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

Polk, Khary Oronde,

Contagions of empire : scientific racism, sexuality, and black military workers abroad, 1898-1948 / Khary Oronde Polk. - Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, (c)2020. - 1 online resource.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations in the Text -- Introduction -- Chapter One. We Don't Need Another Hero: Death, Honor, and the Archive of American Militarism -- Chapter Two. Negro Heroines: Gender, Race, and Immunity in the Spanish-Cuban-American War -- Chapter Three. Charles Young in Five Acts: Patriots, Traitors, and the Performance of American Militarism -- Chapter Four. Contagious Immunity: Race, Sexuality, and the Black Venereal Body Abroad -- Chapter Five. Communicable Subjects: African American Soldiers Trip the Global Color Line Epilogue: The Long Arc of Black Military Opportunity -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y

"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"--



9781469655529 9781469655512


African Americans--Government policy--United States.


Electronic Books.

UB418 / .C668 2020