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  • Terrorist Epidemiologies
  • Kalyan Nadminti (bio)
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 392 pp. $105.00; $35.00 paper.

The striking cover of Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 excerpts a key visual detail from Friedrich Graetz’s “The kind of ‘Assisted Emigrant’ . . .”: a skeletal figure riding the mast of a ship. In its full scale, Graetz’s image tells an epic tale of supernatural epidemiology: a skeletal figure of death wearing a belt bearing the word “cholera” rides the mast of a ship, while below British imperial boats of the “Board of Health” aim canons of carbolic acid at the offending “‘assisted emigrant’ we cannot afford to admit” (Raza Kolb 77). That the image was published in 1883 in the US magazine Puck is hardly surprising: images of “uncivilized” or “barbaric” regions like the Philippines in similar magazines, like Judge, would become the fodder for these imperial cartoons. This veritable “plague of nations” is one such spectral, colonized figure that haunts the imaginaries of imperial administration to the extent that it assumes a mythical dimension. In these uncertain years of the Coronavirus pandemic, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s Epidemic Empire is an uncanny study reminding us about the deeply historical and rhetorical nature of imperial epidemiology in drawing a cordon sanitaire around the dual figure of the diseased and rebellious body. This engaging scholarly work makes plain how structural tensions of Islamic racialization [End Page 597] have become naturalized in the post–9/11 period. Raza Kolb showcases a surprising imagined imperial symmetry between disease and insurgency that mobilizes the language of epidemiology far in excess of its pathogenic function. The author offers three distinct accounts of how imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism conflate the diseased body with the body politic in managing imperial geographies.

Epidemic Empire presents a crucial extension of the work of scholars like Priscilla Wald, Cristobal Silva, and Neel Ahuja who have theorized the undeniable connections between contagion, the viral imagination, and the biopolitics of imperial states. For Wald, contagion is not merely a medical proposition, but a cultural artifact of sociality itself.1 Silva arguably introduced the idea of epidemiology as a form of literary criticism by showing how early American settler colonialism interpreted plagues inflicting Native American peoples as justification for genocide.2 Meanwhile, Ahuja tackles twentieth and twenty-first-century US empire by neologizing “dread life” to think about “the racialized channeling of the fear of infectious disease into optimism regarding the remaking of life through technical intervention.”3 These works all redraw the foundational work of Foucauldian biopolitics, a conviction that also animates Raza Kolb’s monograph. By placing Islam at the center of this virulent narrative, Raza Kolb connects the dots to a series of startling phenomena that delineate what one might call a statecraft of diseased biopolitics, a carefully composed screen of immunocompromised sovereignty that masks the central project of racialization and dispossession.

This study reorders our understanding of the Muslim subject as a political entity obscured by the apparatuses of colonial and neo-colonial governance. While artifacts like Senate Intelligence Reports or the National Book award-nominated 9/11 Commission Report might primarily be imagined as background or paratextual material to literary writing, Raza Kolb illuminates an inherent narrative telos [End Page 598] in these dry reports by showing their proximity to fiction. Much like Joseph Slaughter’s influential study Human Rights, Inc. (2007) situates Bildung and human rights discourse as “enabling fictions” that crafted a mode of Western universalism, Raza Kolb pairs epidemiology and empire to show us the maliciously productive machinery of terror created around Islam, one that furthers “sanitizing the prophylactic measures and retaliations of sovereign and governmental actors” against purported insurgents (287). Epidemic Empire is sprawling in its ambition, moving from British to French to American empires, exhibiting not only the breadth of Raza Kolb’s scholarship, but also the rhetorical resonance among a variety of imperial actors. Such breadth sets up striking comparative frameworks between the British mutiny novel of the nineteenth century, midcentury French apocalyptic imaginaries, and diasporic postcolonial fictions.

Comprising three parts that the author tells us can...

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