Author: lmt459

American Stagnancy in “Angels in America”: What’s next for the U.S.?

By lmt459 · · · 1 Comment

When reading Angels in America, there’s no avoiding its overtness when it comes to the political. The era of Reaganism and conservatism in the 1980s is depicted as one seeking stability of power from the status quo; and, the traditional moral values that, for example, have privileged the traditional, white, heterosexual American. Angels in America therefore places emphasis on the notion of progress and of moving forward. When Prior rejects the angels’ prophecy, for instance, and chooses life and all its uncertainties, it is symbolic of how life and living is about change, not stagnancy.

But in Angels in America, the liberal left is not necessarily made to be any better than the seemingly antagonized right-wing Reaganists. Louis, for instance, despite all his “big ideas” about progressivism and American liberalism, remain just that– big ideas. Louis’ own perceptions of liberalism and American freedom, much like the conservatism he hates, also seems to be focused on a select few, and ignores those such as Belize who emphasizes the significance of race in the political sphere. Therefore, while “the left” and “the right” appear to be polar opposites, neither seem to fully take into account the voices of those who are marginalized or at the periphery.

In thinking about Angels in America, one cannot help but think about the present socio-economic and political state of the U.S. The problems of institutional racism, socio-economic inequality, flawed healthcare, and toxic American individualism and exceptionalism have all resurfaced with full force in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic. And while one can say the Trump administration has exacerbated these problems, they are problems that have always been so deeply rooted in America society, and perpetuated throughout the centuries of even Democrat presidencies. In spite of its more recent signs of progress– such as with the election of the first African-American president, or the legalization of same-sex marriages in all 50 U.S. states– America continues to fall back on a traditional national narrative, and in turn, a broken socio-political system driven by this narrative. Yet if anything, the ending of Angels in America does offer a glimmer of hope, as its final words echo the current state of activism and change-making in the country. “We won’t die secret deaths anymore”– no longer will anyone keep silent.

Camus and the Postcolonial (augmenter’s post)

By lmt459 · · , · 2 Comments

Albert Camus’ The Plague has widely been studied as an allegory for the invasion of Nazism in France during World War II. In the novel, set sometime during the 1940s, the bubonic plague invades the town of Oran in French Algeria, starting from a deluge of unexplained dead rats to the rapid upsurge of “inguinal-fever cases”. According to Steve Coll of the New Yorker, several writers have thus referred to The Plague as allegorical for “the virus of Fascism,” with characters such as Dr. Bernard Rieux— a Fauci-esque figure in the novel—as symbolic of the French resistance to Nazi occupation.  

But while the text can be seen as this allegory for Nazi occupation in World War II, one thing that should perhaps be emphasized is the fact that this text is situated in French Algeria; and that, in the grand scheme of the course, The Plague is the first time we are encountering a pandemic in a postcolonial setting. Keep in mind, that Algeria as a colony contributed significantly to the French army in World War II, and that not too long after the war Algeria gained its independence from France  in 1962. Therefore, in some ways, The Plague is situated within a colonial narrative. David Carroll writes the following in his essay “The Colonial City and the Question of Borders: Albert Camus’s Allegory of Oran” in regard to The Plague and the postcolonial:

“[Camus] claims in fact that his choice to narrate history by means of an allegory of the plague has a decided historical and political advantage: that of suggesting a number of ‘historical referents’ or contexts for the plague and thus different forms of political oppression and injustice rather than just one (National Socialism). Camus clearly had in mind Stalinism as another form of political oppression that should be associated with the plague, but is it really possible to disassociate from the plague the forms of economic injustice and political oppression that were effects of colonialism and imply or assert that Camus intended such a disassociation?”


Carroll, David. “The Colonial City and the Question of Borders: Albert Camus’s Allegory of Oran.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 41, no. 3, 2001, pp. 88–104. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26288456. Accessed 4 Nov. 2020.

One of the questions we could ask ourselves is to what extent The Plague engages with theories and matters of the postcolonial. One of the ways we can think about this question is through the novel’s emphasis on anonymity, and a refusal to name things and/or people. The prefect, for instance, refuses to publicly name the disease, despite the evidence that seems to classify it as the plague bacillus. Then, and perhaps most significantly, there is the refusal of the text itself—at least, in the starting chapters— to name the narrator, who the novel also refers to as a “historian” of sorts given their collection and documentation of plague-related “data.” Why is that so?

If for now, as readers, we assume that Dr. Rieux is our mystery narrator— who, we might further assume, is French— what implication does that have in regard to whose voice is being heard, or whose record of plague history we are reading? As a French physician part of the seemingly wealthier classes of Oran, what does it mean for someone like Dr. Rieux to narrate the events of the plague in colonial French Algeria? Another question also worth thinking about is how does Dr. Rieux’s form of documentation compare to mysterious newcomer Jean Tarrou’s, described by the novel as “observing events and people through the wrong end of the telescope,” with “trivial details which yet have their importance”? And finally, whose voices as a result are being excluded in the novel? In thinking about the postcolonial, Camus in many ways becomes a work of plague literature that offers a lot to think about in terms of whose pandemic experiences are recorded, and whose are potentially overlooked.