Intimacies of Sound and Skin at Carville

Abstract

At the national leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, diverse groups of people diagnosed with leprosy or Hansen's disease (HD) forged an unexpected disability culture of music, touch, and recreation. In the 1970s, HD patients from the small Kalaupapa, Molokai, settlement in Hawai'i arrived at the vast Carville facility seeking advanced medical treatment. They interacted with other people medically sequestered in the US South, including African Americans, Latinos, whites, and recent immigrants. Some residents had benefited from a 1940s sulfone antibiotic cure, while others had a range of physical disabilities. These older adults also shared the experience of stigma, social exclusion, and separation from kin, although leprosy incarceration policies had been far harsher and enacted much earlier in Hawai'i than at Carville. Memoirs and snapshots produced by Hawai'i residents reveal how social encounters in the South influenced their life choices and institutional demands at a critical moment of transition and mobility for disabled people in the late twentieth century.