Document Type
Article
Abstract
This essay investigates the “raciocultural”—a term designating the slippage between, and mutual construction of, “race” and “culture” within discourses of quasi‐biological determinism—as a means of exploring Western representations of non‐Western disease as “foreign” threats to Europe and North America. It suggests that the raciocultural is at once a colonial‐era construction and a reflection of contemporary trends that have seen racist discourse become increasingly displaced onto the notion of the “cultural.” Investigating a range of texts including news media, literary texts, and interactive entertainment, the essay focuses on representations of “African” space as biologically and culturally “infected” in order to examine the spatial dimensions of the raciocultural. The essay concludes by interrogating the present lack of postcolonial literary‐and cultural‐studies engagements with the institutional contexts of medicine, arguing that the readings presented here demonstrate the importance of such analysis.
Repository Citation
Brock, Richard. "Of Zombies, AIDS, and 'Africa': Non‐Western Disease and the 'Raciocultural' Imagination." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 12, no. 4, 2012, pp. 1–35. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol12/iss4/5