Duke University Press, Clarke’s Bookshop and the Centre for Humanities Research, UWC invite you to the launch of the new book by Nancy Rose Hunt (Professor of History & African Studies, University of Florida)

A Nervous State Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo

Duke University Press, Clarke’s Bookshop and the Centre for Humanities Research, UWC invite you to the launch of the new book by Nancy Rose Hunt (Professor of History & African Studies, University of Florida)

Nancy Rose Hunt’s book takes us directly into the afterlives of violence and harm in King Leopold’s Congo Free State. This innovative and exquisitely argued work moves beyond existing frameworks of analysis and develops new categories of historical thought. This is a new kind of colonial history where the Belgian colonial state tended to move between two conditions, the nervous and the biopolitical. The ‘mood’ of nervousness affected medical investigations, security operations and vernacular healing movements. The book has been praised for its compelling research, and its stunning insight.

Nancy Rose Hunt will be introduced by Patricia Hayes (NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory). A conversation between the author and Ross Truscott (Centre for Humanities Research) will follow.

WHEN: Friday 16 September 2016, 5.30 for 6pm

WHERE: Clarke’s Bookshop, 199 Long Street, Cape Town

RSVP: books@clarkesbooks.co.za or 021 423 5739 (by Wednesday 14 September)