Nations must be defended: public health, enmity and immunity in Katherine Mayos Mother India

This essay explores repressed hostility and punitive fantasies in the discourse of international health, using Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). Multiple tendencies in interwar thinking converge in Mayo’s book, making it a veritable archive of major, minor and emergent forces, including those shaping the phenomenon of ‘international health’ post-Versailles. Mother India provides a unique opportunity to explore how progressive principles of international public health tend to obscure a ‘minor’ and forgettable yet disturbing truth: the discourse on life and health can ‘safely’ harbour an alternative politics and poetics of enmity. Spotlighting the way international health interventions, centrally shaped by USA, operated across multiple levels of governance, the essay locates the significant detail of Mayo’s representation of India as ‘world-menace’. Propelled by the logic of enmity, her shaming portrait of a dysgenic Hindu India justifying emergency international intervention resonates with a strand of interwar conservatism given theoretical expression in the writings of Mayo’s contemporary, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s animosity towards political liberalism helps identify Mother India’s vision of imperial sovereignty as a curious antiliberal, American iteration of the logic of enmity in extra-European space and in the ‘humane’ domain of health. Biologising the discourse of juridical-...
Source: Medical Humanities - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Original research Source Type: research