Where Psyche, History and Politics Merge : Decolonizing PTSD and Traumatic Memory with Fanon

This chapter interrogates the hidden articulations and implications of trauma and the politics of its diagnosis in different sociohistorical settings. In the context of racialized violence, (post)colonial psychiatry and the mass migration of subjugated and resisting bodies, how viable is “PTSD” as a clinical diagnosis? What does trauma reveal about past, insurgent memory, and a new apparatus of suspicion and control (from the “denials” of colonial psychiatry to the current medicalization of political suffering)? And what does global history reveal about the myriad forms of alienation reflected within trauma itself? This chapter draws upon the work of psychiatrist and anticolonial militant Frantz Fanon, and particularly the psychiatric case studies found in Chapter Five of his Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), to unpack these questions and imagine a different approach. A grounding in Fanon also allows this chapter to keep an eye on possibilities for dis-alienation and ...