Colonial Hauntings: Migrant Care in a French Hospital

ABSTRACT

In France, the treatment of migrant patients is haunted, but not overdetermined, by colonial practices of cultural essentialism and othering. Taking tuberculosis care in a public hospital as an example, I show how colonial hauntings surface in racialized patient–physician encounters and diagnostic practices. Colonial hauntings exist on two levels of awareness: on the level of the articulated, where physicians critique contemporary and historical politics toward immigrants, and on the level of the unarticulated, where, physicians − as they search to practice a caring medicine − unconsciously reproduce colonial forms of knowing and treating migrant patients as racialized others.

KEYWORDS:

• France
• colonial history
• hospital ethnography
• migrant care
• othering
• tuberculosis

Acknowledgments

My sincere gratefulness goes to the editors of the special issue, Emma Varley and Saiba Varma, for their truly inspiring, thoughtful and patient engagement with prior versions of this article, without which the article would not have come into being. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their close reading and productive comments during the publishing process.

Notes

1. Lhostis, Alain. “70 Ans de l’hôpital Avicenne.” Bobigny, November 23, 2005. http://archives.alainlhostis.net/article.php3?id_article=83, website last accessed on October 18, 2016. For an overview of historical sources on Avicenne hospital, see http://odysseo.generiques.org/ark:/naan/a011442407908mJL9Cw.

2. “French North Africa” was an ensemble of colonized territories (now Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria) ruled by France. Algeria particularly was governed as an integral part of metropolitan France, as one of its departements.

3. This police division, called Brigade nord-africaine, was a special police department set up in 1925, to control North Africans in the metropole. It operated until 1945. Avicenne hospital was under its command. For a critical history of the Brigade, see Blanchard (2011).

4. Seine-Saint Denis is a French department bordering Paris at the North-East. It is one of the economically most disadvantaged departments in France, with levels of poverty approaching 28 percent and unemployment rates reaching up to 18 percent (2013 data). Seine-Saint-Denis is a highly diverse department: 27 percent of the population are immigrants, from which 23 percent come from non European-Union countries (2008 data). All data from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), accessible online www.insee.fr.

5. For a history of social struggles, especially communism, in Bobigny, where the hospital is located, see Stovall (1990). See also Giblin (2016) and Le Moigne et al. (2016) for the entanglements of immigration, deprivation and their related social and racial politics in Seine-Saint-Denis.

6. Article 4 of the law specifies that school manuals should insist on the “positive role of the French presence overseas, specifically in North Africa” (Loi N° 2005–158 Du 23 Février 2005 Portant Reconnaissance de La Nation et Contribution Nationale En Faveur Des Français Rapatriés). https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000444898&dateTexte=&categorieLien=id.

7. Historians of colonial France (Fanon 1965; Scott 2010; Stora 1999) have shown that Muslim religion, customs and clothing have served since colonial times as archetypal blueprints to construct a republican Other in a context where “cultural assimilation” has long been a “defining characteristic of Frenchness”, and where the representation of France as “homogeneous nation” based on common language, culture and adherence to republican values of universalism is an old one (https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2016/scott-veil-in-france). Today, Muslims are still (or again) France’s archetypical Others in a racialized and increasingly racist public debate, where ethnicity and religion are often conflated (Billaud and Castro 2013; Mazouz 2017; Scott 2010).

8. For more information on this initiative, see http://www.mfh-eu.net/public/home.htm.

9. For the colonial hauntings of migrant housing in Paris in specific shelters, the so-called foyers de travailleurs migrants, see Bernardot (2008).

Additional information

Funding

The fieldwork for this research was funded by a dissertation grant under the NaFöG Berlin scheme.

Notes on contributors

Janina Kehr

Janina Kehr is SNSF-Ambizione Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology at Bern University. She has published on tuberculosis, migrant care, and global health. Her current research concerns austerity medicine in Spain, where she is investigating public health infrastructures at the intersection of history, debt economies, state bureaucracies, and peoples’ experiences.