is a brave book that recognizes the many complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions that such histories should compel us to confront. It is also a timely one that has much to say about the dangerous discourses around the relationship between Islam and irrationality that reverberate around the world today. Keller shows that Orientalism and discourses about “the Other” were powerful framers of supposedly objective science and medicine, including psychiatric knowledge and institutions, in the Maghreb. He makes it clear that from its arrival in North Africa in the late 1800s, and more especially through the work of the “Algiers School” of Antoine Porot and his protégés, which was influential in the interwar period, colonial psychiatry directly contributed to stereotypes of North Africans as “born slackers, born liars, born robbers, and born criminals.”1 According [End Page 746] to such “knowledge,” the normal North African Muslim represented a “mixture of insanities in varying doses.”2 This knowledge had material consequences: “the new discipline of ethnopsychiatry informed educational and professional discrimination against Muslims, shaped discourse about immigration into France, and provided the essential background for the French army’s psychological warfare programs during the Algerian struggle for independence” (p. 7). The significance of the study is far wider than the study of North Africa, however, as Keller challenges the traditional narrative of the relationship between metropole and colonial peripheries. While in France itself, psychiatric theory and practice stultified, the supposedly blank canvas of the Maghreb gave psychiatrists license to experiment and to innovate. “In the twentieth century, colonial psychiatrists honed their discipline’s cutting edge by implementing these technologies at least contemporaneously with—and in many cases far earlier than—their metropolitan colleagues . . .” (p. 6). Moreover, Keller powerfully argues that the history of the discipline is more complicated than its critics, most notably Frantz Fanon, have hitherto suggested and that “colonial psychiatry was more than a system for the defense of settler prejudices. At different periods, . . . the field was less a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism than it was a tool for the emancipation of the colonized, an innovative branch of social and medical science, an uncomprehending therapeutic system, a discipline in crisis, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship” (p. 4). It is this ambiguity that lies at the heart of the book and that is explored through analysis of institutional practices in mental hospitals and mental health services and in medical writings; through a provocative reading of patient experiences and the meanings of madness as resistance; via literary, filmic, and documentary representations of madness as a metaphor; and through an illuminating and important concluding chapter that introduces the reader to the legacy of colonial psychiatry for France as well as for the Maghreb. I close with two observations. First, Colonial Madness ultimately shows that while there is no “Grand Narrative” of psychiatry in Africa or elsewhere, there is also a disturbing common thread in its institutional practices no matter how utopian its originators or sincere its practitioners. As Keller notes of Blida Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria today: “The hospital has become what its founders and caretakers, including Antoine Porot, Frantz Fanon, and Mahfoud Boucebci, had most hoped to avoid: a warehouse of madness that recalls the asylums of the late nineteenth century rather than a vestige of colonial investment and a sign of a progressive outlook on psychopathology” (p. 225–26). This is a troubling but challenging insight for...

Размышления о “Центральной Азии в составе Российской империи”

SUMMARY: In his essay, Sergei Abashin shares reflections on the volume Central Asia within the Russian Empire . He compares this volume with other volumes published in the series Borderlands of the Russian Empire . Abashin observes that the task of writing histories of different regions of the Russian Empire according to a single plan has failed. The author contends that attempts made in the series to overcome the influence of national narratives were unsuccessful. Proof that national narratives have crept into a new analytical framework is found in the fact that the volume was eventually titled Central Asia , despite the fact that the region had never constituted geographic or administrative unit prior to the twentieth century. Moreover, Abashin contends that putting all the borderlands of the Russian Empire into a single analytical framework conceals imperial diversity and inequitable relations between different borderlands and the imperial center. Though Central Asia briefly fascinated Dostoevsky and other champions of mission civilisatrice , it never occupied a place in governance and symbolic geography of imperial mindscape similar to that of the Caucasus. At the same time, the efforts undertaken in the series to overcome the inertia of past imperial narratives, with their concomitant focus on the imperial center, led to a paradoxical situation in which the center did not merit a separate volume. Still, study of the history of diverse borderlands evokes the image of the center and judging by the various volumes of the series, the imperial center was perceived differently in different borderlands. Reflecting on the volume dedicated to Central Asia, Abashin observes that the period of entry (conquest and incorporation) of new territories into the Empire receives more scholarly attention than periods of ruling routine. This creates an imbalance in the historical analysis of colonialism and pushes historians to rely on the visionary designs of a short heroic period, thus missing the importance of the dissipation of these visions during the longer period of imperial routine. Abashin also describes other imbalances apparent in historical reconstructions of the steppe region and Turkestan, both of which (contrary to historical evidence) are usually taken together and thought of as homogenous colonial peripheries. In conclusion, Abashin defends the view of the steppe region and Turkestan as a peculiar borderland in the Russian Empire, based on a number of historical factors. More to the point, Abashin reminds the reader that the region of Central Asia appears to be a peculiar part of the Russian Empire because its study is contested between two hardly compatible traditions: historiography (or studies of Russian history) and Oriental Studies.

Babylon, Christianity, and Republicanism in New World Slave Societies

Babylon, Christianity, and Republicanism in New World Slave Societies María Elena Díaz (bio) A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. By Laurent Dubois . (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 466. $55.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.) Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. By Laurent Dubois . (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. 384. $29.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.) The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil. By Laura de Mello e Souza . Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty . (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Pp. 374. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.) Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680. By Stuart B. Schwartz . (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 368. $59.95 cloth, $22.50 paper.) Slavery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias. By Margaret M. Olsen . (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Pp. 208. $59.95 cloth.) Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835. By Aline Helg . (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 384. $59.95 cloth, $22.50 paper.) The expansion of Europe in the fifteenth century, the establishment of colonies in the New World and generally speaking, the emergence of a dynamic Atlantic region produced, for better or worse, an unprecedented circulation of peoples, commodities, discourses, and practices across that ocean. Atlantic racial slavery was one sordid aspect of all that oceanic activity. That forced migration of millions of captive people entailed irrevocable transformations for all those involved in the crossing, for the new societies they entered, and probably for the communities they left behind forever. Research on differing aspects of Atlantic racial slavery [End Page 265] and on the new lives, identities, and communities that people of African descent constructed in New World colonial and postcolonial societies has constituted one of the fastest-growing areas in Latin American history in the last three decades, but particularly in the last ten to fifteen years. Although probably more work has been recently coming out on the postcolonial modern period, the Latin American colonial field has produced its share of solid research as the study of slavery moves out of the plantation loci (the Babylon of the title) into new sites of life and work (urban areas, military frontiers, mines, maroon and corporate communities, lay brotherhoods) and also into new geographical regions. There is not only a new interest in colonial peripheries and frontiers such as those in Colombia, Ecuador, eastern Cuba, and Florida but magnet regions such as Mexico, which are usually construed as mestizo or Indian, are also increasingly the focus of research on enslaved and free people of African descent (albeit there is no example of such work in this group of books). This expanding interest is also benefiting from the ever wider academic frameworks of Atlantic history and African diasporic studies, as well as from extra-academic movements and mobilizations in some Latin American regions (Colombia and Brazil in particular). This new wave of research is still developing its own specialized historiography, but future work on Latin America may soon turn to more hybrid social and racial formations and to intersections and comparisons with other groups, particularly Indians and castas. When appropriate, I will indicate potential moves in that comparative direction as suggested by some of the work reviewed here. The specific set of books under review in this essay represents a relatively wide range of themes, approaches and lines of research within this area of work in colonial historiography. The meaning of the disparate triad in this essay's title: "Babylon,""Christianity," and "Republicanism," will become clearer as the works are discussed. These books explore the limits and outcomes of a range of expanding projects and discourses that attempted to reconstitute subjects of African descent in various Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonial Atlantic locations, first as slaves, commodities, and laborers; as enslaved black, Christianized subjects; and later at the dawn of the old (colonial) regimes as free Republican citizens. Stuart Schwartz' anthology Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 is a...

The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire

This article explores the Spanish crown's efforts to study, cultivate, and transplant spices from the East Indies to the West Indies and then to Spain in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Beginning with Christopher Columbus's first observations of New World flora, the Spanish crown sought out spices to cultivate for economic gain. Although they were ultimately unsuccessful in efforts to generate a large-scale spice trade, colonial officials and local entrepreneurs participated in a coordinated program of empirical information gathering and botanical experimentation that is itself of historical significance. For the empirical and experimental—"scientific"—methods they represented serve to challenge and enhance current understanding of several historiographical themes: the origins of economic botany and the Scientific Revolution more generally, the role of human agency in the Columbian exchange, and the dissemination of knowledge from imperial centers to colonial peripheries.

Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820

Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820

Portuguese, French and British discourses on colonial education: Church–State relations, school expansion and missionary competition in Africa, 1890–1930

This article draws a comparison between the Portuguese in relation to British and French discourses on overseas educational policies at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century until the 1930s. It focuses on three main colonial educational dynamics: school expansion (comparing the public and private sectors); State–Church relations (comparing these relationships at the European and colonial levels); and missionary competition (comparing Catholic with Protestant strategies towards educational incorporation). Colonial discourse is seen here as a power‐knowledge discourse aimed at constructing the colonial subjects as individuals, enabling them to imagine themselves as belonging to a particular cultural polity. The article intends to show how cross‐national discourses on education affect the principles on which theories of schooling are built and the ways in which they influence the first attempts to systematize pedagogical and school models in the colonial peripheries. On the other hand, it tries to understand, within government technologies of domination, the conflicting views, negotiations and ambiguities between global policy formulation and local school system implementation. In this sense, the author sought to analyse the different ways in which concepts such as ‘assimilation’, ‘civilizing mission’, ‘adapted education’, and ‘learning by doing’ were mobilized and appropriated into the colonial education discourses in order to legitimize particular governmental strategies. Two main ideas run through the text: the first attempts to demonstrate the existence of discontinuities between official educational ideologies at home and local system and school expansion strategies in the colonies. The second claims that educational borrowing from other colonies at the Empires' peripheries was, more often that is thought, a crucial feature of colonial educational discourse.

Colonial Linguistics

▪ Abstract Academic knowledge of human linguistic diversity owes much to descriptions written, over four centuries ago, under the aegis of European colonial regimes around the world. This comparative review considers a small part of that body of linguistic descriptive work relative to its conditions of production: authorial interests that animated such writings, ideological and institutional milieux that enabled and shaped them, and the authoritative character they took on as natural symbols of colonial difference. European technologies of literacy enabled missionary and nonmissionary linguistic work that resulted in representations of languages as powerful icons of spiritual, territorial, and historical hierarchies that emerged in colonial societies. As descriptions of languages traveled from exotic colonial peripheries to European metropoles, they came under the purview of comparative philology. This disciplinary precursor to modern linguistics helped to legitimize colonial linguistic projects and legislate colonial difference on a global scale.