Terrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in order to contain its political energies. In Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817-2020 (University of Chicago, 2021), Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb shows that this trope began in responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and tracks its tenacious hold through 9/11 and beyond. The result is the first book-length study to approach the global War on Terror from a postcolonial literary perspective. Raza Kolb assembles a diverse archive from colonial India, imperial Britain, French and independent Algeria, the postcolonial Islamic diaspora, and the neoimperial United States. Anchoring her book are studies of four major writers in the colonial-postcolonial canon: Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Albert Camus, and Salman Rushdie. Across these sources, she reveals the tendency to imagine anticolonial rebellion, and Muslim insurgency specifically, as a virulent form of social contagion. Exposing the long history of this broken but persistent narrative, Epidemic Empire is a major contribution to the rhetorical history of our present moment.

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and a scholar of colonial and postcolonial literature and theory with particular research interests in the history of science and intellectual history, poetry and poetics, gender and sexuality studies, political theory and independence movements, the gothic and horror, and comparative literary studies.

Jess Row is the author of two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost, a novel, Your Face in Mine, and a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues. He lives in New York City and Plainfield, Vermont.

Organized by Soyoung Yoon and co-sponsored with The Racial Imaginary Institute and the James Gallery at The CUNY Graduate Center as part of The Fragility of "We": The Fiction of Nation, a new series dedicated to exploring the political and affective ties that produce the concept of the nation.

This event is part of BORDER AS METHOD, a virtual, public-facing event series featuring artists, curators, activists, and scholars across the world focused on the making and unmaking of art under conditions of exile or forced migration, or from areas where travel is prohibited or difficult. Hosted by faculty from the Department of the Arts at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. All events are free and open to the public, but prior registration is required.

Zoom link will be sent in advance of the event.