Overview

In 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 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 amidst 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 and visionary to create collective futures. By considering the radical nature of cohabitating with violence, Niehuus demonstrates that Congolese practices of healing imagine and articulate alternative ways of living in a global regime of antiblackness.

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9781478025757

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Reviews

“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 *

“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, stand 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 *

Author Information

Rachel Marie Niehuus is Surgical Critical Care Fellow in the Department of Traumatology and Surgical Critical Care at the University of Pennsylvania.

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