Nancy Rose Hunt. A Nervous State

In African and world history classes, the horrors perpetrated in the Congo Free State are a staple example of the excesses of European imperialism, and with good reason. But to what extent should the atrocities committed in the early twentieth century define the history of this region and its people? In addressing this question and many more, Nancy Rose Hunt’s A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo seeks to “move historical imaginations beyond horror and humanitarianism.” As a result, her narrative “aims for no heroes, no villains, and little haunting,” focusing instead on the “numerous afterlives [that] emerge as quite distinct from a single aftermath” (3). Famous figures like Leopold II, Roger Casement, Joseph Conrad, and Simon Kimbangui loom in the background. Instead, Hunt looks at the period from roughly 1915 through the end of Belgian rule in 1960, recovering accounts of lesser-known prophetic healers, minor colonial officials, and all but forgotten writers from provincial state archives and more obscure sources, such as songs that preserve traces of historical memory, therapeutic practices, and stories about trees, among others. The result is an extremely rich account that eschews narrative for an emphasis on a deep and lasting impression, difficult to articulate but reflective of the complexity of what Hunt calls “the nervous state.”

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Literature · Narrative · Period (music) · State (computer science) · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History