Rev Left Radio - Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, professor of English at Toronto University, joins Breht to discuss her book "Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror". They have a wide ranging conversation on British colonialism in India, the concept of terrorism, how metaphors of plague and infection are marshalled by empire, Covid-19, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Albert Camus' "The Plague", Islamophobia, and much more!  Find Anjuli's book and her other work here: https://www.anjulirazakolb.com/ Check out The East is a Podcast interview with Anjuli here: https://eastisapodcast.libsyn.com/epidemic-empire-w-anjuli-raza-kolb Check out our previous episode on Albert Camus and Sartre here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/jean-paul-sartre-albert-camus-existentialism-w-existential-comics Outro Music: "Talkin' Bout a Revolution" by Tracy Chapman ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have on the show Anjuli Fatima Reza Kolb, who is the author of Epidemic Empire to talk about her work and many other issues. I mean, we cover such a wide spectrum of history and thought and post-colonial thinking and literature. And then we touch on the COVID-19 crisis. I mean, this book, which is centered around colonialism, imperialism, plagues, was being published right as the lockdowns for COVID-19 went into effect. So we absolutely discussed that. We discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict happening right now, or should I say, the Israeli occupation and slaughter of innocent Palestinian civilians. And we just cover a wide swath of material here.

So this is a wonderful conversation. with a wonderful guest, really want to have her back on at some point to talk more. And the links to the book and to her work more broadly will be in the show notes of this episode. And as always, ReveLeft is 100%

listener funded and supported. So if you like what we do here, you can join us at patreon.com forward slash Reveleft Radio. And in exchange for your support, you get access to a monthly bonus content. Without further ado, let's get into this wonderful conversation.

Enjoy. I'm Anjali Fatma Reza Kolb. I'm an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, where I teach post-colonial literature and theory, women's and gender studies, poetics, and poetry, and various other topics, sometimes history of science, largely all linked to the history of imperialism and the literatures of imperialism. and I'm also a poet and a translator. I did my PhD at Columbia University, and I live in New York City. Wonderful. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show. We're very excited to have you.

And, of course, today we'll be talking about your wonderful book, Epidemic Empire, Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817 through 2020, but we'll even go into 2021 in this particular discussion. I think we have to. We have to, absolutely. And as listeners will know, if you're not familiar with the book, It only becomes increasingly relevant as historical events continue to unfold. I do want to give a shout out to a podcast that you also appeared on.

The East is a podcast. I've been a longtime fan of their show as well. And it's always worth pumping them and amplifying that show. If you're listening to this and you like what we do at RevLeft, you will no doubt like the East is a podcast as well. I'm going to pump up your pump up and say he's also been doing amazing coverage of what's going on in Syria, what's been going on in Palestine. So it's an especially good time to dig back through the archives and also listen to the episodes he's making now. They're really

great. Absolutely. Could not agree more. Incredibly principled and insightful analysis. So we have a lot to cover today for sure. And the way I like to introduce these interviews, particularly when there's a book that I have to assume most of my audience won't have yet read, is to kind of talk about the motivation behind it and a general bird's eye view of it. So why did you write this book and broadly speaking, what did you want to accomplish or at least examine with it? The answer to this question seems to change in some senses hour by hour. So let me start by talking about the most consistent truth in this question, which is I wrote this book because I was a Muslim in America on 9-11. I was a college student at the time and I lived in

New York. So I was just a couple of miles away from where the towers fell. And watching that happen in real time, as many diasporic subjects know, your mind is all over the map, not in a chaotic or random way, but in a very programmed way. So as I was experiencing my body and living my life in New York, no cell service, trying to get a hold of my parents, figuring out where my friends were I was also hearing immediately from George W. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld that within hours this was blamed on the Muslim world as a whole and terrorism coming from what later came to be known as the axis of evil. And so my mind was also in the places that I suspected and worried were going to bear the brunt of American shame, American rage, American racism

and at that time I was studying post-colonial literature and I had some gut instinct that there was a relationship between the war on terror and longer practices of imperialism. But it was a project that unfolded really over the 20 years between that event and my own coming into being as an academic and as a researcher and as a teacher and what these 20 years have meant in terms of an updating of imperial discourse and technique.

and what histories are still kind of pressing, the Orientalism that's still pressing at American discourses about Islam and various others. And yeah, I guess maybe the last thing to add is that I grew up in a family of doctors. So the connection to medicine was pretty ever-present in my life. As I was researching literature and culture, science never seemed very far away. And so the more I read in the 19th century archive and tried to figure out where ideas of a contagious fanaticism come from, which is really what the book is about, how does the idea of fanaticism or religious feeling or political feeling become coded as contagious? It struck me that I could research the science too. So the book became a history of science contribution to post-colonial studies.

And my training at Columbia was heavily influenced, as you will see, if you take a peek at the book, by Saeedian discourse analysis, and then all of the projects that kind of flowed out from there. So I saw my work as being very much in that tradition and really trying to follow the lead of my teachers. Yeah, incredibly interesting. And as you said, that connection to science and medicine is a fascinating element of this examination. And your book overall examines how metaphors of sickness, disease, contagion and epidemics have been used historically to structure people's thinking and as you said, they're feeling, particularly when it comes to terrorism in colonialist and imperial context, which

we'll definitely get into throughout this entire discussion. But I was hoping that you can maybe flesh out just a little bit more, this primary theme for people to orient themselves to this discussion and maybe even mention the four works of literature that you used as really interesting entry points into this exploration. Yeah, absolutely. So just to kind of zoom in on one of the observations I made in those days just as a person, not even as the scholar or researcher, just a young person, was that we kept hearing from leaders that there was an epidemic of terrorism. And I was like, is this just a lazy phrase or is there something, is there some history here? What do they mean a contagion of terrorism? What do they mean an epidemic of Islamism? What do they mean an epidemic of violence or a plague of violence? Terrorism is a cancer. This metaphor seemed so easy to reach for, and the motivation behind the book was to just figure out, like, is there something more in that metaphor than what immediately meets the eye? I think it was sort of an accident. I was working on an essay about the, like, millennial surge in vampire stories. I mean, Twilight is the one that comes to mind for everybody, but then there were all of the kind of spinoffs from Twilight. violate, including like a number of kind of, I wouldn't call them prestige, but like pseudo-pristage TV shows. And then there was a bunch of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen wrote this book called Monster Theory. There's a scholar, Jaspir-Poar and Amitrae, or a pair of scholars, Amitrae and Just Beer Poir, who wrote an essay about the figure of the monster and the terrorist. And so I started observing a little bit more like what was happening with this epidemic metaphor. But then I also was reading Dracula. I guess I would say,

I thought by accident. So Dracula becomes one of the big literary texts that I'm reading in the book to think about how contagion is connected to a fear about the Ottoman Empire and the legacies of Ottoman rule in the kind of liminal spaces between Europe and Asia. And that 19th century kind of interest in contagious science and my asthma theory turned out to have been much more central to Bram Stoker's work than I had initially noticed. So that chaotic mess of a book told me a lot about how people were thinking about contagion, how people were thinking about evil, how they were thinking about what threats were coming for Victorian England.

And from that kind of textual nexus, I moved both backward in time and then forward in time. So I think we're going to talk about some of the non-literary or paraliterary texts that I also read in the book. But the big four chapters on literary texts are on Dracula. And then I backed up to read, it's actually not backed up chronologically, but I read Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, which has, you know, it's largely read as a kind of adventure story, but it also has a subplot about the Indian uprising or the first war of independence, which is often called the Indian Mutiny of 1857, that links the mutiny to acts of contagion or plague.

And then I have a chapter on Albert Camus' famous plague novel, The Plague, and finally a chapter on a bunch of Salman Rushley books. Focus primarily on the Satanic verses on Shalimar the clown, but with a section in that chapter also on Rushdie's memoir. So those are the kind of four literary pillars of the book. Yeah, and we'll definitely get into some of those throughout this conversation, particularly I'm interested in Dracula and the plague personally, but we'll get there when we get there.

I want to talk about this first, because you've talked about this in other interviews about, you know, being sort of shocked or surprised in some ways while researching the archives and diary entries and journalist articles around British imperialism in India in particular. And the first part of part one of this book really focuses on that. I was hoping you could dive a little deeper into what you found surprising, what you sort of explored and unveiled, and how British colonialism in India

plays into the larger themes of your work. Totally. This is such a strange pleasure to talk about. But the surprises that you're referring to largely center around like feeling moved by early 19th century science, it's something that I, it's something that over the last couple of months has come into much sharper focus for me. I guess I kind of approach that material with the sense that, you know, here's this enormous machinery. There are amazing historians who since the late 1970s have been thinking about

how all these forms of knowledge that we think of as being sort of neutral or anodyne like the creation of encyclopedias or I think we're kind of overthinking that anthropology ever did anything good in its first 100 years. But this big knowledge making enterprise, like I just thought of it as like a massive monolithic, basically evil undertaking. And I continue to think that's true, but the surprises in the archive, I have started to think of as being much more like what it feels like today to live in the world's worst empire. I was raised and I continue to reside in the United States. And just like, I think, people who were parts of or cogs in the machinery of the British Empire, there are many of us here who object to the principles and policies of our government. So in that 19th century archive, I saw a lot of scientists railing against the common sense of the empire, trying their best to protect people, trying their best to understand why Indians and British people were getting sick from.

A lot of the 19th century research in my book centers around cholera because cholera was the disease that brought into being the discipline of epidemiology as a kind of formalized study. But it's easy to create villains out of historical figures. And being in the archive shows you a lot of subtlety, not that I come away from it thinking anything better or nicer, kinder about the entire project of British imperialism. But recognizing those dissenters, even if they weren't what we would call explicitly revolutionary, was kind of a shock for me. I also just discovered about myself as a researcher that I love to read old and wrong science. I find it incredibly amusing and motivating and oftentimes like stunningly written. Yeah, absolutely. And there is this sort of, you know, the humanizing of the situation for better or worse, you know, when you go into those archives.

And as you've talked about, it's incredibly interesting. And this interview will reflect the sort of. of thing you do in the work, which is this jumping around in space and time to do these different points of analyses. And so in chapter one entitled Great Games, you discuss the narrative around the capture of bin Laden and the use of a public health campaign as cover for the search for him. I don't know if many people know about this public health campaign and this covert sort of operation surrounding it, but it is very, very interesting. I was hoping that you could discuss this and some of the connections and arguments you draw on in this chapter more broadly.

So I am super, super grateful to two reporters, Matthew Aiken's, who was reporting for, I think, GQ at the time, and Mark Massetti, who's at the New York Times for, I mean, I leaned really heavily on their reporting. This reporting started in 2009, 2010, prior to the assassination of bin Laden. But basically, both of those journalists. broke the story of how the CIA was using a doctor, a local Pakistani doctor, Shikilafridi, to launch a hepatitis B vaccination campaign in and around Bashar and Abidabad. And Abidabad is the town where bin Laden was actually found. But the purpose of the CIA vaccination campaign was to collect blood samples from which DNA could be extracted to become a point of triangulation or comparison to the DNA of bin Laden's sister. who had died at the Mass General Hospital in Boston a couple of years before,

you kind of can't invent a more nefarious and misled and misleading representation of how deeply cruel the United States government has been and how the war on terror transformed under Obama from something that looked under Bush, like a much more kind of chauvinistic, red, white, and blue. I'm going to wear, you know, fatigues on a,

on a airliner and I'm going to, you know, act like a GI Joe to something much more cool and dispassionate under the Obama administration, which involved a lot more intelligent, ramping up of intelligence, and then these kind of scientific or pseudoscientific schemes to collect intelligence. As you could probably imagine, the fallout after the capture of bin Laden in 2011, the killing of bin Laden in 2011 was pretty intense and severe. First of all, dozens of children, maybe hundreds of children, we're not really sure yet, were left only partially vaccinated against hepatitis B because in fact the vaccination was never the point. But much more importantly, polio, which had been completely eradicated from Pakistan or nearly completely

eradicated from Pakistan, is now on the rise again. Over the last 10 years, people in Pakistan have become increasingly suspicious of vaccination campaigns and public health workers for very good reason. So there were a rash of attacks on public health workers that had nothing to do with the CIA campaign, suspicion and distrust in the entire system has been rampant, and polio is endemic in the region again. So the public health consequences are immediate and extremely, extremely sinister. I read that event in concert with the spy games that are described in Kipling's novel Kim. So you mentioned earlier that the book does a fair amount of jumping around in time and space.

But I wanted to get out like, what's the blueprint for this kind of behavior? How does spycraft from the 19th century in the northern regions of Pakistan, the same exact locations where the bin Laden operation took place? How does that older spycraft kind of influence and even make possible, even blueprint what is what is reached for in terms of military strategy in the 21st, century. So that's kind of what I'm up to in that chapter. And some of the documents were declassified during the writing of the book. So I was able to say a little bit more about the doctor's involvement in this operation than I had been able to say when I started drafting. But in the end, there's still a lot we don't know about how that all went down. Yeah, definitely. On our sister podcast, Gorilla History, we have an episode that we've unlocked publicly on a couple instances of

vaccine flubs or the covert use of public health campaigns in this way by institutions like the CIA, the U.S. government, et cetera, how it undermines public health campaigns in the global South, how it leads to destabilization, detrust, it literally hurts children. It's just really the depths of imperial cruelty have no end. And with the election of Obama, you know, the Bush years were the chauvinist right getting on board with U.S. imperialism. I mean, no connection between 9-11 and Iraq whatsoever, but here we are invading Iraq only a year or two after the events of 9-11. And the Bush years, the political right, 100% on board. But what Obama did was come in and get the liberals who were, you know, suspicious rightfully of Bush and the forces that he

marshaled, got them on board with U.S. imperialism, more or less, expanded. dramatically drone warfare. And I think we're seeing another iteration of that with Biden, where Biden is trying to present himself as this radical divergence from Trump, in some ways on the domestic front, at least he is, while in other ways ratcheting up imperial aggression abroad. And after years of Russia gate and anti-Russia stuff on the liberal side and anti-Chinese stuff all over the political spectrum,

we're seeing how the geopolitical rivals of U.S. empire are sort of dehumanized and targeted on the liberal and conservative sides of the political spectrum to build this bipartisan consensus of imperialism, which ravages the globe. That's right. And I do want to circle back to the point you started with, which is the conscription of these imperial stories into a liberal agenda, which is so much in keeping with the 19th century. phenomenon that is called by scholars of this period imperial care. Imperial care should make you shudder in your boots. The idea that the empire is coming to build schools or railways or save you, that rhetorical trick has worked for 200 years. I was watching this morning a clip of Biden from 1986 talking about how if Israel didn't exist for the U.S. to support, the U.S. would have to invent Israel in order to have a military foothold in the Middle East. So the kind of smoothing over, I even, I even think of it almost as like the Instagram, like social justice, fake social

justice warrior, smoothing over of Biden's rhetoric. If you do the research, it doesn't hide the same war hawkery that has been in action since he was in Congress in the mid-80s. Yeah, perfectly said. And of course, Biden just came out yesterday with a statement quote-unquote on the Israeli-Palestine conflict and didn't mention Palestine once, didn't mention Palestinians or the multiple dozens of children and innocent civilians being slaughtered and just simply said that Israel has a right to defend itself. So Biden has not changed at all, particularly on that front, and we should keep that in mind. Let's go ahead and move forward, and I want to sort of circle back to something you already

put on the table, which is Dracula by Brahms. Stoker. And in your chapter, circulatory logic, you examine that work as colonial literature and fascinatingly, it's revival, along with a slew of popular culture works on vampires in general after 9-11. And I was hoping that you could sort of walk us through some of the main points of that chapter, and particularly what's behind this growth and the interest in vampires in that post-9-11 period in American and Western media. Yeah. It's such a... a great question. I have to say in some senses, I still don't know. What I was trying to do,

I was trying to do a couple of things in that chapter. One, as you say, was to figure out, like, why all of a sudden are we seeing this figure, this ancient figure, which in fact doesn't start with Stoker. In the English literary tradition, it starts much earlier in the romantic period in the early 19th century with Sheridan LaFanue and Byron, who was like part of Keith's and Shelley's circle. This is getting into some nerds. British lit history. But so first of all, there was the question, why does the vampire come back in 1897 when Dracula was written?

And what's different about the 1897 vampire in Bram Stoker's hands? And why is that the one that's stuck? Because we don't really think about Sheridan LaFanoe or Byron when we think about the vampire and those were like the guys for a long time. We really go back to Dracula. And Dracula is the one that got made into, you know, hundreds of movies and TV shows, and he's the, yeah, he's like the indelible figure of the vampire. And my argument in this chapter is that it's for a couple of reasons. One is that

he's probably the most recognizably oriental of the vampire figures because he comes from Turkish or Ottoman blood-soaked soil. So there's this really interesting what's called autokinous theory, meaning that the character himself seems to emerge from the very place, like his personality has a lot to do with literally dirt beneath him. And it's kind of interesting in Dracula because he's his mode of conveyances in boxes of dirt. There's all this interesting stuff about graves that move from place to place. But so what I came to think was that Dracula was a super good expression for, let's say, dozens of the anxieties of late empire. And, and And so I wanted to sort of add to the conversation what I think of the, of the novels Orientalism, and how that intersects with its other concerns like a fear of homosexuality, a fear of the Semitic, a fear of the liquidity of money, a fear of immigration, just your good old garden variety, xenophobia.

There's a lot of stuff in there, and there's a ton of scholarship about how this novel, you know, just became a kind of face. favorite because you could almost slot in anything you were scared of and it would still sort of work on you. It's that flexibility that I think makes this Dracula, I mean, this vampire story so durable because kind of every generation of readers can find in it what they are at that moment afraid of. So I wanted to think both about that kind of critical flexibility or that allegorical flexibility and why everybody loves it all the time every couple of decades. But then I also wanted to ask like I did about the epidemic of terror, is there something specific about why this came back after 2001? And that specific kernel is how the novel negotiates

two things. One, the interface between Europe and the Orient. So there's all this interesting stuff about the sweet waters of Europe and the sweet waters of Asia and Constantinople stands as this sort of scenic backdrop to the relationship between the Carpathians and what was formerly Turkish land or land under the sign of the crescent. And then the second reason why I think Dracula has endured as much as it has is because unlike those earlier romantic tales of the vampires, it's really a bureaucratic document. The novel is obsessed with typewriters and mimeographs and recording apparatuses and notes and documentary stuff. So it's a problem-solving novel. On top of being a vampire novel, it's really about the mystery of information. And I think

that in the earliest of the war on terror, because there was such a dearth of information and so much was classified and so much was happening behind the doors of black sites and closed torture chambers and interrogation sites, that desire and that hunger for a novel that seeks to domesticate something really scary through reams and reams of information. I think we were really in search of that as a culture, which is why I think that novel in particular comes back in the early years of the millennium. Yeah, fascinating. Do you have any thoughts on they sort of of contagious element of a vampire bite. I know sometimes that's dropped in retellings of vampire stories. Like in the Twilight series, it was a huge part, you know, to turn, I forget the character's

names, but to turn the protagonist into a vampire through the bite. Do you have any thoughts on that and the role that plays here? Yeah. So I'll keep this brief, but my main thoughts come from earlier scholars who, from whom I learned that Stoker had written another short story for children, really creepy. I mean, the children's literature of the Victorian period was very odd. He had written a short story for children called The Invisible Giant. And there was this huge debate in the 19th century about whether cholera especially, but like lots of diseases traveled by what were called miasmas or like disgusting air or whether they were contagious, meaning co-touch, like the derivation of the word contagious literally means like touching together.

So we've thought a lot about this over the last 12 months, 13 months. We wouldn't think of these things as being so diametrically opposed at this point. Like COVID is something that spreads through droplets, which means it literally is in the air. But it's also not emanating as they believed in the 19th century from like a stinky sewer and the air itself was poison. But in this earlier story that Stoker wrote called The Invisible Giant, he was like trying out myasma theory. And so the monster in that book is like literally a mist or a fog that hangs over a town and kills everyone. Again, amazing content for children. And then that, so that story was written about 15 years before he, like maybe 10 years before he started drafting Dracula.

His brother was a surgeon general of Ireland. And his mother had been a nurse during the cholera outbreak in Sligo in 1832. So he had like medical information. And he was often pumping his mom and his brother for for details about this. We had this kind of interest in science. The way that contagion works in the novel Dracula is not quite as spectacular as it is in the invisible giant. It doesn't kill everybody all at once. I've actually been thinking about this a little bit more in terms of evolutionary epidemiology.

And I won't, I won't bore you with the details about it. about that, but basically, in order for the character, Dracula, to continue existing in the novel, the bite of vampirism can't kill people, and it can't kill people super obviously, because then there would be no mystery for the novel to solve. So it's a really intimate form of contagion, and it only happens to a couple of the characters in the book. I think this is really interesting because there is a kind of different ethos or vibe when we think about a horror story that doesn't like wipe out a whole population. Like it's not an apocalypse story. It's not a catastrophe story. It's like the deeply intimate spaces of the house or the home. It's totally

sexual. There's one point at which the character, Dracula, is like force feeding, almost like he's breastfeeding. One of the female characters in the book, the status of whether blood is clean or unclean is something that the characters talk about a lot. So I think essentially what that novel is doing with the concept of contagion is thinking about how it can operate really invisibly and in these tiny ways that we might not perceive initially as being dangerous, if that helps and helps to make sense of the novel a bit. Absolutely. I find that to be incredibly fascinating. And of course, there's, like you just mentioned at the end there, the idea of clean blood and dirty or infected blood.

and the intimacy of having to nestle your face into the neck of somebody else to pass on the bite, as it were. Yeah, it's very interesting point. Well, I should mention this last little moment, too, in the Dracula chapter because it's something that sort of kept me going through the writing that after 9-11, I mean, like that very day in New York, there was this amazing mobilization of Americans who wanted to give blood. like there was this super fascinating kind of collective sense that like oh my god we have to like open our veins for the nation so that kind of iconography of blood and nation and belonging and gift economy was like super in the air anyway in those few days after 9-11 so it made me want to know more about how how the goodness or badness or contagion of blood was working in earlier moments in history yeah great great point and The thing about miasma theory that always interested me is, like, humans are so close, you know, like, it's the smells coming off of this rotting putrid sewer or the dead body. Like, it's something in the air. It's like, we don't have germ theory quite yet. We don't fully understand the mechanisms of contagion, but like, like children trying to figure something out, we're getting closer and closer. I've always found that to be an interesting little element of human evolution and the evolution of science. It's totally fascinating. I benefit from this every day because I live in a, in a, in a, an apartment building that was created as a school in the 1890s. And this was kind of the high point of contagion and myasma theory in New York City.

And the commissioner of schools fancied himself a bit of a designer. So if you look around New York, there are all these late 19th century school buildings. Some of them are still schools. Some of them are not. But we have 14 foot ceilings at enormous windows because children need air and light. According to that moment's science. Yeah, very, very interesting. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move on. And the next one is based on Albert Camus, The Plague. And I remember reading and really enjoying at the time the plague when I was about 20 years old, though at that time I had limited knowledge of the historical context that he was writing in. Just a well-written, interesting book. And I know that since COVID, there's been like a wave of renewed interest during the pandemic of people going back and rereading that book because it seems so timely and interesting. And it is, you know, if I remember correctly,

a really interesting, great book, and you spend some time in your book analyzing it in the context of the broader Algerian struggle against French colonialism. And I don't want to narrow this question down too much. I'll leave it open-ended. I just wanted you to sort of talk about some of those elements and the book itself. I love that you ask the question this way. So a few things come to mind immediately. Like, I feel like everybody reads Camus when they're 20 and finds them to be so deep and so serious and so existence. And then, of course, when the plague was becoming a bestseller again, you know, in March of 2020, I was like, oh, my God, this is horrible. Like, why is this happening again?

And I do, in some ways, I really hope that for people whose interest is peaked and they did go back to Camus, that they'll also read my chapter. Because that novel, you know, it's gotten away with being a novel about human existence. and French thought for a very long time. But what is really skipped over, not just in the scholarship, but also in public kind of conversations about what the plague is about, is how the allegories, historical allegories he was drawing from, bump up against each other. So Kamu was involved in the French resistance against the Nazi occupation. He ran a newspaper called Combat, which was, you know, really an important document of resistance and active. Like, I want to be clear. It wasn't some armchair like I'm hanging out and theorizing about the resistance.

He was like in the resistance. He was also an Algerian-born Frenchman. And he spent much of his adult life, I mean, his whole childhood in Algeria and much of his adult life traveling back and forth between Algeria and France. And the novel is set in Oran, which is a port city in Algeria. And the status of Arabs in that French city is a minor point in the novel, but it's the one that I focus on. So where are the Arabs in this quarantined city that has been struck by plague, literally black plague, bubonic plague? And what can we know about Camus' kind of political work and political leanings by reading the absences in the novel, the plague. And what I wind up thinking in the end, and I delved really

deep into these kind of like literary world fights of the 1950s when after Kim who had published this book and he broke with Sartre over Algerian independence. And he was kind of ousted from the French left for not being enough of a communist, for not being enough of an anti-imperialist. He said that horrifying thing at the Nobel acceptance speech preview or whatever that, you know, I'm on the side of freedom, but if freedom is going to be a bomb and my mother is on that bus, I'm on the side of my mother. So he got a really terrible reputation in the 40s and 50s, and he got in this fight with a French writer named Roland Bart, who basically said, like, stop lying. Your allegory is not about the French resistance. The plague is not. a figure for the Nazi occupation. This is actually about something else. And Bart doesn't go so far as to say it's about Camus terror

of Algerian independence movements, but that's what I'm saying in my chapter about this book. So I think the plague he's working out allegorically and metaphorically is really this rising nationalism in the 1940s in Algeria. And the way that I kind of ground that in evidence is by looking at how Arabs are absented from the story and how rats and Arabs are connected with the idea of contagion in the story. So there's a way of reading it if you're not paying attention

where you can be like, this just came from nowhere. But if you're paying attention to what he was writing about Algeria at the time, and you're paying attention to the mechanisms of contagion in this book, you can see pretty clearly that it's coming from a space where rodents and Arab human beings are being sort of conflated for each other. So, yeah, I would say it's a worthwhile reread if people remember loving Camus, but I also wanted to take my own, like, youthful reading of his writing a bit to task

and see if it held up. And in some ways, it really doesn't. Yeah, I'll have to take mine to task as well. I'll have to reread that book with that analysis in mind because, yeah, I was ignorant of that entire context, but that makes a lot of sense from what I remember. And for anybody interested in the sort of political milieu and some of these debates that were happening at that time, we have done an episode in the past entitled Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and existentialism for people who are interested in learning more about that history and some of those political and philosophical disputes. I'll link to that in the show notes. But yeah, very, very interesting.

I'll definitely have to go back and reread that book with that in mind. I'm going to also like come to your youthful defense and say the book is designed not to let you see that. So you know, you weren't a bad reader. Like it's it's tricky that way. Well, thank you for giving me an out. I appreciate that. Well, let's go ahead and move on. And a huge theme of this book is obviously Islamophobia.

And particularly you focus on its relevance in the post 9-11 so-called war on terror. You also analyze the 9-11 commission report, which I found incredibly illuminate. And moreover, Islamophobia in the last two decades has really been and continues to be a pillar of far right-wing ideology and behind a lot of the fascist violence that we've seen in the last several years. Can you discuss some of these themes and connections and your analysis of Islamophobia more broadly? Yes. I just really feel so grateful to have stepped into a scholarly and analytic tradition where a lot of people have done amazing. work on the question of Islamophobia, I would say beginning with with Saeed's orientalism. The way that xenophobia and othering works in imperial discourse and imperial formations is sneaky and it's complicated. Sometimes it takes the form of obsessive interest and love.

I think that's what I would call the kind of light orientalism where you see, you know, like just a lot of interest in the Middle East. It doesn't immediately appear to be hateful. It doesn't immediately appear to be about conquest. But knowledge has always been an avenue for conquest. There are, as we were discussing earlier, like much more hot-blooded versions of Islamophobia, and there are some great scholars who have done work on that and who I really learned a lot from. I'm thinking of a legal scholar Khalid Bedouin, whose book on Islamophobia, I think, is really useful.

because there was such a strong recognition of the racism against Muslims, against Arabs, against terrorists, and I say those three words kind of in triptych because they were often used interchangeably by by leaders in the West, British leaders, French leaders, obviously our elected officials in the U.S., those more hot-blooded hateful forms seemed, I don't, let me. just say, like, other people were covering them. Other people were taking care of them. It doesn't mean that they stopped, but there were some amazing analysts whose work I was building on. What I wanted to do in epidemic empire was see about what we were talking about earlier as the kind of more

rational, cool-headed forms that Islamophobia might take, the modes in which it becomes just a matter of science or just a matter of study or just a matter of statistics, as if statistics and science and study, you know, can be in any way free from bias. I've said in the book and a couple of times in interviews that I think Islamophobia has shaped, been the most consistent driver and shaper of U.S. foreign policy over the last 20 years, while anti-blackness has been the most consistent driver of domestic policy. And I think I stand by that. To understand Islamophobia, I think is to have a really strong sense of how American racism has been built on imperial racism, French and British, to some extent Dutch. So what expressions does the phobia take?

Sometimes it's a cab driver who gets bludgeoned for wearing a turban. Sometimes it's a shooting. Sometimes it's drone warfare. I wanted to know what happens when it wears the costume of science, when it wears the costume of rational data analysis. So I just hope the book is a contribution in that way to a big and burgeoning and largely really great study of Islamophobia. I also want to shout out the book by Mahmoud Mahmoud Mahmdani called Bad Muslim, Good Muslim, or maybe it's the reverse from which I learned a lot about just the concept

of the Muslim in contemporary political discourse. Yeah. You know, one element of this that I've talked about a few times on the show and that this discussion reminds me of you're talking about dressing up Islamophobia in the costume of science or giving it this sheen of objectivity. And I think the ideological role played by the new atheists in that post-9-11 early aught period was doing exactly this.

They were presenting ostensibly a critique of religious faith broadly, but with a very specific and pronounced focus on Islam itself. And this was this sort of scientific, secular, not rooted in theological dispute approach to demonizing and dehumanizing an entire people, while also, importantly, obscuring the history of imperialism and colonialism that led to an act. act like 9-11. I mean, if you read bin Laden's justifications for orchestrating 9-11, he's very clear it's in response to imperial aggression in Lebanon and countless other areas around West Asia and the Middle East. And that's completely wrinkled out of the analysis and the new atheist presented as terrorism more broadly as coming from the inherent ideas theologically that are in in Islam. And so it's this idealist approach that gives Islamophobia and U.S. imperialism at the time a scientific and secular justification. And I think that fits

really well within your broader analysis here. Yeah. And it's it's, you know, I don't want to oversimplify things, but it's very nearly exactly the justification that was made for blaming Muslim fanatics for the 1857 uprising in India, that these are not reasonable people. They've been caught up by some kind of religious fanaticism or some religious feeling there beyond logic. One of the essays that I build on in the book is by Ranajit Guha, who talks about how peasant insurgency and insurrections under colonial governance were often likened to natural disasters like earthquakes or fires. And he also puts plagues in that category. And I think he's exactly right in that way. To call something a contagious fanaticism is also to say, you're not

rational. I'm the rational one. I'm the one who can analyze this from a, from an objective perspective, religious feeling is akin to like an earthquake or a rogue wave. So I mean, And that's also to say, like, I'm interested in the book, and readers will see if you're eager to, you know, watch Rushley get taken down a peg. Readers will see that I'm also interested in how these ideas circulate on the so-called left or the putative, like, liberal side of the discourses. Do you want to touch on, Rushdie, really quick before we move on? I know there's a lot to say there, but anything you want to say before we move on to, like, talking about more recent events? Oh, my gosh, tends to say. I think what I'll limit myself to is that I hope the chapter expresses my like deep admiration for his early work.

I think the satanic verses gives us a super interesting paradigm for how illness and disease can actually affiliate communities around things like disability and vulnerability. It's the later works where he has much more of a political and public platform that you see a kind of growing Islamophobia taking the form of plague narratives or. epidemic narratives in his work. I don't, you know, I'm not interested in like coming after any particular person, but because Rushdie stood for such a long time for the successes of a Muslim diasporic subject who joined the ranks of the World Republic of Letters, it does behoove us to see what ideas are being promulgated by the, I mean, let me also say like those books got passed around by pat themselves on the back sorts of Warhawk liberals. And so we can't ignore the influence of literary ideas on literal policy.

Yeah, absolutely. And there's also a close connection during the Iraq War, early days of the Iraq War between Salman Rushdie and figures like Christopher Hitchens, who was, of course, a big part of the new atheist movement. They're like besties. Yeah, it was gross. Exactly. So let's go ahead and move on to, and before I guess we move on to more current events, I just want to say that, like, you know, as with so many interviews of this type,

There's just no way to cover all the chapters or all the themes that you explore in the book. So I really encourage people to go out and get this book, support a wonderful author and thinker and learn a lot that is radically applicable to what's happening around the world right now. And let's get into a little bit of that. So, you know, this book was written right before the COVID-19 pandemic and was being prepared for publishing, if I'm not mistaken, just as the lockdowns went into effect. And over the last year, we've seen, you know, huge swaths of Americans, you know, call it a hoax, feed into orientalist and xenophobic conspiracy theories about China purposefully unleashing the virus on the world. We're currently seeing a sort of vaccine imperialism in which countries in the Imperial Corps have excesses of vaccines, while the global South has virtually nothing, all the while huge pharmaceutical companies are sort of weaponizing their patents to protect their profit. over human life. There's also this interesting development on the victims of communism side where they are adding every death by COVID-19 to the list of deaths caused by communism because the virus

came out of China. So there's a lot of rhetoric and ideology and ramping up and manufacturing consent for the new Cold War going on around this pandemic. And of course, that's rooted a lot and racism, Orientalism, imperialism, et cetera. So just wondering broadly, like, how does all of this sort of dovetail with your work? And what have you learned from this pandemic generally? I did not know that about the victims of communism count. That is unbelievable. I'm going to be thinking about that a lot.

What have I learned? I mean, I guess I want to say that there's been a sort of uneasy feeling amongst historians of empire and the sort of difficulty of finding oneself in a sort of Cassandra-esque space where you're like, yeah, well, I'm not surprised by any of this. And I think, you know, being not surprised is a certain kind of flex and I'm trying really hard to keep myself, you know, approaching the news every day with the disposition of both responsibility and astonishment. But truly, I think the surprises have been in the extent to which communities have come together. I mean, New York was hit really fast, really hard right at the beginning and watching mutual aid networks

that have sort of been in effect and have been actually grown out of like decades-long projects sponsored by immigrant communities, the Black Panthers, right? Like those ways of turning away from the state have moved me and impressed me and in some senses surprised me with their durability in the face of what looks ever more like the inescapability. or imminence of global capital after the putative end of the Cold War. So that's what I would say as far as surprises are concerned. I wrote an article while I was drafting the book about a diplomatic standoff or kind of conflict between the then Indonesian Minister of Health, Siti Fidelasupari, who during the first

avian out or maybe the second avian outbreak in 2006 refused to supply while. type viral samples from her population. So just to break that down a little bit, there was a bird flu, novel bird flu outbreak in 2005, 2006. And the Global Influenza Surveillance Network, which works with the WHO and the UN to create global flu vaccines, was like, okay, so you have this new strain, give it to us. So we can code it and make a vaccine.

And the Minister of Health was like, no. That's my sovereign property. Like that belongs to Indonesia. What you're going to do is take this virus and sequence it and create a vaccine, which we then cannot afford. And she was absolutely raked over the coals in the press. Lori Garrett, who wrote a book called The Coming Plague, and then like, whatever, I've been like coming for this lady forever.

She's like a kind of popular science journalist, and she was on the news all the time when COVID started because she did, in fact, write a lot about how a virus like this was probably going to take out a large portion of the human population, especially as globalization accelerated. So she and Richard Holbrook, who used to be special envoy to Afghanistan, they famously wrote a Washington Post op-ed that called what she was doing viral sovereignty, like doubling down on this crazy Islamophobia that essentially posited that in Islamic spaces, politicians, acted insane. They were going to kill the rest of humanity by not giving over their their sovereign bio property and that the virus really was who was in charge in a place like

Indonesia. There were all these comparisons between Indonesia as a terrorist haven and how it was going to become a bird flu haven, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the stuff about vaccine sovereignty, the stuff about manufacture, the stuff about intellectual, property, the way that, I mean, the moving moment last week when the U.S. decided to also agree to waive the TRIPS agreement so that at least intellectual property about vaccines could be shared. Like, all of this stuff I've been sort of watching for the last 10 years or so. And I think what we've seen in terms of who's been hit hardest by this, I won't bore listeners of this podcast who probably simply agree with me, like it is the, it shows the fault lines of

our racism. It shows the way that the history of xenophobia and terror of others is being reanimated, updated, re-exploited. And it's, it's really sickening. I think the last thing I'll say on this is just that you mentioned the xenophobia. Early in the virus, there has also all of the ways in which big imperial governments have blamed others. There was also an extreme focus in BJP, India, in the early days, on what they were calling Corona jihad. So the idea that Muslims in India were actually the vector of coronavirus and that it was being launched as a kind of attack on the Hindu population, what's happening now in

India is just absolutely devastating. and the loss of life, it's not just connected to government neglect. It's also connected to a vast propagandist approach to dividing the population and sowing hatred between Hindus and Muslims. Yeah. Yeah, I did not know that it was used in that way in India, but it certainly fits with what's happening more broadly, the rise of Hindu nationalism and Islamophobia and the leader of Modi, which is, you know, India's version of Bolsonaro, which is Brazil's version of Trump.

I mean, you know, the countries, the big, big countries with huge populations that have been hardest hit all have these rabid nationalist, xenophobic, often Islamophobic movements that are centered in their country and have, in some sense, political power for a big portion of the pandemic had political power. So, you know, that can't be separated from this overall context. And, you know, the history of vaccines more broadly, which I do want to get into on a separate show maybe in the future, because I think there's a lot here to talk about. History of vaccines and intellectual patents when it comes to vaccines is a history of, like, Western imperial capitalism, brutalizing unnecessarily the global South in the name of profit and geopolitical control. So this is just another chapter in a long and horrifying book. I haven't checked the numbers recently, but there were those early weeks.

weeks where there was almost like those, you know, loving video reels of the Pfizer factory, boxing up doses and people cheering and getting so excited. I think at this point, Pfizer is said to, is slated to make $360 billion in profit just off of the COVID vaccine. Like hailing, hailing that company as some kind of public servant, Mother Teresa, hero, it just makes my stomach drop. It's absurd. And, and the argument. behind the keeping the patents behind lock and key is like oh companies like Pfizer they took the economic risk to to make the vaccine and so they deserve to profit from it but the truth is

as is so often the case with vaccines more broadly but especially in this case taxpayer money by the billions and billions were funneled into these pharmaceutical companies guaranteed money too even if the vaccines didn't work it was this huge public investment in the production of these vaccines And so the argument from right-wingers or free marketeers that the risk was taken entirely by these corporations and therefore they deserve all the profit is not only inhumane, but it's just economically incorrect. That's exactly right. And this is maybe just a side point that's something that's interesting to me. But that whole narrative rests on, we didn't talk about this much in terms of Camus novel, but the history of literature and film has long had this like Roman. romantic portrait of the lonely scientist working to save humanity.

And everything about that notion that they've put all the risk in when in fact it's taxpayer money, there's no kindly lonely scientist in a lab whose name is Pfizer. Like there are many people who are doing this work and who really do care and who are sequencing MRNA vaccines. But there's a kind of iconography around the selflessness of medicine that almost disables critical approaches or critiques, critical critiques. Anyway, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, no, great, great point.

And of course, we could also talk about how the basic science that these vaccines are premised on is publicly funded and generations of scientists have contributed to it, not to mention generations of workers and lab techs and the people who build the buildings in which this happens. So if you want to take that argument to its fullest extent, everything is a collective project. but you know social production individual appropriation that's the name of the game in capitalism it is um right now as we are speaking the israeli government is bombarding palestinians with airstrikes slaughtering innocent civilians and children in the process at the same time you know mob

violence is breaking out all over the country and there are some talks about a possible ground invasion of Gaza by the idf i'm not exactly sure i haven't followed up on if that's for sure happening or not But this conflict revolves around themes that you explore in your book, like settler colonialism, Islamophobia, and rhetoric about terrorism to demonize Hamas and the Palestinians. So again, open-ended question to sort of what are your thoughts on what's happening and in maybe what ways can your book or your work help illuminate elements of this conflict? So I think that as of this morning, the ground invasion in Raza has actually commenced and the death toll the last I checked it. It was 119, with 40% being women and children. As you mentioned earlier, the world leaders, including Biden, have not even uttered the word Palestine.

Israel's right to defend itself, I just want to make the line very clear, is an extension of imperial self-protection that has taken the form of quarantines, of sanitary borders, of insisting on ever more encroaching settlements in order to quote unquote survive when in fact what is happening

is that territory land and settlements and villages are being dispossessed. People are being dispossessed. Raza is understood rightly to be an open air prison. I just want to emphasize in talking about this today that these airstrikes are taking place in a region where there is nowhere else to go. There is no escape.

The funding, I mean, the Israeli army, which represents a nation about, I think I saw in 2018, about the population of Amsterdam, has one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. There is no symmetry on the other side. And so when world leaders talk about the laws of war or classical warfare or the ethics of bellicosity, they're moving the logic of the discussion out of imperial occupation and into a fantasy that we're talking about to recognize states simply disagreeing with each other and each should be allowed to defend themselves. There is no defense on the Palestinian side. These are occupied territories that are continually encroached upon and the violence is gutting.

I don't know how much you've been able to manage to look at what's happening, but it's not just rockets and airstrikes, it's mobs of angry right-wing Israelis moving into Arab neighborhoods in Sheikh Jura, pulling people out of cars, bludgeoning them until they can't walk. I mean, the hatred and the national chauvinism is acute in a way that we don't see in many other zones of conflict in the 21st century. So I don't know that the book has a lot to offer in terms of commentary on Palestine. I mean, I kind of studiously avoided writing about Palestine in this book because the imperial formation of Israel is so very different technically than the 19th century formations. But it's worth saying that the moment of Israel's formation in 1948 was

also the beginning of a vast wave of decolonization. So Pakistan and India became independent in 1947, all three of these events, and then you see a kind of domino effect after that, all three of these events are direct outcomes of the Second World War. So I think it's important to consider the legacy of the Holocaust, the legacy of world space and a world public as being very much with us today. It's odd to say it this way, but if we think about 1947 and 1948, I think the imperial parameters of this conflict become much, much clearer. Each day I sort of absorb or learn a little bit differently. I guess today I'm really moved by looking at the maps over time of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and in Gaza, the way that East Jerusalem

was requisitioned by the Trump administration in a weird, bizarre, kingly bid to like Prince Jared Kushner. I mean, it was so strange, but the idea that the U.S. could move the Israeli capital to Jerusalem, we're just seeing the fallout of that right now with people being removed from their homes and attacked and further displaced. And others know so much more about this than I do. So let me not belabor the point. But I just, maybe I hope that something in the book is useful for thinking about this conflict, but much, much more importantly, I hope that this conversation is just an opening for others who know more about Palestine than I do to get in touch and let us all who are talking today and listening today know what it is that we

can do to help, not just in sending money, although I think that's really important in putting pressure on our elected officials and so forth, protests in the streets. But I think also in terms of knowledge-making and scholarship, syllabus, construction, curricular changes. These, to really change the conversation is a deep and long process. And I want to be a part of it, and I hope that I am. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. And, you know, there's so much to say. There are lots of Palestinian voices that are emerging on social media. And, you know, if you want to really know what's happening, the voices on the ground are some of the best to tap into. There's this documentary that came out last year from Abby Martin and the Empire Files

called Gaza Fights for Freedom with a lot of on-the-ground investigative journalist videos and footage and interviews for people who want to learn more about that specific area and what's going on. And Abby Martin also released this sort of sickening video where she goes into the streets of Israel and just interviews random people, right? Random Israeli citizens and ask them, And what is to be done about, you know, Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims, etc. And just the on the ground every day Israeli rhetoric is genocidal. I mean, talks of purging them from our land, of eliminating them, of carpet bombing them, said with such casualness, it's just like taken for granted in common sense among at least large segments of the Israeli population.

I know that no group is a monolith, and there are plenty of Israeli Jews and Jews in the diaspora who stand with Palestine and against this violent settler colonial Zionism. But it really is a peak inside of the ideology of occupation and how it trickles down and comes out of the mouths of everyday regular people in such horrific ways. I do wonder, though, it's hard to really to know for sure. It almost feels, and maybe this is too hopeful on my part, that something has shifted in this conflict, in the optics of it, in the way that the world is responding. I mean, forever in American politics, both sides, Democrats and Republicans, 100% pro-Israel, all the media outlets were for it. And with the rise of social media, with the rise, I think, importantly, of video footage and camera phones coming out of places. like Gaza, showing the world the reality of the situation. You see mass protests across the world

in solidarity with Palestinian resistance. Maybe again, it's too hopeful, but do you get at all the sense that something is slowly shifting and changing in the sort of global perception of this conflict and where the blame really lies? You know, I do. I think that it, I do think it matters that common sense shifts. I don't feel that hopeful that what this is going to lead to is immediate. I mean, I really don't after watching some of the interviews with Israeli politicians this morning. But I don't feel hopeful that it's going to lead to an immediate policy reversal. The U.S. is standing in the way of the UN Security Council, even having a conversation about what's happening in Palestine. I mean, this is the nation I live in.

I'm a citizen of for three days, the U.S. has blocked a Security Council conversation. So, you know, what happens in terms of common sense amongst loving, caring people who care where injustice is happening in the world, I don't feel super hopeful that that trickles up fast or even in predictable ways. But when I started my work as a scholar, colonialism was kind of a funny term, imperialism. was kind of a funny term. Social justice was kind of a funny term. I mean, you could find pockets of people who knew what you were talking about, but it was largely understood as jargon.

It really gives me a lot of hope that, like, any kid on Twitter now knows what those terms mean. Like, it's part of being a person and being critical, being really critical, not just of heteropatriarchy or anti-blackness in the United States, but these bigger geopolitical forces, I don't know how sophisticated the understanding is, but it means a lot to me that those words are common parlance now, and they're not understood to be some mystifying egg-head-by,

far away in an ivory tower thing, but in fact, the stuff of our everyday conversations. I don't get too optimistic about scholarship in general, but I do want to say, like, those things, those theories that seem odd obscure and weird at one moment can change public opinion over time. That's a 20-year story, but I think it's a good one. Yeah. Incredibly well said. I largely agree with your overall take, both the short-term pessimism of the actual power dynamics and the sort of genuine optimism that springs from younger people coming up with broader social and political consciousness. And

And that could only be an asset to the forces of liberation and emancipation long term. So there is some hope for optimism. That social consciousness, I also just want to add, like, I think where I get a little bit scared is when it doesn't translate into anti-capitalist action. Like, that's what I'm hoping to see from this generation of students that I teach is that that instinct towards social justice really turns into a fire, an important and significant anti-capitalist movement. Absolutely.

Couldn't agree more. The book is Epidemic Empire, Colonialism, Contagent, and Terror. Thank you so much for coming on this show. It's been a fascinating conversation, fascinating work. We'd love to have you back any time to talk about anything. Before I let you go, though, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and your work online. Yes. So the book, Epidemic Empire, is available on the University of Chicago Press website, as well as wherever you buy books, support your local indie, please. bookshop.org. You can order it through. I'm on Twitter at at Anjali Fatima, A-N-J-U-L-I-F-A-T-I-M-A, and various other platforms. Instagram is the same. All of my rating is collected on my website, which is Anjali-Razacolb.com, but nobody has my name, so I'm easily Googlable. Absolutely. And I will link to all of that in the show notes so people can easily, easily find you. Thank you so much, Anjuli. It's really been a pleasure. Let's do it again sometime. Thanks, Solidarity, and I hope you stay safe, and I look forward to keeping on listening to the show. Don't you know, talking about a revolution sounds

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