Archiving Medical Violence
Consent and the Carceral State
Interrogating the notions of national and scientific progress, Archiving Medical Violence shows how such violence is both an engine of medical progress and, more broadly, the production of empire. Christopher Perreira centers how the medical archive is produced, remembered, and contested within cultural production and critical memory, arguing that it is in the contradictions of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that we find how medical violence is narrated as a public good.
In this deeply researched and sweeping examination of medical violence across time, space, and scale, Christopher Perreira takes us on a journey that unsettles progress narratives about medicine and asks us to reckon with the everyday forms of harm embedded in a profession purportedly dedicated to healing. Ultimately, Archiving Medical Violence forces us to remember all those devalued as prisoners and revalued as patients and to reimagine whose stories and lives matter for anticarceral futures animated by justice.
Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want
At the heart of Archiving Medical Violence is an interrogation of the notions of national and scientific progress, marking an advance in scholarship that shows how such violence is both an engine of medical progress and, more broadly, the production of empire. It reads the medical archive through a lens that centers how it is produced, remembered, and contested within cultural production and critical memory.
In this innovative and interdisciplinary book, Christopher Perreira argues that it is in the contradictions of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that we find how medical violence is narrated as a public good. He presents case studies from across a range of locations—Hawai‘i, California, Louisiana, Guatemala—and historical periods from the nineteenth century on. Examining national and scientific conceptions of progress through the lens of medicine and public health, he places official archives in dialogue with visual and literary works, patient writing, and more.
Archiving Medical Violence explores the contested public terrains for narrating value and vulnerabilities, bodies and geographical locations. Ultimately, Perreira reveals for us a medical imaginary built on racialized criminality driving contemporary politics of citizenship, memory, and identity.
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In this deeply researched and sweeping examination of medical violence across time, space, and scale, Christopher Perreira takes us on a journey that unsettles progress narratives about medicine and asks us to reckon with the everyday forms of harm embedded in a profession purportedly dedicated to healing. Ultimately, Archiving Medical Violence forces us to remember all those devalued as prisoners and revalued as patients and to reimagine whose stories and lives matter for anticarceral futures animated by justice.
Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want
Examining the ways in which human bodies are rendered subject to biomedicine’s epistemological and material violence, Christopher Perreira highlights the discursive technology of the ‘prisoner-patient,’ a figure which bears the histories of white supremacy and settler colonialism. Contemporary biomedicine would do well to engage Archiving Medical Violence to think through its reliance on the same racial–carceral logics that places like prisons and segregated schools rely on, which in turn might provide new public policies to address the deep health care inequalities that are the long-term effects of the violences that Perreira’s book reveals.
James Kyung-Jin Lee, director, Center for Medical Humanities, University of California, Irvine
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Archiving Medical Consent
1. Medical Violence, Archival Fictions
2. Memory, Memoir, and the Carville Leprosarium
3. Imagining Medical Archives at Olive View
Epilogue: Futures of Medical Violence
Notes
Index
