{"product_id":"colored-insane-by-diana-martha-louis-9780231212878","title":"Colored Insane","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe nineteenth century in the United States witnessed the end of slavery and the expansion of another form of confinement: the asylum. How did enslaved and free Black people encounter psychiatric institutions? How were notions of mental disability used to reinforce slavery and Jim Crow? And how did Black people express alternative ideas about individual and communal mental health?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDiana Martha Louis explores Black experiences and views of mental disability in the nineteenth century, shedding light on the lives and struggles of the “colored insane.” She demonstrates how psychiatric discourses made Blacks “mad” both by inflicting real psychological harm within asylums, plantations, jails, and society writ large and by constructing mental disorders according to prevailing notions of race, class, gender, and sanity. Yet even as white medical professionals pathologized the enslaved as suffering from “drapetomania” (runaway slave syndrome), portrayed slavery as beneficial to Black mental health, or cast African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices as signs of madness, Black people developed their own complex perspectives on mental disability.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLouis considers the lives and writings of Black intellectuals and cultural figures including James McCune Smith, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as a group of Black women who were incarcerated in Georgia Lunatic Asylum, showing how mental disability was entangled with questions of freedom, spirituality, and self-determination. Combining literary and historical analysis, \u003ci\u003eColored Insane\u003c\/i\u003e is a rich account of nineteenth-century Black Americans’ experiences of mental illness and wellness.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46789659001068,"sku":"9780231212878","price":121.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/dc147ce1eac6251079512d2ad5e1ca67.jpg?v=1757060364","url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/products\/colored-insane-by-diana-martha-louis-9780231212878","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}