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.

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

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Where the Scars Are So Thick  1
1. Dirt Work  21
Interlude 1: A Timeline  45
2. A Sea of Insecurity  47
Interlude 2: Running  69
3. The Body, the Flesh, and the Hospital  73
Interlude 3: Where War Is (Always) Coming  95
4. When Life Demands Release  99
Interlude 4: Joy  121
5. “We Are Creating a World We Have Never Seen”  123
Interlude 5: Otherwise  143
Conclusion: Cohabitation  147
Notes  157
Bibliography  179
Index