[This book offers an examination of how the language of
imperialism portrays anti-imperialism and rebellion as infection and
pestilence, and how that language is "central to the management of
empire and neoimperial formation."] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

EPIDEMIC EMPIRE: COLONIALISM, CONTAGION, AND TERROR 1817-2020  
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Joshua Moufawad-Paul
April 27, 2021
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
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_ This book offers an examination of how the language of imperialism
portrays anti-imperialism and rebellion as infection and pestilence,
and how that language is "central to the management of empire and
neoimperial formation." _

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_Epidemic Empire
Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020_
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb
University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226739359

A poetics of contagion flourished throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Language regarding literal epidemic measures (quarantine, isolation,
personal protective equipment, hygiene, vaccines, etc.) intermingled
with figurative language about nations and populations: orientalist
claims regarding the source of the virus, migrants as vectors of
transmission, quasi-Nietzschean interpretations of ‘herd
immunity’. Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s _Epidemic Empire_
demonstrates that this ‘disease poetics’ has been part of global
capitalism since its emergence. The thinking of contagion is bound up
with how a global imperialism in development imagined insurgency
alongside epidemics, how the study of counter-insurgency and the study
of epidemiology were entangled. Hence, it is difficult to separate the
political figuration of contagion from medical discourse.

_Epidemic Empire_ ‘was going to press when the COVID-19 pandemic
struck North America in March 2020,’ (xi) and thus only the preface
and several edits were added to reflect on the conjunctural moment of
its release. Because of this conjunctural moment that rendered the
book’s subject matter more immediate, however, it will likely become
one of this moment’s iconic works of academic literature. Since its
research predated the pandemic, it wasn’t rushed to print like a
host of other books dedicated to theorizing the pandemic. Moreover,
the prose is lucid and, quite often, lovely: Raza Kolb presents us
with a counter-poetics of the disease poetics she is excavating. But
this counter-poetics is also a rigorous examination of its object of
study, and _Epidemic Empire_ is concerned with ‘two connected
arguments.’ The first of these arguments is ‘that imperial disease
poetics that casts insurgent violence as epidemic is grounded in
narrative and scientific practices central to the management of empire
and neoimperial formation.’ The second is ‘that a comparative
historical study of the rhetorical commingling of colonial science and
counter-insurgency can offer us urgently needed lessons for reading
the global political and public health landscapes of today.’ (4)

These two arguments are explored by an examination of the topoi of
imperial disease poetics, and the ways in which contagion was
conceptualized from early imperialism to today, through both the
archives of medical discourses regarding outbreaks such as cholera
(studies that developed alongside a cartographic epidemiology in
service of the British Empire) and popular literature reflecting these
discourses and reinforcing common sense ideology. In tracing the
relationship between the medical-historical archive (Malleson, Bryden,
Bartlett, Babington, Snow) and key works of popular literature about
plague and metaphorical plague (Kipling, Stoker, Camus, Rushdie), Raza
Kolb is interested in ‘the conceptualization and epistemological
framing first of world health and later of global health [that] emerge
from the immunological crisis of colonial contact.’ (36) Such a
conceptualizing and framing demonstrates the ways in which a
scientific investigation overdetermined by imperial-capitalist logic
contributes to this epistemological framing. Our thoughts about
pandemic are configured by ruling class common sense: the way we think
about contagion even now is influenced by the ways in which the
investigation of contagion was bound up with the management of empire.
A popular literary archive reflects this common sense.

Raza Kolb moves through her analysis of medical literature and its
comingling with popular literature in a way that is quite breathless.
What we witness, in her discussion of this archive, is the thinking
and development of a disease poetics that is able to conceptualize the
meaning of contagion but remains undermined by imperial power. Despite
the importance of Snow’s mapping of contagion for medical science,
for example, its ‘language of reconnaissance, invasion, and combat
suggests an important overlap between colonial administration and the
techniques of surveyorship […] [s]uch an overlap, it must be
recalled, was always more than metaphorical, given the origin of
cholera’s first epidemic outbreak in the movement of East India
Company troops in Bengal.’ (80) Medical science in the service of
empire, regardless of what truth processes it might establish, is
still overdetermined by empire. Such overdeterminations are reflected
in popular literature and ultimately reified.

The way in which this literature conceives of imperial nation-states
and their colonies as bodies at risk of infection is a sign of this
reification. Whether it be the infection of vampirism with the
orientalist figure of Dracula, or the French Algerian city of Oran in
Camus’ _The Plague_, where the absence of Algerians ‘allegorizes
political violence through a chronicle of epidemic,’ (130) the
anthropomorphizing of the social through this disease poetics
demonstrates the development of medicalized tropes that would
eventually be used to explain Muslim terrorism in the War on Terror.
Raza Kolb reminds the reader of how the Pentagon screened _The Battle
of Algiers_, emphasizing those scenes where Colonel Mathieu mapped the
organization of FLN cells as an epidemiologist would map the spread of
disease, as if a radical piece of third cinema could provide a key to
winning the long war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The medical imaginary of
the War on Terror further finds its expression in state-sanctioned
literature such as _The 9/11 Commission Report_ with its ‘healing
narrative’, and _The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on
Torture_ with its ‘black-boxed infection sites’ which mimic
‘tropes […] of nineteenth-century cartographies of disease.’
(277)

On the one hand, these tropes serve to make the imperial social body
appear to be otherwise healthy, naturalizing violence. Examining the
work of Salman Rushdie, for example, Raza Kolb notes that ‘terror is
plague––horrible, inhuman, amoral, cyclical, and nonagental.
Counterterror is equally nonagental, procedural and prophylactic, like
quarantine.’ (222) If terrorism is conceived as nonagental, an
epidemic unleashed upon a supposedly peaceful imperialist reality,
then the originary violence of conquest is conjured away; social
causes for social phenomena can be dismissed because everything takes
place in the realm of natural disaster, like the modern day equivalent
of the miasma unleashed upon the Thebes of _Antigone_. On the other
hand, however, these tropes are not separate from – and are in fact
reinforced by – the very real and persistent collaboration between
medicine and imperialism: ‘both the League of Nations and the United
Nations recognized epidemic and global health alongside war as one of
the most basic threats to freedom and lived existence in an
increasingly globalized world.’ (224) Such a recognition is not
neutral since it has resulted in the collaboration between public
health organizations and ‘security organizations and branches of
national governments to secure borders that are permeable in both
material and rhetorically continuous ways to viruses and terror
networks.’ (233)

To be clear, Raza Kolb is not suggesting that medical science itself
is imperialist; she is definitely not advocating for a ‘left’
version of the anti-science discourse prevalent amongst contemporary
anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers. Rather, her archival excavations are
based on a very obvious point: medical science, like all sciences and
all forms of knowledge production, is developed by people living in
very real social circumstances who themselves are affected by social
norms. Medical science as an institution, regardless of the fact that
it generates truth procedures and empirically verifiable technologies,
is definitely affected by the social relations within which it is
embedded. (Which is why we now have vaccines for COVID-19, for
example, but also why these vaccines are being denied to the majority
of the global south.) In order to make this nuanced point, Raza Kolb
mobilizes Fanon’s overlooked, _Medicine and Colonialism_, which
discusses the way in which medical science and doctors are enlisted by
colonialism, how this enlistment can be used to brutalize oppressed
populations, how this brutalization generates suspicion of science,
but eventually how a liberation movement generates an appreciation of
medical science between the doctors and patients within an
anti-colonial ethos. As Raza Kolb writes at the conclusion of
_Epidemic Empire_: ‘This book is not against colonial science any
more than it is against literature. But it is against the scientific
packaging of counterinsurgency and the concurrent evisceration of
social services, health equity, and care.’ (288) In discussions and
interviews following the book’s publication, Raza Kolb has pointed
out how the states and their ideologues that use disease poetics to
justify imperialist violence have simultaneously, during this
pandemic, refused to listen to medical professionals regarding actual
medical measures necessary to care for everyone equally and prevent
pandemic proliferation.

My only complaint with _Epidemic Empire_ was that at times it leaned
too heavily, especially at the end, into a Foucauldian methodology.
While this leaning seems to make sense because of Foucault’s _The
Birth of the Clinic_ and the professed claims of biopolitics, I uphold
the longstanding critique that devotion to a Foucauldian register is
ultimately epiphenomenal and misses out on what a much more robust
historical materialist analysis would generate. That is, a concrete
analysis of a concrete situation, with attention to the ways in which
imperialist ideology functions, would have better served _Epidemic
Empire_ than Foucault’s ruminations. After all, Foucault was
incapable of theorizing colonialism and imperialism; this is a serious
lacuna in his thought. Post-colonial thinkers who have castigated Marx
for Eurocentrism have often dismissed the much more egregious
Eurocentrism in Foucault, stretching his categories to accommodate a
critique of empire when a vital terrain of anti-imperialist historical
materialism already exists. To be fair to Raza Kolb, however, she also
draws from this terrain through her aforementioned use of Fanon.
Moreover, within academia Foucault (and similar chic radical
theorists) is often unavoidable; he is something of an industry and
what Gabriel Rockhill has called his ‘faux-radicalism’ seeped into
the post-colonial tradition since the latter emerged during the same
period when Foucault was first being overpopularized in western
academia.

But this complaint is outweighed by the overall rigorous work
demonstrated by _Epidemic Empire_. As I noted at the outset of this
review, this book is a joy to read due to its lucid and often lovely
prose. One passage about the blinding of Kashmiri insurgents still
haunts me: ‘In this library of eyes, each bearing its own invisible
wounds, the poet cleaves closely to the material in the metaphor of
dark days, dark times. The shards or shrapnel of his experience will
be the inescapable curse, settling in the _rooh_––the spirit or
breath––accompanying the gift of sight because the ruin he speaks
of seeing––the plague of nations, of nationalism, of communal
violence, of military coup and exile––is not, or ought not be
confined or quarantined to an over-there, the dark zones of war-torn
failed postcolonial states, whose endemic violence periodically breaks
out in worldwide pandemic.’ (232) In passages such as this, and in
those points where Raza Kolb employs Fanon’s dialectical approach to
medicine and colonialism, _Epidemic Empire_ borders on the sublime.

Joshua Moufawad-Paul works as an adjunct professor at York University
where he received his PhD in Philosophy. He is the author of _The
Communist Necessity _and _Continuity and Rupture_.

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