Download e-book for kindle: A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial by Nancy Rose Hunt

In A fearful State, Nancy Rose Hunt considers the afterlives of violence and damage in King Leopold’s Congo loose country. Discarding disaster as narrative shape, she as an alternative brings alive a historical past of colonial anxiety. This temper suffused scientific investigations, safety operations, and vernacular therapeutic events. With a heuristic of 2 colonial states—one "nervous," one biopolitical—the research alternates among clinical examine into birthrates, gonorrhea, and childlessness and the securitization of subaltern "therapeutic insurgencies." by the point of Belgian Congo’s famed postwar developmentalist schemes, a shining infertility health facility stood close to a bleak penal colony, either sited the place a infamous Leopoldian rubber corporation as soon as enabled rape and mutilation. Hunt’s historical past bursts with layers of perceptibility and tune, conveying daily surfaces and daydreams of subalterns and colonials alike. Congolese persevered and avoided compelled hard work and clinical and defense screening. Quick-witted, they stirred unease via therapeutic, ask yourself, reminiscence, and dance. This capacious clinical heritage sheds gentle on Congolese sexual and musical economies, on practices of distraction, urbanity, and hedonism. Drawing on theoretical suggestions from Georges Canguilhem, Georges Balandier, and Gaston Bachelard, Hunt offers a daring new framework for teasing out the complexities of colonial history.