Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown

Abstract

This striking book asks provocative questions and seamlessly weaves together narratives central to the history of race, Asian Americans, urban politics, public health, and citizenship. Nayan Shah begins by asking how public health officials and regulations racialized the Chinese in San Francisco and defined them as dangerous, contaminating medical menaces in the late nineteenth century. Anti-Chinese sentiment and politics have been well documented for this time period and location. What makes Shah's contribution so important is the way in which he uses the lens of public health to explain how officials built upon existing anti-Chinese antipathy in order to medicalize the threat of Chinese immigration. The Chinese were deemed the very embodiment of disease. Chinatown was ruled a “laboratory of infection” in need of vigilant scrutiny, regulation, and containment. These “strateg ie s of co n tain m ent” included quarantines, strict examinations of incoming immigrants at Angel Island, house and workplace inspections, mass vaccinations, and residential segregation that disproportionately targeted the Chinese. Even as science “advanced” to incorporate medical inspection practices such as bacteriology, racial assumptions did not become irrelevant. Rather, race remained essential to the new systems of border control.

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