This, I love.
In Pandemic 2, the plucky island nation of Madagascar (plucky, and also riven by political conflict) closes its borders as soon as a pandemic is declared, isolating the island completely from outside contamination and ensuring its survival. In the real world the outcome of this strategy is North Korea, and good luck with that.
At my regional airport, passport inspection comes complete with facemasks, handwash and a sheet exhorting you to report your symptoms to the nearest medical centre.1 The pandemic has re-awakened all sorts of interesting cultural krakens, and BLDGBLG has embarked on a large scale project examining notions of quarantine and isolation from a spatial / architectural perspective. There’s a particularly interesting interview with history professor Krista Maglen, whose research focuses on the prevention of infectious disease, where she discusses how physical space determines cultural space when it comes to controlling the spread of disease.
Quarantine differs very much depending on where a country is in relation to a disease source or perceived disease source… Quarantine became a very big deal [in Australia]. First of all, there’s a perceived proximity to Asia, which in the West has traditionally been seen as this great source of disease – the “Yellow Peril.” Quarantine is also a way to draw a line around White Australia, racially, just as much as it is to draw a line around the notion of a virgin territory that doesn’t have the diseases of the rest of the world.
Britain has a different relationship to quarantine because its borders are much more fluid. It can’t have borders as rigid as somewhere like Australia, for lots of different reasons: because of its empire; because it relies on maintaining open borders to let trade flow; and because Britain is itself quite undefined, in a way. It’s a composite of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The borders of Britain are much more fluid, so quarantine takes a different form there and has a very different history.
Quarantine is closely tied to immigration in the United States: Ellis Island was a quarantine processing site, as well as an immigration processing site. Until the 1920s, immigrants arriving into the United States came into facilities that were also quarantine stations, and also places where you could isolate people for disease control reasons. Part of the processing of who can and can’t get into the United States is always about quarantine—what bodies are seen to be diseased and undesirable.
This sheds much light for me on the way in which immigration discourse in the USA is shaped – on both sides, but particularly on the right – in terms of disease control. Uncontrolled immigration is an infection in the body politic – the right demands that the intruder cells be expelled, a classic CD4+ T cell response, while (broadly) leftist plans for controlled assimilation are the political equivalent of quarantine measures.
The US attempts to deal with immigration issues as if it was an island nation (in addition to shouldering its own legacy of racial tensions), as if it was a body with clearly identifiable borders rather than a free-floating concept with only a thin match to its actual spatial coordinates, which is of course a recipe for an epic fail. How should we deal with the brute fact that the history of civilisation is a history of population movements?
Tags: Australia, BLDGBLG, Krista Maglen, quarantine, UK, USA