Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Mary Augusta Brazelton

This introductory chapter provides a background of how mass immunization programs made vaccination a cornerstone of Chinese public health and China a site of consummate biopower, or power over life. Over the twentieth century, through processes of increasing force, vaccines became medical technologies of governance that bound together the individual and the collective, authorities and citizens, and experts and the uneducated. These programs did not just transform public health in China—they helped shape the history of global health. The material and administrative systems of mass immunization on which these health campaigns relied had a longer history than the People's Republic of China itself. The Chinese Communist Party championed as its own invention and dramatically expanded immunization systems that largely predated 1949 and had originated with public health programs developed in southwestern China during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945. The nationwide implementation of these systems in the 1950s relied on transformations in research, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and concepts of disease that had begun in the first decades of the twentieth century. These processes spanned multiple regime changes, decades of war, and diverse forms of foreign intervention. Most important, they brought with them new ideas about what it meant to be a citizen of China.

Author(s):  
Athena Athanasiou

This chapter engages the discursive conditions that made ethno-nationalist ideologies and armed conflicts of the 1990s possible and probable. Indeed, the question of how to recall the late twentieth-century history of former Yugoslavia constitutes a central aspect of the Women in Black labour of memory. The dissolution of Yugoslavia, especially the normalization of nationalist military violence in the mid-1990s, has manifested gendered norms as constitutive of nationalist discourses. Drawing on the ways in which the movement performatively brings forth an alternative public to embody the potentiality of displaced memory, this chapter argues in favor of breaking through the universalist, moralist, and humanist scripts of mourning. It seeks to make sense of the politically enabling ways in which these activists stage mourning as a site of agonistic resignification in order to interrogate the injustices and foreclosures which sustain dominant regimes of grievability, in Judith Butler’s terms.


2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 225-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie H. Levison

From biblical times to the modern period, leprosy has been a disease associated with stigma. This mark of disgrace, physically present in the sufferers' sores and disfigured limbs, and embodied in the identity of a 'leper', has cast leprosy into the shadows of society. This paper draws on primary sources, written in Spanish, to reconstruct the social history of leprosy in Puerto Rico when the United States annexed this island in 1898. The public health policies that developed over the period of 1898 to the 1930s were unique to Puerto Rico because of the interplay between political events, scientific developments and popular concerns. Puerto Rico was influenced by the United States' priorities for public health, and the leprosy control policies that developed were superimposed on vestiges of the colonial Spanish public health system. During the United States' initial occupation, extreme segregation sacrificed the individual rights and liberties of these patients for the benefit of society. The lives of these leprosy sufferers were irrevocably changed as a result.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-155
Author(s):  
Wlodzimierz Cieciura

This article examines the modern social history of Chinese Hui Muslims in the context of transregional connections within and beyond the borders of the two modern Chinese nation-states, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan. The article applies Engseng Ho’s concepts for the study of Inter-Asia to the biographical study of several prominent Hui religious professionals and intellectuals. The experiences and personal contributions to the development of modern Chinese Muslim culture of people like Imam Ma Songting are scrutinized, along with political and ideological conflicts over different visions of Chineseness and “Huiness” during the turbulent twentieth century. It is argued that when studying the social history of Chinese Muslims, researchers should not limit themselves to the religious activities of Hui elites that occurred within the confines of the two Chinese nation-states, but should also take into consideration the expansion of those elites’ religious activities abroad and the intensive circulation of knowledge across Inter-Asian spaces in which they participated.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-56
Author(s):  
Debjani Bhattacharyya

Abstract From the beginning of the twentieth century, new urban housing forms, including social housing, land pooling, and building syndicates, began to emerge as products of housing rights and labor movements. Yet this emergence cannot simply be accounted for by a history of workers' rights and housing movements but must also take into consideration the political economy of land and housing created by new forms of real estate speculation. This article situates the history of urban speculation and the new fiduciary innovations pertaining to urban land and housing markets within the scholarship on the development of architectural and town-planning theories during the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on Calcutta and Bombay—two central cities of the British Empire—as case studies, I will trace the history of how the housing market became a tradeable object of speculation through colonial policies that disentangled housing from its singular history and abstracted it out of its nonmonetizable attachments. Indeed, it is by understanding how the land and housing market became a site for future investments and ultimately was structured through new social relations and values following World War I that we might get a fuller understanding of how we arrived at our contemporary “residential capitalism” and landscapes of accumulation and homelessness.


2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 253-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Hunter

ABSTRACTThe ‘triumph of liberalism’ in the mid-twentieth-century west is well known and much studied. But what has it meant for the way the decolonisation of Africa has been viewed, both at the time and since? In this paper, I suggest that it has quietly but effectively shaped our understanding of African political thinking in the 1950s to 1960s. Although the nationalist framing that once led historians to neglect those aspects of the political thinking of the period which did not move in the direction of a territorial nation-state has now been challenged, we still struggle with those aspects of political thinking that were, for instance, suspicious of a focus on the individual and profoundly opposed to egalitarian visions of a post-colonial future. I argue that to understand better the history of decolonisation in the African continent, both before and after independence, while also enabling comparative work with other times and places, we need to think more carefully and sensitively about how freedom and equality were understood and argued over in local contexts.


2018 ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
Samuel Shaw

This chapter argues that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists seem to have been especially attracted by quarries, treating them as a means of exploring modernity through the lens of rural romanticism. Quarries regularly appear in paintings in many of the artists associated with rural modernity: William Rothenstein, Edward Wadsworth, Walter Bell, Roger Fry, and J. D. Fergusson, among them. Appreciating that there is no single way of categorising and representing quarries, this chapter (the first ever study of this important subject) explores many of the common themes to be found in paintings of quarries in the first half of the twentieth century. It considers a wide range of artists and art-works — the majority of which are owned by rural art galleries — in close relation to the history of rural industries in such regions as Cornwall, West Yorkshire, and Edinburgh.


2020 ◽  
pp. 127-140
Author(s):  
William K. Malcolm

The final chapter reviews the development of Mitchell’s literary legacy following his death up to the present. Translations of his best work to different genres, including radio, drama and film dramatisations, have had variable success while generically reflecting the growing popular esteem with which the Gibbon fiction is held. Critical appreciation has found a prominent place for A Scots Quair within the history of campaigning working-class writing and within the Scottish tradition in literature. Gibbon’s achievement with narrative focalisation and stream of consciousness combined with the epic grandeur of the trilogy working through Scottish subject matter to address vibrant universal themes has secured his place within the growing body of global criticism as one of the pre-eminent modernist novelists of the twentieth century. While his reputation within the British literary canon has been deemed to have suffered from his subliminal association with a marginalised culture, however, the author’s profound humanitarian principles manifested in his championing of the rights of the individual, irrespective of class, gender, religion and race, together with his prowess as a supreme proponent of ecofiction have a timeless appeal.


Author(s):  
Václav Paris

Modernist epic is more interesting and diverse than we have supposed. As a radical form of national fiction, it appeared in many parts of the world in the early twentieth century. Reading a selection of works from the United States, England, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Brazil, The Evolutions of Modernist Epic develops a comparative theory of this genre and its global development. That development was, it argues, bound up with new ideas about biological evolution. During the first decades of the twentieth century—a period known, in the history of evolutionary science, as “the eclipse of Darwinism”—evolution’s significance was questioned, rethought, and ultimately confined to the Neo-Darwinist discourse with which we are familiar today. Epic fiction participated in, and was shaped by, this shift. Drawing on queer forms of sexuality to cultivate anti-heroic and non-progressive modes of telling the national story, the new epic contested reductive and reactionary forms of social Darwinism. The book describes how, in doing so, the genre asks us to revisit our assumptions about ethnolinguistics and organic nationalism. It also models how the history of evolutionary thought can provide a fresh basis for comparing diverse modernisms and their peculiar nativisms.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-336
Author(s):  
WARREN W. QUILLIAN

WITHIN the past few years American medicine has made tremendous strides in prestige and influence. The Academy has contributed its part to this advance. But, progress has not been gained by accident. Behind the scenes in organized medicine are many conscientious and tireless workers who, by their enthusiasm and consecrated effort, are accomplishing the tasks with which they are confronted. Committee members are often unsung heroes in the solution of problems pertaining to the furtherance of more adequate medical care for children. The individual Academy member occasionally forgets how much so many of us owe to so few in the practical application of our ideals. For example, those of you who attended the Annual Meeting at Toronto last fall heard the panel discussion on Pediatric Education; and saw the exhibit, describing some of the aims and objectives of our Committee on Medical Education. Under the inspired leadership of the Chairman, Dr. Lee F. Hill, this group is making progress in attempting to answer some of the questions posed by the Academy Survey of 1946-48. During the current year, continuation of regional conferences throughout the United States and Canada, with emphasis upon the problems of undergraduate education, has resulted in an intelligent exchange of ideas and an opportunity for discussion unparalleled in the history of North American medical schools. The inevitable result of these discussions will be an improvement of standards for medical education. Interpretation and evaluation of new ideas, inclusion of practical and progressive concepts for the betterment of medical school curricula, requires a great deal of time and effort.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 489-514
Author(s):  
Lukas Engelmann

Abstract The arrival of bubonic plague in San Francisco in 1900 has become a pivotal case study in the history of American public health. The presence of plague remained contested for months as the evidence provided by the federal bacteriologist Joseph Kinyoun of the Marine Hospital Service was rejected, his laboratory methods disputed and his person ridiculed. Before the disease diagnosis became widely accepted, Kinyoun had been subjected to public caricature; his expensive and disruptive pragmatics for containing the epidemic were ridiculed as a plague of ‘Kinyounism’. Not only does this history offer insight into the difficult and contradictory ways in which bacteriology became an established science, it also provides an early twentieth-century example of ‘politicised science’. This paper revisits the controversy around Kinyoun and his bacteriological practice through the lens of caricature to sharpen the historical understanding of the shifting and shifty relationships between science, medicine, public health and politics.


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