Main description:

What was the longest and harshest medical quarantine in modern history, and how did people survive it? In Hawai'i beginning in 1866, men, women, and children suspected of having leprosy were removed from their families. Most were sentenced over the next century to lifelong exile at an isolated settlement. Thousands of photographs taken of their skin provided forceful, if conflicting, evidence of disease and disability for colonial health agents. And yet among these exiled people, a competing knowledge system of kinship and collectivity emerged during their incarceration. This book shows how they pieced together their own intimate archives of care and companionship through unanticipated adaptations of photography.

Contents:

Contents

Preface: Encountering the Photographs
Note on Language
Chronology of Significant Events
Map of Hawaiian Islands

Introduction: An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin

1 * Ocular Experiments and Unruly Technologies of the Body
2 * A Criminal Archive of Skin
3 * Dressing the Body: Laundry and the Intimacy of Care
4 * Dreaming in Pictures: Queer Kinship and Subaltern
Family Albums
Epilogue: Healing Encounters at the Settlement

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index