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.
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Not Aftermath
- Nervousness
- Modes of Presence
- States and Persons
- Therapeutic Insurgency
- Infertility, Zest, Hedonism
- A Shrunken Milieu
- Multitudes, Reverie, Dread
- Archives and Futures
- The Chapters
- Chapter 1. Registers of Violence
- Nearness with Casement
- Dhanis, Abir, and “Bassankussu”
- Nervous Laughter
- Sexual and Visual Economies
- Rape and Specters of Sterility
- Ikakota and Memories
- Ekuma and Suicide
- The Biopolitical Meets Bandits
- Conclusion
- Chapter 2. Maria N’koi
- “A Special Situation”
- Column on the March
- Relegation Time
- Copal Charms and Sales
- White Hens
- History, Clichés, Tellings
- Wartime Reverie
- Sleeping Sickness and Extinction
- Pathology and a Magistrate’s Story
- Afterlives, Njondo, Trees
- Conclusion
- Chapter 3. Emergency Time
- Pan-Nègre Traces, White Trash, Rebels by Fire
- Touring Doctors and Gonorrhea Logics
- The Slump
- Flags and Garveyite Reverie
- Roads, the Overworked, Pueperal Infection
- Flight, Copal, Nganda
- Yebola and “Neurasthenia”
- Reproductive Disappointment, Lianja, and Baby Theft
- Amicale and Distraction
- Song and Sexual Economies
- Conclusion
- Chapter 4. Shock Talk and Flywhisks
- Losilo Pamphlet
- A Research Mission
- Likili
- Nervous Diagnostics
- Degeneration
- Rebeka Botungu and Trees
- Brussels Scolds
- Fear of Massacre
- Anachrony and Sight
- State Critic
- A Nervous Chiefdom
- Tears and Rape in Wangata Hearing
- Science in the Bush and Somatization
- Conclusion
- Chapter 5. A Penal Colony, an Infertility Clinic
- Kimbangu, Kitawala, a Remedy
- Doctors and Wartime Duress
- Letters, Mpadi Escapes, and the Nervous Van Campenhout
- The Songo Experiment and “Joy”
- Ekafera
- Penicillin Arrives
- Penal Colony as “Hoax”
- “Worse Than Death Itself ”
- The New Befale
- Dr. Allard’s Infertility Device
- Conclusion
- Chapter 6. Motion
- Drama in Loma
- Dreaming
- A Belgian Cyclist, a Lucienne Delyle Song
- Urbanity and Anachronisms
- Bars and Venereal Debates
- Three Figures: Mata, Munga, Bowane
- Ekuma’s Fanfare
- Conclusion
- Conclusion: Field Coda and Other Endings
- Field Coda
- Latitude in a Shrunken Milieu
- Naming Disaster
- Remembering
- Harm and Female Imaging
- Hedonism and Sexual Economies
- Reproductive Disappointment and Somatization
- Harm and HIV Logics
- Exit Time
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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