A nervous state
Subtitle: violence, remedies, and reverie in colonial Congo
By: Nancy Rose Hunt
Contributors: Duke University Press
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 353
ISBN-13: 9780822359463; 9780822359654; 9780822375241
Copyright date: 2016
Subjects: Medicine; Social conditions; Colonies; History
Description: "In A Nervous State, Nancy Rose Hunt considers the afterlives of violence and harm in King Leopold's Congo Free State. Discarding catastrophe as narrative form, she instead brings alive a history of colonial nervousness. This mood suffused medical investigations, security operations, and vernacular healing movements. With a heuristic of two colonial states--one "nervous," one biopolitical--the analysis alternates between medical research into birthrates, gonorrhea, and childlessness and the securitization of subaltern "therapeutic insurgencies." By the time of Belgian Congo's famed postwar developmentalist schemes, a shining infertility clinic stood near a bleak penal colony, both sited where a notorious Leopoldian rubber company once enabled rape and mutilation. Hunt's history bursts with layers of perceptibility and song, conveying everyday surfaces and daydreams of subalterns and colonials alike. Congolese endured and evaded forced labor and medical and security screening. Quick-witted, they stirred unease through healing, wonder, memory, and dance. This capacious medical history sheds light on Congolese sexual and musical economies, on practices of distraction, urbanity, and hedonism. Drawing on theoretical concepts from Georges Canguilhem, Georges Balandier, and Gaston Bachelard, Hunt provides a bold new framework for teasing out the complexities of colonial history."--Back cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-342) and index.
Table of contents: title: Registers of violence; title: Maria N'koi; title: Emergency time; title: Shock talk and flywhisks; title: A penal colony, an infertility clinic; title: Motion; title: Field coda and other endings.