The Narrative of Ann Pratt
Life-Writing, Genre and Bureaucracy in a Postemancipation Scandal
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4494546 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christienna D Fryar (University of Liverpool, corresponding author), Christienna Fryar (University of Liverpool) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 85 |
| Pages | 265-279 |
| Publication date | 2018-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History Workshop Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/hwj/dby001 |
| OpenAlex | W2790825034 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 18 |
The pamphlet Seven Months in the Kingston Lunatic Asylum, and What I Saw There detailed the experiences of Ann Pratt, a mixed-race Jamaican woman, during her months-long commitment to the facility. Seven Months portrayed the asylum as an institution failing its mission to care for some of the island’s most vulnerable inhabitants. A text produced in colonial Jamaica by a woman most likely born in enslavement, the pamphlet had an unusual career, moving from local island circuits to limited circulation within London’s political and philanthropic elite. There, in the metropole, it transformed Colonial Office bureaucrats’ understanding of a local scandal that had been brewing in Jamaica for two years over conditions in the asylum and adjoining hospital. Once they had read it, metropolitan officials demanded investigations into asylum conditions in Jamaica and, more broadly, across the empire. That Seven Months transformed imperial opinion to this degree was testament both to its fusion of life-writing genres and to the bureaucratic practices that elevated a specific version of this text to the attention of the Colonial Office. Seven Months was thus a bureaucratic artifact as much as a literary text. Drawing on historical and anthropological studies of paperwork, especially ‘the file’, and on literary analyses of nineteenth-century life-writing, this essay argues that the bureaucratic practices of collating and filing that colonial governors used produced a more powerful edition of the pamphlet, one that primed the Colonial Office for a positive reception of Ann Pratt’s claims.
Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Bureaucracy · Colonialism · Elite · Empire · Institution · Literature · Lunatic · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law
Blind memory
The New Cultural History
Representing Madness
Disability and Life Writing Reports from the Nineteenth-century Asylum
Narrative Survival
The regulation of British colonial lunatic asylums and the origins of colonial psychiatry, 1860–1864
An Outrage on All Decency
The Moral Politics of Cholera in Postemancipation Jamaica
Imperfect Models
The Sacred Rights of the Weak
The Slave’s Narrative
Decency, dependence and the lash
Doubling out of the Crazy House
The file
The Lady Mico Charity Schools in the British West Indies, 1835-1842
Along the Archival Grain
Venus in Two Acts
Where ethics and politics meet
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,43 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2026 (8) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |