K009: Medical Emergencies and Epistemological Ruptures: Epidemics and Their Cultural Legacies in China in the 20th and 21st Century

Organizer(s)

• 

  Victoria Lupascu

  University of Montreal, Canada

Chair(s)

• JH

  Johanna Hood

  University of New South Wales, Australia, Australia

Paper Presenter(s)

• JH

  Johanna Hood

  University of New South Wales, Australia, Australia
• SC

  Shelley Chan

  Wittenberg University, United States
• 

  Rong Huang

  School of Health Humanities
  Peking University, China (People's Republic)
• 

  Victoria Lupascu

  University of Montreal, Canada

Discussant(s)

• KM

  Katherine Mason

  Brown University, United States

Session Abstract: Medical emergencies create a void of signification, a rupture, and their metaphorical meanings imbue and politicize the social realm. Hu Fayun, a Chinese novelist, holds that epidemics know no borders, as they are more political than medical events. This panel continues Hu’s statement and holds that epidemics and pandemics determine not only medical, but political, social and cultural world-scale reforms and impact how race, class and gender are constructed beyond the end of medical emergencies. They demand highly interdisciplinary methodologies to illuminate the interconnected cultural, aesthetic, social, political and medical relations across history, borders and identities. This panel brings together experts from three major academic fields (anthropology, literature, history) to analyze the epistemological ruptures in the systemic and symbolic constellation of Chinese national governmentality and international positionality. The collaborative work here proposes composite methods of intellectual grounding of the current pandemic while drawing on legacies of past emergencies. Each presenter focuses on a moment of profound rupture: from the Spanish flu’s presence in China, to HIV/AIDS, to SARS and to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In all cases, medical emergencies were inscribed on cultural and political levels by a reexamination of historical practices of self-care and identity formation and a redefinition of national borders. Underscoring the political, cultural and epistemological continuities through the 20^th century, the papers offer an alternative history of the contemporary Chinese milieu; they unveil legacies shaping current understandings in East Asia of the ongoing pandemic, and highlight China’s networked global positionality via epidemic containment.

Presentations:

• Understandings of Place and Underclasses: Shaping Actual and Imagined Transmission of HIV in China
  

  Paper Presenter: Johanna Hood – University of New South Wales, Australia
• The State-Sponsored Epidemic: AIDS Narrated by a Chinese Novelist
  

  Paper Presenter: Shelley Chan – Wittenberg University
• Narrating Infectious Diseases: Story-telling in China during the COVID-19 Pandemic
  

  Paper Presenter: Rong Huang – Peking University
• Networked Ruptures During the SARS Epidemic in China: Negotiating the Maoist Cultural Legacy in an Emergency
  

  Paper Presenter: Victoria O. Lupascu – University of Montreal