Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic

Description

Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction “sugar”—or, as some say in Belize, “traveling with sugar.” A decade in the making, this book unfolds as a series of crónicas—a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those “still fighting it” as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, these individuals speak back to science and policy misrecognitions that have prematurely cast their lost limbs and deaths as normal. Their families’ arts of maintenance and repair illuminate ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine. Cover Traveling with Sugar Title Copyright Contents PART ONE. CONTEXTS Approach Emergency in Slow Motion Shorelines A Global Epidemic as Seen from Belize Traveling with Sugar Errata: Methods and Mistakes Slow Care Past Is Prologue Sugar Machine Sweetness Sugar Roads Chronic Landscapes Diabetes Multiple Still. There What Is Communicable? Caregivers in an Illegible Epidemic Foot Soldiers Non-Traumatic Measures Displaced Surveillance Mixed Metaphors Para-Communicable Conditions Geographies of Blame Three Atmospheres PART TWO. CRÓNICAS Crónica One: Thresholds Traveling an Altered Landscape with Cresencia The Normal and the Extraordinary Ancestral Discontent Coral Gardens and Their Metabolism Sugar Girls Land Tenure (Is This Legal?) On the Other Side Dr. Saldo Great White Hazards Healthy Living Made Fun and Easy! Straddling Crónica Two: Insula Technology, Policy, and Other Units of Jordan’s Isolations Type What? Islands and Empire Global Policy Gaps Other Orphans Unsteady Units Many Machines The Life of Muerte Design Archipelagos Counting Crónica Three: Generations Approaching “Biologies of History” with Arreini and Guillerma Scientific Racism: Lineages Housekeeping Trans-Plantation Epidemiological Transition Hunger and Diabetes What Is the “Epi” in Epigenetics? Prevention Blood’s Sugar Quicksilver Sequencing Crónica Four: Repair Work Maintenance Projects with Laura, Jose, and Growing Collectives Halfway Technologies Phantom Limbs Sugar Shoes Dialysis: Pressure “We Don’t Want to Die” Food Infrastructures Between Hurricanes Prosthetic Hope International Holding Measures The Gradual Instant Epilogue Dedication Acknowledgments About Translations Image Credits Notes Bibliography Index