Jaleel Mashaul Plummer is a Joint Ph.D. Candidate in the Medical Anthropology program with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory. His dissertation, titled “The Noose of Existence: Blackness, Madness, & the Aftermath of Colonialism,” focuses largely on black Caribbean experiences with madness in London, England and Kingston, Jamaica. Drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork in community clinics and day centers, “The Noose of Existence” argues that black Caribbean experiences of madness delimit psychiatric knowledge and pose the question of what it means to be cured and free in the contemporary period.
When black Caribbeans are detained in acute psychiatric wards, psychiatric treatment often involves the use of forced restraints administered by psychiatric personnel and the police. Jaleel argues that when black patients are involved, the act of listening to the mad is a dying art. Psychiatry’s attempt to care for black patients is often through the violent acts it enforces. Under the guise of safety, coercive measures that can kill black patients or exacerbate their illnesses are understood as a necessary means to “cure” them. This paradox of a cure that kills dates to the founding of Caribbean colonial asylums that perceived enslaved and recently freed black people as “outrageously violent” and incurable, thus were interned indefinitely. The violence of psychiatric treatment in London and Kingston today is part of a larger network of factors that render the madness experienced by black Caribbeans sociogenic. These factors include but are not limited to the persistent psychical impacts of slavery and colonialism, racial capitalism, psychiatry’s deployment of anti-black stereotypes, and the hyper-policing of black Caribbeans and their political and spiritual practices. The sociogeny of black Caribbean madness is symptomatic of what he calls “the aftermath of colonialism”.
Drawing from black studies, psychoanalysis, psychological anthropology, African diasporic spiritual practices, and aesthetics, Jaleel engages with the psychic lives of his black Caribbean interlocutors to determine the political and ethical implications of what is to be done in the meantime. A time in which the absolute overthrow of colonialism remains to be actualized and anti-blackness shapes notions of cure and freedom in the so-called postcolonial present.
