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

by Nancy Rose Hunt

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. 

Genres: History, Africa, Grad School

371 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 8, 2016

Reviews

[Anya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Attempting to come up with an adjective. Failing to do so. Have been unable to put this down.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 2016, Historian Nancy Rose Hunt published A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reveries in Colonial Congo. The book has a section of notes. The book has a bibliography and an index. Hunt writes the book, “A Nervous State tracks perceptions, sounds, and the everyday. A Nervous State uncovers brutal rape, nervous laughter, and flight. It embraces toil, reverie, even joy, albeit largely after the Congo Free’s State’s end in 1908” (Hunt 4). Hunt writes, “a dizzying range of topics and people appear, nervousness, therapeutic insurgency, a penal colony, modern dance music, sexual economies, wonder and song” (Hunt 4). The book has maps and illustrations. The book is about the western region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The region borders the Republic of Congo. This region is known as Equateur. The book focused on the southern region of Equateur (Hunt 2-3, 32). Hunt writes, “The Belgian colonial state was born from nervousness, and Congo became a nervous state” (Hunt 1). I read the book on my Kindle. The book is well written. Hunt tries to read historical sources “with an attentive ear yield sound, but also smells, peering, sensing, and the invisible” (Hunt 31). Hunt’s book, A Nervous State, was a well-done study of Colonial Congo.