Mukharji Projit Bihari
University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA.
Bull Hist Med. 2012 Fall;86(3):303-32. doi: 10.1353/bhm.2012.0050.
The "cholera cloud" is one of the most persistent presences in the archives of nineteenth-century cholera in the "British World." Yet it has seldom received anything more than a passing acknowledgment from historians of cholera. Tracing the history of the cholera cloud as an object promises to open up a new dimension of the historically contingent experience of cholera, as well as make a significant contribution to the emergent literature on "thing theory." By conceptualizing the cholera cloud as an object-without-an-essence, this article demonstrates how global cholera pandemics in the nineteenth century produced globalized objects in which a near-universal recognizability and an utterly context-specific set of meanings, visions, and realities could ironically cohabit.
“霍乱云”是“大英世界”19世纪霍乱档案中最持久的存在之一。然而，霍乱历史学家对它的关注却很少，大多只是一笔带过。追溯霍乱云这一事物的历史，有望为霍乱这一具有历史偶然性的经历开辟一个新的维度，也能为新兴的“物理论”文献做出重要贡献。通过将霍乱云概念化为一种没有本质的事物，本文展示了19世纪的全球霍乱大流行是如何产生全球化事物的，在这些事物中，一种近乎普遍的可识别性与一套完全特定于上下文的意义、愿景和现实能够奇妙地共存。
