Pandemic / Critic

Abstract

The assignment: use Anjuli Raza Kolb’s Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, andTerror, 1817–2020 as a starting point for a think piece. Hmm. “Epidemic.” “Empire.” “Colonialism.” “Contagion.” “Terror.” “2020.” Yeah, I thought, I should be able to find a hook here somewhere. What I didn’t expect was to findmyself thinking somuch—alongside all those other keywords—about words such as metaphor, canonicity, and poesis. That’s to say among the many other things it is, Epidemic Empire is a book with which to reconsider the possibilities of criticism in our terrible time. Raza Kolb herself is ambivalent at best about the role of the critic in our pandemic moment. Noting in the book’s opening that she comes from a family of doctors, nurses, andmedical technicians, she declares: “Every one of them has infinitelymore to offer our immediate collective welfare than I do.”1 Certainly the COVID-19 pandemic has placed the old joke about the relative value of academics—“I’m a doctor, but not that kind of doctor”—in a darker light. But I wouldn’t be so quick to downplay the contribution a work like Epidemic Empire can make to our “collective welfare”; the benefits aren’t as immediate as those from the hands of a medical provider, but they are real and significant nevertheless. After all, as she notes later in the book, at the root of the word crisis—and its related descendant, critic—is ill health and its reversal: “its Greek root krisis describe[s] the turning point in the progression of a disease ormalady” (162).With the search for a “turning point” in our current pandemic becoming a daily obsession, the critic may indeed have some work to do alongside the medic. Raza Kolb is a beautiful reader, careful and wickedly smart. Most important, she is a generous reader. Imean “generous” also in the sense of “generative”—just as criticism, in its best sense (as against the more prevalent model of the critic as criticizer), is a creative force. I want to dwell on and with this sense of generosity because from a certain angle there is something vaguely scandalous about reading canonical texts by writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, and Albert Camus generously. So too somemight object to the care given the now-canonical work of Salman Rushdie, who Raza Kolb rightly notes plays a central role in the powerful institutional category of “world literature” as “a depoliticizing scholarly paradigm” (20). Even the 9/11 Commission Report is a