The Crisis of Crisis: Rethinking Epidemics from Hong Kong

Writing in the late 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, historian Charles Rosenberg suggested that epidemics furnished "useful sampling devices" for examining "fundamental patterns of social value and institutional practice." This paper reconsiders Rosenberg's seminal essay and the central question it addresses-what is an epidemic?-from the vantage of a historian in Hong Kong working on colonial and postcolonial Asia in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper begins by setting Rosenberg's essay in its historical context and then considers whether explanatory models developed in a Northern American context may be applicable (or not) to other non-Western settings. The paper makes the case for a re-interrogation of the "epidemic" as an epidemiological and social category, and it concludes by suggesting that COVID-19 is challenging underlying assumptions about what a "crisis" is to the extent that the pandemic may be understood as a crisis of crisis itself.