Epidemic Stories

Despite international attempts (as I write this review) to contain the emergence of H1N1 swine flu in Mexico City and other spots in the Americas, a first glance at the title of Priscilla Wald’s impressive Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative might tempt readers to treat the book as merely a single entry in a relatively small academic subfield, without significance to wider interrogations of culture and power. Such a response would be a mistake, as Wald ably demonstrates in her investigation into key episodes in the last hundred-plus years of what she terms “the outbreak narrative,” a “paradigmatic story” that arrives in “scientific, journalistic, and fictional incarnations” and “follows a formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes a discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment” (2). Such narratives, Wald argues, generate knowledge about infectious disease and powerfully shape responses to epidemics; thus they have profound material consequences for people all over the globe (3). While Wald addresses those effects directly in her brief and persuasively argued epilogue, throughout the majority of the book she argues that the issues central to outbreak narratives are also at the center of cultural studies and American studies, especially with respect to those disciplines’ interest in the relationship between the body and national belonging. Importantly, Wald critiques both the dangerous political outcomes of outbreak narratives—their scientific demonization of ethnic, racial, gendered, and sexual others, for example—and the complex ways in which such narratives help to constitute ever-shifting forms of belonging. The outbreak narrative is, for Wald, a producer of knowledge and identities. Rather than merely drawing borders around communities and separating insider from outsider, the outbreak narrative creates communities both at specific historical moments and over generations. It is to those intertwined effects of the outbreak narrative that Wald directs her attention. Such effects place contagion not at the edges of scholarly concerns but at their center: as she notes, “As epidemiologists trace the routes of the microbes, they catalog the spaces and interactions of global modernity” (2). Contagion becomes a key to seeing those spaces and interactions anew.

The field of contagion studies (if such a field can be said to exist) has a complex and multisided history. Its current form has been coalescing since the mid to late 1990s, beginning in part with the publication of articles by Wald herself—she has long pushed for more conversation between the literary and medical/scientific worlds—along with, among others, Lisa Lynch, Heather Schell, and especially Nancy Tomes.¹ It also clearly draws on medical humanities’ long record of interest in “illness narratives,” although primarily to distinguish itself from that genre. Wald’s interests in Contagious have less to do with personal stories of being ill than with the knowledge produced through the use of contagion across genres and media.

A few related disciplines, often treated as distinct but actually complexly intersecting, form the critical and historical context for Wald’s analysis of contagion. One of the most important of these is the emergence of both critical scholarship and activism in response to HIV/AIDS. Wald’s work, and most cultural studies investigations of contagious disease, cannot be fully understood unless placed squarely in the lineage of queer political organizing and analysis. Work by activists and critics (overlapping categories, especially in this case) such as Paula A. Treichler, Simon Watney, and Cindy Patton, but also Lee Edelman, Douglas Crimp, Thomas E. Yingling, and Leo Bersani, helped to establish the analysis of the politics of narratives told about infections from which Wald’s own detailed and powerful cultural history of “outbreak narratives” springs.² In addition, Wald’s work in Contagious and humanities-based analyses of contagious disease more generally draw upon and engage complexly with a long history of semipopular books that offer ways of conceiving of the relationship between...