Abstract
Building upon recent political and historical accounts of postcolonial transformation in Senegal, this dissertation considers the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar as a powerful lens through which the postcolonial state has been—and indeed, continues to be—experienced by the doctors, staff, and patients who have inhabited it. It argues that the way the institution's past has been alternately romanticized, rejected, disavowed, or regarded with ambivalence both reflects and is emblematic of larger social and political transformations that have occurred since Senegal's independence. As these pages illustrate, there are various strands of remembrance at play when it comes to the history of the Fann Psychiatric Clinic as well as the postcolonial state. This project is an ethnographic engagement that explores the entanglement of these various strands and thus contributes to wider debates surrounding the relationship between memory and history, both within the discipline of anthropology and beyond.
