Sign-In
Cart
Mad Fictions: Psychiatry, Disability and the Politics of Mental Distress in African Literature
Hardcover
Series: Liverpool Studies in Health, Disability, Culture & Society, Book 12
Biographies GeneralFiction AnthologiesGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies
ISBN13: 9781836244776
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: Nov 7 2025
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.20
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.
Mad Fictions is the first book to place African literature in conversation with mad studies and disability studies, offering a groundbreaking reassessment of how madness is represented in African fiction. Challenging dominant readings that reduce madness to a metaphor for collective suffering, Femi Eromosele insists that it is both a site of personal distress and a locus for social justice discourse.
The book argues that the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of madness in African literary scholarship stems from the dominance of nationalist frameworks in the production of political legibility. It explores the way African writers situate madness at the intersection of the individual and collective body, alternatively upholding and dissolving the boundaries between selfhood and national belonging. Throughout, it explores topics including:
- Psychiatric power and violence.
- The imbrication of madness and the nation.
- The political conditions for the emergence of a Mad discourse.
- The possibility of narrating a life in the grip of mental distress.
- The importance of Indigenous and psychiatric epistemologies.
Eromosele pushes for an attentiveness to the links between reading practices and sites of exclusion embedded in both culture and politics, a relationship he describes as 'narrative comorbidity'.
Mad Fictions reorients critical discussions toward the lived realities of mental distress, while challenging the nationalist paradigms that have long dominated African literary scholarship.
Cover art: ..deny that! Acrylic on canvas, 2023. Nontokozo Tshabalala, myportfolio.com.
Also from
Eromosele, Femi
Also in
Biographies General
Bluesland: Portraits of Thirteen Major American Blues Masters
Pete Welding (ED.)
Toby Byron (ED.)
Hardcover
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 Bc0-400 AD
Freeman, Charles
Hardcover
Make It a Double: From Wretched to Wondrous: Tales of One Woman's Lifelong Discovery of Whisky
Sackier, Shelley
Hardcover
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Isaacson, Walter
Hardcover
An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents Over Three Centuries
Correia, David
Hardcover
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Cooper, Christian
Hardcover
The Secret Life of the Savoy: Glamour and Intrigue at the World's Most Famous Hotel
Williams, Olivia
Paperback
The Badger: The Life of Bernard Hinault and the Legacy of French Cycling
Fotheringham, William
Paperback
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Womens Political Culture, 1830-1900
Sklar, Kathryn Kish
Paperback
The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
Wittman, Robert K.
Kinney, David
Paperback
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Purnell, Sonia
Hardcover
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Paperback
Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors' Wives
Cordingly, David
Paperback
The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy: A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry
Cherington, Gretchen
Paperback
My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
Dessa Wander
Hardcover
Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
Giuffre, Virginia Roberts
Hardcover
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
Lawson, Jenny
Hardcover
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
Kuehn, Christine
Hardcover
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
Dohrn, Zayd Ayers
Hardcover
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
Fedarko, Kevin
Paperback
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
Colloff, Pamela
Hardcover