In this talk, Bassam Sidiki (UT English) briefly outlines the main argument and structure of his first monograph in progress, Parasitic Empires, which is a cultural history of infectious disease in the Anglophone world in the long twentieth century and a novel theorization of British-US imperial relations in that period. He then homes in on the fourth chapter of the book—about the 1918 influenza pandemic in Western and American Samoa and the resulting inter-imperial disagreements and collaborations between New Zealand, the United States, and the British Empire. Drawing on government correspondence, short stories, newspapers, and physicians’ memoirs and archives which describe New Zealand’s and the United States’ disparate efforts to quarantine their islands from influenza, Sidiki theorizes a “poetics of archipelagic reference” in these documents which is at the same time a “politics of inter-imperial prestige.”

This talk is part of the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine series (HSTEM talks).