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Epidemiology of Terror: Health, Horror, and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

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Epidemiology of Terror: Health, Horror, and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature Epidemiology of Terror: Health, Horror, and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature Anjuli Raza Kolb Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Anjuli Raza Kolb All rights reserved Abstract Epidemiology of Terror: Health, Horror, and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature Anjuli Raza Kolb This dissertation is intended primarily as a contribution to postcolonial criticism and theory and the rhetorical analysis of epidemic writing as they undergo various crises and sublimations in the geopolitical landscape that has come into focus since the multilateral undertaking of the War on Terror in 2001. I begin with a set of questions about representation: when, how, and why are extra- legal, insurgent, anti-colonial, and terrorist forms of violence figured as epidemics in literature and connected discursive forms? What events in colonial history and scientific practice make such representations possible? And how do these representational patterns and their corollary modes of interpretation both reflect and transform discourse and policy? Although the figure is ubiquitous, it is far from simple. I argue that the discourse of the late colonial era is crucial to an understanding of how epidemiological science arises and converges with colonial management technologies, binding the British response to the 1857 mutiny and a growing Indian nationalism to the development of surveillance and quarantine programs to eradicate the threat of the great nineteenth century epidemic, the so-called Indian or Asiatic cholera. Through a constellation of readings of key texts in the British and French colonial and postcolonial traditions, including selected works of Bram Stoker (Dracula, “The Invisible Giant”), Albert Camus (La Peste, Chronique Algérienne) and Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses, Shalimar the Clown, Joseph Anton), I demonstrate how epidemics have played a complex representational role in relationship to violence, enabling us to imagine specific kinds of actors as absolute, powerful enemies of biological and social life, while also recoding violent political action as an organic affliction in order to efface or suppress the possibility of agency. There are two crucial aspects of this story that run throughout the histories and texts I engage with in this project. The first is that the figure of insurgent violence as epidemic has two opposing, yet interrelated faces. One looks to the promise of scientism, data collection and rational study as a means of eradicating the threat of irregular warfare. This is the function of the figure embedded in the practices and progress of epidemiology. On the other hand, the mythopoetics of infectious disease also point toward the occult and the unknowable, and code natural forces of destruction as sublime and inevitable. This is the function of the figure embedded the literary and political history of the term terror, which encompasses both natural and political events and the structures of feeling to which they give rise. The result of this duality is the persistent epistemic collapse of data-driven rational scientism and irrational sublimity in texts where epidemic and terror are at issue. The second crucial aspect of this story is that the dissolution of a colonial world system changes the shape of thinking about both epidemics and violence by displacing a binary architecture of antinomy in both public health and politics. The broadened view of epidemic since the end of the nineteenth century, in other words, has moved us away from metaphors of bellicosity to a more multi-factorial view of bacteriology and virology in temporal, geographic, and demographic space. One of the main goals of this project is to examine the relationship between these shifting epistemologies, narrative form, and imperial strategy. A connected through-line in the dissertation attempts to map what becomes of the biologistic and organicist conception of the state—which are already a matter of representation and imagination—as the very notions of biotoic life and the purview of the organism undergo no less radical redefinitions than the concept of the nation itself, providing the conceptual underpinnings for a subsequent biomorphic conception of the globe. Contents List of Illustrations ii Dedication iii Acknowledgements iv Prologue: Great Games 1 Introduction: Epidemic Materialism 15 1. Terror and Horror 23 2. Reading Epidemiologically 29 3. Epidemic, Figure, and the Literary 36 4. Epidemiological Historiography 42 Chapter One: Circulatory Logics 50 1. Choleric Pretexts: Charlotte Stoker’s Letter and “The Invisible Giant” 61 2. “Like Indian Ink” 78 3. Gothic Skin 90 4. Organs of Knowledge 107 5. Occult Blood 117 6. Bittersweet Waters 126 Chapter Two: The Brown Plague 144 1. The Unthinkable 153 2. It’s Not Cholera 166 3. La Déesse inconnue 181 4. Blank Maps and Absent Subjects 198 5. Rats 217 6. Dirty Ink 227 Chapter Three: Selfistan 244 1. “Both the Houses” 248 2. The Plague of Nations 269 3. Imaginary Homeland Security 291 4. The Falling Sickness 312 Epilogue: Cures from Within 341 Bibliography 346 i List of Illustrations The London Board of Health Hunts Cholera 35 Delhi: Wears Pant and Shirt I 40 The Invisible Giant 69 Zaya and Knoal 76 Cholera as Assisted Immigrant 81 Cholera as “Rascal” 82 Cutting the Stone 113 Cholera in Eastern Africa 165 Death as Fiend 174 Sitala Devi, Goddess of Poxes 190 Cholera in India 238 Cholera Tramples the Victor and the Vanquished 241 Shalimar the Clown 277 Satanic Verses Protest 317 Oscar, Wow! III 333 ii for my parents, who taught me that medicine could be an art and reading a vocation iii Acknowledgements I am grateful to Columbia University for supporting the research and writing of this project. This dissertation would not have been possible without the help and support of an extraordinary group of people who I feel lucky to call my mentors, colleagues, and friends. My greatest debt is owed to Gauri Viswanathan, without whose steady encouragement I would not have known how to begin finding my place in scholarship; indeed, without whose path-breaking scholarship such a place may not have existed at all. She has held me to more exacting standards than I thought I deserved to be held to, has let me get away with nothing, and has shown me that the best questions—for scholarship and teaching as much as for friendship—are the ones you want to sit with for years. That she has invited me to do so in her company and under her guidance is among the highest compliments I have ever been paid. Brent Edwards and Joey Slaughter have offered their wisdom, humor, support, and keen editorial eyes with unwavering generosity and patience since my first days in graduate school. Their work has and will continue to serve as a model for my own, for the possibilities and purposes of interdisciplinary scholarship. In this last year especially, I have found in them both kindness and intellectual guidance that far exceeds their obligations. The chapters have benefitted from the careful scrutiny and creative feedback of a number of mentors, chief among them Sarah Cole, who generously read mountains of unrevised pages, dozens of formulations, and an embarrassing number of emails, and emerged with characteristically incisive, perfectly formulated answers to my every question. It is a tremendous privilege to have had readers in Emily Apter, Judith Butler, Sara Suleri, Michael Ralph, Bruce Robbins, and Cristobal Silva. At Columbia, Gayatri Spivak, Bob O’Mealley, Marianne Hirsch, Marcellus Blount, Jenny Davidson, Eleanor Johnson, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Nicole Wallack, Janaki Bahkle, Cassie Fennell, and Gareth Williams have all helped me think through tricky questions and work out rough spots in the conception and writing of the project. The staff at Butler Library has offered extraordinary support and assistance; I am especially grateful to Kerry Saunders for his daily warmth and cheer. Without the forum of the CUNY Humanities Center Seminars in Humanity, International Law, and Third World Sovereignty and Law, Justice, and Global Political Futures, this dissertation would have taken a very different shape. Gary Wilder, Kandice Chuh, Susan Buck-Morss, Talal Asad, and Uday Mehta were instrumental in encouraging me to explore new avenues in my work, and in facilitating one of the most exciting sustained conversations I’ve had the good fortune to be part of. At Bard, Nancy Leonard, Thomas Bartscherer, Bill Dixon, Cecelia Watson, and Bill Martin never stopped asking me about my writing, and every response they gave made it better. At NYU, Abigail Joseph and Maeve Adams reminded me daily how and why a dissertation could be done. My friends have made every thought sharper and every pleasure greater. Amiel Melnick has entwined herself in the DNA of my thinking, and invited me always to be a part of hers. Adam Waytz has reminded me of the virtues of low-urgency, high-importance work, in writing and in life. This project has benefitted immensely from the love, brilliance, and companionship of many others, especially Sherally Munshi, Kate Stanley, Anne Diebel, Alvan Ikoku, Musa Gurnis, Alicia DeSantis, Ben Parker, Alice Boone, Bina Gogineni, Genevieve Yue, Lauren Silvers, Steffani Jemison, Nico Muhly, Evans Richardson, Robin Varghese, Daniel Hoffmann-Schwartz, and Emily Witt. My deepest thanks go to my family. Sughra Raza, James Kolb, Jaffer Kolb, and Walter Johnston have talked and laughed
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