Parasitic Empires: Immunity, Insularity, Inter-Imperiality, 1870-2020

Abstract

Parasitic Empires is a cultural history of infectious disease and tropical medicine in Anglo-American maritime colonies. It proposes two models for understanding the convergence of infectious disease, racialization, and imperial power. The first, “spatio-racial immunity,” refers to how enclosed “rhetorical spaces” like the plague ship, the brothel, the penal colony, and the leper colony racialized communicable disease. The second, “imperial parasitism,” shows how these same rhetorical spaces also facilitated the enduring ties, rivalries, and solidarities between the British and U.S. Empires at the turn of the twentieth century. The dissertation comprises four chapters. The first, entitled “Parasitic Invasions: Migration, Quarantine, and the Genre of the Plague Ship,” shows how the rhetorical space of the diseased ship channeled fears of two kinds of parasitic “invasion” from foreign lands: the “Yankee invasion”—a term employed in the British press for the preponderance of American products, finance capital, and immigrants in Britain—and the “invasions” of racialized and allegedly parasite-ridden immigrants in the 1890s. While the ship was the physical vessel that disseminated germs across the world, it also became the symbol of a renewed transatlantic rapprochement and rivalry between the Anglo-Saxon powers. These two repertoires of parasitism aboard the steamship—microbial germs and the germs of imperial cooperation or rivalry—curiously emerged in an explosion of what I call the “plague ship genre” in 1897, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Joseph Conrad’s Narcissus. The second chapter, “Venerealisms: Inter-Imperial Social Hygiene and the Anti-Marriage Plot.” moves from the ship in the late-nineteenth century to the colonial brothel in the early twentieth as a key rhetorical space adumbrating parasitism and racial formation. It argues that the brothel and venereal disease are fugitive presences in Anglo-American literary texts from the 1920s wherein failed heterosexual marriage plots are often juxtaposed with representations of tropical epidemics. I analyze and compare three novels from the mid-1920s: E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith. The doomed marriage plots of physician-heroes in these texts can be read as constituting a new genre of “venerealism.” The third chapter, “Cellular Immunities: Malarial Romance and Carcerality in the Indian Ocean,” takes up the rhetorical space of the Andaman Islands for the discursive invention of “immunity” and “impunity.” Assembling an archive of colonial and postcolonial “malarial romances” that represent malaria, malarial experimentation, and Cellular Jail—for instance, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890), Ronald Ross’s The Child of Ocean (1889), and Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali (2019)—the chapter investigates how, first, narratives of malarial “seasoning” troubled the distinction between white and nonwhite and between colonizer and colonized; and second, how unethical malaria experiments on Andaman prisoners introduced a slippage between biological immunity and colonial impunity. The final chapter, “Leprous Diasporas: Hybridizing Races and Empires in the Caribbean,” examines three postcolonial historical fictions of the Chacachacare leper colony in Trinidad, by authors Elizabeth Nunez, Lawrence Scott, and Tiphanie Yanique. I argue that while colonial medical discourses racialized leprosy as a tropical, nonwhite disease, postcolonial historical fictions coopt the malady as a dermatological metaphor to engage theories of racial and cultural hybridity. Further, these texts and other archives show how Chacachacare signifies the formation of a hybrid, albeit contested, Anglo-American empire in the region.