University of Chicago Press Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020

Terrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in order to contain its political energies. In Epidemic Empire, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb shows that this trope began in responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and tracks its tenacious hold through 9/11 and beyond. The result is the first book-length study to approach the global War on Terror from a postcolonial literary perspective.  Raza Kolb assembles a diverse archive from colonial India, imperial Britain, French and independent Algeria, the postcolonial Islamic diaspora, and the neoimperial United States. Anchoring her book are studies of four major writers in the colonial-postcolonial canon: Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Albert Camus, and Salman Rushdie. Across these sources, she reveals the tendency to imagine anticolonial rebellion, and Muslim insurgency specifically, as a virulent form of social contagion. Exposing the long history of this broken but persistent narrative, Epidemic Empire is a major contribution to the rhetorical history of our present moment. Review "In her forceful and timely debut book. . . Raza Kolb describes a 200-year history during which politicians, Supreme Court justices, policymakers, and novelists have described terrorism as 'a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague.' Identifying the metaphor's origin during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, she traces it and epidemiology's coterminous evolution through a rich and unexpected archive of texts including novels by Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Albert Camus, and Salman Rushdie, as well as colonial epidemiologists' writings and The 9/11 Commission Report. . . . [The book is] a pedagogical lesson, in which epidemiology [is] not just a science but a mode of reading."--Charles Shafaieh "Los Angeles Review of Books" " [Epidemic Empire] will likely become one of this moment's iconic works of academic literature. . . The prose is lucid and, quite often, lovely: Raza Kolb presents us with a counter-poetics of the disease poetics she is excavating. But this counter-poetics is also a rigorous examination of its object of study. . . . This book is a joy to read. Epidemic Empire borders on the sublime."--Joshua Moufawad-Paul "Marx and Philosophy Review of Books" " Epidemic Empire is grippingly told--a fantastic story of the coemergence of the epidemiological, colonial, and 'terrorist' imaginaries. Raza Kolb's close readings are superb and revealing, and it is urgent that these arguments and methodologies and this archive make their way into the public debate. These debates become more pressing every day, as the long histories of colonial and white national violence become less and less 'merely' historical, in the United States and globally."-- "Jacques Lezra, University of California, Riverside" "Moving well beyond viral transmission as a metaphor in social, political, or economic life, Raza Kolb's book offers us an innovative account of violence as a form of contagion in its own right. Showing how medical and political thinking were intertwined in British and French imperialism, she traces the legacy of its distinctive history down to the present day."-- "Faisal Devji, University of Oxford" "Raza Kolb renders a startling account of the extent to which figures of illness, disease, and virality saturate quotidian discourses on terrorism and race from the nineteenth century to the present. Uncannily prescient yet historically profound, Epidemic Empire allows us to glimpse the future of pandemics from the racial prisms of the past. The temporal arc is sublime, and the writing, exquisite."-- "Jasbir K. Puar, Rutgers University" About the Author Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto.