Surfacing Up

Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908-1968

Lynette A. Jackson

 

Synopsis

Focusing on the history of the Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum (renamed a mental hospital after 1933), situated near Bulawayo in the former Southern Rhodesia, Surfacing Up explores the social, cultural, and political history of the colony that became Zimbabwe after gaining its independence in 1980. The phrase "surfacing up" was drawn from a conversation Lynette A. Jackson had with a psychiatric nurse who used the concept to explain what brought African potential patients into the psychiatric system. Jackson uses Ingutsheni as a reference point for the struggle to "domesticate" Africa and its citizens after conquest.

Review

[Jackson's] Surfacing Up carries on the project of exposing what Franz Fanon called the 'pathology of colonialism.' ― Clapperton Mavhunga, MIT

Author

Lynette Jackson is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.