This essay explores how epidemics in the past and present give rise to distinctive, recurring racial scripts about bodies and identities, with sweeping racial effects beyond the Black experience. Using examples from cholera, influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS, and COVID-19, the essay provides a dramaturgical analysis of race and epidemics in four acts, moving from Act I, racial revelation; to Act II, the staging of bodies and places; to Act III, where race and disease is made into spectacle; and finally, Act IV, in which racial boundaries are fixed, repaired, or made anew in the response to the racial dynamics revealed by epidemics. Focusing primarily on North America but touching on global racial narratives, the essay concludes with reflections on the writers and producers of these racialized dramas, and a discussion of why these racialized repertoires have endured.
...More
Book
Katherine A. Foss;
(2020)
Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory
(/isis/citation/CBB265756868/)
Thesis
Jazmin Antwynette Evans;
(2019)
Scientific Racism's Role in the Social Thought of African Intellectual, Moral, and Physical Inferiority
(/isis/citation/CBB578195827/)
Book
David Chanoff;
Louis W. Sullivan;
(2022)
We'll Fight It Out Here: A History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity
(/isis/citation/CBB412812968/)
Book
Peter Ward;
(2019)
The Clean Body: A Modern History
(/isis/citation/CBB337509863/)
Book
Anne Pollock;
(2021)
Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB548925523/)
Book
Lisa T. Sarasohn;
(2021)
Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin
(/isis/citation/CBB825215949/)
Book
Kathleen M. Brown;
(2023)
Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition
(/isis/citation/CBB065925879/)
Book
Kah Seng Loh;
Li Yang Hsu;
(2019)
Tuberculosis – The Singapore Experience, 1867–2018: Disease, Society and the State
(/isis/citation/CBB456060024/)
Thesis
Kevin George McQueeney;
(2020)
The City that Care Forgot: Apartheid Health Care, Racial Health Disparity, and Black Health Activism in New Orleans, 1718-2018
(/isis/citation/CBB995254049/)
Book
Alex de Waal;
(2021)
New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives
(/isis/citation/CBB645621187/)
Book
Leung, Angela Ki Che;
Furth, Charlotte;
(2010)
Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001252082/)
Book
Anthony Ryan Hatch;
(2016)
Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America
(/isis/citation/CBB245142743/)
Book
Humphreys, Margaret;
(2008)
Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War
(/isis/citation/CBB000774696/)
Article
John P. DiMoia;
(2020)
Contact Tracing and COVID-19: The South Korean Context for Public Health Enforcement
(/isis/citation/CBB803372291/)
Book
Goulet Denis;
(2020)
Brève histoire des épidémies au Québec: Du choléra à la COVID-19
(/isis/citation/CBB318570787/)
Book
Vittorio Alessandro Sironi;
(2021)
Le maschere della salute: Dal Rinascimento ai tempi del coronavirus
(/isis/citation/CBB761112821/)
Book
Dan Royles;
(2020)
To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS
(/isis/citation/CBB139646090/)
Book
Natali Valdez;
(2021)
Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era
(/isis/citation/CBB961294836/)
Article
McMillen, Christian W.;
(2008)
“The Red Man and the White Plague”: Rethinking Race, Tuberculosis, and American Indians, ca. 1890--1950
(/isis/citation/CBB000930711/)
Article
Kathryn Olivarius;
(2019)
Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans
(/isis/citation/CBB394438457/)
Be the first to comment!