Chienyn Chi, Madness, Psychiatry, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) xvii + 143 pp. £109.99 Hb. £89.99 ebook. ISBN: 978-3-031-59891-3
Chienyn Chi’s work is a bold attempt to decolonize psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourse by revealing how theories of madness are deeply entangled in imperial histories and power structures. Chi argues that psychological and scientific study of the mind has served both colonizing and decolonizing purposes, but her focus lies on exposing how psychiatry and psychoanalysis functioned as imperial tools. She calls for a new language; one that does not obscure the workings of Empire but rather highlights them across disciplines, literary texts, and cultures.
At the heart of Chi’s method is ‘Crossing’, a conceptual and analytical approach that simultaneously traverses disciplinary, cultural, historical and political boundaries. These crossings are essential to decolonizing not only global structures but also our imaginations. She critiques the dominance of Western psychoanalytic frameworks that define madness through culturally specific, often colonial lenses, calling instead for a recognition of context: how madness is constructed and interpreted differently across cultures and historical moments.
Chi begins with an in-depth analysis of Aimé Césaire’s work, particularly his critique of the French Octave Mannoni. Drawing on Discourse on Colonialism, she explores how psychoanalytic language can obscure contexts of oppression and perpetuate imperial narratives. Mannoni’s theories, she argues, pathologize the colonized subject as inherently damaged and in need of psychoanalytic ‘cure’- a cure rooted in imperialist assumptions. Chi critiques the modern proliferation of such ideas through terms like ‘trigger’ and ‘trauma’ in mainstream media, arguing that even seemingly therapeutic language can reproduce empire’s logic under the guise of healing. Rather than dismissing European Enlightenment thought entirely, Chi calls for its deconstruction – specifically, the interrogation of its foundational assumptions and its complicity in colonial projects. She echoes Césaire’s denunciation of Cartesian rationalism and argues that Western reason, under Empire, becomes a mechanism for making domination appear natural. In this sense, the Enlightenment must be recontextualized within the full weight of its imperial legacy.
Chapter two turns to Chinese literature, specifically Lu Xun’s A Madman’s Diary, to explore madness as a site of resistance. Here, Chi introduces the concept of ‘Hengzhan’, literally ‘standing sideways’, a metaphor for a defiant stance against both Chinese tradition and Western imperialism. She argues that decolonization in China requires resisting essentialist notions of both ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Westernness’. Lu Xun’s work serves as a dual critique of how literature can destabilize binary narratives of tradition versus progress. Hengzhan then becomes a powerful emblem for non-conformity, one that critiques imperialism not only from without but also from within.
In chapter three, Chi challenges the conventional binary that separates the colony from the city. Drawing on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Tangled Forest, she shows how colonial metropolitan spaces are mutually constitutive, not oppositional. Woolf’s depiction of psychiatry particularly through the character of Sir William, who uses terms like ‘proportion’ and ‘conversion’ demonstrates how empirical language dehumanizes and isolates the patient. Chi argues that such language reflects and reinforces Empire’s logic that normalizes dominance under the banner of mental health. By deconstructing the myth that the city is the site of reason and civilization, and the colony the domain of chaos, she shows how both spaces co-produce each other through imperial discourse. Citing Césaire again, Chi identifies the real-world consequences of Empire that blur the lines between colony and city: decivilization, proletarization and the boomerang effect. These processes demonstrate how colonial violence returns to haunt the metropole, suggesting that imperial structures are not limited by geography but embedded in global modernity itself. Empire’s reach, therefore, extends through language, diagnostics and effective relationships, whether between doctor and patient or colonizer and colonized.
The final chapter builds a case for a decolonial psychoanalysis. Chi argues that adopting Western psychotheories as universal frameworks for analyzing Global South cultures, texts, or communities merely extends the civilizing mission of Empire. She challenges the presumed neutrality of psychoanalysis, asserting that it is historically and culturally situated, often serving as an instrument of colonial classification and control. To develop an alternate, Chi draws on Freud’s The Uncanny, reinterpreting the term ‘native’ as a colonial construct that provokes unease precisely because it calls forth repressed imperial traumas. She advocates for a psychoanalysis that is historically grounded, attentive to positionality, and culturally responsive – what she calls decolonial psychoanalysis. This revised approach would address the ‘nervous conditions’ of the formerly colonized, conditions generated by centuries of subjugation, rather than diagnosing them through imperial norms of rationality or pathology.
Although Chi’s book deals with psychoanalysis, which can be hard to navigate, she guides the reader’s journey with interesting chapters, chapter titles and familiar notions of scholars such as Freud, Césaire, Woolf and Xun, that break the book into manageable pieces, offer a roadmap and echo the themes and motifs in the book. Chi’s book invites us to rethink our understanding of relationships, power structures and (language) traditions from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis, psychology or psychiatry. Her work teaches us that madness is not universal, apolitical or acultural but contextual and culturally constructed/shaped often by colonial histories. In order to heal and understand more justly, we must decolonize the languages and disciplines that define sanity, identity, civilization, and knowledge – across psychiatry, literature, and beyond. And this requires crossing disciplinary, cultural and historical boundaries, and inventing new vocabularies that confront, rather than conceal, the legacy of Empire. Overall, Chi’s work teaches us that decolonial psychoanalysis would consider history, positionality and cultural difference, rather than applying Western norms universally.
Temitope Dorcas Adetoyese, University of Texas at Austin
