History and dementia are both concerned with time. Writing history is all about folding time, making sense of things that have become confused and confusing with the passage of time by bringing different points into contact. And dementia, as the reflections in this series show, suggest different ways of experiencing and enacting time. These variations in dealing with time …
Tag Archives: History
Vampires, Cannibals, and Sorcerers on the Loose
On February 8, 2019, a symposium organized by Nancy Rose Hunt on the scholarship and career of Luise White was held at the University of Florida. In the nearly twenty years since the publication of White’s Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (University of California, 2000), her thinking at the intersection of anthropology and history continues to …
Creating Bodies, Creating a Nation: How the Idea of the Straight, White, Muscular Male Body Shaped America
Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 224 pages.
1.
When Michelle Obama launched the “Let’s Move” campaign in 2010, it triggered a backlash by conservatives anxious about the so called “nanny state” interfering unduly in the private sphere. The campaign was a national initiative “dedicated …
Patient Zero and the Making of a Myth: History as an Archaeology of the Present
Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic
University of Chicago Press, 2017, 400 pages
…“An innocent he was not. He eventually told health investigators that during the 1970s he’d had some 2,500 sexual contacts with men in Europe, Canada, South America – and in the large centers of gay lifestyle in New York and California.
Politics by Other Means: Health in Việt Nam
My research in Việt Nam addresses how medicine, health, and disease function as political and cultural signifiers as well as telegraphing – in the form of epidemiological data and public health outcomes – important features of the socioeconomic order. While health and disease are highly politicized everywhere in the world, these issues take on intriguing significance in socialist and formerly …
Cancer Culture avant la lettre
In the class I teach on illness narratives, cancer comes after the plague. In the realm of representation and cultural memory, infectious diseases have a long visual and allegorical pedigree. Pestilence is always already more than an epidemiological reality. With cancer culture things are different. A cursory search for early modern images of cancer in the U.S. National Library of …