An Archive of Possibilities : Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo

Abstract

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 displacement, enslavement, 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 amid 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 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.