Nancy Rose Hunt
Biographic Data
| ID | 133994 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nancy Rose Hunt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nancy Rose |
| FAMILY NAME | Hunt |
| SIGNATURE | HUNT N R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0009-0008-5398-0483 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1173 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 9 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Working borders: Mad studies, psychiatric museums, and decolonization
This essay considers recent, contemporary ’mad studies,’ in their activist, academic and museological dimensions, especially in the 2000s. It attends to mad histories in relation to Global North/Global South borders and other decolonizing aspects, and the emergence since the 1980s of mad/asylum museums in European and African manifestations. The notion of ’working borders’ is engaged in relation to disciplinary academic borders but also as workin…
Madness, the Psychopolitical, and the Vernacular: Rethinking Psychiatric Histories
Nancy Rose Hunt, “Madness, the Psychopolitical, and the Vernacular: Rethinking Psychiatric Histories”: The introduction offers an innovative, critical historiographical overview of the field of psychiatric and madness scholarship for Africa, with a comprehensive historical overview of evidence and stories about madness in African history and scholarly studies, and attention to category work, sensibilities, and three concepts: madness, the psychop…
Psychiatric Contours: New African Histories of Madness
Psychiatric Contours investigates new histories of psychiatry, derangement, and agitated subjectivities in colonial and decolonizing Africa. The volume lets the multivalent term madness broaden perception, well beyond the psychiatric. Many chapters detect the mad or the psychiatric in unhinged persons, frantic collectives, and distressing situations. Others investigate individuals suffering from miscategorization. A key Foucauldian word, vivacity…
Violence, intimacy and veins of madness in a fraught border city
This article considers the intimate, the violent and the psychopathological in Bukavu, an eastern Congolese border city known for rape and war. A phenomenological focus pries open tensions in this ruinous, neoliberal 'boom town', frictions related to mental health, patterns of resort, and derangement. Ethnographic portraits from co-produced fieldnotes reveal family and street dynamics and a few adaptive, public figures of madness. Bukavu knows un…
Jan Vansina (1929-2017)
Aphasia, History, and Duress
This essay celebrates the publication of Duress, explores its concepts and themes, focuses on the way Ann Stoler rejects the notion of historical forgetting and develops a heuristic of "colonial aphasia" in an ethnographic chapter on the emergence of France's Far Right near Marseille in the 1990s. The essay also tracks how postcolonial scholars are using the notion of aphasia, drawing on Stoler's colonial usages in contexts like the Netherlands a…
History as Form, With Simmel in Tow
This essay is an engagement with forms, objects, and the nature of sly poetics in historical practice. It wonders about how historians have been practicing and theorizing craft at a time when postcolonial politics are urging for stronger attention to the vernacular, the archival, the affective, and the aesthetic. Offering a generous detour through a little-known version of Georg Simmel, then driving idealist ideas about history and creativity, th…
Colonial medical anthropology and the making of the central African infertility belt
This chapter urges for studying anthropological practice within colonial situations in a capacious way that questions the distinction between the guild of academic anthropologists and other less schooled and credentialed practitioners. Moving between Belgian and French Africa, the chapter provides the reason to think about differences and convergences between ethnographic and statistical representation that Talal Asad posed rather elusively some …
Into Africa: A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change by Barbra Mann Wall
Reviewed by: Into Africa: A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change by Barbra Mann Wall Nancy Rose Hunt Barbra Mann Wall. Into Africa: A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015. xvii + 231 pp. Ill. $49.95 (978-0-8135-6622-1). Into Africa is a fresh and substantial history of Catholic nuns working in diverse contexts across colonial and p…
A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo
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 birthr…
Accra’s Women on Screen, 2001: A Documentary Pair about Body, Risk, Tonics, and Health
The article introduces two documentaries, “Excuse Me to Say”—Notions of Body and Risk in Accra, and “Where Shall I Go?”—Tonics, Clinics, and Miracles in Accra, which take viewers on an intimate voyage through diverse territories of women’s health” and medical care in West Africa. An outgrowth of the Women’s Health in the City of Accra Research Collective, these documentaries grew out of this collaborative project that engaged students and faculty…
The Affective, the Intellectual, and Gender History
The integration of gender as a vibrant stream within African historical writing suggests a remarkable success story with many prominent historians and fresh thematics involved. Alongside an interest in subjectivities has emerged vigorous attention to the affective, emotions, and the senses. Why affect has emerged now matters. At the same time, new kinds of intellectual histories are burgeoning in the African field, frequently forwarding an unackn…
Espace, temporalité et rêverie: Écrire l'histoire des futurs au Congo belge
Cet article explore l'histoire de la région de l'Equateur au Congo Belge, des violences de l'époque de l'État Indépendant du Congo à leur mise en mémoire écrite dans les années 1950. Un récit de type « évènement/ répercussion » ou « évènement/catastrophe » ne peut que simplifier l'histoire mouvementée de cette région. L'article fait plutôt appel à la notion de rêverie, empruntée à Gaston Bachelard, et aux concepts liés à la temporalité chez Reinh…
Health and Healing
The ‘Health and Healing’ field emerged in the late 1970s as a way to focus more on vernacular healing practice and the politics of health. The essay covers an earlier generation of colonial anthropological work; key concepts like public healing, the social costs of production, drums of affliction, ambivalence, translation, debility, care, and therapeutic citizenship; and major themes, including colonial medicine, health workers, reproductive heal…
Whither African History
Historians of Africa often lament the provincialism of their field, that few books receive a wide airing or make a significant mark on other historiographies. Yet African history has long been experimental and methodologically inventive, and has grown ever more so over recent decades, primarily through greater attention to craft, theory, and a diverse range of sources linking past to present. However a strict empiricism is still strongly engraine…
Rewriting the Soul in a Flemish Congo
Journal Article Rewriting the Soul in a Flemish Congo Get access Nancy Rose Hunt Nancy Rose Hunt University of Michigan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 198, Issue 1, February 2008, Pages 185–215, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtm049 Published: 01 February 2008
An Acoustic Register, Tenacious Images, and Congolese Scenes of Rape and Repetition
This article argues for the importance of rewriting the conventional atrocity narrative about violence in King Leopold's Congo Free State in relation to the present, the ongoing war-related humanitarianism and sexual violence in the DRC. The central idea is to push beyond the shock and tenacity of the visual, the ubiquitous mutilation photographs that tend to blot out all else; and instead seek weaker, more fragile acoustic traces in a diverse ar…
Between Fiction and History: Modes of Writing Abortion in Africa
Entre fiction et histoire : l’avortement dans la littérarure africaine. – L’avortement clandestin est le sujet de nombreux romans féministes africains des années 1980 et 1990. Cet article propose aux historiens d’expliquer les raisons de ce phénomène. Dans un premier temps, nous passerons en revue la littérature médicale et socio-scientifique sur l’avortement en Afrique, en montrant comment cette question totalement ignorée au milieu des années 1…
Fertility's Fires and Empty Wombs in Recent Africanist Writing
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Tintin and the Interruptions of Congolese Comics
This chapter examines the depiction of Congolese people in comics, focusing on Tintin au Congo by Georges Rémi. It suggests that Tintin au Congo is notorious for its depiction of animal slaughter and its caricatured representation of the black body and it racialized humor is elemental, largely arising from contradictory pairings and episodes of misrecognition. It also describes comic-based advertisements produced by Europeans for Congolese people…
The Poetics of Ghosts: Social Reproduction in the Archive of the Nation
Shamed States
Mutant Messages
Index
Sex Rites, Civil Rights
The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism
I been panic.I been have to get up.I been
A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo
a hyaena, he would not join in.As we were under military discipline, I laid him down, and gave him a half a dozen of the best for insubordination, and attained my object with the help of a native Christian teacher, and procured an interesting skeleton, but even forty years later it is not an easy thing to do.≤ This book lies at the juncture of this kind of evidence about colonial violence, medical research, and bodies in Africa.Such a source does…
A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo
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 birthr…
Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura's Foyer Social, 1946-1960
An Acoustic Register, Tenacious Images, and Congolese Scenes of Rape and Repetition
This article argues for the importance of rewriting the conventional atrocity narrative about violence in King Leopold's Congo Free State in relation to the present, the ongoing war-related humanitarianism and sexual violence in the DRC. The central idea is to push beyond the shock and tenacity of the visual, the ubiquitous mutilation photographs that tend to blot out all else; and instead seek weaker, more fragile acoustic traces in a diverse ar…
Le Bebe en Brousse: European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo
Placing African women's history and locating gender
African women, whether as subjects or objects (and to a lesser extent as authors) of history, are no longer invisible in African historiography. Despite continuing lapses in awareness,' invisibility is no longer the problem. Several (more or less historical) anthologies have been published since Denise Paulme's ahistorical one of I963 (1960), and the number of monographs and dissertations focusing on the history of women, their social roles and t…
The Affective, the Intellectual, and Gender History
The integration of gender as a vibrant stream within African historical writing suggests a remarkable success story with many prominent historians and fresh thematics involved. Alongside an interest in subjectivities has emerged vigorous attention to the affective, emotions, and the senses. Why affect has emerged now matters. At the same time, new kinds of intellectual histories are burgeoning in the African field, frequently forwarding an unackn…
Single ladies on the Congo”: Protestant missionary tensions and voices
Espace, temporalité et rêverie: Écrire l'histoire des futurs au Congo belge
Cet article explore l'histoire de la région de l'Equateur au Congo Belge, des violences de l'époque de l'État Indépendant du Congo à leur mise en mémoire écrite dans les années 1950. Un récit de type « évènement/ répercussion » ou « évènement/catastrophe » ne peut que simplifier l'histoire mouvementée de cette région. L'article fait plutôt appel à la notion de rêverie, empruntée à Gaston Bachelard, et aux concepts liés à la temporalité chez Reinh…
Rewriting the Soul in a Flemish Congo
Journal Article Rewriting the Soul in a Flemish Congo Get access Nancy Rose Hunt Nancy Rose Hunt University of Michigan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 198, Issue 1, February 2008, Pages 185–215, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtm049 Published: 01 February 2008
Fertility's Fires and Empty Wombs in Recent Africanist Writing
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Violence, intimacy and veins of madness in a fraught border city
This article considers the intimate, the violent and the psychopathological in Bukavu, an eastern Congolese border city known for rape and war. A phenomenological focus pries open tensions in this ruinous, neoliberal 'boom town', frictions related to mental health, patterns of resort, and derangement. Ethnographic portraits from co-produced fieldnotes reveal family and street dynamics and a few adaptive, public figures of madness. Bukavu knows un…
Aphasia, History, and Duress
This essay celebrates the publication of Duress, explores its concepts and themes, focuses on the way Ann Stoler rejects the notion of historical forgetting and develops a heuristic of "colonial aphasia" in an ethnographic chapter on the emergence of France's Far Right near Marseille in the 1990s. The essay also tracks how postcolonial scholars are using the notion of aphasia, drawing on Stoler's colonial usages in contexts like the Netherlands a…
Whither African History
Historians of Africa often lament the provincialism of their field, that few books receive a wide airing or make a significant mark on other historiographies. Yet African history has long been experimental and methodologically inventive, and has grown ever more so over recent decades, primarily through greater attention to craft, theory, and a diverse range of sources linking past to present. However a strict empiricism is still strongly engraine…
Between Fiction and History: Modes of Writing Abortion in Africa
Entre fiction et histoire : l’avortement dans la littérarure africaine. – L’avortement clandestin est le sujet de nombreux romans féministes africains des années 1980 et 1990. Cet article propose aux historiens d’expliquer les raisons de ce phénomène. Dans un premier temps, nous passerons en revue la littérature médicale et socio-scientifique sur l’avortement en Afrique, en montrant comment cette question totalement ignorée au milieu des années 1…
Technologies of Pregnancy and Birth
A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo
Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa
Research Protocol and Resources in Burundi
Information on the existence and resources of African libraries and archives is scanty at best, and the scene changes quickly. No one has attempted to assemble a list for researchers of such institutions and resources in Burundi since 1974, when Daniel Nyambariza provided a list of documentation and research centers and other adresses intéressantes as a preface to his bibliography. No doubt once a very useful list, much of Nyambariza's informatio…
Research Protocol and Resources in Burundi
Information on the existence and resources of African libraries and archives is scanty at best, and the scene changes quickly. No one has attempted to assemble a list for researchers of such institutions and resources in Burundi since 1974, when Daniel Nyambariza provided a list of documentation and research centers and other adresses intéressantes as a preface to his bibliography. No doubt once a very useful list, much of Nyambariza's informatio…
Le Bebe en Brousse: European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo
Placing African women's history and locating gender
African women, whether as subjects or objects (and to a lesser extent as authors) of history, are no longer invisible in African historiography. Despite continuing lapses in awareness,' invisibility is no longer the problem. Several (more or less historical) anthologies have been published since Denise Paulme's ahistorical one of I963 (1960), and the number of monographs and dissertations focusing on the history of women, their social roles and t…
Femmes Coloniales au Congo Belge: Essais et Documents
Single ladies on the Congo”: Protestant missionary tensions and voices
Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura's Foyer Social, 1946-1960
Noise Over Camouflaged Polygamy, Colonial Morality Taxation, and a Woman-Naming Crisis in Belgian Africa
This paper highlights analytical and historical commonalities between Belgian African anti-polygamy measures and the unusual practice of taxing urban un-married women. Secondly, it interprets the 1950s rebellion against this tax in Bujumbura in light of how the colonial category of femme libre and a 1950 antipolygamy law converged in the Muslim African community of Buyenzi. Colonial categories and camouflage, name-giving and name-calling, noise a…
In the Shade of an Acacia Tree: Memoirs of a Health Officer in Africa, 1945-1959
Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa. John M. Janzen. Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care, 34. John M. Janzen, gen. ed
Milk, Honey, and Money: Changing Concepts in Rwandan Healing
“Le Bébé En Brousse”European Women, African Birth Spacing, and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo
This chapter examines colonial intervention in breastfeeding and milk distribution in the Belgian Congo. It shows that these colonial initiatives were linked to a discourse which viewed African birth spacing customs insidious and saw a solution in European women. The chapter explains that the colonial call for a crusade to combat the prejudices that separate the spouses led to the development of the most massive network of maternal and infant hea…
A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo
a hyaena, he would not join in.As we were under military discipline, I laid him down, and gave him a half a dozen of the best for insubordination, and attained my object with the help of a native Christian teacher, and procured an interesting skeleton, but even forty years later it is not an easy thing to do.≤ This book lies at the juncture of this kind of evidence about colonial violence, medical research, and bodies in Africa.Such a source does…
Gendered Colonialisms in African History
Introduction: Nancy Rose Hunt (University of Arizona, USA). 1. Ngaitana (I will circumcise myself): The Gender and Generational Politics of the 1956 Ban on Clitoridectomy in Meru, Kenya: Lynn M. Thomas (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA). 2. Cocky Hahn and the Black Venus: The Making of a Native Commissioner in South West Africa, 1915--46: Patricia Hayes (University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and Zimbabwe). 3. Not Welfare or Uplift W…
Pawa: A Memoir from the Belgian Congo, 1945-1949
Gendered Colonialisms in African History
Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa
Gendered Colonialisms in African History
Tintin and the Interruptions of Congolese Comics
This chapter examines the depiction of Congolese people in comics, focusing on Tintin au Congo by Georges Rémi. It suggests that Tintin au Congo is notorious for its depiction of animal slaughter and its caricatured representation of the black body and it racialized humor is elemental, largely arising from contradictory pairings and episodes of misrecognition. It also describes comic-based advertisements produced by Europeans for Congolese people…
The Poetics of Ghosts: Social Reproduction in the Archive of the Nation
Shamed States
Mutant Messages
Index
Sex Rites, Civil Rights
The Truest Belief Is Compulsion
The Vulva Thieves (Atna Nylkna): Modal Ethics and the Colonial Archive
Sociology (25 works) · History (24 works) · Political science (20 works) · History (16 works) · African history and culture studies (15 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Colonialism (12 works) · Archaeology (11 works)