UC Berkeley

This dissertation correlates the evolution of biomedical discourse and prose fiction in nineteenth century Havana, Cuba. Both, I argue, function as narratives that shape collective consciousness in that era. Beginning with the cholera epidemic of 1833, medical language increasingly insinuates itself into the constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Cholera gives rise to medical fictions that invade or "contaminate" many domains of Cuban life. In effect, the disease blurred the distinctions between the concepts of contagion, race, and sin; the physical and the moral were thereby collapsed into one category. The city--understood to be a biological extension of the individual--was threatened by barbaric racial "outsiders." Their intrusive presence corrupted the entire Cuban social body. In the end, the cholera epidemic led to a symbolic, if not a physical, cleansing of the colonial city.

The early Cuban novel functions as a laboratory or taller in which theories of purity and disease develop and mature. The individual subject, a microcosm of the larger Cuban social body, becomes the locus of the desire to see and to know enigmatic disease. As the "clinical eye" of the medicalized viewer searches the body for signs of contagion, it defines the hygienic Cuban subject against its impure, racialized Other. However, the novel itself is an agent of contagion, since writing, as Derrida's pharmakon, exacerbates the problem it meant to solve. I argue that the Cuban novel not only unmasked the fiction of stable identities; it also anticipated fin-de-siècle European narratives of degeneration and decline.