Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's ChinatownContagious Divides charts the dynamic transformation of representations of Chinese immigrants from medical menace in the nineteenth century to model citizen in the mid-twentieth century. Examining the cultural politics of public health and Chinese immigration in San Francisco, this book looks at the history of racial formation in the U.S. by focusing on the development of public health bureaucracies. Nayan Shah notes how the production of Chinese difference and white, heterosexual norms in public health policy affected social lives, politics, and cultural expression. Public health authorities depicted Chinese immigrants as filthy and diseased, as the carriers of such incurable afflictions as smallpox, syphilis, and bubonic plague. This resulted in the vociferous enforcement of sanitary regulations on the Chinese community. But the authorities did more than demon-ize the Chinese; they also marshaled civic resources that promoted sewer construction, vaccination programs, and public health management. Shah shows how Chinese Americans responded to health regulations and allegations with persuasive political speeches, lawsuits, boycotts, violent protests, and poems. Chinese American activists drew upon public health strategies in their advocacy for health services and public housing. Adroitly employing discourses of race and health, these activists argued that Chinese Americans were worthy and deserving of sharing in the resources of American society. |
Contents
Public Health and the Mapping of Chinatown | 17 |
Regulating Bodies and Space | 45 |
Perversity Contamination and the Dangers | 77 |
White Women Hygiene and the Struggle | 105 |
Plague and Managing the Commercial City | 120 |
White Labor and the American Standard of Living | 158 |
Making Medical Borders at Angel Island | 179 |
Other editions - View all
Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown Nayan Shah No preview available - 2001 |
Common terms and phrases
Angel Island Annual Report Asian American Asiatic Exclusion League Babies bacteriological Berkeley Board of Health body bubonic plague CCBA Chicago China Chinese American Chinese immigrants Chinese laborers Chinese merchants Chinese prostitutes Chinese race Chinese residents Chinese women cigar cisco citizenship Committee conduct cultural developed disease district domesticity epidemic Exclusion feared federal female prostitutes Folder gender health authorities History hookworm hygiene infection Journal Judy Yung laundries leprosy Letter living Marine Hospital Service Meares Medicine middle-class missionaries moral municipal nese nineteenth century norms opium dens Pacific PHS officers physicians Ping Yuen political population public health public health officials public housing quarantine race racial regulations San Fran sanitary Sawtelle segregation sexual SFBH smallpox social society strategy Street Surgeon syphilis tion trachoma tuberculosis twentieth century U.S. Marine Hospital Union Label United University of California University Press vaccination workers Wyman York