Archiving Medical Violence

Consent and the Carceral State

2023
•
Author:

Christopher Perreira

A major new reading of a U.S. public health system shaped by fraught perceptions of culture, race, and criminality

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.

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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Christopher Perreira is associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego.

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