Madness in Con-Texts : Historical, Poetic and Artistic Narratives

Madness in Con-Text explores a series of discourses and counter discourses on madness produced in a wide range of historical, cultural and geographical contexts. A common thread in this volume relates to madness narratives, providing specific readings of written and/or unwritten texts, from archival research of 17th Century legal documents entailing the coexistence of different interpretations of insanity, to the analysis of old Afro-Caribbean proverbs, songs and folklore to explore political resistance of those labelled as 'mad' in a context of slavery, the exploration of Anorexia as an illness that acts out the paradoxes of femininity, exposing gender practices in the present, the analysis of auto-biographic narratives of madness, introducing the notion of 'psychopathographies' and observing the therapeutic value of gendered madness narratives, the exploration of visual narratives in film and theatre, the use of multimedia installation art as a creative tool towards an understanding of the subjective experience of psychosis, and an exploration of the inaccessible world of schizophrenia, through an analysis of its silent signs. The chapters compiled in this volume illustrate the complexity of madness as a human, historical, social, political and cultural phenomenon, and the resulting palimpsest must be considered within the different spheres, perspectives and contexts that constitute it.