Epidemic Empire

Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817 - 2020

Epidemic Empire
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb
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NZ$ 95.00
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NZ$ 76.00
Paperback
Not defined - 392pg
1 Feb 2021 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226739359
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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 neo-imperial 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 anti-colonial rebellion, and Muslim fanaticism specifically, as a virulent form of social contagion. The metaphor surfaces again and again in old ideas like the decadence of Mughal India, the poor hygiene of the Arab quarter, and the "failed states" of postcolonialism. Exposing the long history of this broken but persistent narrative, Epidemic Empire is a major contribution to the rhetorical history of our present moment.
"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" "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"
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780226739359
Published: 1 Feb 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 9mm
Width: 6mm
Spine: 28mm
Pages: 392

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