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

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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