Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, PhD // Ixcanul (Jayro Bustamante, 2015) is a film about a young Kaqchikel girl who lives with her parents in a humble shack on the edge of a coffee plantation on the slopes of a volcano where she and her father work during harvest seasons. The film was made in close…
Category: Race and Ethnicity
Using Narrative Medicine to Improve Public Health Messaging
Marcus Mosley // According to the CDC, 1 in 2 Black/African-American gay, bisexual, same gender loving and other men who have sex with men (MSM) will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime.1 In facing such statistical odds, it is imperative that the public health community engage in messaging that not only reaches this group…
Colonial Medicine and Literary Geography: Placelessness in Patrick Deville’s “Plague and Cholera”
Eleanor Grabowski // A tropical vista of lush, green trees, endless mountains, and brilliant sunlight. This idyllic landscape graces the original cover of the Points edition of Patrick Deville’s 2012 novel Peste & Choléra, also sheathed in a bold, red banner announcing it as the winner of the Prix Femina. [1] Yet there is something…
Yellow Fever and Other Plagues: Saint-Domingue, Biopolitics, and the Roots of Racism in American Public Health
Sam Millner // “Let’s be realistic: the Atlantic is the Atlantic (with all its port cities) because it was once engendered by the copulation of Europe — that insatiable solar bull — with the Caribbean archipelago; the Atlantic is today the Atlantic (the navel of capitalism) because Europe, in its mercantilist laboratory, conceived the project…
Essay Series: “Illness and Francophone Literature and History”
Madeleine Dobie & Thomas Dodman // This collection of essays in Synapsis grew out of a course on pandemics in francophone history and culture that we offered in Columbia’s Department of French and Institute for Comparative Literature and Society in fall 2021. The unprecedented experience (at least in our community) of teaching in the midst…
Turning Forty and a Corner: a Storyteller’s Data Analysis on an Empathic Life Lived So Far
Cover Image: Mujer by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo 2021. Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo // OUT OF THIS WORLD Learning that I was an empath changed my life. It wasn’t that this label gave me meaning or purpose; it just simply explained “me.” As an artist, being sensitive is celebrated and somewhat necessary to create. In academia, emotions and feelings should…
Ri k’ak’a tzij: Kaqchikel Maya Neologisms in Response to COVID-19
Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, PhD // Though Guatemala is a relatively small country in northern Central America, it boasts of a robust multilingual and multicultural diversity. In addition to Spanish (the official language), Guatemala is also the home to 22 Maya languages, and two other Indigenous languages: Garífuna and Xinca. Within this ethnolinguistic landscape, Kaqchikel…
A Most Health-Giving Flood: Spatial Promiscuity in E M Forster’s A Passage to India
Bassam Sidiki // E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) may be one of the most important novels chronicling the spatial logics of segregation during the zenith of the British Raj. However, critical work on colonial space in the novel often ignores the centrality of health and disease in the narrative and how they…
Archive Fevers, Archive Cures: Leprosy and Decolonization in Hawaii
Bassam Sidiki // In the summer of 2019, a mere months before the pandemic would dramatically alter our lives, I boarded a plane from Detroit to Honolulu. I had received a pre-doctoral research grant to visit the Hawaii National Archives where they keep papers of the Kalaupapa Leper Settlement on the island of Molokai. This…
Im(m/p)unity as Defense: The Killing of John Allen Chau
Bassam Sidiki // The story made international headlines and invited global condemnation of the figure at its center. On November 16, 2018, a 26-year-old American missionary was killed by members of an uncontacted tribe on North Sentinel Island, a part of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. The young missionary…