The Limits of Linearity
Recasting Histories of Epidemics in the Global South
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3408467 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Valentina Parisi (0000-0003-4614-474X, Columbia University), Kavita Sivaramakrishnan (0000-0002-5584-2585, Columbia University) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 114 |
| Issue | S1 |
| Pages | S247-S287 |
| Publication date | 2023-09-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Isis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/726987 |
| OpenAlex | W4387039890 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 47 |
Writing about the history and politics of epidemics and pandemics requires stepping into a historiography that is expansive, transnational, and slotted into specific historical periods. This essay considers the main debates in this expansive historiography and highlights the strengths and limitations of dominant historiographical approaches to the study of epidemics and pandemics. This essay also interrogates the framing of three thematic periods, or categories, commonly identified by historians and social scientists in analyses of epidemics and pandemics: categories of "colonial health," "international health," and "global health." As this essay underscores, scholarship often analyzes epidemics and pandemics through overlapping and complex historical temporalities involving colonization, decolonization, and globalization. However, this approach is often constrained by the limitations of existing archives and the overwhelming focus of published scholarship on dominant institutions, scientific and political figures, and specific disease outbreaks that are commonly associated with categories of "colonial health," "international health," and "global health" from the late nineteenth to the present. As a result, scholarship may include linear narratives that flatten or generalize the legacies of epidemics and pandemics. The links between pathogens and pathologies are not linear, however, and colonial structures of power, disease tropes, and surveillance doctrines often persist across time and space. This essay ultimately seeks to challenge and complicate these dominant framings and categories from within. This approach highlights the connectedness—and complex continuities and discontinuities—in the political, economic, social, and scientific perceptions of and approaches to epidemic and pandemic risks
Econometrics · Geography · Linearity · Physics · Global Health and Surgery · Global Security and Public Health · Mathematics · Zoonotic diseases and public health
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A Pox on Your Narrative
HIV scale-up and the politics of global health
The “Cholera Cloud” in the Nineteenth-Century “British World”
Looking Sideways
Endemic risks
Public health or public menace? The Rockefeller Foundation and public health in Mexico, 1920-1950
Global biopolitics and the history of world health
Making Global Health History
The Global Menace
Africa as a Living Laboratory
Public health in British India
The Return of Epidemics and the Politics of Global–Local Health
The World Health Organization and the Transition From “International” to “Global” Public Health
Death and the Modern Empire
Philanthropy and World Health
The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze
Imperialism, ecology and disease
The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary Conferences on Cholera, 1851–1894
Tropical medicine in nineteenth-century India
Sars Epidemic and the Disclosure of Singapore Nation
Security, Disease, Commerce
The Scale Politics of Emerging Diseases
Neoliberalism Redux
Intimidation, coercion and resistance in the final stages of the South Asian Smallpox Eradication Campaign, 1973-1975
The politics of civil society in confronting HIV/Aids
Globalizing the History of Disease, Medicine, and Public Health in Latin America
The Politics and Anti-Politics of the Global Fund Experiment
Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |