60 RüdigerKunow
issues of American Studies, namely immigration and U.S. imperialism.
In both focus areas, American Cultural Studies, and especially its
internationally-minded variant, "Transnational American Studies," is
concerned with the "connections established by U.S. imperialism"
(Rowe, "Disease" 144) and the consequences of these connections on
the individual, mostly though on a systemic level. In addition to the
existing rich body of work, a focus on biological connectivities can
show, broadly speaking, how, as a consequence of migration and
imperialist outreach, indigenous ecologies had an impact far from their
original location. The incidents of yellow fever, discussed below, can
showhowinthewakeofcommercialandmilitaryexpansion,biological
materialfrom"faraway"couldaffectlifeintheAmericanheartlandand
produce "zones of vulnerability" (Stoler 18; B. Anderson 98-99) right
there.
To rethink both migration and empire from within the horizon of
humanbiologythenmeansfirstofalltopayattentionbothtothebody's
vulnerableoutsideandtothevisibleandinvisiblelinesofconnectionof
this body with others across the "promiscuous social spaces" (Wald,
Contagious14, 91), also cultural spaces, of U.S. empire. I will present
such an engagement below in my narratives of the U.S. medical
interventions on Cuba and the biology of culpability directed against
Chinese immigrants during the incidents of bubonic plague on Hawai'i
andtheWestCoast.
These cases will demonstrate not only that biological encounters
occurinthesametransnationalspacesroutinelyinvestigatedbycultural
critique; they also act as useful reminders for cultural critique of the
inextricable entanglements of the public and the private in such
moments. Biological encounters occur simultaneous "out there" and "in
here,"intheintimatespacesofhumanbodies.Inbothcases,theyremain
mostly invisible for the gaze of the beholder, and this lack of empirical
accessibility is an important factor for cultural critique to reckon with.
Theelementofprivacy,evensecrecysurroundingbiologicalencounters
produces, in dialectic fashion to be sure, a desire for discovery,
disclosure,forgettingtoknowthewholetruth.Thisoftenfranticsearch
for meaning—what Keats (himself the victim of such an encounter)
calledinadifferentcontextthe"irritablereachingafterfactandreason"
(Keats 261)—has always produced major hermeneutical emergencies.
This is true also of enlightened secularized EuroAmerican modernity,