Special Issue: Pandemic, Plague, Pestilence and the Tropics (2025)

Pandemic, plague, pestilence and the Tropics | with Anita Lundberg, Kalala Ngalamulume, Arbaayah Ali Termizi and Chrystopher J. Spicer (e-Tropics)

Pandemics and 'Zombies': How to Think Tropical Imaginaries with Cinematic Cosmologies

etropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, 2021

The tropics in occidental imaginaries are typically coded as either edenic paradise or as hell. It is in the latter mode that they come to be linked with zombies, diseases, and questions relating to the autonomy of the human body. In this article I first summarise historical connections between colonialism and the tropics as expressed through dealings with disease set against a background of Christian-secular cosmology. I then further think the issue with two films that approach disease and the tropics through the zombie, which I conceive of as radical heteronomy. One film, Zombi 2, is a Euro-American engagement with the tropics as imagined from a temperate zone and a Christian tradition. The other, Cemetery of Splendor, is a Thai film that engages notions of disease and the autonomy of the human body from within the tropics and a Buddhist imaginary. I tie these questions of disease, 'zombies' and the tropics in with more general discussions of cosmologies, including those of the moderns. The displacement of modern ontological certainty (which is imagined through the zombie and conditioned by cultural and ideological imagination) opens a space for engaging the problem of a pandemic with notions of subjectivity and corporeality. An underlying thematic throughout this article is an argument for the importance of the cinema image in dealing with bio/socio/political issues. Here, in this translation of the cinematic world into discourse we are engaged at the intersection of tropics, disease, bodies and heteronomy.

[Book/Introduction chapter] Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation

Springer, 2022

Pandemics and epidemics have always shaped our history. Throughout recorded human history, periodic outbreaks of catastrophic pandemics and epidemics have threatened human existence on this planet and have been a regular reminder of our mortality and vulnerability in the face of nature’s calamities, including deadly diseases. These episodes have often shown the limitations of human knowledge, particularly advancements in science to fortify against the violence of new and often deadly pathogens. At the same time, pandemics and epidemics have also been formative moments of human history, ushering in momentous transformations in the ways in which we live and relate to each other. They have provided opportunities to gain new insights into the human body and how it functions, as well as reflect on the ways in which societies and communities form and interact.

Pandemic Literatures and Being Human in Times of Mass Infection and Catastrophe: Some African Perspectives

Beyond apocalyptical epidemics: Out of a paradox

Epidémies et sociétés, passé, présent et futur, édition préparée par Bernardino Fantini, Edizioni ETS, Pisa, 2017

Epidemics Have Lost the Plot (with Guillaume Lachenal)

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2020

Anthropology of a Pandemic

Selim Monique, 2021

colective book about the pandemic. Dir. Monique Selim.

Rethinking the history of plague in the time of COVID‐19

Centaurus 62:2, 2020

We are currently experiencing one of the most disruptive pandemics in modern history. The outbreak of COVID-19 that was first recorded in Wuhan, China and quickly spread across the globe has resulted in nearly 5 million confirmed cases to date and more than 300,000 deaths. Where we stand now, it is still uncertain how many it will infect or kill worldwide, how long it will continue, and when-if ever-life will return to normal. What we know for sure is that this is a pivotal moment and that we are experiencing a historic event that will transform our societies both profoundly and irreversibly. As we wade into this new age of pandemics, it is critical to rethink how we write the history of pandemics. With a conviction that the past helps us to understand the present and that the present should help us to rethink the past, I turn to the legacy of past plagues. In this essay, I take stock of the lasting legacies of past plagues because they continue to shape the way we think about new pandemics. In particular, I address persistent problems, such as European exceptionalism, triumphalism, and epidemiological Orientalism, that are not only ubiquitous in plague studies, but also staples of public opinion about pandemics, past and present.

Peggy Karpouzou-Nikoleta Zampaki, “Introduction. Pandemics in the Western Literature and Culture (20th–21st centuries)” in Special Issue on “Pandemics in European Literature”, Interlitteraria 27.1, 2022, 6-17.

The Shapes of Epidemics and Global Disease (co-edited with Andrea Patterson)

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020

This volume investigates the multifaceted SHAPES (socio-historic, artistic, political, and ecological significance) of global disease. It challenges conventional views of infection and transmission by associating epidemics with ideologies and their accompanying institutions. It argues that the physical threat of epidemics is irrevocably linked to culture, economic resources, social class, and power. Epidemics involve both the infected and non-infected, affect the local and global, and they expose control and neglect. This book provides a radical collaborative approach, drawing contributors from closely related and vastly distant fields in the search for innovative ways to address human suffering, and to find real solutions that may determine whether people live or die. Such an approach is needed within an increasingly interconnected world where both pathological diseases and health behaviors are infectious. Experts from fifteen diverse disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities present case studies from across the world and time, demonstrating the uniqueness of each disease and epidemic in its place, but also the shared experiences that span human life and death. In order to identify, measure and control epidemics, we must understand epidemics more as long biosocial processes than abrupt events in nature or culture. Such methodology examines the meaning we attach to epidemics, as well as their material reality, and provides a more complete understanding of how epidemics shape and are shaped.