‘A paradise among leprosariums’: Hansen’s disease and affective containment in the Panama Canal Zone

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Panama Canal Zone’s American administration established Palo Seco Leper Colony in 1907 in order to contain individuals with Hansen’s disease. Yet containment was never a simple strategy. This article argues that American observers used rhetoric to transmute their fear of Hansen’s disease into pity, imagining isolation as a form of care and buttressing the United States’ claim that the curative violence of incarceration was part of a beneficent global project of humanitarianism, civilization, and modernity. At the same time, residents at Palo Seco often reworked or simply rejected these affective claims, and close attention to the archival record finds examples of their anger, love, and hope, as well as pain, stigma, and loneliness. Residents were labelled and consigned, ostensibly made static and ordered through diagnosis, but the site hosted a dynamism and disorder—in both senses of the word—that American imperialism professed to control, but never could. Palo Seco was a kind of emotional contact zone where managers, commentators, and residents negotiated the affective scripts and sentiments of their imperial encounter. Attention to these subjectivities testifies to the humanness, the ragged edges, and the profound affect of the imperial enterprise and its ableist institutions.