Paper Presented at the 2025 Medical and Health Humanities: Global Perspectives Conference in Doha, Qatar
Abstract:
This paper connects the representation of malaria in Jean-Luc Raharimanana’s Nour, 1947 (2001) to the novel’s decolonial engagement with nonrealist forms. By analyzing moments where malaria shapes the narrator’s experience, I complicate the representation of malaria in the novel by rejecting its facile metaphorization for the ways in which the colonial and postcolonial governments fail the peoples of Madagascar, instead situating the disease as an embodied way of knowing the nation’s histories, particularly the events surrounding the 1947 insurrection. Raharimanana’s malaria representation draws on necropolitics that enable the novel to construct a decolonial historicity. Malaria consequently informs Raharimanana’s literary form in a way that is conducive to the counter historical narrative he emphasizes through assertions that have downplayed the responsibility of French colonization for the extent of violence in its occupation of Madagascar. In the conclusion, a global health humanities and postcolonial inquiry into fictional representations of malaria in, and the realist forms of, postcolonial Indian literature serves as a contrast to the example Raharimanana’s form sets for decolonial representational modes.
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