Shit Voyeurism, Anti-Blackness, and the Spherical: Rendering Antibiotic Use in Africa

Abstract

This piece interrogates anti-Black racism and coloniality in global health reporting on antibiotic use in Africa. I focus on New York Times discourse, imagery, and films, reading these intertextually with wider political and public health rhetoric. In critically attending to mediated imaginaries of Nairobi, Kenya as “unhygienic,” I demonstrate how this figuration comes to index local pharmaceutical practices that appear “non-Scientific.” The situated knowledge informing such practices is disregarded or, worse, presented as a threat to be targeted and eliminated. Such biomedical transgressions are indexed in the NYT by racialized references to waste, dirt, and excrement, turning the (structurally white) reader-viewer into what I call a shit voyeur. Building on Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization of Man, I argue that Man-the-shit voyeur disregards his own culpability in rising antimicrobial resistance, locating health risks instead in the contaminating nature of Others. This racialized grammar is further subtended by the logic of the spherical—the illusion that the world-as-sphere is a totality that Man can perceive with a unidirectional gaze. Global health reporting that is racialized via the logics of the spherical and shit voyeurism not only fails to accurately represent medical concerns in Africa but also perpetuates biomedical hegemony and/as global white supremacy.