A Nervous State Book Forum

Somatosphere Presents a book forum on

A Nervous State Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo by Nancy Rose Hunt

Contributions from

Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski Richard Keller and Emer Lucey Joe Trapido Joshua Walker Lys Alcayna-Stevens

with a reply by Nancy Rose Hunt edited by Todd Meyers

Wayne State University University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Oriental and African Studies Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, Collège de France

University of Florida

New York University, Shanghai

1

Somatosphere Presents

A Book Forum on

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

by Nancy Rose Hunt  Duke University Press  2016, 376 pages

Contributions from:  Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski Wayne State University

Richard Keller and Emer Lucey University of Wisconsin–Madison

 Joe Trapido School of Oriental and African Studies

 Joshua Walker Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER)

with a reply by

Nancy Rose Hunt University of Florida

Edited by

Lys Alcayna-Stevens  Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, Collège de France

Todd Meyers New York University, Shanghai

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://somatosphere.net/2017/01/book-forum-nancy-rose-hunt-a-nervous-state

2

When Nancy Rose Hunt suggests that her book “joins the ferment” of colonial aggressions and uncertainties “while taking up harm and pleasure in a shrunken colonial milieu and in postcolonial historiography too” (4), an uninitiated reader might mistake Hunt’s appraisal of her project as attempting the impossible labor of largeness of scope and precision of subject. After spending time t ime with A Nervous State:Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Duke University Press, 2016), it becomes obvious that Hunt’s words verge on understatement. A Nervous State weaves the medical and administrative anxieties of infertility through violences and joys of life (lives worn thin, lives rich and dense) through songs and words, as a pursuit of futures. Hunt’s archive is immense, and she places it on offer in writing both lyrical and complex. It’s no wonder that the book was awarded the 2016 Martin A. Klein Book Prize in African History from History  from the American Historical Association. The commentaries that follow give diverse readings of Hunt's remarkable book. We hope you enjoy.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

3

Beyond Catastrophe: The Pasts and Futures of Kinship in Colonial Congo  JESSICA ROBINS-RUSZKOWSKI  Assistant Professor, Profess or, Institute of Gerontology, Ge rontology, Anthropology, Anthro pology, Wayne State University

COLONIAL CONGO became famous for its ghastly violence, but in this vibrant, dense, and capacious history, Nancy Rose Hunt refuses this legendary violence as a single explanatory frame. In A Nervous State, the reader encounters Kurtz’s “The horror! The horror!” on the first page—but so too women’s dance songs, so ngs, whose lyrics of economic, emotional, generational, and reproductive concern point to dimensions of life that both contain and exceed these histories of violence (2016:1). It is these “perceptions, moods, and capacities to wonder and move” (2016:1) which form the core of Hunt’s impressive, dazzling text. By tracing these sensory experiences, atmospheres, and possibilities across what she identifies as the state’s two modes—the biopolitical and the nervous (2016:8)—Hunt provides multiple, nuanced perspectives on life in colonial Congo. This work offers much for scholars who seek to merge phenomenological and political-economic analysis, and who seek to illuminate the textures of everyday life in ways that escape dominant narratives. Violence remains central at both the empirical and analytic levels, but it is never uniform or totalizing in Hunt’s narration. She explores how violence varied by place and time, occurring alongside and followed by experiences and moods as diverse as silence, laughter, healing, rumors, disappointment, reverie, and zest. In showing how bodies, persons, and places cannot be reduced to violence alone, Hunt rejects the linear temporality of event-aftermath in which violence can be followed only by ruin or resilience (2016:2-5). By embracing openness, imagination, wonder, and monstrosity in the archives, Hunt creates a history that goes beyond dichotomies of colonizer and colonized to show the dizzying range of African and European persons who populated (and de-populated) the forested, riverine landscape of the Belgian Congo in the first half of the twentieth century. To ask questions, then, that escape the catastrophic c atastrophic mode: How was violence experienced and understood, remembered and forgotten? Which forms of violence left traces, upon whom, and how? Which other dimensions d imensions of life emerge in the archive, and how can these forms of sociality be characterized? Hunt presents several theoretical frames that shape her analysis: among others, Balandier’s perspective on the pathological in the colonial, Canguilhem’s “shrunken milieu” (2008:132, in Hunt 2016:18), Bachelard’s reverie as “poetic, material imagination” (Hunt 2016:19), and Benjamin’s distraction and  flânerie. In addition to these, I would like to consider the category of kinship as another way of thinking through these questions and materials. Recent work in kinship studies has called Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

4 for attention to how politics, memory, and kinship become caught up in each other, as a remedy to modernist perspectives (even within anthropology) that tend to isolate studies of politics from studies of kinship (Carsten 2007; McKinnon and Cannell 2013). This perspective suggests questions such as: How does d oes kinship emerge in memories of violence? What does focusing on kinship illuminate about state power, forms of sociality, and possibilities for life in colonial Congo? How might highlighting kin relations amplify the “perceptions, moods, and capacities” (Hunt 2016:1) of these places and times? In the rest of this commentary, I aim to tease out the threads of kinship that run throughout Hunt’s account of the nervous, biopolitical state. In the memory accounts written by Congolese in the 1950s for an essay contest organized by Father Edmond Boelaert, recalling the Leopoldian period some fifty years earlier (Hunt 2016:48-53), kinship emerges as fundamental to these texts’ production. These essays’ authors learned of the Leopoldian times from their elders (Hunt 2016:49). Yet other elders refused the task of remembering: essayists “told of grandfathers who cried that the past was too awful to commit to writing” (Hunt 2016:243). The content of the memories too had to do with kinship. The Ikakota charm, a potent charm used to resist colonial power that also entailed sexual prohibitions (one of many vernacular registers that appear throughout the text), came from ancestors (Hunt 2016:51). The terrible sexual violence wrought by colonial powers sometimes operated through kinship, as kin were forced to violate each other, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons having sex (Hunt 2016:52), and men raping sisters and mothers (Hunt 2016:49). Kinship emerges here as a form of sociality that fost ered both remembering and forgetting, and offered possibilities of strength through Ikakota, but was also vulnerable to the monstrous. The urbanity that became a defining feature of colonial Congo (Hunt 2016:218-225) hinged on ideals and practices of kinship. The fact of “independent women” who were outside of marriage relations and engaged in the cloth trade (Hunt 2016:118-119), and the category of “friendship marriages,” or sexual friendships (Hunt 2016:122), made possible the “sexual economies and hedonistic forms of distraction” (Hunt 2016:225) that characterized urbane life. At the same time, this gendered sociality intersected with anti-venereal disease campaigns that sought to name the partners of people being screened, which s ome saw as endangering marriages (Hunt 2016:224-225). Kinship thus enabled urbane distraction and economies, while hindering state knowledge of bodies and relations. In the intertwined modes of nervousness and biopolitics that characterized the colonial state, kinship was central. The penal colony of Ekafera was meant to isolate rebels “who might try to stay in touch t ouch with neighbors and kin” (Hunt 2016:176), housing people who hailed from a distant region. Yet some degree of kinship continuity was permitted, as rebels could move to Ekafera with wife and children (Hunt 2016:185). However, not all wives of Kitawala rebels did move, preferring “the allure of continuing urbane lives in a temperate city rather than risking the unknowns of a grisly penal colony set down in remote, humid  jungle” (Hunt 2016:187). Moreover, Moreover, the fact of Ekafera being established on Boyela ancestral Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

5 lands, where Boyela were still living, meant that it could c ould never become the imagined ideal of a “no man’s land” (Hunt 2016:193). And because some of the Boyela were already Kitawala— that is, the same religious rebel group being relegated to Ekafera from distant lands—rebel sociality persisted despite colonial fantasies of isolation (Hunt 2016:193-195). In the penal colony, kinship was a target of colonial intervention yet also escaped and thwarted its control. A central object of concern and intervention for the biopolitical state was infertility, in which the very future of kinship itself seemed to be at stake. In nervous fears and fantasies of “race suicide” and “racial degeneration,” Belgian doctors doct ors and scientists confronted and tried to halt the end of kinship for some populations of Congolese facing infertility (Hunt 2016:141,146-147). Through forms of “therapeutic belonging” like Likili, a bote or charm, Congolese worked to ensure the future of kinship (Hunt 2016:141-143). Likili’s origin stories were centered on kinship, along with movement and trees, focusing on reproduction and continuity rather than fear of “extinction” (Hunt 2016:147-148). Yet infertility was also experienced as a disappointment, marked by shame and sorrow, evident in “oversized” “fragile” houses (Hunt 2016:120-125) 1 and vibrant songs (Hunt 2016:128-130). Infertility and childlessness seem to constitute the very limits of kinship, perhaps even the end of sociality and life itself. And indeed, on a totalizing population-wide scale this would be true. Yet the story of the journalist Charles Lonkama, who traveled with Hunt in 2007, offers another view. In a moralizing discussion in which his mother was seen as “sullied” from being in a polygamous relation, Lonkama revealed that of his two mothers, “[t]he one who he had been taught to call Mother showered him with material attention but had not given birth to him” (Hunt 2016:240). Local practices and ideologies of relatedness thus “ensur[ed] belonging and inclusion” (Hunt 2016:240) for the woman who could not bear a child. Such a case, along with forms of belonging like Likili, suggests the capacious possibilities for a reproductive, regenerative, and vital sociality that exceeds the limits of a nervous, biopolitical state.

1

I am reminded here of the resurgence of interest in house kinship (e.g., Carsten and Hugh Jones 1995). Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

6 Work Cited

Canguilhem, G. (2008). “The Living and Its Milieu.” Milieu.” In Knowledge of Life . Translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg. New York: Fordham University Press, Pp. 98120. Carsten, J., ed. (2007). Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Carsten, J., and S. Hugh-Jones, eds. (1995). About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKinnon, S., and F. Cannell, eds. (2013). Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of  Kinship. Santa Fe: School for f or Advanced Research Press.

 Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski is Assistant Professor Professor in the Institute of Gerontology and and the Department of Anthropology at Wayne State University. Her research interests are in aging, personhood, kinship, care, memory, the body, and political economy, from comparative ethnographic and historical  perspectives. In her ethnographic ethnographic book manuscript on aging in Poland, she she draws on theories from  studies of kinship, postsocialism, postsocialism, and memory to show how contemporary desires desires for “active aging” in  Poland exceed standard postsocialist postsocialist narratives and instead are rooted in particular national understandings of the links between person and place.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

7

Tensions of Empire Redux? RICHARD C. KELLER  Professor, Medical Me dical History and Bioethics, Bioethics , University of Wisconsin-Madison Wisc onsin-Madison

EMER LUCEY Graduate Student, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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. While most will likely seize on the nervousness Hunt exposes at the heart of the Belgian colonial co lonial project—an endeavor never as sure as its pretenses, never as confident as its conduct—we focus instead on the ways in which the book exposes the tensions of the historian’s craft, the inherent violence, nervousness, and reverie that yields the productive uncertainty of a brilliant historical narrative. Like A Colonial Lexicon before it, A Nervous State signals the imaginative capacities of the  possible. Within the “shrunken milieu,” per Georges Canguilhem, of Equateur, Congo, Hunt finds latitude, expression, and motion in Congolese life constrained by the violence, sorrow, and harm, ongoing and remembered, of the colonial project. Nowhere does Hunt claim t o give us the or even a full story of the Belgian Congo; instead, she seeks the aleatory, offering many histories that draw us into a vortex of tensions. There are the emotional tensions, when acts or memories of violence are punctuated by nervous laughter, an “ acoustic register” that belies the iconography that characterizes so many historical and contemporary Congos. There are the tensions of practice, as administrators and policies move between brutal repression and making live: the penal colony just 50 miles from a fertility clinic, forced labor and coerced medical treatment, the disc iplinary practice of a rehabilitative punishment adjacent to an effort to reanimate a population in decline. And there is a historiographical tension as Hunt zooms in and out of micro- and macro-histories that exploit multiple archives to vacillate between horror and nearly comic incompetence as hallmarks of Belgian colonial administration. But these tensions cannot exist without one another. Although Hunt speaks of “the nervous state” with its mobile security apparatus on the one hand and a “biopolitical face” of a mission civilisatrice on the other, she also makes clear that “these two thrusts disclose a modernist, paranoid colonial state” (168). A biopolitics in practice is never as seamless and confident as one might pretend, so it is not by coincidence that the normative capacities of a biopolitics of population coexist with shadow states of exception that suspend normality and extend official sovereignties in ever-changing ways. The colonial context merely exacerbates This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://somatosphere.net/2017/01/book-forum-nancy-rose-hunt-a-nervous-state

8 this tension as public “order” collides with “therapeutic insurgencies.” These two modes of colonial presence—the nervous and the biopolitical—intersect and interweave as processes of securitizing and medicalizing provoke and react against vernacular therapeutics, motion, and creativity. This could be a book about colonial biopower. It has all the necessary ingredients: a penal colony, a fertility clinic, administrative obsessions with both individual discipline and the ordering of population. But it doesn’t recapitulate David Arnold, Megan Vaughan, or (in its depictions of resistance) Luise White so much as it builds on their work and drives it toward new imaginings.1 It is less a history of colonial medical power than it is a historiographical intervention on the possible frames of colonial and anticolonial violence, one that dares not to romanticize the colonized even as it eviscerates the logics of colonial rule. Memory files— collected in the 1950s but detailing the period of the Free State—depict paroxysms of violence. Their sheer multiplicity creates a frenzied state, a repetition of accounts that evolves into reverie, becoming a compulsive violence in the form of a sort of colonial death drive, an entropic fantasy where Conrad meets Bataille. 2 Hunt interrogates reverie as an engagement between memory and past possible futures. The acts of wandering, daydreaming, distraction, dancing, song, and fanfare evoke the t he embodiment and experience of the rich interior life of the Congolese. But administrative bungling also populates the narrative, chiefly through the narrative of Maria N’Koi, or Maria the Leopard, a healer and architect of therapeutic insurrection, and her elusive capacities of disruption. These tensions inherent in the productive violence of colonial power—a violence that makes as it destroys—are of course not unique to Congo. Every imperial project expresses its nervousness in outbursts of frenzied violence and anxieties about pacification: the Sepoy mutiny and its repression, the atrocities at My Lai, L ai, and the hécatombe of Sétif are key examples. But this history is one more evocative of Rushdie than of Adam Hochschild or Alastair Horne, one in which the savagery of Amritsar might sit alongside a poor little pithhelmeted Orwell struggling to inhabit the role of the Great White Hunter as he raises his rifle to appease a demanding and restive Burmese crowd. In stark contrast to the pornographic atrocities of King Leopold’s Ghost , violence here often punctuates the pathetic impotence of Belgian rule and the banalities of colonial administration. Here the dysfunctions of the colonial state are embodied in the dysfunctions of its practitioners: in their alcoholism, their murderous tendencies, their unruly sexuality, their disordered bookkeeping.

1

For example, David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University University of California Press, 1993); Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 2 See Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss,  Formless: A User’s U ser’s Guide  (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

9 Nearly twenty years ago, Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper’s Tensions of Empire  became required reading for historians of colonialism. The book’s essays, by figures such as Luise White, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Homi Bhabha, explore the uncertainties of colonial expansion and in particular the ambivalences of bourgeois political culture in a world of empire. But for all its importance, the volume left aside the raw violence of colonial rule and resistance. A Nervous State makes no such omission, with such violence both figure and ground in the project, serving both as an implicit backdrop for the actions, reactions, and interactions of Belgians and Congolese, as well as the very focus of the project. And yet while violence is the force that shrinks the Equateurien milieu, the book cannot be shrunk to a representation of pure violence: for Hunt, colonial fear and horror produce reverie alongside pleasure, sorrow, insurgency, and healing.

 Richard C. Keller is Professor Professor of Medical History and Bioethics Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also Associate Dean in the International Division. He is the author of Fatal Isolation: The  Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (Chicago, 2015) and Colonial Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North  Africa (Chicago, 2007), and is the editor, with with Warwick Anderson and Deborah Jenson, Jenson, of Unconscious  Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties Sovereignties (Duke, 2011).  Emer Lucey is a graduate student in the the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests are in disability history, history of the body, and global medicine and public health. Her current work looks at the history of childhood developmental disabilities, examining the construction of disability from medical and parent  perspectives.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

10

Music and Infertility in the Nervous State  JOE TRAPIDO  Lecturer, Anthropology Anth ropology and Sociolog y, School of Oriental and A frican Studies, University Univ ersity of London

A NERVOUS STATE (ANS) 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 of ten 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 evidence will support. Highly attentive to daydreams and to music in her research, I found that the structure of ANS also had affinities with music and with dreaming. Like a dream, ANS took out familiar cultural items, and revealed a significance to them that is hidden from the waking brain. Like most people who have spent a little time in Congo, I have been fascinated by many of the phenomena that Hunt presents here—brass bands, sterility and wealth, Yebola and Zebola, culturally sanctioned forms of madness—but it was only on reading this book that I begin to get a true sense of the extent to which these things are freighted with meaning and history. Like music, ANS has a repetitive structure that reminds one of the fugue or, more appropriately in this context, Yebola—where complex musical figures are repeated with minor variations, until the music has arrived at a different d ifferent place from where it began. Meetings on the river

As in a Colonial Lexicon, an important theme in ANS is about a conversation between two very different social configurations. In this conversation the people involved sometimes arrived at a shared ‘lexicon’. Without getting lost in terminology, we could call these configurations ‘colonial capitalist’ and ‘Equatorial African composing’ respectively. Colonial capitalism can be divided into a phase we might loosely term primitive accumulation and a later phase of more capital intensive, but also disciplinary and bio-political development. The idea of ‘composing’ here relates to a variety of o f social strategies seen in west and central c entral Africa focussed on the gathering and redistribution of diverse wealth objects, and, above all, people. These people could be clients, dependents, captives, children or wives. Neither of these configurations was discrete or static. As Hunt describes, some of the worst violence of the Free-State period came from the particular twist that colonialism, still in its primitive accumulation phase, gave to local logics of composition – local specialists in This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://somatosphere.net/2017/01/book-forum-nancy-rose-hunt-a-nervous-state

11 violence were encouraged and promoted via the rubber trade to acquire wives and dependents, armed and supported by the heads of trading outposts, who could also be drawn into local notions of wealth and honor. As Hunt reminds us, local notions of wealth and clientelage, but also of acceptable thresholds of violence, had already been confused and turbo-charged as they were drawn inexorably into the vortex of the expanding world market. This configuration is beautifully illustrated in the story of the Abir agent Van Calcken (46-47) who sulks like a syphilitic Achilles over the gift of a diseased woman from chief Lopombo. Music and fertility

Nervousness about fertility was one of the places where these two social modes found their greatest shared interest, and music created many of the spaces where this shared interest was thought about, negotiated and performed. Low fertility grievously affected the material base of both these configurations, but it also struck at key parts of their legitimating ideologies. For the welfarist/utilitarian claims of the bio-power state barren women and dying villages posed a problem, but this was also true for the compositional claims of wealth in people. The powerful individual in such a configuration was considered as a fruitful bough bestowing wealth, carrying children or impregnating wives, and attracting followers (who could also become classificatory children or kin). Such wealth was also the outward manifestation of an empowering connection to the world of spirits and the dead. Music opened channels of communication with these powerful dimensions. The forms of ecstatic and cathartic madness brought on by dancing (states often somewhat reductively called ‘joy’ in late colonial spaces like the bar), invoked and realized these flows of power. It is in spaces of music like the bar—the natural habitat of intellectuals like Lumumba or Bomboko, who makes an appearance in ANS,—that the claims of the modern state, with their bio-power like concerns about quantifying fertility and the producing goods and subjects, became something more than a simple imposition. Ideologies were domesticated and adapted by African elites. The paradox is that while the clientele of such bars was invariably the salaried African elite, who drank beer and chased after glamorous women, the press where this nascent male African intelligentsia expressed themselves was full of nervous and censorious debate about these kinds of ‘free women’ who met in bars and drank beer. The women of Equateur—‘mwasi mongo’ and the ‘mwasi bangala’—were considered the embodiment of this troubling license: disparaged but also deeply desired and admired for their swagger and their (often imagined) social and sexual freedom. In what remains of this piece I am going to present three minor anecdotes that illustrate how some of the characters and themes found in ANS resonate beyond the covers of the book.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

12

Some stories Bowane.

The guitarist Bowane is one of the key protagonists of ANS’s penultimate chapter. He was the co-author of the song Marie-Louisa, the first smash hit record of Congolese popular music. Local legend has it that the song was so popular that the dead rose from their graves to dance to it. One sceptic’s version of the story has it that a group of femmes libres had been drinking beer on the tab of some soldiers in a bar in Kinshasa’s Kintambo district, which holds the main cemetery. Not wanting to repay this largesse in the manner expected, they fled the bar and headed through the cemetery, giving rise to the legend that the dead had been tempted from their graves and into the bar by the strains s trains of Marie-Luisa. Bomboko.

 Justin Bomboko appears in ANS as the Coquilhateville journalist. journalist. As Hunt alludes to, he went on to become one of the major politicians of the post-independence state. He became a member of the Binza group, a set of politicians, also including Mobutu, who were all originally from the north west of Congo, and who were cultivated by the CIA agent Larry Devlin. Both Devlin and the Binza group members and were key protagonists in the destabilisation of Congo’s elected government and assassination of Lumumba. Bomboko was a huge music fan, particularly associated with the popular group OK Jazz. Not unrelated to this was the fact that he was also an incredible womaniser, such that the story goes that when Mobutu was first presented by his medical advisors with the evidence for a new sexually transmitted disease called AIDS, he is reputed to have replied: ‘I won’t believe in it until Bomboko gets it.’ In fact Bomboko died only recently, old, and rich and in his bed. Pascal.

Pascal was the father of a good friend of mine. Born near Basankusu he was an Ngombe, a group often seen as perpetrators of violence against the Mongo (though all of these groups should be seen as relatively contingent and recent). An educated man, arriving in Leopoldville from Coquilhateville during the Belgian colonies late flourishing, he found a job in the local tax office. From there he rose through the ranks. Bomboko, who knew Pascal from Coquilhateville, repeatedly tried to get him to take a position in the government. Pascal was scared of politics, and though he

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

13 respected his Bomboko’s intelligence he also thought him a dangerous and dishonorable man. Pascal had been a great fan of the 1970s group Negro Success and I still associate him with the band’s biggest hit,  Libanga na Libumu which he would play to himself sitting in his wife’s outside bar a portable tape player. ‘Libanga na Libumu’ means ‘stone in the belly’, and it is sung from the viewpoint of a woman who has spent her time in bars and who cannot conceive. ‘…For I have drunk bottles (of beer) and I cannot give birth, Who will carry me to the doctor? docto r? …It is too late I will never give birth Truly I have a stone in the belly.’ From Negro Success, Libanga na Libumu, 1970 (my translation).

 Joe Trapido currently teaches in the the Anthropology and Sociology Department Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies, with stints in Pretoria University and at Birkbeck College before that. His own work has concerned themes such as music and cultural patronage in Kinshasa and in the Congolese diaspora, delevopment and underdevelopment in the Congo, and local politics and political  performance in Kinshasa. His book Breaking Rocks: Music and Ideology between Kinshasa and Paris will be published by Berghahn, as part of their dislocations series, in January of 2017. His work has been published in numerous other places including Africa and the New Left Review.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

14

Enclaves and States in (Post)colonial Congo: Spatial Logics and Epidemiological Metaphors  JOSHUA WALKER  Postdoctoral Fellow, Fe llow, Political Studies, Studies , University of the Witwatersrand W itwatersrand

IN THE INTRODUCTION to his book on postcolonial Congo1 – The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire – Michael Schatzberg (1988:1) describes a Janus-faced state: “Zaire has two t wo faces: one smiles, the other snarls; one exudes paternal confidence and caring, the other is insecure and oppressive.” Nancy Rose Hunt’s (2016) magisterial  A Nervous State offers a unique and compelling account of the colonial precursor to Schatzberg’s postcolonial postc olonial state. Unlike Schatzberg, however, Hunt (2016:8) understands the nervous and biopolitical states not as normative categories but as “guises, tracks, or modes of presence .” This is a useful way of seeing the state not solely as a set of institutions, but as an orientation rooted in a close study of state actors, their worldviews, thoughts, and praxis (cf. Gupta 1995). As an anthropologist of contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I am interested in how Hunt's argument constitutes a historical prelude to the transformations that would later occur in the postcolony. In DRC today, one is bombarded by local discourses about the “absence” or “resignation” (démission) of the state. Yet while the “caring, paternal” (i.e. biopolitical) state has withered since independence, the “snarling, insecure,” “nervous” state is still very much  du jour . Hunt’s reading of the colonial state(s) through southern Equateur thus provides an invaluable lens through which to understand contemporary Congo. It helps us to reconsider the histories and residues of the colonial state(s) and the postcolonial manifestations of another kind of nervous state—one that is concerned not so much with demarcating and caring for populations it is with policing and controlling them. Yet Hunt’s use of Canguilhem’s concept of the “shrunken milieu” attunes us to the particularities and variations of the ways in which the colonial and postcolonial states emerged and changed in different parts of a huge country co untry that is as large as Western Europe in area. In short, a country that could easily engulf several countries simultaneously— something to which DRC’s fraught history of secession movements and so-called civil wars attests. Thus, Hunt’s shrunken milieu presents the scholar of Congo with a challenge: how to pay attention to the specificities of the non-linear aftermath/s of the rubber trade and other 1

Here, I refer to “Congo,” although the country has had different names throughout its history: Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Republic of Congo, Zaire, and now, Democratic Republic of Congo. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://somatosphere.net/2017/01/book-forum-nancy-rose-hunt-a-nervous-state

15 significant events in colonial history, and yet also understand the generalities of colonial governmentality that emerged simultaneously, albeit unevenly, in the Congo colony. How can we trace the effects of the biopolitical and nervous states across different diff erent regions of this vast country? The chapter entitled “A Penal Colony, an Infertility Clinic” brings together the two strands of state that Hunt weaves throughout the book. I would like to home in on what I consider the most interesting aspect of her argument here in order to amplify it. It pertains not simply to the state’s double d ouble sidedness but to its two components’ emergence in “enclosed space” (Hunt 2016:168). These were, I argue, two kinds of enclave—produced, aspirational spaces (Lefebvre 2000[1974]). In my own work on DRC and the history of diamond mining in the Kasai region, I (Walker 2014) describe the slow development of these spaces of biopolitics and security-cumnervousness, beginning in roughly the same time period in which Hunt is working. I show how by the 1950s, biopolitics and security were entirely spatially intertwined in industrial mining centers like that of Bakwanga under the control of the Société Internationale Forestière et Minière du Congo (Forminière).2 The extraction of diamonds presents an acute case in which regimes of security often resemble and indeed are derived from penal colonies, due to the stones’ small size and ease of being hidden on or inside the body.3 At the same time as security regimes were ramped up to prevent illegal mining and mineral theft, colonial parastatal mining companies like the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) and the Forminière became deeply concerned with the health and well-being of their workers and their families. The latter, particularly since the end of the Second World War, were located adjacent to the mining sites, in order to give companies control over the biological and social reproduction of the workforce. Alongside deeply invasive security measures (notably in diamond and gold mining sites) thus existed an intensive, paternalistic program of care that included vaccinations, health care, and schooling for mineworkers’ children. In the different enclaves of the Belgian Congo, epidemiological metaphors of infection were prevalent in discourses about space, and it is here that we begin to see the intertwining of biopolitics and security and the t he ways in which they emerged in different parts of the colony. Hunt (2016:175-176) writes that Befale territory was described, in 1943, as “‘contaminated,’” the epidemiological idiom calling not (at that moment) for sanitary agents 2

Hunt notes the regional variation and different rhythms through which the two states developed, signaling that the extractive zones had perhaps advanced further in their securitization at an earlier date: “So it was that a group of eighty-three eighty-three Kitawala arrived as Ekafera prisoners from Congo’s industrial core in 1944. Their dossiers contained fingerprints, suggesting they hailed from a more hardened , sophisticated world of security management…” (Hunt 2016:186-187). 2016:186-187). 3 It is instructive instructive here to remember that De Beers’ own business, which inspired diamond-mining compounds elsewhere in Africa, was transformed and heavily buttressed by the construction construction of a penal station in Kimberley, South Africa. This enabled De Beers to use particularly invasive techniques on inmate-workers to prevent diamond theft (see Turrell 1984). Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

16 but for “informants and spies.” In my own work on Kasai, colonial agents used similar metaphors. Consider the following passage, from a 1928 medical officer’s report on indigenous labor: The European areas ( postes européens) and mining company workers’ camps ( cités de travailleurs des sociétés minières ) constitute small islands of healthy terrain ( îlots de terre saine ) in the middle of a deeply infected region. We must never lose sight of the fact that we are surrounded by a poisoned human atmosphere from whose contact we must protect ourselves, and that we have nothing but contaminated co ntaminated labor, from which we can but extract certain sorted elements (éléments triés) as long as we have not disinfected all the masses (cited in Walker 2014:62) The medical officer’s words are instructive for the logics of enclaved space they reveal: on the one hand, they refer to a small island of health. On the other, o ther, it is easy to see how the “poisoned human atmosphere” surrounding the “small islands of healthy terrain” was an idiom that evoked more than just the strictly biomedical, much in the way that metaphors of health and unhealthy bodies stood in for colonial nervousness in Equateur. Yet it is the doctor’s last phrase that is the t he most significant. He notes that they must simultaneously protect themselves from dangers outside the enclave while nevertheless denoting an ideal of expansion in order to eliminate those dangers – to dispense with an “outside” to the enclave in general: “…as long as we have not disinfected all the masses.” Indeed, mining companies like Forminière conducted vaccination campaigns well outside the territories over which they had legal control. They also sought, at different points in time, to increase security and curb illegal mining by soliciting an expansion of the legal borders of the mining zones. The enclave—both biopolitical and security-oriented—is always fraught, however, which is what makes it an aspirational space: the Ekafera penal colony became a “porous ‘hotbed’ for all Tshuapa’s Kitawala,” (Hunt 2016:195).  Forminière also later decided to retract its request to expand its zone of intervention, in order to concentrate its security and biomedical interventions in a smaller area presumed to be more manageable after it realized it was unable to prevent illegal informal mining within the wider region (Walker 2014:62). The histories of these contractions and expansions, as well as the advent and implementation of the techniques of enclaving that Hunt identifies in Equateur and that I have witnessed in Kasai compel us to think about how the spatial logics of enclaving encompass and complicate our understanding of the processes through which the biopolitical and security states were constituted and transformed t ransformed over time. In this way, we can be attentive to the micro-histories of the Congo’s many regions while highlighting the emergence of different guises of state and their reliance on sanitary and corporal metaphors that appeared simultaneously in different parts of the colony.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

17

Works Cited

Gupta, A. (1995). “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State”. American Ethnologist  22(2):375-402.  22(2):375-402. Lefebvre, H. (2000[1974]).  La production de l'espace. Paris: Anthropos. Schatzberg, M. (1988). The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Turrell, R. (1984). “Kimberley’s Model Compounds”. The Journal of African History  25(1):59-75. Walker, J. Z. (2014). The Ends of Extraction: Diamonds, Value, and Reproduction in DR Congo . University of Chicago.

 Joshua Walker received his PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2014.  From 2014-2016, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic  Research (WiSER). He is currently working on a new new research project entitled "'I Will Never Marry A  Luba Man': Gender, Marriage, Marriage, and Ethnicity in Central Democratic Democratic Republic of Congo" as a  Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Studies at the University of of the Witwatersrand.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

18

Scholarly Synaesthesia LYS ALCAYNA-STEVENS  Post-doctoral  Post-doctor al Researcher, Laboratoire Laborat oire d’Anthropologie d’Anthropo logie Sociale and Institut Institu t Pasteur, Paris

NANCY ROSE HUNT’S LATES 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’ (23), for example – that renders her work so compelling for an anthropologist of Equateur and of the senses.

Young girl covered in red ngola paste dances baáta with dozens of other women and girls following the death and burial of a beloved young woman in this village. Tshuapa Province. © Alcayna-Stevens 2013

Hunt carries the reader through histories, memories and reveries in southern Equateur, in what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo (and the contemporary provinces of Tshuapa, Mongala and Equateur). The reader is transported from the brutality of forced

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://somatosphere.net/2017/01/book-forum-nancy-rose-hunt-a-nervous-state

19 rubber extraction under the Congo Free State (from 1885), through to the distraction, hedonism and ‘motion’ that punctuated the end of colonial rule (until 1960). With each chapter, the reader is swept, as if by an eddy, into events ‘when state power and subaltern wills clashed’ (23). While the reader might find herself awaiting the familiar plotline of ‘horror and humanitarianism’ (3) associated with severed hands in the Congo Free State and sexual violence in the ongoing Kivu conflict, Hunt makes clear that she eschews ‘catastrophe logic’, crisis and haunting. Instead, the reader meanders along with her, through myriad afterlives – as opposed to any single aftermath. Hunt’s attention to mood (palpable in the stories, poems, diaries, letters and songs she analyses) steers the reader beyond narratives of moral indignation and ‘resilience’ – a ‘platitudinous word […] born of neoliberal austerities’ (253) – into the undercurrents of insurgency and resistance: anger, excitation, regret, privation, fright… nervousness. My own research traces the encounters between Tshuapan villagers and the same ‘energetic, environmental NGO’ (239) with which Hunt makes a canoe-trip up the Lomako in 2007. These relationships are plastic: they stretch and bunch, simmer and boil over. W hen moods shift, tensions can suddenly erupt, as they did when the young people of the territorial capital (a small town of around 3,000 people) stormed and ransacked the compound of the environmental NGO in 2014, demanding jobs, repairs to local infrastructure, and a football pitch. Later in 2014, a group of women in a village 90km from the territorial capital felled a tree – ‘across the warpath’ (242) – to block the arrival of the NGO, accompanied as it was by the Congolese Wildlife Authority, deployed in order to secure the newly-created forest reserve. Flight, and ‘concealment’ in what Hunt calls ‘refuges’, is also practiced in contemporary Equateur. The nganda, or temporary forest encampments, kept alive despite colonial efforts, continue to thrive as ‘alternate spaces’ (116) in forested parts of DR Congo. So too does the frustration of the post-colonial state (and that of the environmental NGO). Both lament the number of people who live in the forest, or who periodically enter it for months at a time to hunt, fish, or gather caterpillars(which are then transported to and sold in urban centres as far away as Kisangani and Kinshasa). Both state and NGO continue to make plans to ‘peacefully evict’ such people. I find Hunt’s work inspiring on several levels. Firstly, it encourages me to linger on the visceral and vernacular memories that fuel edginess and volatility: the ways in which the armed Wildlife Authority induces shudders and frowns, and conjures up recollections of government soldiers’ abuses during the war of the late 1990s; or the ways in which people recall the responsibilities fulfilled by plantation bosses in the 1970s (and now, as far as they are concerned, neglected by NGOs). Secondly, her work motivates me to attend to the reverie that springs from NGO promises of development, as well as from a nostalgia for futures imagined in decades past. In their discussions and debates, people mingle this

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

20 nostalgia with an ‘eviction reverie’ reminiscent of Maria N’koi, Likili and Kitawala (which continues to flourish and grow in nearby forests to this day). Thirdly, I am curious to trace the ways in which the ‘pathologization’ (241) of nganda in medical and territorial eyes, as ‘unhealthy’, mosquito-ridden, and leading to the neglect of villages and fields, compares with the environmental concerns of contemporary NGOs preoccupied with the bushmeat crisis in central Africa, and with the separation of people and wildlife. Beyond these resonances, Hunt’s work also inspires me to attend to gestures, glances, sighs, nods, restlessness and laughter, and the ways in which they allude to simmering resentment, ambition, reverie or suspicion. Hunt’s attentiveness to the senses renders her analysis both capacious and fine-grained. I am touched particularly by her attention to women’s stories and bodies, and the affective and corporeal repercussions of violence in their lives. Contemporary Tshuapan women intimate past violence at the hands of former European plantation bosses, of soldiers, rebel armies or police, or ongoing violence at the hands of husbands. Often silent on the public stage, they whisper these stories at the stream, in their fields, in their kitchens and at women’s church groups, and sometimes they join together and protest, as they did in 2014, when the Wildlife Authority arrived. In the stories of both men and women, it is often through sound (the forest suddenly silent after an explosion during the war), smell (the earth as one presses against it to hide when a patrol passes), or other senses (such as hunger in one’s stomach, aching in one’s back, or a sudden loss of balance during grief) that poignant moments are recalled. Both women and men also speak of aspirations, of seeking out the kind of ‘independent, urbane lives’ (246) Hunt and other scholars of Congo have attempted to trace and capture. Today’s researchers of Congo are part of a growing and vibrant research community, and increasing numbers of excellent historical, sociological and anthropological works on Congo and its diaspora have been published in recent years. But while much of this research focusses on the country’s capital, Kinshasa, Hunt’s work provides an invigorating engagement with Equateur which I hope will stimulate further research into the lives (and afterlives) of the people and politics of this region, inspiring anthropologists and historians of Congo – and beyond – to consider how writing can be used to make room for that which is unsaid, but which is felt . I eagerly anticipate the ways in which such a scholarly synaesthesia can be used to capture the nervousness, suspicion and reverie taking hold as thousands of Congolese (as well as the international community) call for the end of Kabila’s presidency.

 Lys Alcayna-Stevens is Alcayna-Stevens is a post-doctoral researcher at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, and in the Medical and Environmental Anthropology research group at the Institut Pasteur, both in Paris.  Her most recent publication, ‘ Habituating  Habituating Scientists’ Scientists’ (2016) was published in the journal ‘Social Studies of Science.’

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

21

A few postscripts on  A Nervous State, with much gratitude NANCY ROSE HUNT  Professor, History Histo ry & African Studies, University U niversity of Florida

SOME BOOK REVIEWS examine wholes. Others zero in on a strand or term that helps push immediate work forward. Both kinds may invigorate, and I am very grateful to Todd Meyers, everyone at Somatosphere, and these fine scholars for this spectrum of deep critical readings and reactions to A Nervous State. Its multidimensional strands are not easily skimmed. Some knots seem refractory or minutiae tough to discern, but I did not write the book for readers seeking a quick, easy read. It may require a kind of patience many no longer muster in these times of quick raiding across screens and sites.  A Nervous State rewrites Congo at the turn of the 20 th century while it sidesteps iconic photographs, reimports Conrad, and jettisons catastrophe narratives. It also suggests how historians may reckon with complexity. Trauma or social catastrophe would have been easy and predictable for this violated, hyperscripted location in imperial history. Instead, the book veers into the unexpected: pleasure and latitude following stark, grisly violence. These five reviews suggest A Nervous State disperses singular lines. I am grateful to Jessica Robins-Ruszkowski for her subtle reading of the ways kinship bleeds into political matters within the book. It also shows Congolese figuring their colonial masters with kin and antikin idioms, and using ancestral imaging to reckon with the “birth” of healing charms. And these technologies, critical to the book’s many therapeutic insurgencies, spread along fictive lines of descent. The reflections of three Congolese specialists offer a sense of where historical ethnographies are heading in this field: not merely to music, enclaves, and environmental NGOs, but theoretically, in time, and in relation to pressing politics and futures. Joseph Economic Collapse, from Paris to Trapido, whose wonderful Breaking Rocks: Music, Ideology and Economic  Kinshasa will be out in January, takes a long materialist view with vocabulary from some of central Africa’s enduring best: economic anthropology. Lys Alcanya-Stevens moves beautifully among ecologies, the senses, anger, and Equateur’s environmental NGOs. And,  Joshua Walker offers a fascinating discussion of entwined security logics producing enclaves in the past and present. Flight and freedom

 A Nervous State reads not for agency and resilience, and it avoids brittle images of spectacular violence. Instead, it tracks motion and plasticity in a violated, “shrunken milieu.” Rather This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://somatosphere.net/2017/01/book-forum-nancy-rose-hunt-a-nervous-state

22 than a narrative of ruin or dire subfertility, I offer one of flight. Mass rape in the 1900s chafed long after with troubling nightmares about incestuous violence and spirit rape. Congolese strategies involved furtive, secondary homes; music, dance, ironic laughter, healing spectacles, and reverie; underground communication networks; and terror tactics, wielding charms that unnerved. Feisty independent women emerged alongside many practices of freedom: refuge zones, dance, urbanity, and therapies. Lys Alcanya-Stevens and  Joseph Trapido beautifully underline the prominence prominence of nganda spaces and urbane bars. The lexical & Congolese studies

The biopolitical has become a predictable, tired category in much academic prose. My reading of a knotted colonial double--health system plus security apparatus—opposes narrowly conceived governmentalities and colonial numeracy. The double entendres to nervousness and nervous states interweave political and intimate dimensions. Joshua Walker wonders about the same nervous epidemiological lexicon used in diagnosing security risks in his region of Congo. Such repetitions in colonial framing and idioms across Congo’s immense terrain fascinate, and they are worthy of canny research. Most Belgian off icials probably spoke and thought with the same words, while their language was surely mediated by Congo’s diverse regional economies. Colonial speech deserves attention as poetics, and such lexical analysis originated with Johannes Fabian (whose “poetics of lexical borrowing” also fostered my A Colonial Lexicon). Congolese studies has long been an astonishingly inventive field with scholars unafraid of theory, ingeniously mining the visual and the textual, attending to wealth and composition, as well as European and métis presences, structures, chaos, imaginations, labor, words, and dreams. It is arguable that Congo is Africa’s richest, most innovative historiography. Interwoven with anthropology, it emerged in 1950s Belgian Congo and went on to pioneer orality, immediate history, forms of historical ethnography, and the use of visuality and paintings. The diversity of methods, archives, and theoretical orientations challenges newcomers with an extraordinarily rich literature, from Mary Douglas to Luc de Heusch, Johannes Fabian, and Filip De Boeck, or Jan Vansina to Benoît Verhaegen, Jean-Luc Vellut, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Yoka Lye, Johan Lagae, and Amandine Lauro. These two lines were never separate, and the list can and does go on. Scholars of Congo and other colonial terrains have much to learn from this library and its methods. Perhaps more will grapple with the nervous, the paranoid, and bleeding diagnostic and securitizing vocabularies, too. The subjective and a slender footnote

Foucault’s comment about history imprinting itself on bodies remains important. Yet histories need more than bodies. They need minds, senses, persons, and practices, too. In Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

23 intercutting bits of stories, A Nervous State enables moods. Disparate subjective experiences surface, too. The book is often about observational and sensory capacity: who perceived what, when, and via what senses or nerves. Congolese middle figures of dance halls and VD inspections nervously feared losing prestige and honor. Most Europeans were nervous some of the time, though unevenly so. Some S ome of my strongest characters are white men who wrote—Dhanis, Casement, Jadot, Schwers, and Graham Greene. Congolese women are less sketched in as individuals; even Maria N’koi is more figuration than a self. Yet inner, psychic lives are suggested strongly through women’s songs and their “neurasthenic” therapeutic forms. Most Congolese seem to have known self-possession, rage, and flight more than nervousness. Yet fraught women alternated, like trembling trees, between agitation and calm within regional templates of healing. This same human spectrum is what my many archives delivered. One message may be about mining deeply and bending to what archives offer up. More than one reader has pointed to my slender footnote suggesting historians would do well to stop ranking the value of evidence by racial provenance. This proclivity has flattened histories of colonial Africa, keeping them from engaging with and illuminating European texts, characters, fantasies, and nightmares. My book also suggests that I have little interest in theory hailing only from some intellectual concoction or another of a “Global South,” as if Mbembe should count and Benjamin, Balandier, Fabian, or Quayson not. Theory moves and contaminates and should be made to move and contaminate, and I am pleased to be part of o f motion that challenges policing -- and disturbs. Form and the how 

My writing attends to form, and the how of writing has a politics to it. Helen Tilley suggested the book reads like a museum display, though mine is hardly still. It meanders while telling of metamorphosing phenomena at several levels. Working against easy binaries, it turns up blind spots, collects, and curates. I rummaged through a multi-sited, multi-produced set of archives and brought into being what some scholars now call “an archive,” “their archive,” a freshly assembled set of sources (or bibliography). Benjamin’s “techniques of nearness” and assemblage inspired. These traces are necessarily uneven, while the voids are important evidence in their own right. The method is hermeneutic and diagnostic, while the writing involves parsing, evoking, figuring, juxtaposing, and what I call “suturing.”1 Patterns came from working with what I found or had on hand, letting accounts, legends, and repetitions emerge from “my archive” of many dimensions and locations. In the t he end, emplotment worked through ordering, disordering, authorial voice, foreshadowing, and a sense of futurity. The arrangement of stories--some diminutive, others a chapter long—worked to

1

Nancy Rose Hunt, Suturing New Medical Histories of Africa (Berlin and Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2013).

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

24 shift away from dehumanization and horror, toward wonder, insurgency, freedom, and sense-making. Limits of textuality and the senses

I imagined multiple kinds of readers for this book: those laboring in Congolese studies, more widely in the field of colonial studies, or more theoretically in relation to historical theory and temporalities. The mode of presentation aims to open fresh thinking about possibility in historical writing. Still, the challenges of composition remain unresolved. As the very generous and profound words of Richard Keller with Emer Lucey suggest, the book’s historical, methodological and historiographical tensions achieve a “productive uncertainty.” In Cape Town, Ross Truscott brilliantly suggested that the book’s central problem—“violence and its reproduction” (a problem glossed as a nervous state)—is condensed not in the photographic slice on the back cover (exposing a mutilated medical worker in the 1920s), but in the same photograph pictured on the cover: co ver: a depiction of nervously held and decomposing objects including a book in Congolese hands. This image speaks to “the limits of textuality,” the difficulties of writing about violence and its reproduction.2 The opening chapter tackles this challenge directly, reading for the senses and assembling an “acoustic register.” Lys Alcanya-Stevens strikingly interprets my attention to the senses and sensations as a form of “scholary synaesthesia.” A Nervous State does mix in modalities of perception, attending to one sense while kindling or disregarding another, achieving much through coloration and subverting images with sound. Dispositions and social moods matter  as  as do depths, surfaces, and interruptions. I would only o nly say that my point is not to let all fold into the affective and the sensory. Ideas and analysis coexisted with the visceral, and the rationalities to vernacular healing are exposed. I am not fond of the new term, “affective history,” finding this new branding reductive, ablative. Rather, may that t hat impossible Annaliste aspiration, a “total history,” still inspire. Writing and theory become inseparable in  A Nervous State. The attention to form and the senses buttresses the strong work in critique and explanation: the book is about practices of freedom and flight in a colonial situation, and these practices resulted from infringement, violation, and harm. They took on shapes in healing, insurgency, and pleasure-seeking,

2

Stat e,” unpublished book launch manuscript, Clarke’s Bookshop, Cape Ross Trusscott, “Discussion of  A Nervous State, Town, 16 September 2016. I am deeply grateful to Ross, Patricia Hayes, Premesh Lalu, UWC’s Centre for Humanities, and Clarke’s for this splendid event, as well as many others who helped organize, prepared comments for, or posed critical questions at several other exceptional critical occasions in 2016: notably, Mike McGovern and Brandi Hughes in Ann Arbor; Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Eric Worby, and Joshua Walker at WISER; Sean Hanretta and David Schoenbrun at Northwestern; and Florence Bernault, Andy Ivaska, Juan Obarrio, and Abena Osseo-Asare at the African Studies meetings in DC. All made invaluable remarks that assisted in this rethinking here. Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt

25 while igniting, fueling, and inflaming nervousness among many a colonial master and two successive nervous colonial states, first King Leopold’s and the Belgian Congo. But please beware: the book’s many strands build density in an almost phantasmagoric, kaleidoscopic manner whose effects may overwhelm those impatient, hurried multi-taskers of the 21st century.

Nancy Rose Hunt  is  is Professor of History & African Studies at the University of Florida.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State St ate by Nancy Rose Hunt