LAS 470 Homework and Reflections

This article focuses on a common metaphorical trope in American rhetoric throughout modern American history: relating immigrants to disease. The article focuses on "three periods of immigration history" 1880-1924 (when the National Origins Act was passed and racially based quotas were enacted, the "era of retrenchment and exclusion from 1924 to 1965 when far fewer immigrants entered" and "1965 to the present, when family reunification laws became the centerpiece of immigration policy" (Markel and Stern 757). During all these periods, immigrants were associated with the invasive destruction of disease, both physically and metaphorically, and this association affected their time in America from the moment they landed. Stories from Ellis Island abound where immigrants "passed through an elaborate set of medical and psychological criteria that were quite real and frightening" (762). All of this happened on a racial basis in line with the stereotypes ...

As I'm trying to make sense of this and its connection to our course, I think of the war metaphor and how it motivates so many facets of our society. War is synonymous with victory, with patriotism and nationalism, and with the struggle against invasive "evil." Sontag's piece brings these associations into question by unpacking the assumptions or pretenses that underlie them. She begins by referencing the Aristotelian definition of metaphor: giving the thing a name that belongs to something else. Are the people of Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Chavez's Venezuela, or Castro's Cuba evil because of the actions and consequences provoke negative consequences around the world? No, but metaphors like "the Axis of Evil" that associate an entire country of people with a leader with violent tendencies brings unwarranted stigma to all people from that country. Further, the association of disease like HIV, syphilis or COVID-19 with objective evil ignores the f...