Bacteria

Agnes Malinowska (author)

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Title	Bacteria
Contributor	Agnes Malinowska (author)
DOI	https://doi.org/10.53288/0396.1.04
Landing page	https://punctumbooks.com/titles/microbium-the-neglected-lives-of-micro-matter/
License	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Copyright	Agnes Malinowska
Publisher	punctum books
Published on	2023-09-07
Long abstract	Bacteria have played a truly outsized role in the evolutionary story of life on earth, and they continue to be crucial to sustaining organisms and ecosystems. Until recently, however, most cultural and scientific interest in bacteria has centered on defeating the nefarious “germ.” This entry focuses in particular on how public health efforts to reign in the threat of bacterial disease in the US around 1900 aligned with the aspirations of a hegemonic Anglo-American culture to control and suppress marginalized groups like immigrants and racial others, easy scapegoats for disease. At the same time, British settler colonialism and, eventually, US government policy catalyzed devastating epidemics amongst Indigenous populations from the colonial period into the twentieth century, such as the tuberculosis crisis in Native health. While bacterial disease has been largely divisive in the US, bacteria themselves can encourage humans to think in terms of cooperation and alliance, rather than the strict enforcement of borders. Both symbiosis—bacteria’s preferred social relation—and binary fission—bacterial reproduction—suggest a radical form of sociality that permeates, ruptures, and transforms “individuals” constantly, so that the one always slips into the collective.
Page range	pp. 31–45
Print length	15 pages
Language	English (Original)
Keywords	bacteria germs symbiosis race contagion

Contributors

Agnes Malinowska

(author)

Assistant Instructional Professor in the MA Program in the Humanities and in English at University of Chicago

Agnes Malinowska is Assistant Instructional Professor in the MA Program in the Humanities and in English at the University of Chicago. Her teaching and research focuses on American modernism and modernity, nonhuman studies, the history of science, and gender and sexuality studies. Agnes’s recent writing appears in the journal Modernism/modernity.