Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown

by Nayan Shah

Contagious 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, China, American History, Academic, Health

384 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 2001

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

really fantastic analysis of how racial discourse shaped responses to healthcare in san francisco during the gilded age. impressive how shah is able to reconstruct these discursive connections that might be seemingly disparate but were actually a part of a salient biopolitical regime of racism.

[clvmars · Rating 4 out of 5]

amazing archive about the western association between chinese people, disease, and filth which permeates american hegemony even today. super good sources

[kess | wordwanderlust]

read this for one of my papers ok so it counts x

[Dan Zalewski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well researched and not afraid to dive deep on particular topics, but the writing is dense. I've read academic works, and even then this is on a different level. A slow, encumbering read.

[Antonia Wilson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had to read for class and thought putting my progress on here would help me get through it. Soooo dense and repetitive

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very well written history that focuses mainly on public health in San Francisco through a racial prism. Shah argues convincingly that race was a critical factor in the various public health interventions of the 19th and early 20th centuries in particular. Chinatown specifically was seen as a source of disease and a threat to "respectable" society.

This book reminded me quite a bit of Warwick Anderson's Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines and Megan Vaughan's Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, in that both were extremely interested in the discourses surrounding human intervention about disease, much moreso than the effect of the diseases themselves.

I would love to read a follow-up to this book that looked at the same events and actions through the prism of something like public choice theory. I thought of Graeme Allison's Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis quite a few times while reading this book. With a lot of the interventions, I kept hearing a screaming subtext about things like organizational capabilities and how those influenced decision-making, particularly with respect to new methods in disease testing in his (excellent) chapter on Angel Island.

My rule of thumb, though, is not to hold a book a writer didn't write against that writer. This was a strong entry into the field.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thorough examination of the perceptions of Chinese-Americans in SF's Chinatown through the lens of disease and public health. Interesting and definitely informative for this reader, but so so dry! I don't think scholarly, well-researched cultural history has to be this dry. Dryness aside, Shah's concept of "queer domesticity" is pretty influential and certainly the most compelling part of his analysis.

[Aj Davenport · Rating 2 out of 5]

I find medical history compelling but this book did nothing for me. About a third of the way thru it became apparent that this was a PHD thesis that was padded to make a book. Lots of repetition of the same facts/sources with almost no development of history or story.

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well done. Good footnotes and bibliography.