Chronic Conditions: Noncommunicable Disease in Twenty-first Century Postcolonial Writing - ENG00142H

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Module summary

This new module arises from a growing awareness that literary and cultural scholars have privileged communicable diseases in our analyses, often overlooking the social, racialized, and colonial politics of underlying, noncommunicable conditions. This tendency to privilege contagion has only been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The module therefore pivots on ‘communicating the noncommunicable’, exploring how illness that cannot be ‘caught’ is nevertheless communicated – through metaphor, narrative, structural neglect, and embodied experience. By ‘communicable’, I mean illnesses that are transmissible between people (e.g. influenza, Ebola virus disease, HIV/AIDS), and ‘noncommunicable’ denotes chronic or long-term conditions not caused by an infectious agent (e.g. diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, pulmonary or lung conditions, mental ill health).

The module introduces students to the postcolonial health humanities by examining how stories of sickness and healing reveal unequal worlds. This means uneven investment in chronic care, the erosion of long-term support infrastructures, and distinct forms of stigma and embodied harm that follow colonial logics. Noncommunicable disease, mental ill health, and long-term conditions are not only biomedical but also cultural flashpoints. They expose long-term hierarchies of race, class, and gender; colonial legacies; neocolonial trauma; and the uneven distribution of (health)care. A decolonial lens asks how colonial governance, global-health funding priorities, and racialized narratives have systematically sidelined attention to chronic conditions in the Global South. From colonial medicine to contemporary public health crises, disease narratives make visible who is protected, who gets blamed, and whose suffering is overlooked. Focusing on texts from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and their diasporas, we will explore how illness is imagined, embodied, and politicized. What does it mean to narrate bodily infirmity across lines of race, class, caste, gender, and migration? We read prose writing (fiction, memoir, narrative nonfiction) that examines chronic, noncommunicable conditions – eczema, diabetes, cancer, lung and/or heart disease, injuries from torture, dementia – often linked to or exacerbated by poverty, public health, partition, and protest. We’ll attend to how these texts map the social infrastructures of illness and disability while, sometimes alarmingly, additionally narrating the pressures and moral dilemmas of conflict, climate change, and cyberspace.

Elective Pre-Requisites

These pre-requisites only apply to students taking this module as an elective.

A in A Level English Literature or equivalent qualification

Module will run

Occurrence	Teaching period
A	Semester 2 2026-27

Module aims

The aim of this module is to introduce students to the health humanities via important works of fiction and nonfiction dealing with ‘long-term’ conditions. Participants will engage with how prose authors are working in a variety of genres to assess the impact of non-communicable disease and long-term conditions on health and social justice, especially in the global south.

Module learning outcomes

On successful completion of the module, you should be able to:

1. Demonstrate an advanced understanding of and engagement with writing of disability, disease and mental ill health;

2. Students will be able to differentiate communicable and noncommunicable frameworks and assess how (post)coloniality and/or a decolonizing approach shapes health priorities;

3. Evaluate key debates within the relevant critical fields dealing with the health humanities;

4. 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	100.0

Special assessment rules

None

Indicative reassessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100.0

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 and 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:

• Manju Kapur, Home

• Haifa Zangana, Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London

• Chris Abani, GraceLand OR Nadine Gordimer, Get a Life

• Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

• Hanif Kureishi, Shattered OR Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author

• Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir OR Fred d’Aguiar, Year of Plagues

• David Chariandy, Soucouyant