Still Lives and the Traffic of Infection: Spaces of Quarantine Colonial Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper explores the institution of the quarantine in relation to different modalities of power, and as a site of convergent mobilities: of people, pathogens, and knowledges. Focusing on public health measures to prevent the spread of infection in colonial Hong Kong (cholera, smallpox, bubonic plague), the paper shows how the segregation of diseased bodies became inseparable from efforts to demarcate the contours of ‘new’ scientific and political knowledges. The incarceration of bodies in the quarantine conflated with the sequestration of the scientific specimen: technologies of constraint made bodies visible in new ways. Viewing the history of infectious disease control in relation to material and emergent ‘disciplinary’ spaces in this way, provides a novel framework within which to rethink the history of globalization. While the quarantine might be understood in relation to harmful cross-border flows, globalization might equally be defined in terms of systemic closure rather than the expansion of global connectedness. Drawing on a range of archives – from government documents to scientific reports and newspaper commentaries – the paper tracks the practice of quarantining in colonial Hong Kong to suggest how it may shed light on broader historical processes.