Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History, written by Wayne Soon

Reviewed by: Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History by Wayne Soon Rachel Core Wayne Soon. Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2020. ix + 312 pp. Ill. $30.00 (978-1-5036-1400-0). Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic fixated the attention of armchair epidemiologists on China’s contributions to global health, scholars had begun to recenter China’s importance within global health histories.1 Wayne Soon’s recent volume contributes to this literature by highlighting the role of overseas Chinese—both within Asia and globally—in building biomedical care, education, [End Page 167] and institutions in Mainland China and Taiwan, especially during the 1937–45 war and postwar years. In particular, the book weaves together the contributions of three ethnic Chinese from Singapore and Malaysia. First, Wu Lien-teh, a Cambridge-educated physician from Penang, became a central figure in controlling the 1910–11 Manchurian Plague outbreak. Following the outbreak, Wu established the North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service and convened an International Plague Conference, which brought foreign financial support for disease control. Second, the book examines the unsuccessful attempts of Lim Boon Keng to create a medical school at Xiamen University. Finally, most of the book focuses on Lim Boon Keng’s son, Robert Lim, who like his father, was born in Singapore and educated in Edinburgh. Robert Lim took lessons from his father’s experience, helped to diversify the Peking Union Medical College, and built successful biomedical institutions including: the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps (CRCMRC), blood banks, an Emergency Medical Services Training School (EMSTS), and the National Defense Medical Center (NDMC). While elites championed urban biomedical institutions in prewar China, Chapter 2 details how with financial and voluntary support from overseas Chinese, the CRCMRC adapted to local conditions in 1937–45 China. Specifically, Robert Lim led efforts to develop mobile medical units, which prioritized preventive medical interventions. Because “most soldiers suffered from diseases, rather than wounds,” the CRCMRC emphasized immunization, delousing to reduce scabies and relapsing fever, and improved nutrition (p. 63). As described in Chapter 3, Robert Lim used the priority of improved nutrition to incentivize donations to blood banks. Originally, few Chinese supported blood donation, believing it “would deplete their vitality”; however, Lim’s team offer of eggs and soymilk changed the calculus for would-be donors in wartime China (p. 96). In May 1938, Lim founded the EMSTS, which responded to the urgent need for medical providers by training military personnel in a three-month course. As Chapter 4 argues, the Chinese Communist Party would build upon the precedent of providing practical medical education after 1949; however, Robert Lim hoped the schools where the medics received basic training would evolve “to become comprehensive medical centers,” providing a six-year training course (p. 132). On this point, the leader of the United China Relief (UCR), a United States–based organization that funded the EMSTS, lambasted Lim, claiming that this aspiration was impractical. The exchange between Lim and URC illustrated the precariousness of relying on overseas donors, yet Lim was eventually able to build a more comprehensive medical training program. The final chapter illustrates how the NDMC—which had both vocational and academic tracks—was built in Shanghai after the war, and moved to Taiwan in 1948. This meticulous study is based upon research in more than twenty archives and libraries on three continents. In addition to re-centering the role of the Chinese diaspora in global health history, Soon follows both monetary donations and disagreements about how to best develop biomedicine across boundaries, both geopolitical and temporal. The book crosses the Taiwan Strait to examine Taiwan’s successful blood donation program and universal health care system as [End Page 168] legacies Robert Lim’s vision. The account also spans the 1949-divide in Mainland China, contributing to the growing body of scholarship highlighting continuities in medical care provision in the 1950s and beyond.2 Soon’s claim that the Chinese Communist Party “fostered a sense of wartime urgency,” allowing for biomedical expansion deserves explication in future scholarship, but his own contribution on the importance of wartime institutions to the development of biomedicine in China is...

This article discusses three Malayalam texts written by Gulf-Kerala migrants: V. Musafar Ahammed’s (2014) Kudiyettakkarante Veedu [House of the emigrant], a collection of memoirs; Benyamin’s (2016) Kudiyettam: Pravasathinte Malayalivazhikal [Emigration: Malayali routes of exile], an anthology of essays; and Sam Pynummoodu’s (2016) Kuwait Indian Kudiyetta Charitram: Kuwaitile Indian Pravasavum Malayali Sanidhyavum [A history of Indian emigration into Kuwait: India’s Emigration to and Malayali Presence in Kuwait], a historical work. This essay introduces them as microhistorical writings that attempt to document Kerala’s diasporic history — in particular, the history of the Gulf-Keralan diaspora to which the writers belong. At the micro-level, these diasporic histories are distinguished by their multiplicity, particularity, and dialogic association. Furthermore, this essay maintains that the writings acknowledge the agential force of the migrant subject, thereby reinforcing the primacy of the migrant writer and migrant protagonists. In the course of translating subjective experiences into vivid moments of articulation, migrant memory summons a heterogeneous narrative fabric that is characterized by epistemic disjunctures and methodological shifts. Consequently, these texts present an alternative to the canonical literature (as manifested within the ambit of state and academic engagements) on Gulf-Kerala migration, thereby reinventing the dominant historical discourse and recontextualizing history in the private realm of embodied narratives.

10. Literary Transnationalism and Diasporic History: Frances Watkins Harper’s ‘‘Fancy Sketches,’’ 1859–60 was published in Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation on page 189.

The ninth volume of UNESCO’s General History of Africa reopens the narrative of the continent’s past with a fresh and timely perspective. Building on the foundations laid by the previous volumes published between 1981 and 1999, this volume responds to the profound evolution of research over the past decades. Disciplines such as archaeology, genetics and environmental science have expanded the scope of inquiry, while memory, sustained in cultural practices and shared traditions, is acknowledged as essential to historical understanding. The result is a reimagined historiography, plural, dynamic and closely attentive to Africa’s global connections. This volume, organized into four sections, opens onto multiple dimensions of African and diasporic histories, from the ways they are written today and the foundations laid by earlier works, to the continent’s deep past and the transformative periods linking ancient and modern eras. African and diasporic histories are being reshaped through endogenous perspectives and cultural practices, reflecting on earlier volumes to provide the context that gives these reinterpretations their full weight. The volume traces the initial phases of human evolution, the emergence of complex societies, technological innovations, and spiritual evolutions, while addressing the realities of enslavement and resistance and the formation of diasporic networks that have long connected Africa to the wider world. Woven together, these threads create a coherent and compelling narrative, illuminating the past while inviting a renewed appreciation of Africa’s rich, enduring and far-reaching impact. Africa’s past demonstrates the depth and resilience of its societies, their achievements and struggles shaping the course of history and informing the world that follows. UNESCO Catno: 0000396045 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000396045

Reviewed by: Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History Roger Daniels (bio) Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. By Aviva Ben-Ur. New York: New York University Press, 2009. v + 321 pp. This is a mistitled book. It is not a history of Sephardic Jews in America, diasporic or otherwise. The author, herself, denies the title: “The aim here is not to compose a linear history of the Sephardic community in the first half of the twentieth century or of the various institutions that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews founded over the years. Rather this study has the thematic aim of exploring intra- and interethnic relations between the various groups that Eastern Sephardim, and, to a lesser extent, Mizrahi Jews encountered in the United States”(8). The book contains a great deal of information about relatively recent Sephardic immigration, much of it from interviews conducted by the author and from her research in obscure newspapers and other printed and manuscript sources that will be of value to any person who attempts such a history, which is surely one of the more apparent gaps in American Jewish history. The focus on relatively recent American Sephardic history reflects the work’s origin in the author’s 1998 Brandeis University dissertation, “Where Diasporas Met: Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in the City of New York, a Study in Intra-ethnic Relations, 1880–1950.” The book emphasizes what the author believes has been the “structural and scholarly exclusion” of “the Jews who weren’t there” and it is this alleged intellectual discrimination that fuels and, I am afraid, distorts her vision (1). To her, the conflict, most evident in New York City, between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, is a unreported major event in American Jewish history and anyone who has ignored it is taken to task, chiefly in some of the 1,170 footnotes that accompany the 192 pages of text. Her targets include not only many of the major scholars of American Jewish history, but even immigration historians. Rudolph Vecoli is chastised for an encyclopedia article of nearly 6,000 words covering immigration in all of American history because “the Jewish immigrants who arrived in 1654 are not specified as Sephardim” (201, n. 12). In that essay Vecoli, as was his wont, stressed the diversity of American immigration from its outset and did not feel it necessary to refer to the Ashkenazic/Sephardic dichotomy, but did discuss the conflicts between German-speaking and Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants.1 [End Page 335] That some, perhaps most, of the Sephardic immigrants of her period were insulted because at one time or another other Jews refused to accept them as fellow Jews is recounted effectively in several places. That this is made a kind of leitmotif is, it seems to me, unbalancing as is Ben-Ur’s insistent categorization of all Jewish immigrants as either Ashkenazic or Sephardic, when many, perhaps a majority, never thought of themselves as either. A further weakness is a persistent attempt to provide precise numbers for various American Jewish populations and precise percentages of the numbers of Jews among the immigrants from various nations and of what kinds of Jews they were. Although the author, in introducing an “Appendix: Population Statistics of Non-Ashkenazic Jews in the United States,” recognizes that “[s]tatistical ambiguity is characteristic of U.S. Jewish population [estimates] in general,” nevertheless the text is literally peppered with overly precise numerical statements about both American Jewish population in general and of its component parts (32, 193). A further flaw is that many of her factual statements about American immigration are not to be relied upon. For example, persons denied admittance are not “deported” but “excluded,” Benjamin Harrison did not veto a literacy test bill, and the detention rate at Ellis Island never approached 20 percent. On the other hand, I found Ben-Ur’s extended remarks on Ladino and on the significance of immigrant languages instructive and sensitive. I hope that my stress on what seem to me to be the serious flaws of this work do not cause other scholars to ignore her call for a more nuanced analysis of the ethnocultural variations of the American Jewish experience...

Korea Christian churches and missionaries have a prominent presence around the world. In cities such as Yanji and Los Angeles, Korean churches are an essential part of century-old Korean ethnic communities that trace their origins to Japanese colonization that began in the late-1800s. More recently, the economic success of South Korean corporations has resulted in Korean churches and missionaries in global metropoles such as Beijing, London, and Singapore that serve thriving Korean communities anchored by corporate transnationals, entrepreneurs, and international students. This same economic growth has financed Korean missionaries from Africa to Central Asia to undertake projects ranging from health care to education. While all Korean churches and missionaries have comfortably imbued the global religion of Christianity with their national and ethnic identity, the differences in national and local contexts shape their individual beliefs and practices. Given the dramatic changes in both Korean and its diasporic histories, each Korean church selects from rich and complex vocabularies of religion, nation, ethnicity, and community to negotiate and articulate its mission and identity. Within this context, this article focuses on two Korean churches-one from Beijing and another from Tokyo-as emblematic case studies of global religion and local faith.

In 1874, a New York Herald correspondent in Cuba, James O'Kelly, observed that a Chinese coolie "contrary to the representations made about the traffic in Asiatics was treated in every respect the same way as his sable companions in misfortune." 2 O'Kelly was one of many observers of that period who recorded similar assessments; later, Cuban historians came to the same conclusion. While American scholars debate whether the Chinese coolies of Cuba should be called "slaves," the authoritative scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Jiménez Pastrana and Juan Pérez de la Riva, substantiated the horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and unreservedly stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. What were the conditions of Chinese coolie labor in Cuba and how is this related to our present understanding of labor's legacy in Asian American studies? Such questions become critical as we assess our present narratives of human experience, with the "coolie" having become a major figure in the study of Asian migration to the Americas. The coolie has figured into our diasporic history, literary narratives, ethnographic studies, and perhaps [End Page 99] most importantly, in communal memories and constructions of ancestral heritage.

Jewish émigré designers who fled Nazi persecution and anti-Semitism before, during and after the Holocaust transformed Australian aesthetics in art and design. One such émigré was Louis Kahan. Born in Austria in 1905, Kahan trained as a tailor and costumer in Paris before the Second World War, immersing himself in European avant-garde aesthetic practices. Threatened with deportation as an enemy alien, he instead joined the French Foreign Legion and spent the remainder of the war in North Africa further developing his artist craft before migrating to Australia. There Kahan continued to work as a prominent artist, set and costume designer. He continued to travel, returning frequently to Paris, and intersecting with other creative practitioners. Émigrés like Kahan embody a history that is intrinsically geographical. This chapter examines design influences through an engagement with transnational and diasporic histories, explored through Kahan's life and work. Charting his journey from Austria to Australia, it presents the reception of his work in various contexts, examining how his training, artistic practice and experiences travelled with him. Kahan's material and imaginative journeys are then used to inform new approaches to curatorial practice, illustrating a nuanced reading of the impact of Jewish émigré designers in Australia.

Interrogations of diasporic relations between place, subjectivity, and sexuality have transformed representational practices and paradigms of both Cuban and Cuban-American identity on multiple fronts. Through a consideration of two texts representing the Cuban diaspora-Achy Obejas's 1996 novel Memory Mambo and Carmelita Tropicana's performance piece “Milk of amnesia/Leche de amnesia”, first developed in 1994–I explore the centrality of sexuality in constructions of self, community, and nation. These works effectively ‘queer’ notions of immigrant belonging and Cuban diasporic consciousness, particularly in the sense of exploring the spatial imaginary of diaspora to expose and question the heteropatriarchal, and hence nationalist, underpinnings of more dominant models of diaspora. In their work, Obejas and Tropicana indicate the spatial dimensions of cultural memory and the imbrication of diasporic politics and sexualities. Attending to differences in genre, each work mines a crucial interplay between diasporic and sexual histories. In Tropicana's performance piece she uses a parodic sensibility and the broad humor enabled by the stage to engage, in a new register, with the politics of memory and the uses of place and sexuality, both in relation to Cuba and to the United States. Obejas works through and against the conventions of the contemporary novel (both immigrant and lesbian coming-of-age stories, in particular) to undo many of the assumptions regarding memory, sexuality, and cultural nostalgia as they are represented in her narrative. Both Obejas and Tropicana assert an imbrication of histories of colonialism, migration, and national attachment with experiences and practices of sexuality and gender in ways that underscore the importance of space and place in the constitution of collective memories.

Wayne Soon. <i>Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History</i>.

Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (review)

Abstract: The 1920s and 30s witnessed an explosion of interest in Spinoza among Zionist intellectuals. The reflexive equation of nation and state has led scholars to conclude that Zionists were drawn to Spinoza because he justified state sovereignty. This assumption is mistaken. Eastern European Zionists rejected Spinoza’s sovereignty-centered political thought—precisely because it denies political standing to non-sovereign bodies such as the kahal. Drawing on diasporic history, Spinoza’s Zionist critics elaborated a distinctive political vision that prized national autonomy but did not equate self-rule with sovereign power. I foreground Zionist repudiation of Spinozist sovereignty to challenge reigning assumptions about the ideological sources of non-sovereign politics. Theorists influenced by German Jewish thought have predicated the cultivation of non-sovereign political imagination on a disavowal of nationalism. This opposition—between diaspora and nation, between nationalism and non-sovereignty—is false. In eastern Europe, nationalist figurations of galut (exile) have long inspired non-sovereign, non-Spinozist political imaginaries.

Some contemporary Irish writers put into practice a historical remembrance, in their need to establish specific points of connection between the reality of the newcomers and previous Irish nationals emigrating from the homeland. This chapter demonstrates in its examination of Dermot Bolger's Ballymun Trilogy how present multiculturalism in Ireland can be efficiently described in literary terms through the perspective of the country's long history of emigration. In his play The Townlands of Brazil, Bolger expresses his sympathy for the foreigner through his insistence upon the commonality of experience with Ireland's diasporic history.

Performing the Nation in Chicago Bonnie Urciuoli Hamilton College Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas. 2003. National Performance: The Politics of Class, Race and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In National Performance: The Politics of Class, Race and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago, Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas confronts a central problem of cultural representation; that is, who is being represented? This study of Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago, based on fieldwork carried out in the mid to late 1990s, focuses on the ways in which elements of Puerto Rican identity are selected, foregrounded and performed. Such performance of national identity makes available for analysis the complex, sometimes oppositional elements of class position, racialization and geopolitical location that constitutes the range of people who identify as Puerto Rican. The central question in this study is the nature of representation of that national imaginary. The history of Puerto Rico shows how complicated that question can be. Let us start with some relevant background about Puerto Rico. Originally a colony of Spain, Puerto Rico had achieved a significant measure of autonomy just as the Spanish-American war began in 1898. When that war ended a few months later, Puerto Rico had become a U.S. overseas territory along with the Philippines and Guam. The U.S. thus gained its first geopolitical stakes in the Caribbean and Latin America, and in the Pacific. From the U.S. point of view, Puerto Rico was a territory. From the point of view of those who defined themselves as Puerto Rican, particularly those who had been instrumental in establishing the terms of autonomy from Spain in1897, Puerto Rico was a nation. The sense of Puerto Rico as a nation has persisted ever since, in various ways for different parts of the population, depending on the class, race and geopolitical distinctions that have emerged over the hundred-plus years of U.S. political, economic and racial hegemony. There are those, and have been throughout that century, for whom Puerto Rico should by rights be politically independent. There are others whose political convictions are less radical but who have a profound and lasting sense of cultural uniqueness, and for whom Puerto Rico is an absolutely distinct entity. As a political entity-first territory, then commonwealth-Puerto Rico is enclosed by its island boundaries in the Caribbean with no effective representation in U.S. national process. Participation in specifically Puerto Rican political process has meant participation in a very contained process. At the same time, Puerto Ricans have a long diasporic history. At present, the population of Puerto Rico is about 3.8 million and the number of Puerto Ricans living in the mainland U.S. is about 2.9 million, meaning that of the 6.7 million people who define themselves as Puerto Rican, over 40% live in the U.S. outside Puerto Rico, afuera as people say. (This is a fluid population-many currently living afuera have lived or will live in Puerto Rico, and vice versa.) Those living afuera are in a position to take part in political process as U.S. citizens (which Puerto Ricans have been since 1917) but nothing structural distinguishes that participation as Puerto Rican. Nevertheless, the sense of Puerto Rico as a nation-in Ramos-Zayas' terms, a diasporic nationalism-has been deeply pervasive. At various points over the past century, the U.S. has attempted, with little investment in the interests of actual Puerto Ricans (as opposed to, e.g., tax breaks for U.S. corporations operating in Puerto Rico), to turn the educational and economic institutions of Puerto Rico itself into little models of U.S. policy-craft. The most pervasive outcome of U.S.- sponsored economic policy has been the use of Puerto Ricans as a reserve labor force, either within Puerto Rico or by recruiting Puerto Rican labor to various secondary sector locales, particularly since World War II. …

In Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004; Giller Prize finalist; winner of Canada's Governor General's Award) Nomi Nickel, a sixteen-year-old Mennonite girl from southern Manitoba, Canada, tells the story of her short life before her excommunication from the closed community of the fictional East Village. East Village is based on a real town in southern Manitoba called Steinbach (where Toews was born), where Mennonite culture remains segregated from the rest of the world to protect its distinctive Anabaptist Protestantism and to keep its language, Mennonite Low German or Plattdeutsch, a living language, one which is both linguistically demotic yet ethnically hieratic because of its role in Mennonite faith. Since the Reformation, and more precisely the work of Menno Simons after whom this ethno-religious group was christened, Mennonites have used their particular brand of Low German to separate themselves from the rest of humankind. Toews constructs her novel as a multilingual narrative, to represent the cultural and religious tensions within. Set in the early 1980s, A Complicated Kindness details the events that lead up to Nomi’s excommunication, or shunning; Nomi’s exclusion is partly due to her embracing of the “English” culture through popular, mostly 1970s, music and books such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Insofar as Toews’s novel presents the conflict between the teenaged narrator and the patriarchal, conservative Mennonite culture, the books stands at the crossroads of negative and positive freedom. Put succinctly, since the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, Mennonites have sought negative freedom, or freedom from persecution, yet its own tenets foreclose on the positive freedom of its individual members. This problem reaches its most intense expression in contemporary Mennonitism, both in Canada and in the EU, for Mennonite culture returns constantly to its founding precepts, even through the passage of time, coupled with diasporic history. Toews presents this conflict between this early modern religious subculture and postmodern liberal democracy through the eyes of a sarcastic, satirical Nomi, who, in this Bildungsroman, must solve the dialectic of her very identity: literally, the negative freedom of No Me or positive freedom of Know Me. As Mennonite writing in Canada is a relatively new phenomenon, about 50 years old, the question for those who call themselves Mennonite writers arises in terms of deciding between new, migrant, separate-group writing and writing as English-speaking Canadians.