The Plague Ship Narrative: Racialized Quarantine in Anglo-American Texts of 1897

This essay performs a conjunctural analysis of Anglophone literary culture in 1897, including Bram Stoker's Dracula , Joseph Conrad's " Narcissus ," Jack London's short story "The Plague Ship," and Mark Twain's travelogue Following the Equator . It argues that reading British texts from that year next to American ones illustrates how, in the wake of Britain's repeal of maritime quarantine in 1896, British writers looked to American models to imaginatively resurrect that practice against racialized outsiders. This practice of "racialized quarantine" was a form of Anglo-American "parasitic imperialism," whereby Anglo-Saxons collaborated and competed with one another even as they drew a microbially inflected color line to distinguish themselves from racialized peoples.