The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:01:00 +0000

Vampire mania has taken hold and Sonia Shah’s The Fever goes back in time before Twilight and even Dracula to the first vampires: mosquitoes and their parasites. Shah tells a good story, and this story has everything from drama and risk to villains and exotic locations. The villain is malaria, the exotic locations cross the globe over the past millennia, and the drama and risk are life-and-death situations. Shah documents her research well and conveys a great deal of information about these unlovely Plasmodium parasites, and the mosquitoes that transmit them, without overwhelming the reader or becoming depressing.

This well-documented book covers historical, social, and medical aspects of the disease, its vectors, and human response in separate chapters. Chapters cover each topic chronologically; the chapter on medical research details competing theories from Italy and England, eventual collaboration from the United States, priorities that appall (including racist and classist application of prevention and treatment methods), and the scholarly conclusion that malaria (like everything) must be addressed locally and that efforts combating malaria must be informed by local conditions and life. This last has been ignored, with every effort to find a profitable magic bullet.

On one hand, it’s reassuring that malaria is not unique in this way. The same has been said, and ignored, about other public health issues like HIV; criminal issues like vice; and every feminist issue discussed beyond its social, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. On the other hand, it’s depressing that the same lessons are learned and forgotten in so many contexts. Shah’s investigation into the history of malaria renders her clear-eyed about the ways current efforts to combat malaria may be effective today, but lead to new resistance and a repeat of short-term gains followed by a resurgence once malaria is no longer chic for celebrities and donor organizations to campaign against. (The book was written before this year’s announcement that scientists have genetically engineered mosquitoes resistant to malaria parasites, and I look forward to Shah's opinion of this development.)

Shah places blame for the persistence of this scourge not only on malaria’s tenacity and ability to mutate quickly but also on profiteers from the Dutch colonizers of Indonesia to Novartis, geopolitical events, and vested interests. Some of these include the role of the Vietnam War in the proliferation of malaria; the denial of effective treatment; and apathy from people who live with malaria, a low priority among a long list of worries. But Shah is not full of invective. Rather, she explains why malaria is seen as a normal part of life in places where malaria is endemic, even as she explains that declines in rates of malaria are associated with decreased fatalities from all other diseases, prompting greater concern about a disease that compromises health and well being beyond its own deaths.

Lay readers of science will be interested in this book, as will anyone skeptical about coexistence with microbes or interested in public health efforts.

Written by: Melissa Ditmore, July 26th 2010

Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire

admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:08:00 +0000

Edited by Sonia Shah

South End Press

Incredible. Insightful. Inspiring. These are the words I use to describe Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, the pivotal textbook on the growing politics of Asian American women. Essays embrace wide-ranging issues that include domestic violence, health, exploitation in the global trade, the role of spirituality, and punk-rock culture—all in the light of organizing and activism.

The anthology’s key concern is with the attitude of mainstream feminism whose individualistic and essentialist views are at odds with the affairs and experiences of Asian women. Sonia Shah, editor of Dragon Ladies, believes that a singular Asian American feminist movement is essential in representing Asian American women’s interests. The term ‘Asian’ is problematic in that it corresponds to a diaspora of ethnic identities, but Shah nevertheless manages to take into account the realities that females face from this walk of life.

As Juliana Pegues points out in “Strategies from the Field,” unlike white activists, Asian women have to deal with invisibility as well as “exotic” racial stereotypes and labels like “well-behaved,” “hard-working.” and “obedient.” The trouble is that Asian women’s perspectives are ignored when race is viewed in terms of black and white. When it comes to organizing resistance, “groups in many cases act as all-white groups internally, and white perspectives and standards are the norm.”

Purvi Shah’s article “Redefining the Home” is very engrossing, though the entire text is by no means an easy read. In fact, a lot of the material is tough, but if you’re passionate enough about this topic, you’ll fly through it. Shah discusses the belief that the personal is political when it comes to abuse within the home. Community elites seem to be the culprits in seeding the idea that culture and politics are separate issues—matters of the Home/Marriage for instance are cleverly disguised as tradition; these leaders are in essence threatened by organizations that challenge their norms. Rightly so, Shah proposes that “a home in which violence occurs is a public space” and a political problem that is affected by a range of factors like social, cultural and environmental.

Many prominent figures have come together to comprise this collection of interviews, personal essays, and eye-opening historical and current facts such as on the slave-like treatments of overseas Filipina workers. The joint mother-daughter article “Bringing Up Baby: Raising a ‘Third World’ Daughter in the ‘First World’” was a piece I found quite amusing and relevant to my own view of reality. Shamita Das Dasgupta and Sayantani DasGupta talk about balancing their different identities—Indian immigrant and American-born Indian—against Western culture. The idea of community is important to Indian culture and therefore for Indian women, it forms part of their identity; adopting the model of western feminism whose emphasis lies on the ‘individual’ would inevitably further alienate them; the issues concerning white feminists do not always apply to women of Asian origin.

Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire in itself deconstructs the Asian woman stereotype conveying instead an image of the “virangana”—the ‘warrior woman’ thirsting to battle for change and victory. The contributors are good role models to rouse the next generation to self-reflect and take part in some form of action to empower the disadvantaged. From a spiritual standpoint, Cheng Imm Tan makes an important assertion: “When activism is fuelled by anger and hatred, we end up objectifying the ‘enemy’ just as we have been objectived.” What Tan then subtly suggests is that injustice can be met with compassion, and an intent to transform our aggressors rather than destroy them.

Certainly, this is a book with great ideas from women who not only breathe fire but speak with absolute conviction.

Written by: Payal Patel, July 14th 2009