Whose Pain Is It, Anyway
On Kippie Moeketsi and John Chavafambira’s Encounter with Medical Science
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21665837 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Vusumzi Nkomo (Cape Town Creative Academy, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Pages | 183-201 |
| Publication date | 2024-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | TOPIA Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1206-0143 • E-ISSN: 1916-0194 |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/topia-2023-0060 |
| OpenAlex | W4409797318 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
Black pain, while overwhelmingly real for those experiencing it, has an altogether incontestably singular structure that exposes the incompatibility of protocols of relief with the structure of anti-Blackness. Reading and reflecting on the late South African composer Kippie Moeketsi’s tragic sojourn in London’s Ferreira Hospital’s “mental asylum,” this paper probes, through an afropessimist critique, the tension between the unfettered access to and gratuitous enjoyment of the (pained) Black body and problem of Black thought. Instead of treating this incident as isolated, I trace it from Wulf Sachs’ psychoanalytic-cum-anthropological study of and relationship with a Black analysand, John Chavafambira, in his 1937 Black Hamlet (later adapted to Black Anger in a revised 1947 edition) to highlight a fundamental ambivalence and dependence of human social relations on Black pain for their coherence. Moreover, I interrogate the problem of the figure of the “mad African” and the supposed incongruity of their psychic structure with the demands of an anti-Black order
Medical education · Medical science · Psychoanalysis · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine · Psychology
| Highly cited | No |
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