A Pandemic of Local Concern: Dengue in Pamanukan

Abstract

There is a persistent image of a hygienically superior West perennially at risk of infection from an exotic East or Global South. In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal was seen to place Europe within striking distance of endemic haunts of cholera and plague in Asia. In the present, coverage of the Ebola and Zika outbreaks in West Africa and South America betray similar anxieties. Historians or disease in Asia, similarly, have conventionally studied outbreaks either in situ or in the context of their ‘inexorable westward march’. Studying dengue fever through the lens of migration disrupts such narratives. In this paper, I examine a pandemic of dengue that began in 1870 and rapidly moved east along realigned ‘highways of empire’ – reversing the flow of disease scholarship. Honing in on a local manifestation of this pandemic in rural Java, this paper demonstrates the intertwining of different modalities of migration that both supported disease transmission and changes in assumptions about the nature and transmission of disease. The paper elucidates different scales and speeds of migration, and foregrounds the local, everyday forms of mobility implicated – or seen to be implicated – in the spread of epidemics. By highlighting the intra-Asian circulations of a background but prevalent disease, I provide a counterpoint to classic tales of imperial contagions.