Table Of ContentESSAYS IN CONTAGION THEORY
Edited by
KARI NIXON and
LORENZO SERVITJE
Endemic
Kari N ixon • Lorenzo Servitje
Editors
Endemic
Essays in Contagion Theory
Editors
Kari Nixon Lorenzo Servitje
English Department of English
Southern Methodist University University of California Riverside
Dallas , Texas , USA Riverside , California , USA
ISBN 978-1-137-52140-8 ISBN 978-1-137-52141-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52141-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944549
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Foreword
Nothing in the past half century has dramatized the global ecosystem
as profoundly as the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It lacked the stunning
immediacy of the explosion of an atom bomb, or the dismaying alien-
ation of the revelation of genocidal violence. But in its powerful narrative
arc, it is a human drama writ large. It is the story of ecological violence in
its broadest sense told on a planetary stage: a tale of destruction, discrimi-
nation, and resilience infused by, but exceeding, the experiences of every
individual whose life it took or touched. And who really was exempt?
It is therefore not surprising that the scenario of an outbreak e xploding
into a species-threatening pandemic (or threatening to) proliferated
in the wake of the fi rst decade of the pandemic, from the more or less
journalistic accounts such as Hot Zone , Th e Coming Plague , and their
c inematic manifestations to the veritable industry of zombie apocalypses
from I Am Legend to W orld War Z , Zone One , and beyond. But even the
world-changing HIV/AIDS pandemic cannot suffi ciently account for the
popularity of these contagion narratives.
Th ere is something oddly—almost perversely—compelling about the
idea of contagion. Th e authors of a recent textbook Th e Politics of Global
Health: United by Contagion call “health … the ultimate unifying issue for
humankind.” In what has become a convention of global health discourse,
Mark W. Zacher and Tania J. Keefe muse, “the world is b ecoming an ever
smaller place, and microbes that cause devastating diseases do not stop for
v
vi Foreword
border guards.”1 Health slides almost i mperceptibly into contagion, as it
so often does in the mainstream media and popular fi ction and fi lm when
an outbreak reminds us that we are all, as the subtitle puts it, “united by
contagion.” United, that is, by the common experience of being human
and susceptible, but also literally, as the microbes make their way around
the globe. Communicable disease is, of course, but one concern in the
massive fi eld of global health, and, by most standards of measure, not the
most pressing. It is also but one of many issues that manifest worldwide
connectivity. Th e year 2008 made global economic ties abundantly clear,
and deniers notwithstanding, climate change is a demonstrably global
phenomenon. In many ways, the world is indeed becoming increasingly
interconnected, but then again, we have always been global.
Y et there has also always been a peculiar way in which the idea of con-
tagion compels. Etymologically from the Latin con (together with) and
tangere (to touch), the word itself suggests the primal contact of a touch.
Contagious means communicable by contact, a subset of the broader
infectious. From at least the seventeenth century, and especially in con-
junction with revolutions, c ontagious spoke as much about the powerful
circulation of ideas, emotions, or aff ects as about disease agents, and that
may be what makes the concept so ineluctable. Contagion tells us about
the many ways in which we are in contact; it shows us whom we have
touched both literally and fi guratively, or more to the point, it blurs the
distinction between them.
C ommunication shapes communities; the early sociologists at the turn
of the twentieth century coined “social contagion” to express the material
impact of the circulation of concepts and beliefs. Against the backdrop
of the emerging fi eld of bacteriology, microbes were both analogue and
explanation for the emergence of social bonds: ideas and attitudes cir-
culated like microbes, but also perhaps as microbes, as a not yet visible
substance or energy. In all of its manifestations, contagion illuminates the
connections that turn bodies into bodies politic. As Zacher and Keefe, and
many others, make clear, contagion confi gures the contours of the shrink-
ing world: “More and more we are coming to understand that people with
1 Mark W. Zacher and Tania J. Keefe, Th e Politics of Global Health Governance: United by Contagion
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2008), p. 1.
Foreword vii
diseases located anywhere from down the street to the other side of the
globe have important and varied impacts on our well-being” (1).
Border-crossing microbes materialize the abstractions of contemporary
geopolitics, manifesting the dangers and possibilities of the new
connections, physical and metaphysical. As these microbes map the
changing borders and relationships of a globalizing world, they are also
vivid analogues for the mystical bonds of community. Th e scale of that
community is variable: the outbreak narrative can mark the danger of
strangers, hence reinforce the boundaries of the imagined community
of the nation, for example, or it can envision humanity united by their
fragile humanity, their vulnerability, and, viscerally, by the contact illu-
minated by the circulating microbes, a mystically informed tactility.
Th e outbreak narrative compels as it harnesses the danger and reverence
of the sacred in its depiction of the communal bonds of an i nterconnected
world. It is at once a global and a planetary narrative.
Th e HIV/AIDS pandemic shone, and continues to shine, a spotlight
on global inequities, even as it lit up the geopolitical and ecological con-
tours of a changing globe. It made transparent, to quote Zacher and
Keefe again, that health “is more than a medical issue; it is a development
issue, a commercial issue, a humanitarian issue, and a security issue” (1).
But it also illuminated once again how the very notion of community on
any scale rests in the profound power of attraction—the mystical force of
the sacred—that infuses the concept of contagion.
Endemic begins from the premise that the notion of contagion in the
form of a devastating pandemic so thoroughly saturates the contempo-
rary imagination both as a looming threat and as a principle of cohesion
that it has become endemic in contemporary discourse. In the chapters
that follow, the turn to endemicity underscores the centrality of the
powerful concept of contagion to contemporary biopolitics, which is to
say the power that emerges through the discursive management of life
itself. Th is volume considers contagion as the very principle of cohesion
that threatens not by virtue of its menace from without, or even by the
ever-present possibility of eruption, but by its very nature as a precari-
ous necessity. If epidemics of catastrophic diseases loom as the potential
terror of destruction and possible annihilation, endemic diseases remind
us of the fragile balance of human existence in a world in which the
viii Foreword
forces of destruction are the sources of sustenance writ large. Each chap-
ter explores a facet through which contagion elucidates that precarity,
constitutive of social bonds and potentially corrosive or corrupting in its
excessive generativeness.
Th rough its timely study of contagion as the life principle of com-
munity, Endemic shows how our greatest collective fears inhere in
superabundance—in the uncontrolled proliferation of meanings as well
as circulation of goods and peoples. In so doing, E ndemic off ers contagion
as a way to understand power as operating through the fundamental
precariousness of communication and the bonds it forges.
Priscilla Wald
Contents
1 Th e Making of a Modern Endemic: An Introduction 1
Lorenzo Servitje and Kari Nixon
Part I Contagious Culture and Cultures of Contagion 19
2 Contagion and Anarchy: Matthew Arnold and the Disease
of Modern Life 21
Lorenzo Servitje
3 Dark Zones: Th e Ebola Body as a Confi guration of Horror 43
Catherine Belling
4 Needles and Bullets: Media Th eory, Medicine, and
Propaganda, 1910–1940 67
Ghislain Th ibault
ix
