Author: Bryan

Contagion, Cosmopolitanism, Hillbrow

Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) helps us tie together some threads or strands that have run through several readings in this course. Specifically, it addresses issues such as the relationship between communication and communicable disease (a topic running all the way back to Sampson’s Virality), the weight of history and tradition, the effects of circulation or migration on personal and communal identity, and the very question of individual agency in the face of an epidemic disorder that stresses, above all, our connections to others.

I was tempted to assign — and maybe will in the future — one of the few pieces of criticism on Mpe’s novel that engages with these issues in ways that speak to the rest of our course. It’s this piece by Emily S. Davis, who teaches at the University of Delaware and writes about globalization, human rights, social justice, and (of all things) romance genres. But for now I’ll give you a couple crucial quotes that also serve, usefully, as an example of how you start to build an argument about a text based on the evidence generated through close reading or explication. In this case, she makes an argument that the novel posits contagion as a form of connection or even belonging: “Contagion, as Refilwe realizes, is the condition of modern life, whether in Tiragalong or London. We are all potentially or already sick without exposure to foreigners; one can become infected without ever leaving home.”

From there she seeks to reinforce this argument by offering an interpretation of the repeated “Welcome to our…” passages:

 The structure of the novel reinforces this expansive sense of belonging as shared infection. The refrain of “Welcome to our Hillbrow” (Mpe 2000, 2) in the first chapter expands in scale over the course of the text to include “Welcome to our England” (97), “Welcome to our All” (104), “Welcome to the World of our Humanity” (113), and finally “Welcome to our Heaven” (124). Refilwe is welcomed into Heaven at the end of the book by a cast of other characters, all of whom have died and are being memorialized by the unnamed omniscient narrator. The conception of heaven laid out by this narrator is fundamentally narrative: “Heaven is the world of our continuing existence, located in the memory and consciousness of those who live with us and after us. It is the archive that those we left behind keep visiting and revisiting; digging this out, suppressing or burying that. Continually reconfiguring the stories of our lives” (124). Mpe’s cosmopolitan text suggests that the task of the aesthetic is to memorialize the complex interconnections among people, even those connections people might wish to hide or ignore. Toward this end, the novel dramatizes the competing narratives about the current South African issues of AIDS and immigration. According to the xenophobic rural/nationalist narrative, both the AIDS crisis and immigration involve foreign elements that must be excised through witchcraft. But the narrator demonstrates repeatedly that there is more to these stories than meets the eye: the bone throwers cynically exploit their knowledge of local feuds and relationships for profit, while the villagers erroneously believe that there is a cure for social ills. In contrast, the narrator’s cosmopolitan narrative invokes an interconnectedness for which there is no cure. No god intervenes to restore a parochial moral order; moreover, we are all guilty (or potentially guilty) of the same crimes and linked by our shared bodily passions and our shared vulnerability to suffering.

(Davis 106-107)

I’d love to hear your responses to this reading of contagion and whether you think it applies to texts we’ve read other than Hillbrow. And what are the implications of framing contagion in this way? Davis offers this answer: “As a human rights text, Welcome to Our Hillbrow embraces contaminations of all kinds, presenting physical rights (freedom from disease, access to medical care, etc.) as inextricable from social rights (freedom of speech, freedom from xenophobia, freedom to love), the local as inextricable from the foreign, and the bodily as inextricable from the narrative” (108).

My own comments in class should indicate that I’m sympathetic to this position, but I certainly welcome counterarguments or conflicting takes. I see the position Davis stakes out as compatible, as I’ve noted in discussion, with Appiah’s approach to cosmopolitanism and “contamination,” which I’ve written about in a very early post on this site. That post grew out of a discussion of Angels in America, so perhaps this conversation will spill into our discussion of that work as we turn to it next.

Ghost cities

I was struck, while reading a 2016 interview with Zhao Liang, the director of the documentary Together, by the following description of China’s contemporary “ghost cities”:

There are hundreds of ghost cities like that in China. They are nearly everywhere: in “tier 1” cities [metropolises], in “tier 2” cities [provincial capitals], and “tier 3” cities [cities of smaller dimensions and secondary economic importance]. There is a ghost city in my hometown as well. The ghost city is caused by the blind development, by the unplanned expansion. It is a consequence of the economic model with Chinese characteristics, which is not following the economic laws, namely the regulation of price driven by the supply-demand system. As a matter of fact, the ghost city is the result of one of the many economic bubbles artificially created by the Chinese political system. In China, the price of property is manipulated to allow investors to make huge profits. The possibility of speculation nurtures a fever of real-estate investments, hence the flow of “hot money” in the sector over the past few years. Local governments actively encourage property developers to construct more and more new cities by offering them preferential policies. This way, the government can boast its land-developing achievements and Gross Domestic Product figures, and more plots of land and buildings can be sold under these circumstances. However, the bubble doesn’t last in the long run. These days, making money in real estate has become very hard in China because of oversupply. Hence, all the failed mortgage repayments by the investors, the bad debts, the banks acquiring property, the ghost cities.

One way to read the dream passages in Yan’s Dream of Ding Village, then, may be as a prophecy of or commentary on precisely this phenomenon. The caskets themselves become more than just emblems of hyperdevelopment: they become ghost cities, residences for our spectral narrator an others like him. The final irony in Yan’s novel is that not even the ghosts want to live there. “All I knew was that my home was Ding Village,” the narrator says as his family prepares to rebury him in a new-and-improved casket, covered with scenes not just of Chinese metropolises but Paris, New York, and London as well. “I didn’t care how fancy my casket was, or if the gold paint on it was real, or if it was worth as much as all the land in the village” (320).

His cries, as they carry him away in his new casket (“Save me, Grandpa, save me…”), fall “like raindrops on to the parched and blighted earth” (321). Could this be the beginning of the rainstorm that finally transforms the plain in the novel’s final paragraphs?

Filming Ding Village/Henan AIDS crisis

From Yan Li, who took this course in the spring of 2015:

As promised, here is the link to the full movie based on Dream of Ding Village. This movie is directed by Gu Changwei, one of the most famous “fifth generation directors” in China, and performed by many famous Chinese actors, such as Zhang Ziyi. You may be familiar with her early film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Love for Life was released on 10 May 2011 in China. Though this movie is a little different from the novel and focuses more on Lingling and Ding Liang’s love story, it faithfully illustrates the rural background and the tragic flavor of the storyline. Hope that you will further understand the setting of the novel by watching this film.

Here’s an interview with director Gu Changwei from TimeOut Shanghai, which notes that the film had government sponsorship even though the novel on which it’s based had been banned.

A companion documentary, Together, offers a “a behind-the-scenes look at the Chinese cast and crew’s reaction to AIDS patients who participated in the filming of Gu Changwei’s feature film.” (See this 2016 interview with director Zhao Liang, in which he notes that Together is the only film of his not currently banned in China.) The documentary is no longer on YouTube as far as I can tell but you’ll find it in several parts here.

St. James Infirmary Blues

I’m re-upping this from an older augmenter’s post of mine and fixing some links: Here are two of many versions of “St. James Infirmary Blues,” a song mentioned on pp. 154 & 161 of Camus’s The Plague (the Vintage edition we’re reading). The former, 1928, could have been the recording our characters heard. The latter, 1959, was released after “194-,” so technically it didn’t exist yet. If you want to hear even more versions, check out what’s available at the amazing archive.org.

My question for you: Why this song? Why a gramophone record? Why have it pumping over a loudspeaker? (And how would you compare this to the use of popular music in Pale Horse, Pale Rider?)

I went down to St. James Infirmary,
Saw my baby there,
Stretched out on a long white table,
So cold, so sweet, so bare.
Let her go, let her go, God bless her,
Wherever she may be,
She can look this wide world over,
But she’ll never find a sweet man like me.

More here.

A ghost but more alive than she was

Edvard Munch’s illustration of Oswald, in Ibsen’s Ghosts, slumped in his chair at play’s end, the cold sunlight finally streaming through the window. More on Munch and Ibsen here.

As we transition from Ibsen to Porter, let’s take a moment to remember poor Oswald, slipping into unconsciousness just as the cold, cold Norwegian daylight finally comes streaming through that window. The ending of Ibsen’s play resonates with the final lines of Porter’s story:

No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything. (208)

Porter — or maybe it’s her heroine, Miranda — leaves us in a postapocalyptic landscape. The silent houses might remind us of Defoe. And Ibsen’s cold light makes a comeback. If you lived my ’80s teenage life, you’d have no question about the music direction for this moment:

Morrissey, “Every Day Is Like Sunday,” from Viva Hate (1988)

“Come, Armageddon! Come!”

Compare the endings of Ghost and Pale Horse. When Ibsen’s play closes, Mrs. Alving still stands there, wringing her hands, paralyzed by her own agency. Whatever she chooses to do will certainly result in her being haunted. Will she lose herself or finally find freedom? When Porter’s story closes, Miranda comes “to herself as if out of sleep,” but it’s hard to tell how much of Miranda is left and how much she’s just being propped up by the same voices of duty, obligation, and propriety that continually dogged Mrs. Alving. When she addresses the dead, her newly awakened self becomes self-conscious, chiding: “Oh, no, that is not the way, I must never do that” (208). Has she pulled herself out of sleep or into the numbness of survival?

One set of past conveners used the question of survival — how does it feel to be left behind? — as their way to frame the reading. Miranda, like Mrs. Alving or Defoe’s H.F., finishes the story having to make sense of what’s just passed. But unlike H.F., who seems to have all the answers, or Mrs. Alving, whose survival is overshadowed by the choice she confronts, Miranda seems profoundly altered, at odds with the notion that she’s awake and in charge of a future in which everything is possible. Here’s how those conveners put it:

Have you heard of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic? It killed more people than the first World War did, yet it is not widely remembered. Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter is one of the few literary records of a traumatic event that killed between 20 million and 40 million people. This is Porter’s most autobiographical work as she nearly died of the plague herself when she was working for the Rocky Mountain Newspaper. According to a 1936 interview with Porter, 18 years had passed before she set down to write this fictional novella. This suggests she may have tried to forget the pandemic and was unable to repress her memories of it. Perhaps the act of writing this novella was her way of coming to terms with her personal experience of surviving the influenza pandemic of 1918, and suggesting that events like this should be remembered. In the 1936 interview, she recalls her experience as identity-shattering.


 “It simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, really. It took me a long time to go out and live in the world again. I was really “alienated,” in the pure sense. It was, I think, the fact that I really had participated in death, that I knew what death was, and had almost experienced it. I had what the Christians call the “beatific vision,” and the Greeks called the “happy day,” the happy vision just before death. Now if you have had that, and survived it, come back from it, you are no longer like other people, and there’s no use deceiving yourself that you are.” (“Interview” 85) – The Forgotten Apocalypse

Surviving a plague or a war is a life-changing event for an individual survivor and a community. Porter draws upon her own personal experience of alienation and disorientation after a plague when she describes Miranda’s painful and bitter recovery. It raises the question of what survives in a survivor after a plague? Or after a war?

As another set of conveners explained even earlier, the figure of the survivor — charged with the work of mourning — is prefigured even by the novella’s title, a reference not only to apocalyptic imagery from the Bible but, in Porter’s story, to a song Miranda and Adam improvise based on a spiritual sung by black field workers in Texas, presumably the descendants of slaves:

The suffering of the living is explicitly mentioned when Miranda introduces the song that begins with “Pale horse, pale rider…” (189). In this song the death, represented by “pale horse, pale rider”, takes away not only lover but also the whole family, leaving “one singer to mourn” (190). And Miranda, in her nightmare, experiences this devastating pain. She sees Adam continuously struck by arrows in his heart and dies, while she cannot help but live and endure everything. Miranda believes that the pain of the living is no less than that of the dead, as we can assume from “It’s my turn now, why must you always be the one to die?” (191). She would rather die than become the lone one who has to suffer from the loss.

This isn’t the first time music mediates a crucial moment in Porter’s story. References to popular songs appear scattered throughout. The characters have their own relationships to the popular culture of the war years, the same way I, growing up in the 1980s, had my relationship to the popular culture of the Cold War West. If Miranda, at the end, seems a bit like a zombie, one of the questions the novella asks is whether, when all is said and done, we’re made up of anything more than the stories and songs and social expectations we’ve consumed. It’s another tie back to Ibsen: what is it that actually lives on in us, lodged there, that we can’t get rid of? And is that detritus the stuff that ultimately doesn’t just haunt us but shuffles us into survival?

Oscar Seagle (baritone) and the Columbia Stellar Quartette sing “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag (And Smile, Smile, Smile)” on Columbia A6028, recorded on January 25, 1918.

Topographies of disease

John Snow’s “ghost map”: “Map 1.” Printed map, 37.9 × 40.4 cm. From Snow’s Snow on Cholera . . . (1936). The map originally accompanied the second edition of Snow’s Of the Mode of Communication of Cholera (London: John Churchill, 1854). via Princeton University Libraries

Snow’s 1854 map of cholera deaths in proximity to the Broad Street Pump is one of several examples of attempts to visualize data about an epidemic’s spread. The other examples featured on this Princeton University Library site are fascinating too. See the online exhibit at large for other early thematic mapping projects as well as this UCLA page dedicated to Snow’s influence.

A plague

In a convener’s post for Oedipus the King I wrote for Contagion 2012, way back during the first iteration of this course, I mentioned a strain of recent scholarship on Sophocles’ play that takes the plague setting seriously:

After all, the assumption on scholars’ parts has long been that Sophocles introduced an epidemic as the setting for his version of the Oedipus myth because Athens had so recently suffered from plague (as recounted in the brief excerpt you’ve read from Thucydides). With mass deaths so fresh on their minds, these critics ask, wouldn’t Sophocles and his audience have understood the plague to be an actual fact of life rather than a literary symbol? If this set of questions interests you, I’d point you in the direction of this recent book by Robin Mitchell-Boyask, a classicist at Temple University in Philadelphia. You might also want to check out an even more recent article, written by a team at the University of Athens Medical School. It appeared this year in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the Center for Disease Control in the United States, and “adopt[s] a critical approach to Oedipus Rex in analyzing the literary description of the disease, unraveling its clinical features” to conclude that “this epidemic was an actual event, possibly caused by Brucella abortus.”

My assumption, in that post, is that we’d be approaching the plague in Sophocles’s novel as either intended to represent medical situations Sophocles’s original audience would have recognized, or that the plague was being used metaphorically, for something sick about the community — or its leader. As I noted in that original post, we read this play at the start of this course not just to recognize how long the plague-as-metaphor idea has been around, but also to question whether the literal and figurative registers are as separate or opposed as we commonly take them. From your reading of the play, do you see compelling reasons to side one way or another on the issue? What would it mean to decide that “this epidemic was an actual event”? Does the plague become more or less powerful in the play’s world? And how might this set of questions force us to continue thinking even more carefully about the relationship between sickness or medicine and the language we use to describe it (and anything else)?

As may be apparent by the juxtaposition on the syllabus of Sophocles’ play against Thucydides’ description of the Plague of Athens, we’ll be talking over the next little while about the significance of genre here. Sophocles is writing a play; Thucydides is writing a history. How does the plague figure into each? How does each author represent it? And how might each work help us consider the question of whether it’s possible to write about disease in language that doesn’t trade in metaphor of some sort.

Contagion: The graveyard

Since the first iteration of my Contagion course in 2012, during my first semester at NYUAD, I’ve tinkered with the syllabus quite a bit. I’ve added texts, dropped texts, played around with historical and contextual readings. The current version of the course, spring 2019, marks the most substantial shift yet.

Contagion was originally created as a “Writing Intensive” course in NYUAD’s original Core Curriculum, in a now-defunct category called Pathways of World Literature. It met three days a week, included several writing workshops, and had much more class time to discuss reading. The list of books was much longer than it can be in the current format, which meets only twice a week.

And so I thought it might be good to commemorate here, like so many headstones in a graveyard, the books that have not survived. Here’s a list of titles that no longer appear on the syllabus. Consider them optional further reading if you just can’t get the course to release its hold on you once the semester’s over.

Marcus, The Flame Alphabet (Knopf)
Mann, Death in Venice (Norton)
Pushkin, A Feast in the Time of Plague
Burns, Black Hole (Pantheon)
Preston, Hot Zone (Anchor)
Roth, Nemesis (Vintage)
Sinha, Animal’s People (Simon & Shuster)
Saramago, Blindness (Harvest)
Whitehead, Zone One (Doubleday)

The class changes every time one of these texts comes and goes. I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges in the new, more multidisciplinary format of the Core Colloquium. But I’ll miss some of these and their characters, I’m sure. Search the archives for content related to these fallen friends.

How (not) to write about contagion

(With intended nod to this piece, which came up in class yesterday.)

Heather Schell, a Stanford University graduate student in the late 1990s who now teaches writing at George Washington University in DC, wrote what I think is my favorite critique of Preston’s Hot Zone only a few years after it was published. Her piece pre-dates both the full flowering of Internet culture (and its viral information metaphors) and 9/11 — both of which would wind up playing a huge role in how contagion metaphors work, especially for US-based writers, in this century. So in many ways her essay seems prescient. I think it helpfully highlights the task before us, not simply to evaluate the scientific accuracy (or entertainment value) of non-fiction writing like Preston’s, but to ask more specifically how it works and to what ends.

Schell focuses a large part of her analysis on the role played by “Africa” in texts like Preston’s, which she contextualizes most thickly in relation to US AIDS-discourse of the ’80s and early ’90s:

The repeatedly imagined introduction of killer viruses from Africa to the United States appears to spring from an analogy with AIDS (although many scientists and cultural critics have shown that assigning an African origin to AIDS is problematic). However, the explanation is more complex than simple mimicry. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts’s journalistic account of the AIDS epidemic, opens in Zaire during the 1976 Ebola epidemic, describing the illness of an early AIDS victim, before returning to the United States to follow the development of the AIDS epidemic. 31 His book was published in [End Page 101] 1988, and the film version, with a much stronger emphasis on Ebola as the originary African virus, appeared in 1993. So who inspired whom? Reports of earlier Ebola and Lassa fever epidemics offer no explanation for the repeated trajectory of the opening sequences. The origin does not really matter so much as the paucity of imagination revealed by these consistently structured introductions, which display the reification of African origins for killer epidemics. Richard Preston so wholeheartedly internalizes this assumption that he travels to Africa to look for the origin of the Reston outbreak, despite the fact that he knows that the infected monkeys were shipped from the Philippines, where the disease is endemic.

As she notes, the ultimate concern in texts like Preston’s, even if never states outright, is US national security, and these texts end up contributing to an “imagined community” of US readers (to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term, which we’ve used before in this class) grounded both in border maintenance and in a sense of vulnerability that nevertheless confirms a sense of public health, even if tenuous:

Even authors who do not focus on Africa frequently retain the assumption that viruses are foreign entities, possibly even anti-American. This foreign genesis is structurally emphasized in Peter Jaret’s [End Page 102] National Geographic article on viruses. 35 Jaret reports visiting eight places—four in the United States—in the course of preparing his article. With the exception of a group of students volunteering to contract colds, all the ill people he mentions are encountered abroad. Americans with AIDS enter only as one slide of an infected lymph node and one solitary statistic about U.S. HIV infection rates (placed in perspective alongside the still more ghastly rate of international infection). Even Jaret’s summary of the disease’s discovery makes no mention that AIDS was first reported in the United States.

Schell develops a concept of “viral geography” to account for this sense of fear of invasion/infection among US readers and writers. Preston and other similar writers, she notes, often provide maps of African or Latin American countries, even when they are not the primary focus of their narratives:

Maps provide a good example of the persistently African geography of these viral narratives. Preston’s single illustration is a map of central Africa, though one might easily have expected a map of the Reston, Virginia, vicinity, given that area’s primacy in his story. Still, one instance alone could be disregarded as coincidence. Radetsky’s book has many illustrations, including graphs and sketches of viruses; nonetheless, despite all his lengthy discussions of viruses lurking in the United States, China, South America, and Japan, he too includes only one map—of Africa. Garrett at first seems to break the pattern, with five maps accompanying The Coming Plague: one of the United States, one of Amazonia, and three of Africa. On the academic side, Emerging Viruses, edited by virologist Stephen Morse, includes twenty-eight articles, numerous charts, graphs, and tables—and a map of Africa, with the Kinshasa Highway as the only identified landmark. 36 In addition to affirming a particular origin story for viruses, the maps suggest that Africa is particularly unknown and unknowable and therefore requires special visual aids. 

The geographic imagination produced by such textual features emphasizes the fear of traveling viruses, which links paranoia about outbreaks to a sense of insecurity produced by globalization. (Preston’s text gets at this early on: “A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plane flight from every city on earth” [16].) Schell elaborates:

Viral geography enters virology in the increasing concern about the “importation” of exotic, foreign viruses, with air traffic and highways as particular threats. Krause emphasizes their responsibility in his abstract: some epidemics recur due to “changing life-styles (including increased international travel).” 39 Although epidemics can be caused by “changes in the patterns of human behavior, social organization, urbanization, and agriculture . . ., the most important factor is the spread of microbial organisms from points of origin as a result of the migration and travel of their human hosts.” 40 This fixation on travel represents a consensus among virologists concerned with emerging diseases, to the extent that even viral transmission is understood as transportation. Morse coined the term viral traffic for “movements of viruses to new species or new individuals.” 41

But this metaphor is problematic, as she argues by turning again to Preston:

The metaphor of viral traffic is in some ways oddly incongruous, because viruses, unlike many other microorganisms, have no means of locomotion. Rather, the image originates in the causal explanation of epidemics: “Inevitably, viral traffic is enhanced by human traffic. Highways and the subsequent human migration to cities, especially in tropical areas, can introduce once-remote viruses to a larger population. On a global scale, similar opportunities are offered by rapid air travel.” 46 One suspects that, for Morse, human traffic not only enhances viral traffic but is in fact synonymous with it. Martin Kaplan, a former secretary-general of the World Health Organization, commended Morse’s new phrase “viral traffic” as “apt.” 47

This association between epidemics and modern travel reappears in The Hot Zone and other popular science narratives. Preston cautions that urbanization has released a flood of viruses from the African rain forest—a message that initially seems concerned with the fragile ecosphere and human destruction. However, he ultimately narrows the origin of emerging viral epidemics to one Ur-cause: the paving of the Kinshasa Highway, which “turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War.” 48 The Kinshasa Highway is defined in Preston’s glossary as “AIDS highway.” 49Readers are left to infer that the [End Page 105] boundaries between the “silent heart of darkness” (Preston’s term) and the civilized world should have been maintained, given that contact might actually mean the destruction of the world. Facilitated transportation between the alien world of inner Africa and the rest of the world is blamed. Peter Jaret also assumes that HIV “has changed the world,” and he similarly traces a passage out of Africa (after a brief fling with the promiscuity narrative) as his narrative of disease transmission: “Truckers infected by prostitutes carried the disease from city to town to village throughout the heart of Africa. Infected air travelers spread it to other continents.” 50 Notice that increasing urbanization per se is not a threat, but increasing movement from Africa to the rest of the world is. A recurring image of Africa’s getting out pervades the texts. This is a very new, postcolonial fear—until recently, Europeans and Euro-Americans imagined that they had to travel to Africa themselves if they wanted to be in danger.

There’s a lot more to Schell’s essay, including discussions of sexuality and the boundaries we imagine between humans and other animals. Her conclusion is an apt way, perhaps, to wrap up this course:

Our current fascination with viruses springs from our worries about the future. Ultimately, the metaphor of the virus represents our possible fates—the disintegration of self or of nation; Armageddon; the triumph of multiculturalism and the global community; the ecosystem’s anger at and vengeance for our meddling; the loss of [End Page 131] the unknown; or the escape of the unknown into our society, where everything familiar will be destroyed in its path. We might indeed be coming to see the world as an integrated system, but such integration jeopardizes boundaries many had believed to be real. Viral discourse raises the possibility of a type of global busing, bringing the foreign into our neighborhoods through infection. At the same time, fear of such change (especially change conceptualized as disease) could successfully stall it. Boundary thinking might seem stale to theorists, but it is not static. People who crave boundaries can make boundaries real. Therefore, we must not rely on the current cultural vulnerability to questions of identity as the onset of some automatic process that will ultimately dismantle traditional inequities.

An epidemic future might mean that we have to pay attention to peoples, cultures, economies, and ecologies outside our own national borders. Unfortunately, an insistence on perceiving international relationships in terms of infiltrating viral infections limits the effectiveness of our response. D. A. Henderson of Johns Hopkins has recommended the development of a “network of international centers to detect the emergence of dangerous diseases and, if possible, to contain them.” 144 Morse further suggests that “development agencies should be educated to include emerging-virus considerations when evaluating major changes in land use or when making decisions that will alter ecological equilibria or population densities. It may even be possible to develop regular ‘viral impact assessments.’” 145 While this proposal has some value, it targets only one factor of our experience of disease. According to the World Health Organization, “it becomes more and more clear that morbidity and mortality due to these infectious diseases are as much a function of the state of human development than they are of the virulence of the microorganisms which are their biological cause”; populations living in poverty suffer from a disproportionate share of epidemic diseases. 146 Insisting on some [End Page 132] inherently foreign viral geography might serve to prod us out of our myopic nationalism, but it can also be too easily marshaled as spurious proof to bolster preexisting prejudices. Disease surveillance thus offers only a partial, problematic solution to a quandary that will remain unresolved until we are ready to perceive our complex engagement with the world through a different metaphor.

How have these tendencies in writing about contagious disease (perhaps especially in the US) evolved in the last 20 years? We’ll discuss the rhetoric of homeland security and wars on terror in relation to Preston’s more recent treatment of Ebola.

 

Some comments on Nemesis

Hi, all —

I’m not sure why the comments function isn’t working for this week’s conveners’ post, so I’m pasting some comments here. If you’re responsible for commenting and haven’t yet done so, you can try to comment on this post or, if it still doesn’t work, send them to me and I’ll add them here.

bw

From Nada:

It is always funny seeing how during the time of contagion, “God” is believed to be causing the disease in a dual way: it can be a blessing, it can be a curse. In chapter 2, we can see Bucky struggling with endless questions concerning God’s reasons for creating polio in the first place (p. 170). For religious communities (including the Jewish one), it is hard to believe that God would create something that would bring affliction and suffering to his own creation. Now, some may explain that disease and affliction exist because mankind have sinned and as a result, contagion is perceived as God’s “nemesis” or vengeance, but then again, why did/do good people had/have to suffer? And why is God (or the heavens) being randomly selective? What role does fear play when it comes to believing in God?

And from Odera:

Greetings Everyone,

I personally find this book to be a very interesting read. Unlike some of the texts we’ve looked out so far, Philip Roth is able to provide the readers with a clear and simple lens to reading the passage while still grappling with larger societal issues. At this point in the semester, we are slowly beginning to draw similarities amongst texts. With this one, a see relations to Ibsen’s Ghosts, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and even Oedipus. 

Outside of its similarities to other texts, this one stands out to me for two reasons:

1.) The idea of the ‘plague’ as portrayed  is other texts is most weirdly described as a means to punish a society for its misdeeds. But with this society, there’s no apparent evidence for any form of misdeed. The plague, however, comes as some sort of test for the level of human frailty. To what extent can a society, which holds so steadfast to its Jewish identity and heritage, withstand the moral tests of WWII and the polio outbreak?  

2.) Secondly, the scapegoat role differs greatly from the traditional idea of the scapegoat. Based on my previous experiences with the concept of a scapegoat, when a society is hit with a plague or epidemic, the most ‘irrationally rational’ approach is for the indigenes of the society to lay the blame on an outsider- a societal outlier. With this text though, the scapegoat voluntarily and willingly declares himself the cause of the society’s downfall. This difference from other texts is further heightened as Bucky, the protagonist, is by no means an outsider to this society. Yes, he deals with issues like his poor eyesight, and inability to be conscripted into the American Army, but he is very much central to the workings of the society. He is the playground director, characterized as being of good physical build, and most—if not all—of the parents and children seem to hold him in high regard. So why does he willingly confer on himself the title of ‘scapegoat’ even when he doesn’t ideally fit into that role?