Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San FranciscoÕs Chinatown (American Crossroads) [Hardcover]

Nayan Shah (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0520226283 | ISBN-13: 978-0520226289 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Nayan Shah has written a book of exceptional originality and importance. With a focus on issues of body, family, and home, central concerns of urban health reform, he illuminates the role of political leaders, public opinion, and professionals in the construction and reconstruction of race and the making of citizens in San Francisco. He brilliantly analyzes the politics of the movement from exclusion to inclusion, regulation to entitlement, showing it to be an interactive process. Yet, as he shows with great subtlety, the mark of race remains. As a study of citizenship and difference, this work speaks to a central theme of American history."--Thomas Bender, Director of the International Center for Advanced Studies at NYU, and editor of Rethinking American History in a Global Age

Contagious Divides is an ambitious contribution to our understanding of the troubled history of race in America. Nayan Shah offers new insight into the ways that race was inscribed on the streets, the bodies, and the institutions of San Francisco's Chinatown. Above all, he offers powerful examples of the impact of ideas about disease, sexuality, and place on the rhetoric and practice of racial inequality in modern America.--Thomas J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis

About the Author

Nayan Shah is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (October 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520226283
• ISBN-13: 978-0520226289
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,574,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars an intriguing blend of many diverse source texts, April 9, 2005

By 

S. Hall "Assistant Professor of Communication... (NW Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (American Crossroads) (Paperback)

Even though the United States was still a young country during the nineteenth century - where Shah begins his interweaving of public health, race, and citizenship - a strong enough sense of identity had been established to create a milieu of xenophobia with regard to non-Western cultures. In setting up the perspective of the alien as Other and tracing its influences throughout the health crises of San Francisco into the twentieth century, Shah establishes viral contamination as metaphor for cultural contamination. The threat from invaders comes not merely from their different cultural practices but also from their very biology, conflating a social threat with a physical one. White culture became the normative body by which Chinese difference was articulated.

As viruses and other contagious diseases were just beginning to be studied scientifically, some of the advancements were applied for the improvement of individuals while other advancements were used for the improvement of the society around those individuals through suppression or quarantine. A study of the maps of San Francisco that Shah provides read almost like an anatomy diagram, showing the growing cell of the foreign invader in the body politic. Maintenance of a spatial boundary, in order to control disease, transformed into maintenance of a racial boundary.

Throughout the text, Shah presents a considerable amount of evidence from many disparate sources, showing the collusion - often conscious, but sometimes not - of scientific, economic, legal, and other forces. Initially, one of the most important of the media shaped the city's perception of its Chinese foreign nationals through its articles, particularly through its use of pseudo-scientific jargon and its likening of the Chinese to vermin, another icon of plague; this also dehumanized the Chinese population by relegating them to the border spaces of civilized (white, Western) society.

Shah engages in critical debate about dominant versus subordinate social class, using his sources to illuminate developments within both Chinatown and the rest of San Francisco. By the end of Shah's text, the processes of governance transform the alien into the citizen much like the medication that can control and cure a disease, and he wonders if the ways of cultural assimilation are so strong that, in many ways, they eradicate something essential in the original individual. The patient has been saved, but at what cost?