OUR PANDEMIC AGE
HISTORY IN THE HEADLINES
MARCH 8, 2022
DAVID LUDDEN
though the pandemic is not THE TOP headline in the news …
It is still right up there …
… and one of the distinctive features of this pandemic is that we get more information about it, everyday. But what do we learn …
OUR PANDEMIC AGE: �HISTORY IN THE PRESENT
the pre-industrial sequence …
pandemics of war, commercial expansion, migration, and empire
European conquest and settlement in the Americas creates the first literally global disease: Smallpox
two modern pandemic centuries …. C
pandemics of industrial empire and port city globalization
imperial inequity …
post-1950 — the age of jumbo jets, container ships, and the internet …
ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE, ECOLOGY �(AND THE EXPLOITATION OF NATURE … including fossil fuel travel, indoor climate control, and atmospheric pollution)
A WARNING FROM 2005: GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND NATIONAL PROTECTION ��– NOW COVID-19 IS THE MONSTER
MOBILITY, MIGRATION, TRADE, EMPIRE
MOBILITY AND TERRITORIALITY:�DISEASE AND SOCIAL CONTROL
MONGOL EMPIRE
IMPERIAL VENICE
BUBONIC PLAGUE
KEEPING OUT SICKNESS = STOP THE SPREAD. KEEP OUT SICK PEOPLE. ��TERRITORIAL BORDERS ARE PUBLIC HEALTH TECHNOLOGIES
Classes of aliens ineligible for visas or admission
Except as otherwise provided in this chapter, aliens who are inadmissible under the following paragraphs are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States:
In general
Any alien—
(i)who is determined (in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services) to have a communicable disease of public health significance;
A very old story. See for example:
Zlata Blažina-Tomić author. Vesna Blažina author.
Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press 2015
When the Europeans arrived, carrying germs which thrived in dense, semi-urban populations, the indigenous people of the Americas were effectively doomed. They had never experienced smallpox, measles or flu before, and the viruses tore through the continent, killing an estimated 90% of Native Americans. [PBS]
EMPIRES COVERED MOST OF THE WORLD BEFORE 1950: 1800-1945 AGE OF EURO-AMERICAN IMPERIAL EXPANSION
A phylogenetic tree is a diagram that represents evolutionary relationships among organisms. Phylogenetic trees are hypotheses, not definitive facts. The pattern of branching in a phylogenetic tree reflects how species or other groups evolved from a series of common ancestors.
POLITICAL ECONOMY
THE WORLD OF NATION STATES IS A HISTORICAL NOVELTY
NATIONAL UNITS OF MEASUREMENT AND AGGREGATION
NATIONS ARE PERSONIFIED AND TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES, DEFINING THE PUBLIC IN PUBLIC HEALTH
Keeping poor immigrants from across the southern border OUT has always been his goal.
Public Health concerns dovetail with political interests … this was true also in 16th century Dubrovnik, as it faced the Ottoman Empire.
The Spanish influenza arrived in the United States at a time when new forms of mass transportation, mass media, mass consumption, and mass warfare had vastly expanded the public places in which communicable diseases could spread. Faced with a deadly “crowd” disease, public health authorities tried to implement social-distancing measures at an unprecedented level of intensity. Recent historical work suggests that the early and sustained imposition of gathering bans, school closures, and other social-distancing measures significantly reduced mortality rates during the 1918–1919 epidemics. This finding makes it all the more important to understand the sources of resistance to such measures, especially since social-distancing measures remain a vital tool in managing the current H1N1 influenza pandemic. To that end, this historical analysis revisits the public health lessons learned during the 1918–1919 pandemic and reflects on their relevance for the present.
METHODOLOGICAL NATIONALISM: HISTORY LESSONS FOR THE NATION
NOTE THE NAMING AND BORDER CROSSING “ARRIVAL” – FROM OUTSIDE
GOOD NEWS FROM HISTORIANS
National territory is an political enclosure, into which and inside of which territorial power regulates mobility, in many ways, e.g. with transport/communication infrastructure and law enforcement.
There is an emergent mode of nationhood being fashioned under the project of preemptive biopreparedness. I call this “pathogenic nation-making”—the forging of a sense of national solidarity through pandemic fear and avoidance. Although other states engage disease management with their own securitized logics, pathogenic nation-making names a process peculiar to an American national project. As Joseph Masco has shown, Americans living under the counterterror state today are being “emotionally managed” along a spectrum of terror. This is an effort, he argues, that draws rhetorical, material, and affective resources from the Cold War project to form American life—economically, emotionally, politically, materially—under the prospect of collective ruination under the nuclear bomb.
Rooted in this historical framework and the imperatives of the counterterror state that Masco calls its “ideological fulfillment,” pathogenic nation-making names the process of defining and redefining nationhood though the collective contemplation of possible microbial futures and their catastrophic endings.
That forms of nationhood come to be defined and redefined through the discourses of disease preparedness has been well established by many scholars, most notably by Priscilla Wald. See NYU ebook: Priscilla Wald, Contagious : Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Duke University Press, 2008
Gloria Kim, "Pathogenic Nation-Making: Media Ecologies and American Nationhood Under the Shadow of Viral Emergence." Configurations, vol. 24 no. 4, 2016, p. 441-470. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/con.2016.0029.
COVID-19 AND NATION-MAKING
That forms of nationhood come to be defined and redefined through the discourses of disease preparedness has been well established by many scholars, most notably by Priscilla Wald. Contemporary pandemics, she argues, highlight the dense and interconnected worlds of accelerated globalization.
Pandemics make us aware of the global networks that ineluctably join pathogens from the “distant places,” so often framed as the origins of infections, to our own bodies. This awareness of both the porosity of national borders and the vulnerability of the collective within those lines strengthen … imaginings of nationhood.
The prospect of contagion does so by invoking the precariousness of the national community, thus instilling in individuals the desire to fortify the nation to assure its (and their) continued protection. In examining narratives of disease through the realm of representation, both visual and narrative, Wald, among others, reveals how forms of nationhood become articulated through the management of race, class, and gender. Hence, works in this vein establish that representation shapes concepts of nationhood as they make and remake its boundaries in the discourse of global contagion.
Quote from Gloria Kim, "Pathogenic Nation-Making.” (emphasis added) Ref to
Priscilla Wald, Contagious : Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Duke University Press, 2008, pp.6-14, 29-53
Review of the evidence suggests that Haskell County, Kansas—with a population, just prior to the war, of about 1,800 souls—offered “the first recorded instance suggesting that a new virus was adapting, violently, to man.” Bucolic Haskell County was transformed in 1917 by Camp Funston, a military base home to, on average, 56,222 troops. The first case later deemed consistent with the new strain fell ill at Funston on 4 March 1918. Within a month, many thousands more fell sick on the base. Previously healthy young recruits were, in the words of another historian of the pandemic, “struck down as suddenly as if they had been shot.” Immune therapy for pneumococcal pneumonia, which had by the late nineteenth century diminished therapeutic nihilism regarding its designation as “untreatable,” had little or no effect on the base. Meanwhile, Funston “fed a constant stream of men to other American locations and to Europe, men whose business was killing. They would be more proficient at it than they knew.”4
From the American heartlands, the virus moved with stunning speed across a war-wracked globe. The theatre of war wasn’t just Europe; it included its colonies. By 1918, more than 450,000 soldiers from French Africa had served during the war, some in colonial feuds on the continents, others on European fronts, and most in formal service to local militias. Perhaps three-quarters of them had been, prior to the draft, domestic slaves, serfs, or otherwise unfree. Although other colonial powers in Africa may not have reached French levels of impressment, they used troops from similar backgrounds.
PANDEMICS OF WESTERN CAPITALISM,
IMPERALISM,
WORLD WAR, AND
DECOLONIZATION
THE 1918 FLU PANDEMIC … FORGOTTEN PEOPLE, AND LESSONS FOR TODAY FROM MIKE DAVIS IN THE NATION
WESTERN IMPERIALISM WAS A PANDEMIC
BLAMING PEOPLE FOR PANDEMICS
And not only India
COMPARATIVE NATIONAL DATA ON PUBLIC HEALTH �DURING THIS PANDEMIC
March 15, 2020
Read the article.
*Gerald Keutsch, "The History of Nutrition: Malnutrition, Infection, and Immunity," The Fogarty International Center, American Society for Nutritional Sciences.
EMAIL FROM A FRIEND IN JACKSON HEIGHTS �(MARCH 25, 2020)
we are in a critical zone, but what is particularly heartbreaking is that the majority affected by this are immigrant, poor, and working class.
This like every other disaster brings to the fore the grotesque manner in which those most vulnerable are also subject to premature death.
It distressing to see that here as well as elsewhere. the news from India is horrifying.
we are so far healthy and safe - a testament to our class privilege.