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| Title: | Madness and Colonialism, Colonialism as Madness: Re-Reading Fanon. Colonial Discourse and the Psychopathology of Colonialism |
| Author: | Vaughan, Megan |
| Year: | 1993 |
| Periodical: | Paideuma |
| Volume: | 39 |
| Pages: | 45-55 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Africa |
| Subjects: | psychological research psychology racism colonialism History and Exploration |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/40341656 |
| Abstract: | In 'Black skins, white masks' (1986; first published 1952), F. Fanon produced an account of the psychological effects of colonialism on colonizer and colonized in Africa. The work of Fanon has recently been reevaluated and elevated to the position of a 'global theory' by literary theorists. This paper looks at the reasons for this reevaluation and discusses its relevance to the writing of colonial history. The author argues that central to Fanon's account is the notion that colonialism is itself psychopathological. It is a process in which the formation of subjectivity, for both the colonizer and colonized, becomes distorted. In the literature of colonial psychiatry and psychology, it was thought that stepping over the boundaries of colonial culture (based on class, gender, and race), made Africans mad, for they lost their 'real' identities. The remainder of the paper examines the ways in which this idea was reformulated in the late colonial period in studies of African psychology, particularly the psychology of 'race', and asks how far these studies reveal a colonial subjectivity which differs from that described by Fanon. Special attention is paid to the ideas published by H. Powdermaker in 1956 on the social attitudes of school-going teenagers living in the industrial Copperbelt area of Northern Rhodesia. Bibliogr., notes, ref. |
