Rewriting global health

Abstract

The concept of global health has become popular even with its origins coming under critical scrutiny: namely, its origins in colonial medicine, its links to the protection of international trade and capitalist exploitation, its Orientalist assumptions. To what extent is the concept still adequate or useful? Is it possible to rewrite global health to recognize and tackle its multiple forms of violence? I reflect on the potentiality of the concept of global health from an ethics of writing that intends to be analytical (concerning its ability to reflect social tensions, the multiplicity of experiences, the actors’ justifications and claims, the oppression and the potential unrealized); critical (concerning their ability to identify the contradiction between what social arrangements ostensibly proclaim and what they actually produce); and political (concerning its emancipatory potential and of reparation of historical injustices). I identify five important aspects of an effort of rewriting the concept of global health: the global as planetary; the global as collective; the global as public; the global as peripheral; and the global as everyday.