248 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / 8 halftones
History / African American | Medical / Mental Health | Political History / Civil Rights Studies
The use of race in studies of insanity in the 1840s and 1850s gave rise to politically charged theories on the differential biology and pathologies of brains in whites and Blacks. In Mad with Freedom, Élodie Edwards-Grossi explores the largely unknown social history of these racialized theories on insanity in the segregated South. She unites an institutional history of psychiatric spaces in the South that housed Black patients with an intellectual history of early psychiatric theories that defined the Black body as a locus for specific pathologies. Edwards-Grossi also reveals the subtle, localized techniques of resistance later employed by Black patients to confront medical power. Her work shows the continuous politicization of science and theories on insanity in the context of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South.
Élodie Edwards-Grossi is associate professor of sociology and American studies at IRISSO, Paris Dauphine University, France.
“A work of stunning originality, smart, deeply researched in both primary and secondary sources, and well written and accessible to readers inside and outside the academy.”—Randy J. Sparks, author of Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives across the Atlantic World
“Mad with Freedom is a pathbreaking work that speaks to readers today about the significant intersectionality of race and medicine.”—Catherine Clinton, author of Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom
“This well-crafted study demonstrates that the politics of psychiatry cannot be disentangled from the history of Black freedom struggles.”—Rana A. Hogarth, author of Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840
“Edwards-Grossi smartly crosses disciplinary boundaries in her examination of anti-Blacknesses pervasiveness in psychiatry. This brilliant book should be read by those persons interested in understanding the political legacies of medical racism.”—Deirdre Cooper Owens, author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
“In examining diverse institutions, physicians, and racial theorists across the South, Mad with Freedom provides a temporal and geographic breadth that separates it from previous books on constructions of Black people’s mental health. In short, Edwards-Grossi has written a historiographic touchstone for the study of racism and psychiatry in the United States.”—Christopher D. E. Willoughby, coeditor of Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery
“Edwards-Grossi expands the historiography on anti-Black racism in the US by analyzing the intersection of white supremacy and the evolving field of psychiatry in erecting a supposed biological basis for deviant Black behavior that served to justify slavery and then Jim Crow practices between 1840 and 1940.”—CHOICE
Found an Error? Tell us about it.
