Teaching Epidemic Orientalism
About
I wrote Epidemic Orientalism to explain the durabilities of racist and xenophobic responses to international infectious disease spread over time.
“This book is concerned with a central question: What forces have governed and continue to govern global responses to epidemic threats? After this research and after examining the practices, tactics of regulation, scientific discoveries, and geopolitical transformations over the last two centuries, it has become clear to me (as I hope it will be clear to you soon) that in order to answer this question, it is not sufficient solely to examine the practices by which governments, international organizations, public health actors, and diplomats have attempted to control infectious disease spread. Instead we must unearth and interpret the discourses that motivate and constrain the possible material responses to global pandemic threats. In short, rather than a study of the practice of infectious disease control, this book sets out to explain the terrain upon which epidemic threats are understood in geopolitical terms and subsequently how the practices by which they are managed are rationalized.” pg. 3
“Why, despite massive shifts in political and economic power, transformations in geopolitics, shifts in demographics, and the emergence of new and ever-changing institutions in the world of international health, did most of the same priorities for infectious disease control regulations persist from the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century? How do we understand the ideological and political priorities of this particular area of international public health? This puzzle is both historical and particular to the domain of international infectious disease regulation operating through the International Sanitary Conventions of the past and International Health Regulations of the present. What can explain this persistent Eurocentric and Western-centric gaze on infectious disease regulation?” pg. 7
Audience
I wrote this book, based on my 2018 dissertation to explain the ideological and discursive forces that produce responses to epidemic on the international stage. This book explores how and why certain racisms, xenophobias and disease concerns have persisted from the 19th century to the present in the domain of international infectious disease control. This book is both historical and sociological, aimed at anyone interested in histories of Global Health, histories of empire, the sociology of medicine and infectious disease and theory. This book blends history of medicine with post-colonial theories to understand both our past and present epidemic moments.
“I propose the reinterpretation of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism to define epidemic Orientalism—that particularly durable discursive formation— the discourse and viewpoint, rooted in Europe’s engagements with the rest of the world as colonizer, through which Europe and later the West recognized itself in relation to the world it was colonizing (the non- European and the colonized) and the disease threats they posed. This concept (as I will show) develops not only through Said but also through interventions made by Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Sylvia Wynter, and others.” pg. 18
Advance Praise for Epidemic Orientalism
“Epidemic Orientalism adds tremendous insight to the geneology of global infectious disease control. This is mandatory reading for unpacking the racial and economic costs of global public health campaigns”— Claire Laurier Decoteau, author of Ancestors and Antiretrovirals
“Epidemics have been blamed upon those most marginalized in society; and international responses to global pandemics reflect concerns of diseases spreading to the West. Alexandre White offers a necessary corrective to the history of global health”–Nitsan Chorev, author of The World Health Organization Between North and South
“Operating adroitly on the boundary between history and sociology, White makes a series of crucial contributions to our long-arc understanding of imperialism and the regulation of diseases and people; in the process modernity is reconsidered and retheorized”— Isaac Arial Reed, University of Virginia
Companion readings to Epidemic Orientalism
Companion Books for the whole book:
Chorev, Nitsan. The World Health Organization between North and South. Cornell University Press, 2012.
Harrison, Mark. Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Huber, Valeska. Channelling Mobilities Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and beyond, 1869-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Decoteau, Claire Laurier. Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Petryna, Adriana. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Cueto, Marcos, Theodore M. Brown, and Elizabeth Fee. The World Health Organization: A History. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Wyrtzen, Jonathan. Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.
Introduction:
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Hall, Stuart. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” In Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, edited by Anthony D. King. U of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Rana A. Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Packard, A History of Global Health; Andrew Lakoff, Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.
Chapter 1: Epidemic Orientalism
Huber, Valeska. “The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary Conferences on Cholera, 1851-1894.” The Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (June 1, 2006): 453–76.
Mark Harrison, “Quarantine, Pilgrimage, and Colonial Trade: India 1866– 1900,” Indian Economic & Social History Review 29, no. 2 (June 1992): 117–44, https:// doi.org/10.1177/001946469202900201
Saurabh Mishra, Pilgrimage, Politics, and Pestilence: The Haj from the Indian Subcontinent, 1860–1920. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 2007
Norman Howard-Jones, The Scientific Background of the International Sanitary Conferences, 1851–1938 Geneva: World Health Organization, 1975, http://apps.who .int// iris/handle/10665/62873
Nermin Ersoy, Yuksel Gungor, and Aslihan Akpinar, “International Sanitary Conferences from the Ottoman Perspective (1851–1938),” Hygiea Internationalis 10, no. 1 (2011): 53–79
Chapter 2: The International Sanitary Conventions at a Colonial Scale
Arnold, David. “Disease, Rumor and Panic in India’s Plague and Influenza Epidemics, 1896-1919.” In Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, edited by Robert Peckham. Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2015.
Arnold, David. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Bickford-Smith, Vivian, E. Van Heyningen, and Nigel Worden. Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated Social History. New Africa Books, 1999.
Swanson, Maynard W. “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909.” Journal of African History, 1977, 387–410.
Mohr, James C. Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Myron J. Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague,1894–1901 New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Heyningen, Elizabeth van. “Agents of Empire: The Medical Profession in the Cape Colony, 1880-1910.” Medical History 33, no. 04 (October 1989): 450–71.
Chapter 3: Epidemics Under the WHO
Cueto, Marcos. The Value of Health: A History of the Pan American Health Organization. Rochester Studies in Medical History. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007.
Nancy Leys Stepan, Eradication: Ridding the World of Diseases Forever?. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.
Randall M. Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria.Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
Socrates Litsios, “Malaria Control, the Cold War, and the Postwar Reorganization of International Assistance,” Medical Anthropology 17, no. 3 (May 1, 1997): 255–78.
David P. Fidler, “From International Sanitary Conventions to Global Health Security: The New International Health Regulations,” Chinese Journal of International Law 4, no. 2 (January 1, 2005)
Borowy, Iris. Coming to Terms with World Health: The League of Nations Health Organisation 1921-1946. Frankfurt am Main, DE: Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2014.
Chapter 4: The Battle to Police Disease
Chorev, Nitsan. The World Health Organization between North and South. Cornell University Press, 2012.
A. Bashford, “Global Biopolitics and the History of World Health,” History of the Human Sciences 19, no. 1 (February 1, 2006): 67–88.
David P. Fidler and Lawrence O. Gostin, “The New International Health Regulations: An Historic Development for International Law and Public Health” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 34, no. 1 (March 1, 2006) https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-720X.2006.00011.x.
L. O. Gostin, D. Sridhar, and D. Hougendobler, “The Normative Authority of the World Health Organization,” Public Health 129, no. 7 (July 2015): 854–63, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2015.05.002
Javed Siddiqi, World Health and World Politics: The World Health Organization and the UN System. Columbus: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.
Chapter 5: Epidemics, Power, and the Global Management of Disease Risk
King, Nicholas B. “Security, Disease, Commerce: Ideologies of Postcolonial Global Health.” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 5–6 (December 1, 2002): 763–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631270203200507.
Fidler, David P. “From International Sanitary Conventions to Global Health Security: The New International Health Regulations.” Chinese Journal of International Law 4, no. 2 (January 1, 2005): 325–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/chinesejil/jmi029.
Hoffman, Steven J. “The Evolution, Etiology and Eventualities of the Global Health Security Regime.” Health Policy and Planning 25, no. 6 (November 1, 2010): 510–22. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czq037.
Figuié, Muriel. “Towards a Global Governance of Risks: International Health Organisations and the Surveillance of Emerging Infectious Diseases.” Journal of Risk Research 17, no. 4 (April 21, 2014): 469–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2012.761277.
Kamradt-Scott, Adam. “WHO’s to Blame? The World Health Organization and the 2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa.” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 3 (March 3, 2016): 401–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1112232.
Chapter 6: Pricing Pandemics
J.-A. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1(2003).
Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign St. Louis, MO: Telos, 1981.
James Lorand Matory, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Sarah Quinn, “The Transformation of Morals in Markets: Death, Benefits, and the Exchange of Life Insurance Policies,” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 3 (2008): 738–80, https://doi.org/10.1086/592861