Colonial Hauntings: Migrant Care in a French Hospital

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.