A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo

Nancy Rose Hunt

ISBN 10: 0822359464 / ISBN 13: 9780822359463

Published by Duke University Press, 2016

About this Item

Nancy Rose Hunt tells the affective history of the convergence of biopolitics and colonial violence in the Belgian Congo. By showing how the shifts and interactions between the biopolitical state and the nervous state drove the colonial government's actions toward the Congolese, Hunt provides a new model for theorizing colonialism. Num Pages: 376 pages, 41 illustrations. BIC Classification: 1HFM; HBJH; JHMC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 5817 x 3887 x 25. Weight in Grams: 658. . 2016. Illustrated. Hardcover. . . . .

Seller Inventory # V9780822359463

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822359464
• ISBN 13: 9780822359463
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

 

About the Author

Nancy Rose Hunt is Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and the author of the prizewinning A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo, also published by Duke University Press.