90 RüdigerKunow
catastrophic local outcomes,^40 the "apocalyptic history" mentioned
above,anddevelopinsteadasustainedfocusonthestructuralconditions
in which these encounters are grounded. After all, disease outbreaks
were anything but accidental but were anchored in concrete time/space
frameworks. This enjoins us to think of the American hemisphere as a
"living textures" (Ahuja x) of embodied connectivities and shared
susceptibilities. Secondly, descriptions of diseases and their social and
culturalfalloutneedtoacknowledgearepetitivepatternofexposureand
an interactive chain of infections as always already being cross-hatched
byinternationalandinterculturalmobilities.Howthisprocessworkscan
be illustrated by the repeated outbreaks during the late 1990s of
incidentsofWestNile Fever in New York City.Haitianswhohadbeen
living in the city for a long time were suddenly becoming strangers
again,strangersinthebiomedicalsense,becausetheyweresuspectedof
beingpotentialcarriersofthefever(earlierofHIV-AIDS),evenincases
when they had shown no symptoms, nor recently been to the
Caribbean.^41 And a few years ago, during the SARS epidemic of 2003,
schoolchildren with recognizably Chinese features were barred from
attending school in Ontario, Canada. Parents were afraid their own
children would nonetheless be infected by the children of Chinese
ancestry, even when they had never been to China or at least not in the
recent past. It was their ethnic identity that turned them into risk
personified ("Ontario SARS Death Toll" n. pag.). The fallout of
presumed biological encounters has to this day remained very much a
part of the collective memory in the American hemisphere, as recent
clarion calls about "highly infectious cases of drug-resistant and lethal
tuberculosisthatarewalkingacrosstheMexicanborder"(Minorn.pag.)
show. The self-amplifying threat of unwilled connectivities with this
particular "hot zone" has lost little of its compelling authority even as
the medical means of combatting migratory infectious diseases have
improvedverymuch.
(^40) Most leading causes of death, such as cancer, heart or kidney disease are on
theonehand"silent,"slowandchronic,epidemicdiseases,ontheothermostof
thetimeunexpectedandseeminglywithoutcause,inotherwords,evental.
(^41) For more details on the debate and the issues cf. Clements, Colleen.
Postmodern Malpractice: A Medical Case Study in the Culture War.Bingley:
EmeraldGroupPublishingLimited,2001.Print.