72 RüdigerKunow
Mantle" (1838), Howells'sHazard of New Fortunes(1896),^22 Twain's
"3,000YearsamongtheMicrobes"(1905),SinclairLewis'sArrowsmith
(1925),anditdoesnotendwithDonDeLillo'sWhiteNoise(1985).
Even so, biological mobility has so far not exactly been a terrain
well-traveled by American or Cultural Studies. HIV-AIDS may be a
possible exception,^23 but as the ravages of that illness seem to have
moved outside the global North, interest in the public presence of the
disease has somewhat subsided. The overall lack of interest in the
cultural resonances of biological mobility is in my view all the more
regrettable because such mobility has figured prominently at critical
junctures in the cultural history of the West, at moments when the
established relationships between individual and collective life as well
as the transactions between language and the body were redesigned in
such a way that a healthy body—free from undesirable biological
encounters—became part of the national or nationalist lexicon of the
country,irrespectiveofitsmostlyimaginarycharacter.
The thematic field thathas been sketched so far unfoldsinto several
areasofinquiryandmethodologicalconcerns.Notallcanbeadequately
addressed in the space of such a book chapter. Accordingly, I will now
present a number of case studies to show how encounters forged by
humanbiologyproducedatdifferentmomentsinU.S.-Americanhistory
materialandculturaleffects.Thetrajectoryofthesecasestudiesgoesall
the way from the culpable individual to the medically marginalized
collective, from the biosphere of specific locations to hemispheric
connectivities.Theimaginativesurplusatworkinallthesecasesdidnot
restrictitselfto therealmofspeculationbut,aswillbeshownproduced
manifestresultsinthesocialworldofsocialbeings.
(^22) In Howells's text this process plays out especially in the section called "An
East-Side Ramble." Lewis'sArrowsmithhas a chapter on the bubonic plague in
the West Indies; for this part of the novel, Lewis was supported by Paul de
Kruif,MD,formerlyonthestaffofRockefellerInstituteforMedicalResearch.
(^23) The classical work in this field is still Paula Treichler'sHowtoHaveTheory
in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS(1999). For more recent material
cf. also Nicola Birkner's highly informativeAIDS-Narratives: Die literarische
ImaginationvonKrankheit.Berlin:LIT-Verlag,2006.Print.