This book arose out of a car trip. Sander Gilman was invited to come to the University of Mississippi to speak on “race and madness” as part of the University of Mississippi Critical Race Studies Group’s Fall Symposium on the intertwining legacies of Jews and black Americans. One of the Critical Race Studies Group’s members, James “JT” Thomas, was designated to pick him up at Memphis and drive him the hour to Oxford. On the way, as they chatted about a number of things, the topic of the afternoon talk arose and both were pleased to note that despite very different disciplinary directions, Gilman as a cultural historian and Thomas as a sociologist, they shared a deep interest in the difficulty and complexity of thinking about race and psychopathology as a cultural problem, indeed as a litmus test for our complicated understanding of race, racism, and mental illness. A joint project description arose after the visit. Ilene Kalish of New York University Press and the editors of its series Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the Twenty-First Century, Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore, encouraged the writing of the volume.
Given the authors’ different disciplinary backgrounds, the work on the manuscript was from the beginning clearly divided. However, each read and commented on the other’s work in a critical and productive way. The end result is an overview of a complex topic with which we hope to spur interest in the difficulties of writing and thinking across disciplines and, in this case, the broad historical span from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Because this is an overview, much relevant material has been omitted, as the topic of each subchapter merits (and in some cases has received) its own monograph. But the question of the implications of considering group hatred as a psychopathology, spurred on by twenty-first-century claims ranging from a pill for prejudice to a test to identify the perpetrators of genocide in advance of their acts, seemed to us to warrant our strongly comparative approach.
We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of both our proposal and the finished manuscript for a range of suggestions, most of which found their way into this book. We are also grateful to Kate Epstein for critically editing our text. We are also happy to acknowledge our students at the University of Mississippi and Emory University for their collaboration in the classes we have held on this and related topics. Living scholarship demands critical interaction and this we found in our classrooms. The readings for these classes and the discussion in them helped shape our argument. We are also grateful to Caelyn Cobb at New York University Press for shepherding the project. A special thanks is extended to the University of Mississippi Critical Race Studies Group, and in particular Willa Johnson, for helping to plant the seeds that would become this finished manuscript. Finally, a warm thanks to our families and loved ones, whose support and encouragement prove invaluable to our professional activities.