HARVARD UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY DISSERTATION DEFENSE
"The Cancer War(d): Onco-Nationhood in Post-Traumatic Rwanda"
Presented by Darja Djordjevic
Monday, May 9th 2016
10:00 a.m. in Tozzer 203
In Africa, the effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, rapidly expanding industrial and extractive economies, uncontrolled economic growth, environmental and lifestyle changes, and the rising age of populations with better access to medicine have occasioned rising rates of cancer. Rwanda’s national cancer program has been hailed as a unique example of how to build clinical oncology into a public healthcare infrastructure. I shall argue that Rwanda’s cancer project is an exercise in the construction of a new sense of sovereignty, rendered through the politics of life as onco-nationhood; that it is an effort to create a postcolonial polity whose citizen body is gifted care of a international caliber provided by a paternal state. In a critical moment of post-traumatic social reconstruction, national biomedicine is becoming the entity through which government seeks to fuse sovereign statehood and nationhood in the cause of a healthy Rwandan future. Theorizing this relationship holds at least one key to developing an anthropology of cancer in contemporary Africa.
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