Drug Regimes: Addiction, Biopolitics, American Literature, 1820-1940

Abstract

"Drug Regimes" traces the development of the disease concept of addiction from the early American Republic into the inter-war period. In this work, struggles against alcoholism, both individual and social, are used to frame and explore larger issues of national conflict occurring around race, gender, and political economy. Each chapter discusses a literary text that exemplifies a particular "drug regime" - a mode of the governance of health, both individual and public - and analyzes this text as a mode of extrapolating a political theory of drug conflict.