Mad Fictions: Psychiatry, Disability and the Politics of Mental Distress in African Literature - Hardcover

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.