This is an exploration of the sociology of the body, looking at how the African body has been analyzed in western thought from the Renaissance to the present. Using Foucaultian theory, the author examines European social and medical constructions of the African body and shows how, in the service of white power, these have been perverse. Drawing on his own original research on public health issues under South Africa's apartheid system, the author applies his experience to a wider post-colonial context, and in so doing provides a radical contribution to interpretative science and the history of racism.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 The African body in history and histories of the African body: histories of medicine as achievement, function and repression; historiography, progress and the present; history will teach us nothing. Part 2 Power, knowledge and the body: the individual as invention; power and the body; analyzing power - methodological requirements; a transhumanist frame of analysis. Part 3 Renaissance body myths and the spectacle of strangeness: the body as prose and the Renaissance episteme; monstrous men; the eye of the explorer and the rise of classification. Part 4 The body without volume - the African target of sovereignty and object of taxonomy: the problem of the African body as a surface; the power of punishment and the sight of sovereignty; natural history - the African body as surface, structure and character; from theatre of punishment to theatres of healing. Part 5 Missionary medicine, moral sanitation and fabrication of the heathen heart: creation of the African with a soul and a body of organs; moral sanitation and the medical missionary method; from revelation to confession - the speaking of missionary medicine; a watershed of power. Part 6 The industrial panopticon - mining and the medical construction of migrant African labour: the heat chamber as punishment and panopticon; inventing an economy of bodies - anatomical pathology and epidemiology; debasement and discipline - the mine medical examination; a therapeutic operator - compound design and disease control; the disciplinary descent of mining medicine. Part 7 Discipline and danger - psychological science and the African personality: lunatics and nervous systems; impulsive insanity and the perilous black; a "better native" - indirect rule and the cultivation of culture; black consciousness and the alienated African; a liberatory psychology and the diffusion of danger. Part 8 Filth, food and freedom - public health and its changing African objects: sanitary science and emergence of a body boundary zone; social medicine and psychosocial health community health; a new public health - the socioecological model; body production lines. Part 9 Birth of the Bantu clinic: a Bantu anatomy; the African patient as a lesion containing body; the "quest for wholeness" and a subjective patient; silence and speech. Part 10 Postscript - on the anatomy of power: rewriting the African subject; the relevance of Foucault to socio-medical practice in the present.