Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health, and Pathogenic Novels - ENG00103H
Module summary
The reach and duration of the coronavirus pandemic initially took commentators by surprise. Certainly, sober warnings had come from China, other countries in East Asia, and the Middle East since the SARS and MERS outbreaks of 2002 and 2012, and ramping up when the world first encountered Covid-19 from December 2019. However, such harbingers were underestimated by many complacent and ethnocentric governments in the West, whose hubris was fuelled by racialized exceptionalism and ‘epidemiological neoliberalism’ (Demir n.p.). The rich countries of the US and UK proved particularly poor in their preparation for a pandemic caused by a novel pathogen. Covid brought much of the globe to a halt and, even today, as accustomed as we are to the so-called new normal, there is no doubt that the world has changed. Long-standing arguments from such thinkers as Ziauddin Sardar and Peter Frankopan about the emergence of a post-West world and the increasing irrelevance of Euro-America have only been strengthened by the recent health crisis.
More broadly, Covid’s metamorphoses have made inequalities congeal in ways that will be difficult to undo. Far from accomplishing at least some degree of social levelling, the coronacrisis encouraged fears about minoritized people, widening already vast socio-political chasms. Though we are not yet in a ‘postcoronial’ age, the virus has brought dramatic change very quickly, in a way that would previously have been unthinkable.
This module examines what I am calling ‘pathogenic novels’: literature resisting colonialism and its legacies and thinking through issues around race, class, and gender, while also exploring public health crises and unequal access to medical care. This term will be theorized and discussed at regular intervals with reference to the work of such thinkers as Frantz Fanon, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Judith Butler, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Rob Nixon.
In the module’s first half, we will examine writers who reflect on past health crises and anticipate the future. Dealing with poverty, public health, and protest, these novels of the 1918 flu, AIDS, Ebola, and ‘Shen Fever’ by Emma Donoghue, Phaswane Mpe, Amir Tag Elsir, and Ling Ma prefigure our current health crisis. In its second half, we consider new works by Rumaan Alam, Oana Aristide, Mohsin Hamid, and Hari Kunzru. Their fictional writing deals at least in part with the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and these tumultuous times. In these novels the authors imagine the globe during and after the coronavirus pandemic, and embark on a painful process of reworlding. Alam, Aristide, Hamid, and Kunzru write to inoculate against the diseases of racism, misinformation, anti-immigration bigotry, religious/ideological obscurantism, environmental degradation, and mental ill health.
Although very different in approach and tone, all the writers have fascinating things to say about race relations, disease, writing, art, and linguistic politics, making a defence of increasingly beleaguered commons across the world. The module will thus examine this littérature d’urgence, the writing of immediacy and emergency, through a postcolonial lens.
Elective Pre-Requisites
These pre-requisites only apply to students taking this module as an elective.
A in English Literature A-Level or equivalent qualification
Module will run
| Occurrence | Teaching period |
|---|---|
| A | Semester 1 2025-26 |
Module aims
The aim of this module is to introduce you to the medical humanities via important works of fiction and nonfiction anticipating or reflecting on the pandemic they have lived through. You will engage with how prose authors are working in a variety of genres to assess the impact of disease and global lockdowns on health and social justice, especially in the global south.
Module learning outcomes
On successful completion of the module, you should be able to:
- Demonstrate an advanced understanding of and engagement with writing of disease and quarantine;
- Demonstrate an advanced understanding of and engagement with some of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ most devastating diseases and pandemics;
- Evaluate key debates within the relevant critical fields dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and its aftermath;
- Produce independent arguments and ideas which demonstrate an advanced proficiency in critical thinking, research, and writing skills.
Indicative assessment
| Task | % of module mark |
|---|---|
| Essay/coursework | 100 |
Special assessment rules
None
Additional assessment information
Throughout the module, you will have the opportunity to pitch, road-test, and develop essay ideas. Feedback will be integrated into your seminars or the ‘third hour’ (i.e. the lecture or workshop).
You will submit your summative essay via the VLE during the revision and assessment weeks at the end of the teaching semester (weeks 13-15). Feedback on your summative essay will be uploaded to e:Vision to meet the University’s marking deadlines
Indicative reassessment
| Task | % of module mark |
|---|---|
| Essay/coursework | 100 |
Module feedback
- You will receive feedback on all assessed work within the University deadline, and will often receive it more quickly. The purpose of feedback is to inform your future work; it is designed to help you to improve your work, and the Department also offers you help in learning from your feedback. If you do not understand your feedback or want to talk about your ideas further you can discuss it with your tutor or your supervisor, during their Consultation & Feedback Hours
- For more information about the feedback you will receive for your work, see the department's Guide to Assessment
Indicative reading
Indicative reading may include, though not necessarily in this order:
-
Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome (Malaria; India)
-
Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (HIV/AIDS; USA)
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Amir Tag Elsir, Ebola ’76 (Ebola; Sudan). Trans. Charis Bredin and Emily Danby
-
Emma Donoghue, The Pull of the Stars (1918 Flu; Ireland)
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Ling Ma, Severance (Shen Fever/Covid-19; US and China)
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Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary (Covid-19; China). Trans. Michael Berry
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Zadie Smith, Intimations (Covid-19; UK and US)
- Tabish Khair, The Body by the Shore (Covid-19; Denmark and world)