{"product_id":"a-nervous-state-9780822359463","title":"A Nervous State","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNancy Rose Hunt tells the affective history of the convergence of biopolitics and colonial violence in the Belgian Congo. By showing how the shifts and interactions between the biopolitical state and the nervous state drove the colonial government's actions toward the Congolese, Hunt provides a new model for theorizing colonialism.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Hunt demonstrates how her use of interdisciplinary methods—archival, oral historical, literary, and ethnographic—and unconventional materials provides provocative insights into the colonial history of the Congo.\" -- Elisha P. Renne * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *\u003cbr\u003e\"The book’s synthetic range, historical detail, and conceptual density...make it highly appropriate for graduate work, and essential in equatorial African studies....an exemplary venture in medical anthropology and a truly rich set of resources for those of us engaging such questions in our own thought and research.\" -- David Eaton * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" -- Richard C. Keller and Emer Lucey * Somatosphere *\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eA Nervous State\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eLomongo\u003c\/i\u003e 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 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 will support.\" -- Joe Trapido * Somatosphere *\u003cbr\u003e\"Nancy Rose Hunt’s latest 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 \u003ci\u003eacoustics\u003c\/i\u003e of hushed silence and sadistic laughter,' for example—that renders her work so compelling for an anthropologist of Equateur and of the senses.\" -- Lys Alcayna-Stevens * Somatosphere *\u003cbr\u003e\"The interpretation in this splendid work is a decisive contribution to understanding the jumble of desires, interests, discourses and images in the colonial and post-colonial history of this country, as well as the psychic life of its history.\" -- Roberto Beneduce * Journal of Asian and African Studies *\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eA Nervous State\u003c\/i\u003e provides a complex history of Colonial Congo; it is a huge contribution to African Studies and anthropology.\" -- Charles Tshimanga * International Journal of African Historical Studies *\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eA Nervous State\u003c\/i\u003e is certainly one of the most elegant books I have seen over the last years and an impressive attempt at entangling, and at discussing entangled, narratives. . . . This book is certainly 'a must' for everyone engaging with the history of communities under colonial rule, especially for Central Africa, but also beyond.\" -- Alexander Keese * Social History *\u003cbr\u003e\"The interpretation in this splendid work is a decisive contribution to understanding the jumble of desires, interests, discourses and images in the colonial and post-colonial history of this country, as well as the psychic life of its history.\" -- Roberto Beneduce * Journal of Asian and African Studies *\u003cbr\u003e\"Hunt provides a bricolage of archives, memories, and traces that is more than the sum of its parts. In so doing, she demonstrates in this deeply researched and assiduously analyzed work that the history of colonial Congo is much more than the haunted legacy of its violent inception.\"\u003cbr\u003e   -- Matthew M. Heaton * American Historical Review *\u003cbr\u003e\"In contrast to much popular work on the Congo, this book rejects using catastrophe and crisis as the main narratives to order Congolese history. Without denying the violence of Leopold II’s regime and the Belgian colonial state, this study provides a much-needed sense of the diverse narratives of healing, anxiety, and opportunity that emerged in the decades following the end of the brutal reign of concessionary companies in the northwestern province of Equateur.  . . . \u003ci\u003eA Nervous State\u003c\/i\u003e will take its place among the best works on African social and cultural history for years to come.\" -- Jeremy Rich * Journal of Social History *\u003cbr\u003e“Nancy Rose Hunt’s \u003ci\u003eA Nervous State\u003c\/i\u003e represents a pioneering work in African history, which will surely become a staple in advancing new frontiers for other narratives in the continent’s history.” -- Ben Weiss * African Studies Review *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAbbreviations  ix\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments  xi\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Introduction  1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 1. Registers of Violence  27\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 2. Maria N'koi  61\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 3. Emergency Time  95\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 4. Shock Talk and Flywhisks  135\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 5. A Penal Colony, an Infertility Clinic  167\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 6. Motion  207\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Conclusion. Field Coda and Other Endings  237\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Notes  255\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Bibliography  309\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Index  343\u003cbr\u003e  ","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49406089527639,"sku":"9780822359463","price":112.2,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780822359463.jpg?v=1730494487","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/a-nervous-state-9780822359463","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}