Abstract
"My principal concern since first encountering this incident has been with this relationship between madness, race, and freedom in the post-emancipation era. Of course imperial officials, traders, and colonists had been trucking in discourses about the wild and crazed nature of Africans and their descendants well before the 19th century. They had in fact filled no shortage of books with these kinds of claims since at least the 16th century, when shipments of black flesh to the America’s grew into a full sail business and profiteers felt the need to offer more than one justification for perfecting the production of inhumanity. Still there was something qualitatively different about the ways in which blackness and madness were being related to each other and being experienced by people of African descent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, something different that couldn’t be reduced to the fact that madness had become a professionalized discourse of medicine and surveillance."