Rewriting global health

Abstract

The concept of global health has become popular even though its origins have come under critical scrutiny: namely, its origins in colonial medicine, its links to the protection of international trade and capitalist exploitation and its Orientalist assumptions. To what extent is the concept still adequate or useful? Is it possible to rewrite global health while recognizing and tackling its multiple forms of violence? I reflect on the potentiality of the concept of global health based on an ethics of writing that intends to be analytical (concerning its ability to reflect social tensions, the multiplicity of experiences, the social actors’ justifications and claims, the oppression, and the unrealized potential); critical (concerning its ability to identify the contradiction between what social arrangements ostensibly proclaim and what they actually produce); and political (concerning its potential for emancipation and for the reparation of historical injustices). Five important aspects are identified toward 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.