Traveling with sugar chronicles of a global epidemic
Amy Moran-Thomas
- Oakland, California University of California Press 2019.
- 1 online resource (376 pages) illustrations, maps
Part One. Contexts. Approach: emergency in slow motion -- Past is prologue: sugar machine -- What is communicable?: caregivers in an illegible epidemic -- Part Two. Crónicas. Crónica one, thresholds: traveling an altered landscape with Cresencia -- Crónica two, insula: technology, policy, and other units of Jordan's isolations -- Crónica three, generations: approaching "metabolic memory" with Arreini and Guillerma -- Crónica four, repair work: maintenance projects with Laura, Jose, and growing collectives -- Epilogue -- Dedication -- Acknowledgments -- About translations -- Image credits -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
"Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction "sugar"--Or, as some in Garifuna Belize say, "traveling with sugar." A decade in the making, this book reveals a series of crónicas--a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those "still fighting it," as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Guiding us into the surprising landscapes of global diabetes, these individuals speak back to science and policy misrecognitions that have prematurely cast their lost limbs and deaths as normal. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, they practice their arts of maintenance and repair, illuminating ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine"--Provided by publisher