An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin: Disability and Life-Making during Medical Incarceration

by Adria L. Imada

Overview

What was the longest and harshest medical quarantine in modern history, and how did people survive it? In Hawaiʻi beginning in 1866, men, women, and children suspected of having leprosy were removed from their families. Most were sentenced over the next century to lifelong exile at an isolated settlement. Thousands of photographs taken of their skin provided forceful, if conflicting, evidence of disease and disability for colonial health agents. And yet among these exiled people, a competing knowledge system of kinship and collectivity emerged during their incarceration. This book shows how they pieced together their own intimate archives of care and companionship through unanticipated adaptations of photography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520343856
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Series:	American Crossroads , #62
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	385
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Adria L. Imada is Professor of History at University of California, Irvine, and author of the award-winning Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire.


 

Table of Contents

Preface: Encountering the Photographs vii

Note on Language xi

Chronology of Significant Events xiii

Map of Hawaiian Islands xiv

Introduction: An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin 1

1 Ocular Experiments and Unruly Technologies of the Body 35

2 A Criminal Archive of Skin 70

3 Dressing the Body: Laundry and the Intimacy of Care 119

4 Dreaming in Pictures: Queer Kinship and Subaltern Family Albums 160

Epilogue: Healing Encounters at the Settlement 204

Acknowledgments 233

Notes 237

Bibliography 295

Index 317