Abstract
The Tropics have long been associated with exotic diseases and epidemics. This historical imaginary arose with Aristotle’s notion of the tropics as the ‘torrid zone’, a geographical region virtually uninhabitable to temperate peoples due to the hostility of its climate, and persisted in colonial imaginaries of the tropics as pestilential latitudes requiring slave labour. The tropical sites of colonialism gave rise to urgent studies of tropical diseases which lead to (racialised) changes in urban planning. The Tropics as a region of pandemic, plague and pestilence has been challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel coronavirus did not (simply) originate in the tropics, nor have peoples of the tropics been specifically or exclusively infected. The papers collected in this Special Issue disrupt the imaginary of pandemics, plague and pestilence in association with the tropics through critical, nuanced, and situated inquiries from cultural history, ethnography, cultural studies, science and technology studies, Indigenous knowledge, philosophy, anthropology, urban studies, cultural geography, literature and film analyses, and expressed through distinctive academic articles, poetry and speculative fiction.
Highlights
The Tropics have long been associated with exotic diseases and epidemics
ETropic 20.1 (2021) Special Issue: Pandemic, Plague, Pestilence and the Tropics 2. Infectious he Tropics have long been associated with exotic diseases and epidemics. This historical imaginary arose with Aristotle’s notion of the tropics as the ‘torrid zone’, a geographical region virtually uninhabitable to peoples of the northern temperate regions due to the hostility of its climate;; it persisted in colonial imaginaries of the tropics as pestilential latitudes requiring slave labour
The tropical sites of colonialisms gave rise to urgent studies of tropical diseases which lead to changes in architecture and urban planning, to the creation of institutes of tropical medicine and the subjugation of Indigenous knowledge and science
Summary
Lia Sciortino takes us into the recent past as she examines philanthropic funding of previous efforts to control emerging infectious diseases in the Greater Mekong Subregion, which comprises areas of mainland Southeast Asia and southern China. “COVID-19: Learning from Past Funding Initiatives and their Dismissal in Southeast Asia” (2021), she articulates how American foundations and other like- minded donors identified the risks associated with zoonotic infections in the early 2000s This included Betacoronaviruses, the same family of viruses that are causing the current COVID-19 pandemic. Two decades ago foundations had played an integral role in advancing a transdisciplinary agenda to better understand and respond to new emerging disease threats, over the last decade funding initiatives declined in both value and research intensity. She argues that this resulted in philanthropic foundations, and the development aid community, finding themselves unprepared for the current pandemic. She argues that the current crisis “alerts us to the fact that it is imperative that health – understood as socially determined and not just as a bio- medical issue – and health care, gain greater relevance in international funding (and government agendas)” (2021, p.194)
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