A Clinical South: Speculative Markets and Epic Storytelling in the Pan-African e-Network

• In Event: Global Medicine from the South? Emerging Markets and Indian Ocean Medical Worlds - I

Abstract

In September 2004, former president of India Abdul Kalam proposed to connect Africa with India through a network aimed at providing healthcare services. Five years later, the Pan-African e-Network (PAN) was connecting doctors and patients across the African continent with tertiary care hospitals in India. PAN offers an integrated solution to care for patients at a distance. But beyond every day medical care, this paper suggests that PAN exists primarily as a state of desire. Drawing upon ethnography, the paper examines PAN as a site of affective and imaginative investment, whose logic is thoroughly speculative. It explores some of the pleasurable or disconcerting ways in which PAN’s imaginative power operates, including in diplomatic spectacle, in the place of the fake in the epic story-telling about the project, or in aesthetic excesses incorporated in the network’s design. On the one hand, the paper suggests that the Pan-African e-Network gestures towards the emergence of a ‘South to come’. Claims of Southern affinities, with their own historical trajectories, are expected to help bring into existence new spheres of exchange, in which data, knowledge, and patients circulate. The network stands as material instantiation of a commercial, clinical South in which human lives are the object of remote intervention. On the other hand, PAN also acts as an echo chamber whose resonating effects contribute in nationalist identity-building. For many of its addressees, it is a medium for the Indian nation to perform itself as an aspirant ruler – and obviously, care-provider – in a new world order.

Author

• Vincent Duclos, Drexel University