In recent years, Black and feminist scholarship has foregrounded the ambivalent politics of exhaustion—that is, exhaustion as the experiential ground for survival amid accelerated disposability, and the affective carapace surrounding as-yet-unfulfilled quests for justice. Jennifer Nash (2024) frames exhaustion as a constitutive condition for Black-feminist thought, asking what might arise if it ceased to center fatigue, defense and injury. Similarly, Sara Ahmed (2023) links feminist exhaustion to the impasse of continually calling out injustice, noting that even as it signals persistence, it inevitably debilitates bodies, particularly bodies of color. Alongside thinkers such as Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, both insist on working through exhaustion toward a feminist micropolitics of survival—heralding a quotidian praxis of imagining otherwise, moving beyond violence toward horizons of hope. An Archive of Possibilities can be read in this vein, insofar as it advances what the author—a US-trained surgeon-anthropologist who has worked in war-torn Congolese clinics—terms “an epistemic reorientation” (153) in African studies. The book intervenes in a field where analyses of everyday necropolitics—especially by Global North anthropologists—risk sliding into White-savior “trauma projects” (3) that reify injury while uncritically celebrating indigenous resistance. Against such exhausted epistemologies, the book emphasizes that from a Congolese perspective, projects of repair and healing “require imagination, ingenuity, invention, and the forging of new paths” (6). This orientation toward renewal is expressed in the Swahili phrase “being once again…whole (mzima)” (5). In Congo, the political stakes of this are especially charged amid overlapping histories of pre-colonial slavery, Belgian imperialism, postcolonial instability, neoliberal humanitarianism, and the social injuries of militarization, inter-ethnic conflict, and genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Regional strife and racialized refugee regimes compound these legacies. Against this backdrop of “general disposability” (10) the author seeks to chronicle “the fugitive and monstrous ways that people in eastern Congo make life in the wake of war and death” (11). Ethnographically, the fieldwork is situated in Kishabe, a small farming town—once a Belgian coffee plantation border post—now primarily known for its hospital. It is peopled by the Kinyarwanda-speaking Banyamulenge whose cross-border migrations amid colonial extraction and postcolonial warlordism reveal entrenched faultlines of conflict over land, resources and patronage. Chapter 1, “Dirt Work,” explores the remaking of relationality with soil amid enduring vulnerability and conflict. Being Congolese is portrayed as inseparable from a lived connection to the earth, even as militarization and coltan mining continually unsettle life. This “return to the dirt” (37) becomes both a material and moral act—a way of reclaiming sovereignty and imagining repair in an ecological register. Chapter 2, “A Sea of Insecurity,” shifts to the unstable terrain of “affective chaos” (51) in Kishabe. Unpredictable intimacies between civilians and soldiers amid chronic warfare mirror people's quotidian relationships with volcanoes and methane-rich lakes, denoting how affect becomes a medium of healing and reconstitution against historical fracture. Chapter 3, “The Body, the Flesh, and the Hospital,” examines how pain, endurance, and witnessing interweave in a maternal health ward. Building on Nancy Hunt's work on colonial medicalization, it shows how poor nurses, midwives, and patients navigate recurring trauma and cultivate an ethic of “fostering fortitude” (82). This blurs the line between harming and healing giving rise to a mode of metaphysical and moral care. Chapter 4, “When Life Demands Release,” draws on Achille Mbembe's notion of war as pharmakon—both poison and remedy—to challenge engrained ideas about recovery from violence. By reinterpreting cases of child malnutrition as moral negotiations, where refusals of nourishment signify fragile agency and “therapeutic potential” (109) registering subject formation “besides death” (113). The final chapter, “We Are Creating a World We Have Never Seen,” turns to art and “poetic epistemology” (126) as sites of creative reconstruction through which the Congolese reengage their wounds to envision new futures amid intersecting crises—Ebola, civil war and longitudinal displacement. The overall emphasis on preserving the scars of everyday life-making anchors the text in a speculative mode of futurity. Yet, several scholarly omissions are striking. The author's discussion of ‘repair’ is vague and curiously detached from the vital question of reparation. Its reliance on US-centered frameworks of race sometimes obscures the complexities of affiliation in Congo, distancing interlocutors from their own textured worlds. While ethnographic stories are meticulously documented, there is little engagement with Swahili sources, Congolese scholarship, or African epistemologies. Further, do Congolese interlocutors conceive of themselves as ‘Black’ in the same ways as, say, African Americans? Their layered identities, intertwined with African modes of subjectivity, ethnicity, and racialized power dynamics are insufficiently parsed in and of themselves. This limits the book's decolonial potential, placing it within the mold of parochial Euro-American scholarship on Africa. A critical distinction between racism in North America and anti-Black violence in Africa lies in the latter's entanglement with colonial history, postcolonial necropolitics and neoliberal state formation. As Mbembe (2017) argues, this cautions against assuming a universal Black subject, calling for a decolonial understanding of the onto-phenonemological horizons of Blackness and anti-Blackness. Scholars such as Sylvia Tamale, Olúfémi Táíwò, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, Nathalie Etoke, Mahmood Mamdani, and Mbembe also warn against transplanting American racial concepts to African contexts. Archive, however, does so without engaging their complexity. Its limited dialogue with African and postcolonial scholarship—and its omission of Global South Black-feminist epistemologies—further narrows its analytic reach. Its framing of the quotidian Congolese “archive” as a political repository of unrealized potential thus remains suggestive but undertheorized, revealing more about its own limitations than the conditions it seeks to illuminate. Nevertheless, the book could stimulate debates about trauma, moral formation, and the imagination of repair in postcolonial conflict zones. It can also add to teaching the anthropology of war, trauma, affect, and precarity in Africa.
Nikhil Pandhi (Sat,) studied this question.