Stephan Besser Livres

"This study analyses the imagination of the tropics as a space of disease, madness and infection in German colonial culture around 1900. It introduces the notion of the dispositive of tropical medicine (tropenmedizinische Dispositiv) in order to describe the construction of disease entities such as Tropenkoller (tropical frenzy), tropical neurasthenia and tropical fever as the result of interdiscursive exchanges between medicine, psychiatry, literature and various other discourses. The case studies include detailed analyses of the poetics of Tropenfieber in works by Robert Koch and Thomas Mann, the semantics and materialities of tropical neurasthenia and vitalist constructions of the tropics in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and in expressionist poetry. Special attention is given to the discursive nexus of malaria, race and immunity in German tropical hygiene at the beginning of the 20th century. Methodologically, the study combines David Arnold's notion of 'tropicality' with insights from postcolonial studies and recent approaches to the poetics of knowledge."--Author's page, University of Amsterdam web site.