Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Parasitic Empires: Infection, Insularity, Inter-Imperiality, 1880-2022

Parasitic Empires: Infection, Insularity, Inter-Imperiality, 1880-2022

Sidiki, Bassam

Hardcover

Public HealthLiterary CriticismGeneral Political Science

PREORDER - Expected ship date November 10, 2026

ISBN10: 1469697246
ISBN13: 9781469697246
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: Nov 10 2026
Pages: 254
Language: English
Real and imagined versions of the island and the microbe come together to tell a new story about geopolitical relations between two successive Anglophone empires: the British and the American. Bassam Sidiki assembles a vast archive of literary, cultural, and medical documents to argue that claims of British or American insularity are specious; these Anglophone empires have been economically, culturally, and scientifically interdependent since the turn of the century to the present as the British century gave way to the American. Ironically, the inter-imperial relations that refute imperial insularity are often most visible in island-like spaces such as gardens, ships, and brothels, and in actual tropical islands where the two imperial powers have worked together--or at odds--to hold infectious diseases at bay.

Sidiki documents historical and imaginary representations of infectious diseases such as the plague, venereal disease, Spanish flu, and Hansen's disease in the long twentieth century, and how these diseases brought the British and US empires into simultaneous collaboration and competition across the Anglophone world.

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