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Peter Barham's Outrageous Reason explores how psychiatry became a political tool within the British colonial empire. Employing Saidiya Hartman's method of ‘critically fabulating’ history, Barham retrieves the testimonies of minor lives from historical archives, allowing them to speak on their own terms (Barham, 2023, p. 3; Hartman, 2008). Often recognized only as ‘outrageous,’ these lives reveal several narratives intertwined with colonial conceptions of madness that marginalized those outside the ‘white, male, middle-class’ British norm (Barham, 2023, p. 17). Barham revises ‘outrageousness’ as a counter-hegemonic moral paradigm that challenges the British colonial imaginary and its deployment of psychiatry (Barham, 2023, p. 2). Furthermore, Barham examines various groups, including enslaved Africans, ‘mad’ Black Jamaican women, Jamaican Revivalists and Rastafarians, South Asian men and mentally ill Black men in present-day England. His text unfolds in a spiral structure, beginning with African captives on the slave ship Zong and ending with contemporary issues facing mentally ill Black men. Through a strong intersectional lens, Barham shows how these lives challenge the British colonial imaginary and psychiatric diagnoses, despite being labeled as ‘outrageous.’ The roots of this ‘outrageousness’ lie in the colonial attitudes that viewed Africans as prone to lunacy.
In Part 1, Barham discusses the 1781 Zong massacre, where over a hundred ‘mad’ slaves were thrown overboard from the British warship Zong due to a water shortage (p. 31). Historically, Europeans labeled Africans as ‘cortically sluggish’, ‘hypersexual’ and ‘lacking reason,’ making the disposal of enslaved people on Zong a way to recover losses through insurance claims (Barham, 2023, p. 31; Leiris, 2017; Carothers, 1953). Under Jamaican plantation economies, African slaves were seen by the British colonial system as ‘in need of humane care’ and British cultural influence (Barham, 2023, p. 97). Samuel Cartwr