The necessity of an attention to Eurocentrism and colonial technologies: an addition to critical mental health literature

Abstract

Critical perspectives in mental health and the highly influential contributions of those who identify with and/or ally with the psychiatric-survivor, consumer-survivor, ex-patient, or mad movements have provoked an appreciation of the many exposed epistemological, methodological, and ethical issues that (re)produce violence within biomedical psychiatry. What is often left uninterrogated is the reliance on a Eurocentric conceptualization of history within articulations of struggle and when attending to the political and social contexts of critique. The effect of this enduring Eurocentrism is often an inattention to the complicit influences of colonial and imperial projects on the practices and technologies of dehumanization, taxonomization, and the establishment of human hierarchies to rationalize violence through the implementation of racial and eugenic rationale. The imperative of this attention to Eurocentrism is suggested from a synthesis of contributions from critical mental health, postcolonial, and critical race literature.

Keywords:

• critical mental health
• postcolonial studies
• critical race theory
• historiography
• Eurocentrism
• social justice

Notes

1. See footnote from Fernando (2010, 20) in Bhabha (1984, 125–133). Hybridity is explored in the colonial context for its affront to essentialization but also Mimicry is explored as a complex representation of the colonizer for multiple purposes including self-preservation of identity, and ambivalence is described with respect to the colonizer’s position toward the colonized as a place for disrupting colonial binary relation of subordinate Other and colonizer. Also, see Said (1994).

Said refers to contemporary globalization as the current workings of imperialism through the forced imposition of political, social and cultural institutions on countries targeted by Western powers.