Contagions of empire : scientific racism, sexuality, and black military workers abroad, 1898-1948 / Khary Oronde Polk.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Polk, Khary Oronde, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Government policy--United States.

African Americans.

Armed Forces.

Social conditions.

History.

African Americans--Government policy.

United States--Armed Forces--African Americans--History.

United States.

United States--Armed Forces--African Americans--Social conditions.

Armed Forces--African Americans.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xvii, 270 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2020]

Summary:

"From 1898 onward, the expansion of American militarism and empire abroad increasingly relied on black labor, even as policy remained inflected both by scientific racism and by fears of contagion. Black men and women were mobilized for service in the Spanish-Cuban-American War under the War Department's belief that Southern blacks carried an immunity against tropical diseases. Later, in World Wars I and II, black troops were stigmatized as members of a contagious "venereal race," and were subjected to experimental medical treatments meant to curtail their sexual desires. By turns feared as contagious, and at other times valued for their immunity, black men and women played an important part in the U.S. military's conscription of racial, gender, and sexual difference, even as they exercised their embattled agency at home and abroad. By following the scientific, medical, and cultural history of African American enlistment through the archive of American militarism, this book traces the black subjects and agents of empire as they came into contact with a world globalized by warfare"-- Provided by publisher.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-263) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Polk, Khary Oronde. Contagions of empire.

ISBN:

9781469655499

1469655497

9781469655505

1469655500

OCLC:

1119444610