From effluvia to chemicals: techniques of self and somatic ethics in tropical health travel narratives

• Published in: Studia neophilologica 2021-05, Vol.93 (2), p.155-172
• Main Author: Boyden, Michael
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: autosomatography; Environmental illness; health regimes; somatic ethics; trans-corporeality
• ISSN: 0039-3274; 1651-2308; 1651-2308
• DOI: 10.1080/00393274.2021.1916991

Recent environmental humanities scholarship has argued that environmental illness memoirs perform important cultural work by recasting health as an environmental issue. In this article, I show how EI autobiography hearkens back to a longer tradition of health travel with deep colonial resonances. I explore such connections by means of a comparative analysis of two health travel narratives: The first, A winter in the West Indies and Florida, is an anonymous tract by a self-described 'northern invalid' dealing with his travels to the Caribbean as a remedy for his chronic pulmonary problems during the late 1830s. The second, drawn from a collection by disability activist Aurora Levins Morales, details the author's healing journey to Cuba during the summer of 2009. I argue that, while A Winter points forward to modern sociobiology, Levins Morales's narrative should be read as issuing from a biosocial community of EI sufferers. Finally, attending to the continuities and differences between EI autobiographies may deepen current debates on trans-corporeality, which tend to assume a direct relation between non-dualistic epistemologies and somatic ethics. In this sense, the article can be read as a commentary on overly rights-based approaches to illness and Q1 disability in the present biochemical age.