LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

Closely reading and historicizing three contemporary postcolonial fictions about the Chacachacare leper colony in Trinidad, this essay makes the case for more sustained attention to race, colonialism, and infectious disease in disability studies. Employing the concepts of hybridity and encamped ethnicity, the essay shows that leprosy was racialized in the Caribbean context among the Black populace in the wake of slavery and subsequently among the East Indians in the aftermath of indenture. It further argues that leper colonies such as the one in Chacachacare were not merely incarcerating and immobilizing but spaces where racial and ethnic identities were always being negotiated in conversation with their disabled status. The primary texts under study show how these colonies within colonies manifested both imperial mobilities and immobilities, at times hybridizing different races and ethnicities through the fluidity of Caribbean creolization and at others subjugating them to the rigid encamped ethnicity of "leper."

During the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis and their allies between 1941 and 1944 (one of the most deadliest events of World War II), famine caused hundreds of thousands of deaths among the civilian population. How did people react to malnourishment and its impact on the body and mind? The diaries kept by hundreds of ordinary men and women provide an insight into the intimate perception of the famine as these events were unfolding. While the extent of food deprivation is heavily downplayed (even concealed) in Soviet propaganda, it is absolutely central in the diaries. At the crossroads of history and literature, this article examines the challenges of addressing the experience of hunger: the search for resources (linguistic, literary, historical), the attempts at verbalization, and the limits of language. Ultimately, the diarists furnish us with an invaluable testimony of unmitigated malnourishment, giving us the unique opportunity to it see through the eyes of the starving.

In this essay, I outline the colonial origins of the prevailing beliefs and attitudes towards fatness and current justifications for marginalizing fat bodies. I argue that, because the lineages of anti-fatness are beholden to the violence of colonialism and anti-Blackness, any theorization of fat that relies upon the pathological concept of "obesity" reinforces the imaginative purchase this history continues to exert within literary treatments of fat. As a remedy to this, I argue that Carmen Maria Machado's short story "Eight Bites" provides an alternate interpretive framework that invests in the capacity of a fat belly to nourish and even mother bodies as the organ that cares for those bodies the most. By framing weight-loss surgery as a loss to be mourned, Machado challenges the ongoing "duress" caused by anti-fatness and contends that fat can be generative and even reparative, rather than a perpetual signifier of illness and premature death.

Bram Stoker's Dracula, Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles all paint a picture of primeval hunger. But the satiation of this hunger sustains an undead, monstrous existence. Essentially an animated corpse, the vampire embodies what Julia Kristeva has described de facto as waste. The image of the vampire perverts everything that is sacred: signficantly, it reverses the ritual of the Eucharist. Yet in doing so, it fosters an uncanny exploration of theological hunger at the heart of bodily waste. Three different models of vampirism show us how Stoker, Le Fanu, and Rice play with the concept of vital hunger at the heart of waste. At times a monstered mother, at times an uncanny lover, the vampire always feeds, and in feeding spreads waste. This essay asks: how does literary vampirism make use of waste to explore theological anxieties?