Cloth, Dress and Art Patronage in Africa Book

I just finished Mannoni's book about the psychology of colonization and, because of that, re-read Shakespeare's The Tempest. At the time Mannoni's book was first published in France (Psychologie de la colonisation) in 1950, psychologists around the world were spending a lot of effort studying personality types and personality development. For example, in the same year the famous Adorno et al project, The Authoritarian Personality, was published.

Mannoni, who was later to become a loyal student of the maverick French psycho-analyst Jacques Lacan, was also very familiar with the issues of colonization having been resident in Madagascar for many years.

This is a challenging book in many ways, and is still somewhat controversial. The more famous Frantz Fanon was to write a pretty scathing critique of it two years after it was published. Regardless of the books merits as a work of social psychology, however, it later had a big impact on how Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, was performed. If fact, I don't think you can think about Shakespeare's characters Prospero and Caliban in the same way after reading Mannoni's book, which is perhaps praise enough.