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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...