Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb (review)

In this ambitious and illuminating scholarly debut, Anjuli Raza Kolb deftly traces the genealogy of what she calls the “disease poetics of empire” which have continued to shape narratives of primarily Islamist insurgency both before and after 9/11 (4). She argues that this tendency of presenting insurgent or terrorist violence in terms of “epidemic” has its roots in the same cultural, literary, and scientific practices indispensable for the management of colonized people in nineteenth-century imperial formations. In order to show the ubiquity and tenacity of the “terror-as-epidemic” metaphor, Raza Kolb takes us on a sweeping transhistorical and comparative journey: from British India in the nineteenth century, to French Algeria in the middle of the twentieth, and finally to our current neoimperial moment of global (though challenged) American hegemony. Kolb’s study is a welcome addition to the fields of not only postcolonial studies and cultural studies but also literature and medicine and the “global health humanities.”

Raza Kolb’s preface to the book, “Politics and Scholarship in a Time of Pandemic,” is a must-read in order to understand the larger contexts driving her scholarship, contexts which have influenced her personal and intellectual life in material ways: the Islamophobic fallout of 9/11, the aftermath of the Trump administration’s “Muslim Ban,” and the rise of global Islamophobia tying COVID-19 to Muslim minorities in India and China. Indeed, the preface displays in stark relief the feminist dictum that the personal is political: Raza Kolb stresses that her project had been percolating ever since 9/11 and her encounters with Islamophobia as the child of Pakistani Muslim immigrants in the United States, where Islamist insurgency continues to be framed in epidemic terms such as “cancer” or “virus.” While this personal history is not readily apparent in the rest of the work, the preface prepares the reader to confront the subsequent subject matter not as an abstract theoretical project but one with tangible consequences for real people and the real world. This mode of scholarly inquiry is thoroughly in the tradition of Edward Said, who argued in “The World, The Text, and the Critic” (1983) that the literary scholar must attend to the “worldliness” of the text. This worldliness deeply informs Raza Kolb’s analyses of a rich and capacious literary, cultural, and medical archive, including novels, medical treatises, films, poetry, and government documents. She shows that the place of the Muslim in the current epidemic imaginary should not be a surprise at all; in fact, this pathologization of race (or conversely, the racialization of epidemic) has been an ongoing project for at least the past two centuries.

Epidemic Empire can be said to combine and elaborate on the visions of Said’s massive intellectual corpus and of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978). Sontag had famously argued that we must let disease be what it is—just disease—instead of metaphorizing it as something else, partly because such figuration inevitably leads to blaming the sick person for her own illness. Adopting a method of “Saidian discourse analysis” (19), Raza Kolb follows in Said’s footsteps by focusing on an array of British, French, and American cultural artifacts—but she inflects these readings with Sontag’s admonishing against pernicious disease metaphors. She offers a sustained critique of one Orientalist metaphor in particular: the Muslim insurgent as epidemic. From the first cholera epidemic in India in 1817 to the 1857 Indian War of Independence, from the Algerian revolution of the mid-twentieth century to 9/11, the discursive links drawn by Euro-American powers between Islamic insurgency and epidemic disease have been, according to Raza Kolb, consistent and rife. In a clever twist of words, Raza Kolb also inverts George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) to refer to these pernicious terror-epidemic figures as “metaphors we die by” (4).

In order to further develop her own method...