82 RüdigerKunow
Distrusting their own business elite, they believed that the purported
epidemic(whosefactualstatusmanyofthemdenied)and/orthesanitary
measuresconstitutednothinglessthananethniccleansing,bykillingor
maiming them all (Shah 136, 142-44). Rumors circulating among this
populationsegmentoftenpittedindigenous,culturallydiscreditedforms
of medical knowledge against scientific knowledge "imported" from
outside, i.e., the same Caucasians who often disregarded or maltreated
them.
WhenthequarantinewasfinallyliftedonJune15,1900,onceagain
by court order, this did not mean the end of the epidemic. Instead, the
plaguelingeredon,stillclaiminglives,alsothoseofCaucasians,untilit
gradually subsided. In February 1904, the San Francisco Board of
Health officially declared that the plague was over, leaving a death toll
of 113 persons from various ethnic backgrounds until it returned to the
city in 1907-1908. Even though the presence in public memory of this
major health crisis was soon to be eclipsed by the devastating
earthquake that occurred two years later, the plague nonetheless
revealed the texture of a city life sharply divided along ethnic (at that
timethetermwouldhavebeen"racial")linesbutunitedincomplicityto
downplayhealthrisksforthesakeofcommercialgain.
From a cultural-critical point of view, the two plague incidents
related here prove once again a point repeatedly made so far, namely
that biological encounters are sites of restless activities which intervene
in people's lives and, in doing so, mobilize the imaginative capabilities
of those affected. While the mobilization of ethnic stereotypes simply
re-iterated existing cultural scripts, other activities were more future-
oriented: one can see emerging here the contours of a new, biomedical
form of governance. As Linda Singer has noted, medical emergencies
and the requirements of "damage control and prophylactic
protectionism" have repeatedly made possible hitherto unprecedented
"forms of regulatory intervention into the lives of bodies and
populationswhichmight,inothercircumstances,appearexcessive"(29-
31). She calls this "epidemic logic," a logic which could in the San
Francisco and Hawai'ian cases deploy its regulatory potential all the
moreeasily,asitwasaddressedtoapopulationsegmentwhosecultural
and medical status was spurious at best. Accordingly, the wholesale
identificationoftheChinesewithahealthhazardcanbeunderstoodnot
onlyasthebiomedicalversionofthe"YellowPeril"butasauthorization