An Archive of Skin, an Archive of Kin - (American Crossroads) by Adria L Imada

About the Book

"What was the longest and harshest medical quarantine in modern history and how did people survive it? Beginning in 1866, men, women, and children in Hawai'i suspected of having leprosy were removed from their families. Most were sentenced over the next century to lifelong exile at an isolated settlement. Thousands of photographs taken of their skin provided forceful, if conflicting, evidence of disease and disability for colonial health agents. And yet, a competing knowledge system of kinship and collectivity emerged during this incarceration. An Archive of Skin, an Archive of Kin shows how exiled people pieced together their own intimate archives of care and companionship through unanticipated adaptations of photography"--

Book Synopsis

What was the longest and harshest medical quarantine in modern history, and how did people survive it? In Hawaiʻi beginning in 1866, men, women, and children suspected of having leprosy were removed from their families. Most were sentenced over the next century to lifelong exile at an isolated settlement. Thousands of photographs taken of their skin provided forceful, if conflicting, evidence of disease and disability for colonial health agents. And yet among these exiled people, a competing knowledge system of kinship and collectivity emerged during their incarceration. This book shows how they pieced together their own intimate archives of care and companionship through unanticipated adaptations of photography.

From the Back Cover

"This brilliant book makes clear the power contexts of medicine--historical, cultural, political, legal--that are inseparable from the human relationships of medicine. The dramatic changes in medical education and ideologies that are traced in this book will generate great discussion in the classroom and the wider world. Already I am daydreaming about teaching this book."--Kim Nielsen, author of A Disability History of the United States

"Conceptually powerful, beautifully written, and deeply moving, Adria Imada's An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin examines the medical surveillance and carceral containment of people diagnosed with Hansen's disease, or leprosy, in Hawai`i and the visual technologies that contributed to their capture and control. In clear-eyed analysis of the violence of legal and medical processes that removed people from their families and communities and imposed a sentence of lifelong detention, Imada also shows us the ways in which those who were incarcerated engaged in the reparative practices of care and kinship. The result is a field-making book, one that transforms our understanding of disability, medicine, and the practice of history."--Regina Kunzel, author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality

"A breathtaking accomplishment, this beautifully written narrative is both scholarly and literary. Imada has written a critical expansion of biopolitical theory, one that balances concern for larger conceptual queries about life, mortality, and the human alongside considerations of the precise forms of social life that emerge within medical-carceral contexts of violence, exclusion, and dehumanization. This is the book Agamben should have written but could not write."--Patrick Anderson, author of So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance

"For colonial schools, churches, and museums, the time for reckoning is now, and one will not find a more powerful and revelatory treatment of institutional incarceration and medical racialization than An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin. Adria Imada lays bare the sinews connecting disease, disability, and exile, while revealing a resistant Indigenous tradition of kinship, loving care, and survivance. A stunning book that will move readers to outrage--and to tender respect."--Philip J. Deloria, author of Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract

About the Author

Adria L. Imada is Professor of History at University of California, Irvine, and author of the award-winning Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire.