Élodie EDWARDS-GROSSI, Mad with Freedom, The Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity and Civil Rights in the US South – 1840-1940

Élodie EDWARDS-GROSSI, Mad with Freedom, The Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity and Civil Rights in the US South – 1840-1940, Louisiana State: University Press, 2023, 228p. ISBN-10 : 0807177741; ISBN-13 : 978-0807177747

In her book Mad with Freedom, The Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity and Civil Rights in the US South – 1840-1940, published in 2023 by Louisiana State University Press, Elodie Edwards-Grossi offers us an in-depth study of the treatment of the insanity of African Americans through the establishment of the first psychiatric institutions in the United States which received them. The book focuses on three southern states: North Carolina, Louisiana and Virginia. Right from the introduction, the author places her historical work in the context of the African American experience. Throughout the five chapters, the author highlights the links woven between the question of racial integration, legislation and the right to vote granted to African Americans during Reconstruction, resistance to African American voting power, and the asylum understood as an institution of social protection. She demonstrates the racialization of the psychiatric institution in the South, through focusing on its past, which is an important historical element for understanding the present and essential for studying American society today. This study sheds light on the persistence of a racialized practice (including discrimination, differentiation and racism) of medicine in the U.S. today with neo-liberal policies substituting police repression and incarceration for lack of investment and health care structures for the poor and populations of color, in particular black ones.

The chapters follow a chronological and thematic order. The first chapter traces the theories of ‘sane slaves’ between 1800 and 1860. Chapter two looks at welfare institutions, the 1840 census of insanity statistics in the South and North, and their exploitation. Chapter three deals with the founding of psychiatric institutions for blacks in the South between 1860 and 1880, and explains how physical agricultural labor was seen as the ideal treatment by doctors for African American inmates who were seen as lazy and idle, thereby creating free (or stolen) African American labor. The fourth chapter looks at the period 1870-1940 and questions of race and treatment in asylums and hospitals. Finally, chapter five explains the racial differentiation of epidemiology and pathology between 1880 and 1940.

This 228-page book includes numerous black-and-white archive photographs that provide useful illustrations to the text. The eight-page index and 25-page bibliography reflect the use of a wide variety of sources. The author takes care to define the main concepts and terms, and clarifies the use of a certain terminology. Written in academic English, this study will be of interest to students, researchers and specialists in American studies on African Americans, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, segregation, psychiatry and medicine. The book will be particularly useful for LEA students who, although they may not be specialists, need to understand the historical, political, economic and social context of the countries and populations they may later have to consider in their professional dealings.

The originality of this work lies in its focus on the postbellum period, after the abolition of slavery, which remains far less explored than the antebellum period of slavery. It sheds light on the large-scale segregated psychiatric institutionalization of African Americans in the South after Reconstruction, the relationship between African American patients and white doctors, the identification of specific pathologies attributed to African Americans distinct from those attributed to whites, and the justification for segregation – even within asylums. In this way, it highlights the political aspect of psychiatric medicine in the system of white supremacy in the American South.

Élodie Edwards-Grossi is associate professor in American studies and in sociology at IRISSO, Paris Dauphine University. In 2021, she had already published Bad Brains: La psychiatrie et la lutte des Noirs américains pour la justice raciale, XXe-XXIe siècles[1], as well as two articles (2020, 2021) and a chapter entitled “Médicaliser la folle Émancipation, soigner la folie noire ? Le contexte d’ouverture du Central Lunatic State Asylum for Colored Insane en question”[2]. The present work sheds new and much-needed light on an important aspect of American history and its relationship to the racial question.

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NOTES

[1] Élodie EDWARDS-GROSSI, Bad Brains: la psychiatrie et la lutte des Noirs américains pour la justice raciale, XXe-XXIe siècles, Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021.

[2] In Michel PRUM (ed), Imaginaire racial et oppositions identitaires (aire anglophone), ed. Michel Prum, Paris : L’Harmattan, 2016, pp. 237-249.

Université de Bretagne Occidentale, HCTI (UR 4249),

molly.chatalic @ univ-brest.fr