The #54_IR Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body
Keywords:
African Studies, Identity, Racialism; Body politic, socio-medical, post-colonialitySynopsis
The author analyses the ways 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 intervention - the repressive practices of colonial occupation are seen as having disfigured a pre-existing known identity. Against this perspective the 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. The book spans ten chapters, and contains 16 illustrations.
This is an extraordinary book, using Foucault's thinking on the relationship between power and knowledge.
This book is the winner of the Hiddingh Currie Award 1998 for Academic Excellence.
Chapters
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1. The African body in History and HIstories of the African BodyHistory of medicine as achievement, function and repression
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2. Power, Knowledge and the BodyThe individual as invention ; Power and the body; Analysing power; a Trans humanist frame of analysis
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3. Renaissance body Myths and the Spectacle of StrangenessThe body as prose and the Renaissance episteme, Monstrous men, The eye of the explorer and the rise of classification
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4. A Body without Volume: The African as Target of Sovereignty and Object of TaxonomyThe 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
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5. Missionary Medicine, Moral Sanitation and Fabrication of the Heathen HeartCreation 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
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6. The Industrial Panopticon: Mining and the medical construction of migrant African labourThe heat chamber as punishment and Panopticon, Inventing an economy of human bodies ..., Debasement and discipline ... , A therapeutic operator ..., The disciplinary descent of mining medicine
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7. Discipline and Danger: Psychological Science and the African PersonalityLunatics 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,
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8. Filth, food and freedom: Public health and its changing African objectsSanitary 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
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9. Birth of the Bantu ClinicA Bantu anatomy, The African paitent as a lesion-containng body, The `quest for wholeness' and a subjective paitent, Bodies and voices
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10. Postscript: on the Anatomy of PowerRewriting the African subject, The relevance of Foucault to socio-medical practice in the present, Afterword
