86 RüdigerKunow
neutral functional process, but instead as a highly volatile exchange
where locally specific problems of sustenance and survival emerge and
precipitateahermeneuticalcrisisofthekinddescribedabove.
Ecology and infection in the sense sketched here will guide my
reading of the transit of biological material through the "wide open
spaces" of the American hemisphere and beyond. The focus on these
two factors allows me to articulate an understanding of translocal
connectivities that goes beyond the traditional ideology-critical models
of American Cultural Studies and highlights instead theliving textures
of embodied connectivities which were decisive factors during the
successivestagesofbuildingaU.S.empire(Ahujax).
The imprint of human mobility on ecologies in the Americas has
been intense and transformative, so that they bear a historical index
stronger perhaps than in other parts of the world. Locally existing
ecologies were disrupted and forever transformed by the mobility of
Europeans,^36 and their interventions set into motion unprecedented
biological encounters that claimed the lives of millions of indigenous
people because they had no acquired immunities against the new
pathogens imported by the Europeans. Right before the arrival of the
Mayflower,anepidemic(possiblyofhepatitiscontractedfromEuropean
fishermen) had killed about 90 percent of the local indigenous
population—afactwhichinspiredWilliamBradfordin hisOfPlymouth
Plantationto present a providential reading of disease: "The good hand
of God favored our beginnings by sweeping away great multitudes of
thenatives...thathemightmakeroomforus"(qtd.inWilliams348).
(^36) The advent of Europeans in the Caribbean and other parts of the Americas
marksasignalmomentwhenbiologicalencounters—the"Columbianexchange"
(Alfred Crosby)—occurred with a scope and intensity and with catastrophic
outcomes which are probably without historical precedent and which forever
changedtheecologyofthehemisphere.Seventoeightmillionoftheindigenous
population of the Americas (an estimated five million on the area of today's
continental 48 states), are said to have been killed through the combined
onslaught of smallpox, typhus, yellow fever, diphtheria, influenza, dysentery,
even childhood diseases such as measles, mumps, chicken pox, whooping
cough;thecoastaltribeswereallbutwipedoutby1776(Kraut,SilentTravelers
14). These ecological catastrophes are well-researched and even better
publicized(Ahuja,Kraut)andneednotberetoldhere.