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Beyond a Racialized Representation of Colonial Quarantine: Recollecting the Many Pasts of St John's Island
Abstract
In Chapter 5 Desmond Hok-Man Sham discusses the neglected site of the St John’s Island quarantine station in Singapore. Sham revisits and contests the history and memory of the island, in relation to the legacy of colonialism, analyzing how and why the ‘darker’ aspects of its past have been commemorated or obscured. In narrating the history of the former colonial quarantine facilities on Singapore’s St John’s Island, race has been unduly highlighted, according to Sham. Whereas quarantining has typically been represented as a racial practice unfairly targeting ethnic Chinese, Sham’s research highlights alternative memories of this experience, arguing that class was more significant than race in determining who was subjected to the indignity of quarantine, and of how they were treated while in quarantine.
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This paper investigates practices of border formation through an analysis of Australia’s quarantine processes. We use the work of the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS), through the Northern Australia Quarantine Strategy (NAQS), to interrogate the ways in which borders are made and remade in daily life. By exploring quotidian practices of quarantine we argue that borders are the sites of complex and fluid relationships that are constantly being renegotiated as multiple active agents cohabit, contest, belong, and exclude. We find that quarantine borders are constantly being (re)made by forces outside NAQS’s control, including through the practices of Yolngu Indigenous land-management staff and rangers, individual local residents, and diverse nonhumans. Borders are revealed as active spaces produced in multiple locations at multiple scales. They are underpinned by diverse ontologies and are always more-than-human. This challenges the overly simplified view evoked within AQIS’s public awareness material and the prevailing national discourse of defence, invasion, and fear. Through attention to quotidian practices of border making, different ways of understanding borderland geographies emerge.
This chapter articulates Hong Kong's experience as a (colonial) port city, re-positions Hong Kong into the maritime network, and argues for the significance of “port city” as an inter-referencing framework. Through the example of Happy Valley cemetery cluster, this chapter illustrates how the histories of Hong Kong as a port city, including its multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan foundation, diversity of Chinese population and collaborative colonialism, are embedded in its urban landscape and built heritage. This chapter argues how critically engagement with the histories and heritage of port city could provide space for critical reflection upon decolonization, local and regional histories, and the ethnic relationships of Hong Kong.
Memorialising lives, deaths and events in landscapes can be authorised, official and highly regulated, or spontaneous, unsanctioned and anti-authoritarian. Interpreting and connecting two sites spanning the Pacific Ocean, this paper explores the inscribed and affective landscapes of Angel Island, San Francisco, and North Head, Sydney. Both sites encompass multivalent histories of defence, quarantine, immigration and leisure. Both also host a continuum of mark-making practices, from informal graffiti to monuments aspiring to direct national narratives. Elaborating the rich and complex layering of histories at each site, we trace the semiotic and emotive circuits marked by their endorsed and vernacular inscriptions. In particular, we question the work done when individual or even surreptitious texts are appropriated – or marketed – within formal narratives of inclusiveness, reverence and homogeneous nationalism. Drawing upon scholarship from archaeology, history, geography and heritage studies, this analysis argues that formalised commemoration never escapes the potential for counter-readings – that authority and authorship never entirely coincide.
This book offers an alternative perspective to look into Hong Kong's colonial pasts, tracing how malleable forms of colonial power are underpinning institutions and cultural imaginaries across the social body. Such a collaborative colonial power formation gave shape to the Hong Kong Chinese and its impacts are still lingering after 1997.
There is no doubt that the historical geographies of quarantine and racial nationalism overlapped at Sydney's North Head Quarantine Station. To conflate these practices into a single narrative of immigration restriction, however, obscures other stories and agendas. Drawing upon inscriptions left in the Sydney sandstone by those detained at North Head, we argue that for many Pacific voyagers, quarantine was merely a temporary interruption rather than an exclusionary endpoint or affront. Citing the shuttling trade of ships and crews from New Zealand, Japan and China, this article re-locates North Head from a continental gateway to a Pacific outpost.
The spectacular rise of China as a superpower perhaps only now compels us to recalibrate existing discourses of empire and postcoloniality, but China has been an empire in the modern sense since the mid–eighteenth century, when it conquered vast lands north and west of “China proper.” This history has been largely hidden from view because of two unacknowledged obsessions: the fetishization of Western empires over other empires and the prevailing discourse of Chinese victimhood at the hands of Western empires. The rise of China would not have caught so many by surprise if our vision had not been persistently clouded by our privileging of the oceanic (i.e., Western) mode of colonial expansion, which paradoxically centered the West as the most deserving object of critical attention and intellectual labor. It also would not have been a surprise if we had looked back at the Manchu conquests of inner Asia, which present-day China largely inherited and consolidated in a continuous colonial project. Postcolonial theory as we know it, particularly its critiques of orientalism, may prove irrelevant or even complicit when we consider how the positions of Chinese intellectuals critical of Western imperialism and orientalism easily slip into an unreflective nationalism, whose flip side may be a new imperialism.
The paper examines the public health strategies of segregation, isolation, and quarantine as measures to protect Hong Kong from imported diseases, as well as from the spread of diseases within the colony in the pre-war period, through case studies of cholera, smallpox, and plague. The purpose is to contextualize the discussion of these case studies in order to analyse the assumptions and rationale underlying the control measures, the way they were implemented, and their effectiveness in disease protection. The case studies illuminate some of the political, economic, social and cultural issues involved in the adoption of specific measures which the colonists deemed necessary for their physical survival and the economic well-being of the colony. That fundamental concern was reinforced by the view that since the indigenes were incapable of actively participating in disease prevention, the government had to act even without the indigenes' cooperation or involvement. The study also examines how the colonial government's actions were influenced by the international concern for the spread of infectious diseases and public health developments in England.
From offshore border enforcement to detention centers on remote islands, struggles over human smuggling, detention, asylum, and associated policies play out along the geographical margins of the nation-state. In this paper, I argue that islands are part of a broader enforcement archipelago of detention, a tactic of migration control. Island enforcement practices deter, detain, and deflect migrants from the shores of sovereign territory. Islands thus function as key sites of territorial struggle where nation-states use distance, invisibility, and sub-national jurisdictional status (Baldacchino & Milne, 2006) to operationalize Ong’s (2006) ‘graduated zones of sovereignty’. In sites that introduce ambiguity into migrants’ legal status, state and non-state actors negotiate and illuminate geopolitical arrangements that structure mobility. This research traces patterns among distant and distinct locations through examination of sovereign and biopolitical powers that haunt asylum-seekers detained on islands. Offshore detention, in turn, fuels spatial strategies employed in onshore detention practices internal to sovereign territory.
This article explores ways in which the technology of quarantine functioned in the imagining of Australia as a nation in the early 20th century. With the aim of historicizing scholarship on the formation of identities through boundary maintenance, this article explores that literal boundary which creates ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ spaces and subjects, the quarantine line. Quarantine produced cultural ideas and effects of a pure national self, and a pathologized, contaminated and racialized other. That ‘whiteness’, ‘purity’ and ‘national hygiene’ which was actively sought in the early 20th century functioned through both public health and immigration regulations: the practice of quarantine was the point at which these came together. Quarantine assisted in the imagining of the new island-nation as an integrated whole, and in the imagining (and literal pursuit) of its ‘whiteness’.
This manuscript explores the state’s political use of the past and the function of history education in political transition and foreign relations. Modern historical consciousness in China is largely characterized by the “one hundred years of humiliation” from mid-1800s to mid-1900s when China was attacked, bullied, and torn asunder by imperialists. This research focuses initially on how such historical memory has been reinforced by the current regime’s educational socialization through the national “Patriotic Education Campaign” after 1991. It then explores the impact of this institutionalized historical consciousness on the formation of national identity and foreign relations. This study suggests that, even though existing theories and literature illuminate certain aspects of China’s political transition and foreign affairs behavior, a full explanatory picture emerges only after these phenomena and actions are analyzed through the “lenses” of history and memory.
The present report compares the findings and personal impressions gained independently by two therapists, one treating English alcoholics voluntarily entering a menttal hospital, the other dealing with Chinese opium addicts who, after arrest, had been compulsorily sent to a prison addiction unit. In spite of the differences arising from the nature of the different drugs, the differences in personality and in socio-cultural backgrounds, a large number of points were found in which the findings in the two case materials resembled each other: such as the indifferent attitude of doctors, the layman and the state toward the addicts and the latter's ready response to an understanding, accepting attitude within a therapeutic community. The writers' experiences give no evidence to support the generally fatalistic and pessimistic outlook held toward the addict.
Despite the salience of the Second World War in paving the way for Singapore to attain formal independent status in 1965,
it was not until the 1990s that war events were inserted into the state’s narratives, and ‘mapped’ onto its spaces as visible
national fodder to bind citizens together. Since then, memoryscapes in many forms have proliferated over the state’s cityscape.
After tracing the genesis of official war commemorative gestures within Singapore, the paper examines the ways in which Singaporeans
have responded to them. Specifically, the paper argues that, while Singaporeans recognize the importance of remembering the
war as nationally significant, this has not translated into any physical attempt or desire—beyond the discursive—to participate
in the state’s commemorative endeavours. In analyzing factors that may have hindered the actual bodily practice of war remembrance in Singapore, nationalized war memoryscapes are also seen as embodying numerous politics due
to tensions arising from a collision between what the state and its people perceive to be ideal means of remembering and representing
the war within national discourses in the context of the present.
KeywordsCommemoration–Memoryscapes–Nation-building–Politics–Second World War–Singapore
D uring the 20th century the united states witnessed sweeping social, political, and economic transformations as well as far‐reaching advancements in medical diagnosis and care. Despite the dramatic changes in demography, the meaning of citizenship, and the ability to treat and cure acute and chronic diseases, foreigners were consistently associated with germs and contagion. In this article we explore why, at critical junctures in American history, immigrants have been stigmatized as the etiology of a wide variety of physical and societal ills. Anti‐immigrant rhetoric and policy have often been framed by an explicitly medical language, one in which the line between perceived and actual threat is slippery and prone to hysteria and hyperbole.
Our examination focuses on three periods of immigration history: (1) the late 19th century to the passage of the National Origins Act in 1924 when millions of newcomers arrived in the United States and increasingly stringent quotas were enacted; (2) an era of retrenchment and exclusion from 1924 to 1965 when far fewer immigrants entered yet their identification with disease and contamination remained intact; (3) and the period from 1965 to the present, when family reunification laws became the centerpiece of immigration policy and spawned the migration of millions of Asians and Latin Americans to this country.
During the 20th century the United States witnessed social, political, and economic transformations as well as advancements in medical diagnosis and care. Despite changes in demography, the meaning of citizenship, and the ability to treat and cure acute and chronic diseases, foreigners were consistently associated with germs and contagion. This article explores why, at critical junctures in American history, immigrants have been stigmatized as the etiology of a variety of physical and societal ills. The article analyzes three periods from 1880 to the present and suggests that now, as germs progressively and, often, indiscriminately cross national, social, and economic boundaries through multiple vectors, the mistakes of the past must not be repeated. Protecting the public health in the current era of globalization requires an ecumenical, pragmatic, and historically informed approach to understanding the links between immigration and disease.
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Xinjiapo guzhi chuanzhi jianyisuo zhi moxing yu kanzhe qing congsu xingivu jiaobi shizhi' jjUJOUW fialli [Check out the model of Singapore's quarantine soon before it's too late
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Nanyang Siang Pau
1924. 'Xinjiapo guzhi chuanzhi jianyisuo zhi moxing yu
kanzhe qing congsu xingivu jiaobi shizhi' jjUJOUW fialli
[Check out the model of Singapore's quarantine soon before it's too late],
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Guanyu Qizhangshan fangyisuo gailiang daiyu zhi laiwang wenjian ji gailiang yijianshu
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Nanyang Siang Pau. 1927. 'Guanyu Qizhangshan fangyisuo gailiang daiyu zhi laiwang
wenjian ji gailiang yijianshu'
[Petition to improve St John's Island quarantine station], April 24.
Zuijin yiyue songfu Qizhangshan zhi huaren dake jing da yiwan ren fengpinglun dacang ke qianyu qianri bei song fu gai shan H [Nearly 10,000 Chinese pas sengers were quarantined on St John' s Island last month. 1,000 passengers were sent to
- Nanyangsiangpau
NanyangSiangPau. 1935a. 'Zuijin yiyue songfu Qizhangshan zhi huaren dake jing da yiwan
ren fengpinglun dacang ke qianyu qianri bei song fu gai shan
H
[Nearly 10,000 Chinese pas
sengers were quarantined on St John' s Island last month. 1,000 passengers were sent to
St Johns Island two days ago], April 19.
Xianluo youhuang di Xing zhide zanju Qizhangshan yin tonglun yi chengkc huan tianhuazheng buneng poli zhun bi deng'an' JUilllSlHjte --A ndliAfbhk
- Nanyang Siang Pau
Nanyang Siang Pau. 1939a. 'Xianluo youhuang di Xing zhide zanju Qizhangshan yin tonglun
yi chengkc huan tianhuazheng buneng poli zhun bi deng'an'
JUilllSlHjte --A ndliAfbhk
[Siamese king is to be accommodated
on St John's Island due to a fellow passenger infected with smallpox], January 16.
Gao zonglingshi Zeng Jichen Lin Jindian deng zuo shicha Qizhangshan jiliusuo huanjing youmei shebei meinian zai gaijin zhong jiliusuo zhong ren dui shicha zhe biaoshi mi shao you lie
- Nanyang Siang Pau
Nanyang Siang Pau. 1939b. 'Gao zonglingshi Zeng Jichen Lin Jindian deng zuo shicha
Qizhangshan jiliusuo huanjing youmei shebei meinian zai gaijin zhong jiliusuo zhong
ren dui shicha zhe biaoshi mi shao you lie'
[St John's Island
quarantine station inspection: scenic environment, improving facilities. People com
plain about poor quantity and quality of food], June 21.
Qizhangshan yi Deren dieshangsongzhongyangyiyuan zhenzhi' 0tf?tll-Ic.AE'ifyjSct3 [A German fell on St John' s Island and was sent to hospital
- Nanyang Siang Pau
Nanyang Siang Pau. 1939c. 'Qizhangshan yi Deren dieshangsongzhongyangyiyuan zhenzhi'
0tf?tll-Ic.AE'ifyjSct3
[A German fell on St John' s Island and was sent to
hospital], November 3.
Nanlai liike shiwei weitu zhi Qizhangshan gexiang shebei gaigeshuduo
- Nanyang Siang Pau
Nanyang Siang Pau. 1940a. 'Nanlai liike shiwei weitu zhi Qizhangshan gexiang shebei gaigeshuduo'
[Many facilities on St John's
Diqiao zai juliusuo shenghuo po shushi qinyou jiashu mei zhou ke tanfang yi ci' [®fg:j£jWWaS£f«£SKSia °J^---A
- Nanyang Siang Pau
Nanyang Siang Pau. 1940b. 'Diqiao zai juliusuo shenghuo po shushi qinyou jiashu mei zhou
ke tanfang yi ci' [®fg:j£jWWaS£f«£SKSia °J^---A [Enemy civilians
have comfortable lives in detention camps. Their families and friends can visit them
once a week].
Zeng Jichen yu jizhe cheng Qizhangshan funii luoti jianyan buque
- Nanyang Siang Pau
Nanyang Siang Pau. 1940c. 'Zeng Jichen yu jizhe cheng Qizhangshan funii luoti jianyan
buque'
[Ching Kee Sun tells reporter that
the naked inspection on St John's Island is a rumour].
Qizhangshan jianyisuo shebei guoyu jianlou shoujianzhe chujing canku' fit®
- Nanyangsiangpau
NanyangSiangPau. 1947a. 'Qizhangshan jianyisuo shebei guoyu jianlou shoujianzhe chujing
canku' fit®
[St Johns Island quarantine station
is of poor condition and people suffer].