DISEASE, ANXIETIES, AND CLASS: RESPONSES TO THE 1920S VENEREAL DISEASES EPIDEMIC IN COLONIAL SINGAPORE

Abstract

Following the first venereal diseases epidemic of late-1880s, a second epidemic erupted in 1920s colonial Singapore. This outbreak alarmed the British colonial government to intervene with the 1923 Venereal Diseases Committee Report, proposing measures to tackle the urgent state of disease. While some scholars have examined the first outbreak, this second epidemic has not received adequate attention. Given its official import and provenance, I commence an examination of the second outbreak in the 1920s via a close consideration of the substantive and discursive dimensions of this report. In further differentiation to previous scholarly efforts, often reliant on British sources, I also attempt to study this epidemic — substantively and discursively — through close-readings of articles in Chinese-language newspaper Nanyang Siang Pau. Stories of diseased individuals in this source allow me to offer a keener sense of the epidemic’s gravity by individualising and humanising disease, revealing venereal diseases’ moral implications while interrogating conceptions of venereal diseases. While this epidemic most deeply affected the Chinese coolies, my investigations suggest class and racial tensions in the British and Chinese middle class’s responses to this severe epidemic, incidentally revealing a two-fold neglect of Chinese coolies. The British deemed the Chinese middle class as morally lesser than coolies, while concerned exclusively with Straits-born middle class Chinese in addressing the epidemic. Similarly, conversations in Nanyang Siang Pau imagined a young, literate, middle class victim, the Chinese middle class concerned with only members of their own class in attempts to tackle the epidemic. It appears that these economically and politically dominant actors in colonial Singapore contrived their responses to the epidemic in ways beneficial to themselves, thereby revealing an uneasy relationship fraught with class and racial tensions, exacerbated by venereal diseases’ ability to subvert all moral pretensions.