CfP: Barriers without borders
Global and transdisciplinary perspectives on sanitary cordons throughout
history
2nd
International Conference of the Quarantine Studies Network
7-8
November 2018
Hosted
by the University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca
Sanitary cordons to regulate and control the spread of bubonic plague
were developed in Italy in the 14th century in parallel with
maritime quarantine (mainly lazarettos) and came to be quickly imposed by other
Mediterranean/European countries. Today, various types of
cordons are still being used ‘to control the spread of epizootics and to
mitigate the impact of both newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases
upon the human population’ (Cliff, 2009) with the 21st-century
pandemics of Ebola or avian flu showing their continued utility. At this
juncture one finds a stunning paradox: despite their functions as instruments
of isolation/separation, sanitary cordons came to be highly appreciated,
legitimized and defended by state authorities and frequently by the populations
themselves. By the 1800s, they had already been accepted and utilized in most
countries of the world.
The success of sanitary cordons was also measured by their widespread
adoption across various social and cultural domains. Thus, sanitary cordons
became inseparable from military and political demarcations of territorial
borders especially, but by no means exclusively, at the state level. Well-known
cases include the cordon set-up against the plague in the Austrian-Ottoman
border as from 1770; the so called ‘yellow fever cordon’ set up in the Catalan
sector of the French-Spanish border in 1822; and the one established against
cholera on the Ottoman-Persian frontier during the 1850s. The concept of the
‘common good’ via the preservation of public health was also used as an
argument to legitimize, consolidate and militarize borders through the setting
up of cordons. On the other hand, as sanitary cordons were set up to separate
healthy sectors of a community – or indeed whole populations – from others
considered sick, they were directly involved in processes of nation-building,
international conflict or colonial domination. Sanitary cordons helped to
define and ‘protect’ national identities and, at the same time, ‘isolate’ and
control various provincial, national and colonial ‘others’. This was
legitimized through old and new medical theories, scientific discourse or just
pure prejudice or a combination of all these.
Sanitary cordons were also successfully ‘translated’ into the fields of
politics and diplomacy, where the concept has been employed metaphorically to
refer to attempts to prevent the spread of an ideology or another deemed
dangerous to the international or the social order. For example, in 1917, the
French minister of Foreign Affairs employed such a term to designate the new
states (Finland, the Baltic republics, Poland and Romania) established along
the Western border of the USSR (as buffer states) against the spread of the
Bolshevist revolution into Central and Western Europe. Besides geography,
politics and diplomacy, personal narratives of sanitary cordons became a sort
of subgenre in modern literature, where they have also been used as metaphors
to deal with issues of social control, identity/alterity or dystopic futures.
Incorporating all these perspectives and seeking papers with original
research approaches, this conference wants to explore sanitary cordons
throughout history to the present as they were put in place and employed in
different parts of the globe and different social and cultural domains. Topics
to be addressed could include, among others:
- Origins and development of sanitary cordons for the
prevention of epidemics throughout history to the present: concepts,
practices, regulations, global expansion, unknown or understudied
historical cases throughout the world.
- Patterns of sanitary
cordons throughout history and in different regions/countries of the
world.
- Sanitary cordons as border
sites of negotiation and/or resistance.
- Pre-modern and non-European forms of
isolation/separation of diseased groups or communities from the rest in
all their diversity (and cultural specificities).
- Literary narratives recounting eye-witness
accounts/experience of cordons or employing the metaphor ‘sanitary
cordons’ on issues of identity and otherness, liminality,
movement/migration, global inequality, and so on.
- Memorialization: sanitary cordons
in the collective imaginaries, shared memories, material culture/heritage
sites, lieux de mémoire.
- Sanitary cordons and the
construction, and expansion, of early-modern/modern borders of states,
provinces or any other territorial demarcations.
- Place of non-human
creatures and organisms (animals, plants, substances) within cordons.
- Juridical, ethical,
humanitarian and religious issues raised by the use of cordons in public
health, war, political struggle, migration control, and human rights.
- Sanitary cordons and
science: particularly the connections between contagionism and
hygiene, as well as the part played by novel advances in medicine –
bacteriology.
- Relations with power: effective sanitary cordons and
types of state projections of power (national sovereignty, central
administrative state development, Imperial/colonial state power).
- Connections between cordons and other forms of quarantine, isolation hospitals and the public health systems. Sanitary cordons and western medicalization of society: surveillance and disciplinary processes.
After that date, more information
will be provided about the venue, travel and accommodation options, as well as
funding opportunities.
The Quarantine
Studies Network team
More
information concerning QSN
Local
organization website