Otherness and the Fragmented Self: Representations of madness in Selected Works of African Fiction

Description

Madness has been medicalized by many scholars across disciplines, particularly medicine and psychiatry. Max Byrd observes that the intensity of the Augustan revulsion was too great not “to suggest to us as its cause a deep seated barely controlled terror.” This book rejects individual and medical causes of madness and extends Roberts’ and Laing’s argument that the fragmented self and madness arise from culture rather than personal weaknesses of characters. Whereas most literary scholarship analyzes the nexus between single strands of othering (political or gender) and limited strains of madness, this study investigates diverse strands of otherness including self, ethnic, age, class, racial and their connection to many strains of the fragmented self and insanity such as dissociation, the unembodied self, schizophrenia, social deviance, phantasy and religious fanaticism. Using psychological theories, the study analyses diverse strains of the fragmented self and madness and interrogates their connection to strands of otherness in Hisham Matar’s The Return, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, Nuruddin Farah’s Close Sesame and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North.