Racing immunities: How yellow fever gendered a nation

During the campaign on Santiago de Cuba in the War of 1898, U.S. officials panicked that yellow fever would defeat North American troops. By August, the U.S. War Department mustered in "immune regiments" to relieve the ailing soldiers under General Shafter's command. Officials recruited men who identified with African or Cuban descent, since these affiliations were conflated with immunity to the disease. Episodes controverting this theory of innate immunity had been documented many years before the War of 1898. Papers referencing this contradiction were accessible to the experts, and yet, officials reported their surprise when the immune or "Black" regiments suffered devastating rates of yellow fever.;The dissertation proposes multiple entry points for interrogating these shocking incidents, exploring what it meant that officials both knew and could not know African American soldiers would suffer. The project probes the politics of how some knowledges come to count as credible science, whereas others are designated as raw material. The narrative reveals historical ways that scientific consensus is contoured by symbolic and mythological dimensions of the nation. On the other hand, the book also suggests that legacies of the U.S. sanitation project in occupied Cuba are embedded in subsequent national histories. The dissertation concludes that probing the 1898 yellow fever story makes obvious intimate minglings between the Republics of Haiti, Cuba, and the U.S., exposing a significant and material, albeit repressed historical triangle. Re-reading Pan American stories of yellow fever suggests further research not only on the neocolonial histories of tropical medicine, but also on successor productions of disease, difference, and inequity, such as AIDS.;Racing Immunities incorporates feminist, materialist, and performance studies methodologies to scrutinize story-telling habits that forcibly materialize social relations. The project looks intensively at differentials of power indexed to cultural productions of race, lineage, gender, sexual identity, class, and national membership, among numerous other contingencies of location and history. The interdisciplinary work is designed for readers in American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Women's Studies, Borderland Studies, Performance Studies, the Social Study of Science and Technology, Immune System Discourse, and Public Health.