Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb (review)

Abstract

While this personal history is not readily apparent in the rest of the work, the preface prepares the reader to confront the subsequent subject matter not as an abstract theoretical project but one with tangible consequences for real people and the real world. Just as epidemiology strives to create a horizontal picture of a disease-event with attention to region, timing, and scale, so too does epidemiological reading situate disparate texts in a single field of analysis, facilitating conversation between texts rather than solely relying on a hermeneutics of suspicion which, as Raza Kolb argues, resembles the depth-interior model of the clinical gaze. [...]in the first chapter she reads Rudyard Kipling’s Kim alongside narratives of how a sham public health campaign played a role in identifying and killing Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. While the choice to whisk through so many different genres is not theorized, nor is it discussed how epidemiology may inform these genres in distinct ways, it aligns Raza Kolb’s approach with that of cultural studies, where texts from many genres are examined together as an archive of culture. [...]it demonstrates that the mediation of texts may be as important to the method of epidemiological reading as the texts themselves.