The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body

ISBN 1 86888 092 3. xiv & 220 pp. 

"It is difficult to find a single colonial or post-colonial society in which the hospital doctor, psychiatrist, nurse, public health official, and many other representatives of the socio-medical sciences are not present. It is equally impossible to identify any setting where the population has no knowledge of how to act and react in the ritual of the medical examination by the doctor, inspection by the aid worker, interrogation by the anthropologist, or enumeration by the census officer. "Using Foucault's thinking on the relationship between power and knowledge, the author of this extraordinary book analyses the way in which the body of `"The African" has itself been analysed in Western thought from the Renaissance to the present. 

Conventional analyses of colonialism view the body and society of the African as having pre-dated European conventions - the regressive practices of colonial occupation are seen as having disfigured a pre-existing known identity. Against this perspective, this book argues that socio-medical technologies were and are the creative underbelly of social control, actively inventing the African body, mind and society itself as objects amenable to analysis and domination. A history of the present, the book marshals an impressive array of documentary records - from the texts of renaissance mythology and natural science in the Classificatory age, to Bantu anatomy and "the African personality" in the twentieth century. As such it not only provides a critical edge to debates around colonialism and African identity, it is also an invaluable new reservoir of source materials for scholars with a passion for knowing the body politic and its anatomy of power.

CONTENTS

• 1. The African body in History and HIstories of the African Body History of medicine as achievement, function and repression  
• 2. Power, Knowledge and the Body The individual as invention ; Power and the body; Analysing power; a Trans humanist frame of analysis  
• 3. Renaissance body Myths and the Spectacle of Strangeness The body as prose and the Renaissance episteme, Monstrous men, The eye of the explorer and the rise of classification  
• 4. A Body without Volume: The African as Target of Sovereignty and Object of Taxonomy The problem of the African body as a surface, The power of punishment and the sight of sovereignty, Natural history ... , From theatres of punishment to healing  
• 5. Missionary Medicine, Moral Sanitation and Fabrication of the Heathen Heart Creation of the African with a soul and a body of organs, Moral sanitation and the medical missionary method, From revelation to confession ..., A watershed of power  
• 6. The Industrial Panopticon: Mining and the medical construction of migrant African labour The heat chamber as punishment and Panopticon, Inventing an economy of human bodies ..., Debasement and discipline ... , A therapeutic operator ..., The disciplinary descent of mining medicine  
• 7. Discipline and Danger: Psychological Science and the African Personality Lunatics and nervous systems, Impusive insanity and the perilous black, A `better' native ..., Balck consciousness and the cultivation of culture, Black Consciousness and the alienated African, A liberatory pyschology and the diffusion of danger,  
• 8. Filth, food and freedom: Public health and its changing African objects Sanitary science and the emergence of ta body boundary zone, Social medicine and a psycho-social space, Community health, A new public health ..., Body production lines  
• 9. Birth of the Bantu Clinic A Bantu anatomy, The African paitent as a lesion-containng body, The `quest for wholeness' and a subjective paitent, Bodies and voices  
• 10. Postscript: on the Anatomy of Power Rewriting the African subject, The relevance of Foucault to socio-medical practice in the present, Afterword