Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature

Afterword - The Biopolitics of Drug Control

233 afTerWord The Biopolitics of Drug Control j Beginning around the time of Dracula and continuing into the twentieth century, addicts increasingly inhabit urban underworld zones of “bare life,” into which their seemingly predatory motives suck unsuspecting citizens. This anxiety structures the most common narrative context of addiction in the years 1900–1920, the seduction or rape of vulnerable white women by men of color and their consequent contamination by foreign deathliness.1 For example, in London in 1918 and 1922, the fatal overdoses of actress Billie Carleton and dancer Freda Kempton spawned media sensations and made death seem to lurk in every prick of the sy-­ ringe or sniff of cocaine. Yet as Marek Kohn’s analysis has shown, these Englishwomen’s flirtations with death were also eroticized encounters with dark figures from a shadowy underground, suppliers such as Brilliant Chang and Edgar Manning. These episodes, and their fictionalized and cinematic counterparts, updated the opium den fascination that started in the 1870s by sexualizing narrative relations between white women and racially marked men. Edith Blinn’s The Ashes of My Heart (1916), Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights (1916) and More Limehouse Nights (1921), D. W. Griffith’s film adaptation Broken Blossoms (1919), Sax Rohmer’s Dope (1919) as well as his seemingly endless string of Fu Manchu novels (pub-­ lished between 1913 and 1973), and Lady Dorothy Mills’s The Laughter of Fools (1920) used opium, cocaine, and heroin to bring white Anglo-­ American women into degrading, deracinating intimacy with Chinese and Afro-­British men.2 “I fear he is going to put me to sleep forever,” de-­ clares the gorgeous but decaying opium addict of her Chinese American lover, Foo Gum, in The Ashes of My Heart.3 In contrast to this model of being lulled to death by Chinese narcotics, 234 Afterword the association of African Americans with cocaine led to fears of explosive, fatal violence toward whites, often toward white women and often incit-­ ing brutal retaliatory lynchings.4 “Most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-­crazed Negro brain,” wrote Dr. Christopher Koch in the Literary Digest in 1914.5 In keeping with the supernatural paradigm set by Dracula, southern blacks were thought to acquire the superhuman power of being immune to police bullets.6 Such mythology flourished with respect to a historically disposable population that, not long before, had been nominally included within the norms of citizenship, and yet was still violently under threat of racial extermination. Finally, in the same period, the various wings of the U.S. temperance movement began attacking poor and working-­class European immigrants in northern cities in racist terms, for their allegedly addictive use of alco-­ hol. “Besodden Europe, worse bescourged than by war, famine and pesti-­ lence, sends here her drink-­makers, her drunkard makers, and her drunkards, or her more temperate and habitual drinkers, with all their un-­American and anti-­American ideas of morality and government,” wrote Alphonse Alva Hopkins.7 In all of these ways, even though the typi-­ cal U.S. addict was still a white, native-­born man, the racial valence of addiction began to reverse. Gone were the days when temperance tales told of promising young white men falling into the clutches of drink, phy-­ sicians dabbled with the instruments of their profession, and upper-­class society ladies injected themselves with morphine. Medical, legal, and public health authorities, as well as professionalizing social scientists, be-­ gan to take new notice of those less-­than-­fully franchised subjects, to pathologize and criminalize their customs and habits, and to invent habits to police where none had existed. All of these actions were justified, within this racist ideology, because the groups had been deemed to be parasites on the purer social body. Elaborating such vampiric imagery, addiction narratives increasingly conjured urban “drug undergrounds,” where white drug use could flour-­ ish on the fringes of poor communities, communities of color, queer sub-­ cultures, criminal networks, avant-­gardes, Bohemias, and other outcast milieux. Each of these possess varying degrees of potential for counter-­ modern perspectives on addiction; some are more contiguous with bour-­ geois culture than others. Virginia Berridge emphasizes the Decadent Rhymers’ Club, the occult circles surrounding Aleister Crowley, and the hallucinogenic experimentations of Havelock Ellis and Silas Weir Mitch-­ ell as the 1890s origins of a British drug scene.8 Marek Kohn focuses on [3.133.160.156] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 12:26...