Megan Vaughan writes:

In his account of the history of psychiatry in French colonial North Africa, Richard Keller argues that the psychiatric profession was particularly influential in discussions about the ‘civilising’ mission of French colonialism and the meaning of difference for Republican citizenship. He is at pains to demonstrate that psychiatry in this particular colonial setting was innovative, ambitious, experimental and, in its own way, progressive. But as the story descends into violence, it appears more and more that the lasting legacy of colonial psychiatry was to bring ‘a new degree of sophistication to colonial racism’. Keller wants to complicate an account which too often reiterates a ‘black legend’ of racism and confinement, but some readers might conclude that Fanon was right: there was a dehumanising logic to colonialism, or to settler colonialism at least, and the sciences of the mind played an important role in legitimating it.

(LRB 31 July 2008)

Chicago | hardback 294 pp. |ISBN: 9780226429731