Peter Barham, Outrageous Reason: Madness and Race in Britain and Empire, 1780-2020 (Monmouth: PCCS Books, 2023), 248pp, £21.50, softcover.
by Michael Romyn
In July 1981, Winston Rose, a 27-year-old father of two was choked to death by police officers in a neighbour’s back garden in Leyton, east London. Concerned for her husband during a period of poor mental health, Rose’s wife, Thora, had sought the advice of the social services, setting in motion a series of destructive actions by a range of state agents, including his GP, psychiatrists, and finally the police: 11 officers in total, some carrying riot shields, were sent to apprehend a visibly fearful Rose for psychiatric detention. Like the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis almost 40 years later, Rose’s fate was abetted by the spectre of violence his blackness supposedly portended. Rose, to be sure, stood little chance of being treated by the authorities with the care his situation necessitated. Rather, he was seen and dealt with as someone whose humanity was obscured by the myth and presumption of black dangerousness.
As Peter Barham shows, Rose’s life and death are a window onto the enduring entanglements of race-making and madness under the hegemony of white reason: mapped onto racialised bodies in broad swathes, madness and the dysfunction, deviancy, and dangerousness it signifies has made up a key dimension of the constitutive outside against which white liberal ‘rationality’ constructs and defends itself. This is a story Barham traces from the hold of the transatlantic slave ship to the hold of the police in contemporary Britain, demonstrating the way in which ideas about race and madness continue to flow along channels created by and for empire. The concept of the ‘hold’ certainly appears frequently across Outrageous Reason’s 14 chapters. For Barham, it can mean the deadly grasp applied by police officers and hospital wardens to black people like Rose and George Floyd, as well as Sean Rigg, Jimmy Mubenga, and numerous others, but also a ‘physical, ideological or, sometimes, figurative space, one of traumatic memory, in which persons, or the traces of persons such as records, are sheltered or stored, or, more commonly, held captive.’ (5).
Here, Barham’s objective is to retrieve a number of these subaltern persons or their traces through case studies and vignettes, some of which utilise personal narratives and other testimonial sources that place us squarely in the historical terrain. For example, we are plunged into the miserable depths of Kingston Lunatic Asylum in post emancipation Jamaica via the observations of Henrietta Dawson. Admitted to the asylum in the late 1850s, Dawson, who, like every patient at Kingston, was a woman of colour, was subjected to and witness of all manner of arbitrary violence, humiliation, and routinised punishment at the hands of staff, including the sometimes lethal practice of ‘tanking’, whereby patients were dunked and held underwater. Drawing on works by an array of scholars of slavery and postcolonialism, Barham argues that the conditions Dawson described were not a localised aberration in the hinterlands of British Empire, but that the asylum was an ‘engine room of colonial modernity’ (61); while cloaked in principles of benevolent governance, the Kingston asylum ‘scandal’ exposed the constitutive violence and racist differentiation at the heart of the imperial project. With the case of Orville Blackwood, who died in appalling circumstances at Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital in August 1991, Barham illustrates the disturbing continuities between Dawson’s experience and the treatment of black patients in contemporary spaces of ‘care’. As is made so clear in the book’s final chapters, the systematic negation of the colonial subject – to the status of ‘savages’, ‘beasts’, ‘barbarians’ and so on – continues to seep into and pollute our institutional cultures in both quotidian and cataclysmic ways.
The question of what care has looked like for the poor and racialised is posed at the outset of the book through the episode of the Zong slave ship massacre of 1781, where more than 130 captive Africans were thrown overboard by the crew in a chilling piece of financial calculus. While likely a simple error of re-painting, Barham argues that the earlier renaming of the ship, from the Dutch Zorg, meaning ‘care’, to Zong, augured the horrific events on the vessel to come. But he also sees it as a symbol of the way in which care has been routinely ‘abjected’ or ‘transformed into something else’ (57) when it comes to those deemed ‘mad’ or ‘damaged’ by the arbiters of white reason. The case of Alice Rebecca Triggs, a white domestic servant who spent the last four decades of her life in a mental institution after receiving a diagnosis of ‘moral imbecility’ in 1919, makes a wider point about how such delimitations of care and understanding not only imperilled black lives, but also the lives of the ‘lower or inferior orders’ in Britain who posed ‘a threat to the vitality and stability, and hence to the future, of the white race’ (102).
There is another aspect of care to consider here: early on in the book Barham writes that he is ‘trying to feel my way, challenging and exploring diverse forms of “knowing” and drawing as much as I can on the exercise of…“negative capability”’ (6). Certainly, he treads the complex and multiple intertwining pasts of race, class, and madness and their troubling resonances in the present with considerable care and empathy, and in a way that forces us to think about and contend with our own cultural assumptions. In doing so, Outrageous Reason marks an important step in what Barham describes as a ‘gathering discourse, or convergence of voices’ (213) that enjoins a revaluation of conceptions of pathology and dysfunction, as well as the hegemony of whiteness that upholds them.
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Michael Romyn’s first book, London’s Aylesbury Estate: An Oral History of the ‘Concrete Jungle’, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.