Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, And Terror, 1817–2020

Description

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. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 2 Title - complete......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Contents......Page 8 List of Figures......Page 10 Preface: Politics and Scholarship in a Time of Pandemic......Page 12 Introduction: “Islam,” Terrorism, and the Epidemic Imaginary......Page 18 part i. the disease poetics of empire......Page 44 1. Great Games......Page 46 2. The Blue Plague......Page 72 3. Circulatory Logic......Page 100 part ii. the body allegorical in french algeria......Page 144 4. The Brown Plague......Page 146 5. Algeria Ungowned......Page 187 part iii. viral diaspora and global security......Page 224 6. Selfistan......Page 226 7. Cures from Within......Page 273 Acknowledgments......Page 310 Notes......Page 314 Bibliography......Page 358 Index......Page 396