Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake by Weisenfeld, Judith
Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake by Weisenfeld, Judith

Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake

How white psychiatrists pathologized African American religions In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans...
$122.91 SGD
$122.91 SGD
SKU: 9781479829781
Product Type: Books
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Author: Judith Weisenfeld
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $122.91
Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake by Weisenfeld, Judith

Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake

$122.91
Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake by Weisenfeld, Judith

Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake

$122.91
Author: Judith Weisenfeld
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Description

How white psychiatrists pathologized African American religions

In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists listed "religious excitement" among the most frequent causes of insanity for Black patients. At the same time, American popular culture and political discourse framed African American modes of spiritual power as fetishism and superstition, cast embodied worship as excessive or fanatical, and labeled new religious movements "cults," unworthy of respect.

As Judith Weisenfeld argues in Black Religion in the Madhouse, psychiatrists' notions of race and religion became inextricably intertwined in the decades after the end of slavery and into the twentieth century, and had profound impacts on the diagnosis, care, and treatment of Black patients. This book charts how racialized medical understandings of mental normalcy pathologized a range of Black religious beliefs, spiritual sensibilities, practices, and social organizations and framed them as manifestations of innate racial traits. Importantly, these characterizations were marshaled to help to limit the possibilities for Black self-determination, with white psychiatrists' theories about African American religion and mental health being used to promote claims of Black people's unfitness for freedom.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Black Religion in the Madhouse is the first book to expose how racist views of Black religion in slavery's wake shaped the rise of psychiatry as an established and powerful profession.

Author: Judith Weisenfeld
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 04/29/2025
Pages: 312
Binding Type: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781479829781

About the Author
Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University and author, most recently, of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration.
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