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A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo
Nancy Rose Hunt
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Description for A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo
Paperback. 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: 153 x 230 x 24. Weight in Grams: 558.
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 ... Read morenotorious 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. Show Less
Product Details
Publisher
Duke University Press
Place of Publication
North Carolina, United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
About Nancy Rose Hunt
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.
Reviews for A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo
Nancy Rose Hunt's A Nervous State represents a pioneering work in African history, which will surely become a staple in advancing new frontiers for other narratives in the continent's history.
Ben Weiss
African Studies Review
In contrast to much popular work on the Congo, this book rejects using catastrophe and crisis as the main narratives ... Read moreto order Congolese history. Without denying the violence of Leopold II's regime and the Belgian colonial state, this study provides a much-needed sense of the diverse narratives of healing, anxiety, and opportunity that emerged in the decades following the end of the brutal reign of concessionary companies in the northwestern province of Equateur. . . . A Nervous State will take its place among the best works on African social and cultural history for years to come.
Jeremy Rich
Journal of Social History
Hunt provides a bricolage of archives, memories, and traces that is more than the sum of its parts. In so doing, she demonstrates in this deeply researched and assiduously analyzed work that the history of colonial Congo is much more than the haunted legacy of its violent inception.
Matthew M. Heaton
American Historical Review
The interpretation in this splendid work is a decisive contribution to understanding the jumble of desires, interests, discourses and images in the colonial and post-colonial history of this country, as well as the psychic life of its history.
Roberto Beneduce
Journal of Asian and African Studies
A Nervous State is certainly one of the most elegant books I have seen over the last years and an impressive attempt at entangling, and at discussing entangled, narratives. . . . This book is certainly 'a must' for everyone engaging with the history of communities under colonial rule, especially for Central Africa, but also beyond.
Alexander Keese
Histoire Sociale
A Nervous State provides a complex history of Colonial Congo; it is a huge contribution to African Studies and anthropology.
Charles Tshimanga
International Journal of African Historical Studies
The interpretation in this splendid work is a decisive contribution to understanding the jumble of desires, interests, discourses and images in the colonial and post-colonial history of this country, as well as the psychic life of its history.
Roberto Beneduce
Journal of Asian and African Studies
Nancy Rose Hunt's latest book beats, breathes, quivers and unsettles. Her writing brims with the curiosity and rigour that evidently fuels her meticulous tracing of neglected archival materials. Also palpable are the insight and sensitivity that enable her to encapsulate both the changing machinations of a biopolitical state, and the `therapeutic insurgencies' of ordinary Congolese. However, it is Hunt's attention to sensation and to perception, what one might call her scholarly synaesthesia-her ability to read the archives with an attentive ear, to read `dynamics of combat through acoustics of hushed silence and sadistic laughter,' for example-that renders her work so compelling for an anthropologist of Equateur and of the senses.
Lys Alcayna-Stevens
Somatosphere
A Nervous State is an extraordinary book. Its empirical richness is obvious-the number and variety of different sources that Hunt has drawn upon, and the attention that she has paid to all these sources. Diaries and colonial archives, Lomongo language pamphlets and school essays, photographs, epic poems and dances-all of them receive the same, patient, highly sympathetic, but also questioning, persistent, and often quietly skeptical, scrutiny. Versions of events are presented, and new vistas open up, yet this is also a judicious book where the conclusions never push beyond what the evidence will support.
Joe Trapido
Somatosphere
This is a book that is brimming with tensions: historiographical, epistemological, sensorial, emotional. It is alive with them, both in the material that Nancy Rose Hunt uncovers and in her manner of relaying her subject to the reader.
Richard C. Keller and Emer Lucey
Somatosphere
The book's synthetic range, historical detail, and conceptual density...make it highly appropriate for graduate work, and essential in equatorial African studies....an exemplary venture in medical anthropology and a truly rich set of resources for those of us engaging such questions in our own thought and research.
David Eaton
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Hunt demonstrates how her use of interdisciplinary methods-archival, oral historical, literary, and ethnographic-and unconventional materials provides provocative insights into the colonial history of the Congo.
Elisha P. Renne
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
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