I recently had the opportunity to interview Professor Diana Louis, an assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Amongst other topics, Professor Louis researches the intersections of gender, race, and mental illness. Her bio reads:
“Dr. Diana Martha Louis’ research pursues the intersections of Disability Studies and Critical Race Studies with respect to issues of mental illness in African American life. Her current project, Colored Insane: Slavery, Asylums and Mental Illness in 19th-Century America examines the impact of major transformations in both American psychiatry and African Americans’ social condition — the end of one of America’s prototypical institutions of confinement and the expansion of another, slavery and asylums, respectively. It tells the story of how nineteenth-century psychiatric discourses made African Americans mad by both constructing disorders according to prevailing notions of race and “insanity,” and inflicting real psychological harm within asylums, plantations, jails, and society writ large. Further, it shows how Black intellectual thought on mental illness often challenged reigning psychiatric beliefs. Colored Insane reveals that multilayered, ubiquitous and ongoing experiences of mental illness (real and imagined) among 19th-century African Americans set the stage for black experiences with mental illness for generations to come.
Dr. Louis is beginning a second project that explores mental illness and psychiatry among blacks at nineteenth-century asylums in other parts of the African Diaspora including Black Rock Hospital in Barbados, West Indies and Lutindi Hospital in Tanzania, East Africa.” (bio and photo from the University of Michigan Directory)
Could you talk about how you personally got involved in Women’s and Gender Studies as well as American Culture? What interests you about these topics and/or their intersectionalities?
When first getting involved, I came to Women’s Studies through courses in Africana Studies. I was a student at Cornell, where there was an Africana Center. One of the biggest figures in the development of Black Studies was James Turner, who helped found the Africana Center there. I took courses with him, and there was a moment when we were reading Words of Fire by Beverly Guy-Sheftall. There's a history of resistance to Black feminism in some Africana spaces, but James Turner was one of those who recognized his own limitations in the field and pushed beyond them. I always appreciated that about him—his openness to discussing ideas outside his expertise.
When I came across Words of Fire in his course, it ignited something in me. I read the work of Mariah Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper for the first time, and their writings blew me away. After that, I went on to pursue a PhD at Emory University. Although I was an English PhD student, Emory had a strong cohort of Black feminist scholars at the time, including people like Brittany Cooper from the Crunk Feminist Collective. Many of the founders of that group were at Emory.
While I wasn't formally a Women’s Studies student, I was definitely in conversation with those in the field. Some of my closest friends were deeply involved in Black feminist scholarship, which invigorated my interest in studying both Women’s Studies and Black Studies and bringing the two together.
I eventually took a guest course with Beverly Guy-Sheftall at Emory, which became one of my favorite classes. The readings, the people, and the personal discussions really fueled my passion and interest in Black feminism.
What were your motivations for writing “Black Women's Psychiatric Incarceration at Georgia Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century”?
The starting point for my book actually came from a class I took with a well-known scholar in anti-whiteness and critical white studies. She was teaching at the Golden Johnston Institute at Emory, and I first encountered her when she guest lectured in one of my Women’s Studies classes. I found her to be a fascinating figure, and I thought her course would be valuable, so I enrolled. The class focused on Milledgeville, particularly the asylum there, which later became a central part of my research.
One of our assignments involved examining archival records from the hospital. We were asked to study several patients and create patient narratives based on what we found. I was drawn to the stories of Black women, largely because I had already developed an interest in studying women historically—especially in understanding how their lives were shaped by the words and judgments of those in medical and psychiatric spaces. I began to think about who these women were, where they came from, and how their encounters with psychiatry and medicine altered the course of their lives.
Some of these women first encountered power through interactions with police officers or judges who decided if they were mentally well. These decisions often led to their confinement in asylums, which fundamentally changed the trajectory of their lives. This is the kind of story I'm trying to tell—taking the limited details we have about these women and weaving them into a larger narrative.
The chapter that focuses on these women delves into the stories told from the perspective of those doing the most harm. While this is an essential part of my book, it’s not the most exciting part of my research for me. There’s so much missing from the records, and they often construct these women as ill, ignoring the broader social and health consequences they faced. This erasure of their fuller stories shapes the way their lives are understood, even after they are gone.
It’s really hard to escape the kinds of narratives that are produced when you try to tell these stories, and some scholars have grappled with that conundrum. One of the best examples of this is Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In her book, Hartman is trying to tell the story of young Black girls who were labeled as juvenile delinquents. In doing so, she moves away from relying solely on official records—those produced by public officials, medical professionals, and others—to try to tell a different story, one that reflects how these young women might have seen themselves.
Hartman’s approach is almost speculative because she asks us to imagine how these women might have thought about their own lives. I’ve tried to incorporate some of that into my chapter by asking similar questions and filling in the gaps where the records fall short. That’s one way of addressing the challenge—by creating a context that goes beyond the void left by those who documented these women's lives from an external perspective. Hartman takes this approach to another level by reimagining and world-building in her work, which is in itself a beautiful experiment.
I bring her up because she’s tackling the same problem I am: how do you tell the stories of people whose only records are those created by medical professionals or public officials who objectified them? In my chapter, I try to humanize these women by contextualizing their experiences and focusing on the quality of their lives. However, I feel like my work doesn’t go far enough. Hartman, I believe, succeeds in going further.
As a literary scholar, I use literature as a source of theoretical knowledge to explore the same topics that doctors and psychiatrists discuss. For me, literature is not just about telling stories, but also about offering alternative conceptualizations of mental health. To say that only psychiatrists hold the authoritative view on mental health is to concede too much to dominant structures of power. Literature provides an equally valid lens through which to understand these experiences.
As an African Americanist who focuses on African American literature, I argue that Black people had a lot to say about their own mental health, and that the narratives emerging from medicine were not the only ones. These medical narratives were often challenged. If we view Black people not just as objects of psychiatric thought but as active producers of their own knowledge about health and medicine, we might arrive at new ideas and conclusions that oppose or complicate the medical records.
Sometimes, these perspectives even coincide with medical ideas, as Black people were deeply concerned about their health and engaged with the best available knowledge. For example, Black newspapers often quoted medical doctors, showing that the community was interested in learning what was considered the best medical advice at the time. The key difference, however, is that Black thinkers rejected the tendency to pathologize Black people, even as they adopted certain medical insights.
Take the topic of sleep, for instance. Black commentators echoed the advice of psychiatrists, noting that sleep and rest were crucial for mental health. In doing so, they were showing that Black people were agents of their own health. They took what was useful from the dominant medical discourse while discarding the pathologizing aspects that sought to diminish their humanity.
In my work, beyond that chapter, I explore how Black people articulated alternative visions of health and took command of their own well-being. They understood that their bodies and minds were sites of struggle, not because they were silent, but because they had something to say. In the first half of my book, I discuss how many of the arguments they posed against medicine and psychiatry came through enslaved narratives, as slavery was the most pressing issue for Black people at the time.
Slave narrators were critically aware of how doctors and psychiatrists made claims that supported and justified the continuation of slavery. For example, some argued that slavery protected Black people's mental and physical health. They claimed that when enslaved people left the South and gained freedom, they would go insane. They also pointed to a supposed lack of mental illness among the enslaved population. The 1840 census is a key example, as it was the first to document mental disabilities. Some records from that census suggested higher cases of insanity (a 19th-century term for mental illness) among free Black people compared to those who were enslaved. While these statistics were later disproven, the notion that insanity wasn't an issue during slavery persisted.
The idea that Black people's mental and physical health was better under slavery continued to be prevalent. Some argued that social vices, like alcoholism, led to mental health conditions, and that enslaved people were spared from these issues due to their limited access to alcohol. In this way, doctors used such arguments to defend slavery, claiming that it was a protective institution for Black people.
I argue that psychiatry, during the era of slavery, operated as a pro-slavery regime, using psychiatric concepts about race to support the cultural and economic system of slavery. White psychiatrists played a key role in this, but Black writers, such as Harriet Jacobs, pushed back against these claims. Jacobs, in her slave narrative, challenges the idea that slavery was protective of Black mental health. Black people's responses to these medical claims weren't necessarily in medical journals, especially since there were only a few Black physicians before the end of slavery. Instead, slave narratives became the primary platform where these arguments were contested, as medical concepts were often used to justify slavery, and the narratives worked to refute those claims.
In this dynamic, there was a clear confrontation between Black people's ideas about their mental health and the psychiatric conclusions that supported slavery. However, this pushback wasn't always directly oppositional. For instance, Harriet Jacobs acknowledged the existence of mental anguish in the North but attributed it to the terror Black people felt about being re-enslaved under fugitive slave laws. While psychiatrists claimed that mental illness was more prevalent in the North, Jacobs connected this to the looming threat of slavery rather than accepting it as proof of Northern societal failure. Her argument reframed mental health struggles as a consequence of the slavery system, something the psychiatrists never did, as they avoided critiquing slavery itself.
In the first half of my book, I focus on figures like Harriet Jacobs, who wasn't a medical doctor and wasn't confined by the language and logic of medicine. Instead, she relied on her own lived experience as an enslaved woman to demonstrate to her readers, particularly white audiences, that slavery inflicted serious harm on Black people's mental and physical health. In the second half of the book, I turn to Charles Chesnutt, one of the most prolific Black writers of the late 19th century. Chesnutt's characters often include medical doctors and others who challenge medical assumptions, especially regarding disability.
Through literature, I aim to counteract the dominant medical rhetoric of the time, offering alternative discourses that challenge the medical formulations and hierarchies of power. This approach helps us learn about histories of medicine in ways that don't merely reproduce the dominant narratives or uphold the same power dynamics. Literature becomes a powerful tool to provide a more nuanced and critical understanding of health and mental well-being, particularly in relation to Black people's experiences under slavery.
What are your goals for how you hope to see your research develop, specifically within the next few months?
I’m actually finishing up my book right now, and some of the topics we've discussed are currently being worked into it. One of the more fascinating areas I'm focusing on is how white people's mental health is framed in relation to slavery. I’m examining the writings of a physician who acknowledges slavery as a terrible institution full of abuses, but he doesn’t point to the harm inflicted on Black people as the cause of their medical issues. Instead, he references the impact on white people.
The physician says that slavery is abusive, and although he claims not to be an apologist for it, he still directs attention away from the enslaved and towards the slaveholders. He states that slave masters will have to "take it to God," essentially implying that the wrongs of slavery are something for them to reckon with spiritually. He acknowledges slavery as abusive and admits that the system causes harm, but there's a void in his analysis—he never addresses the medical consequences of that abuse for the enslaved, only alluding to the burden it places on white people.
For example, Benjamin Rush, an early founder of American psychiatry and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, argued that mental disorder arises when people’s natural behaviors are altered. Yet he didn’t consider what it means for individuals to participate in an unnatural and immoral system like slavery. There’s a persistent gap in these analyses about the psychological effects of slavery on those who enslaved others. While these early physicians recognize that slavery might disturb the mental well-being of slaveholders, they don’t treat it as a medical subject deserving of inquiry or intervention.
One particularly striking argument made by this physician is that slavery protects the enslaved from alcoholism, which was believed to cause or promote insanity at the time. However, this line of reasoning raises a significant contradiction. If slavery is such a protective institution, why aren't white people being enslaved to protect them from the same issues? This doctor stops short of suggesting that white people should be enslaved, further underscoring the selective logic at play. This is a bit of the ideas and concepts that I am currently researching.