Description
Book SynopsisIn
An Archive of Possibilities, anthropologist and surgeon Rachel Marie Niehuus explores possibilities of healing and repair in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo against a backdrop of 250 years of Black displacement, enslavement, death, and chronic war. Niehuus argues that in a context in which violence characterizes everyday life, Congolese have developed innovative and imaginative ways to live amid and mend from repetitive harm. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the Black critical theory of Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and others, Niehuus explores the renegotiation of relationships with land as a form of public healing, the affective experience of living in insecurity, the hospital as a site for the socialization of pain, the possibility of necropolitical healing, and the uses of prophesy to create collective futures. By considering the radical nature of cohabitating with violence, Niehuus demonstrates that Congolese practices of healing im
Trade Review“This ethnography of violence and repair, hospitals and therapeutics, is set in eastern Congo’s still warlike Kivu region. It is mediated by the astute eyes and sensibilities of the very talented American anthropologist and surgeon, Rachel Marie Niehuus. Her focus on the intimate, the clinical, and the traumatic, with her pressing arguments about repair, stands to transform how anthropologists and conflict studies scholars approach medical practice, violence, enmity, and injury in Congo and well beyond. Awash with original contributions to studies of violence, humanitarianism, and the affective, this moving book tells some crucial regional histories while it investigates lively strands about hope and possible futures.” -- Nancy Rose Hunt, author of * A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo *
“In this outstanding work of storytelling and ethnography, Rachel Marie Niehuus delves deep into the harrowing realities of life in the war-torn landscape of eastern Congo. Beyond the hospital’s sterile walls, amid the constant specters of violence and death, Niehuus uncovers a resilient and profoundly human story of survival, repair, and healing. Vivid and eye-opening,
An Archive of Possibilities is a poignant exploration of a people’s unwavering determination to create a future beyond the scars of their past. An immensely thought-provoking and illuminating book.” -- Laurence Ralph, author of * Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: Where the Scars Are So Thick 1
1. Dirt Work 21
Interlude 1: A Timeline 45
2. A Sea of Insecurity 47
Interlude 2: Running 69
3. The Body, the Flesh, and the Hospital 73
Interlude 3: Where War Is (Always) Coming 95
4. When Life Demands Release 99
Interlude 4: Joy 121
5. “We Are Creating a World We Have Never Seen” 123
Interlude 5: Otherwise 143
Conclusion: Cohabitation 147
Notes 157
Bibliography 179
Index
