African Pharmakon

“African Pharmakon offers a deep and powerful rethinking of West African mental health from the birth of the Black Atlantic to the present. Quarshie’s novel analytic, the mind politic, is an absolutely precious gift.” * Julie Livingston, New York University *“In this compelling and historically rich account, Quarshie shows how the West African ‘pharmakon’ became entangled with—or even codified into—colonial and postcolonial law, migration policy, and psychiatric care.” * Claire Wendland, University of Wisconsin–Madison *“With African Pharmakon, Quarshie greatly expands the field of the history of madness. He makes it diasporic, he crosses historical time periods, and he calls us to fundamentally rethink histories of confinement and capture in new and exciting ways.” * Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, University of Texas at Austin *

Nana Osei Quarshie is assistant professor in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, with affiliations in the Departments of Anthropology and Religious Studies and the Yale School of Medicine.