Contaminated and contaminating: the diseased body, the disease-spreading body, comes from elsewhere, even if that elsewhere is an enclave at home. In their well-documented #CoronaJihad report, Shweta Desai and Amarnath Amarasingam tell us of an annual gathering of Muslim believers, the Tabhighi Jamaat, at their headquarters in a largely Muslim neighborhood in New Delhi. This meeting, between March 13 and 15, 2020, came a few days before the Indian government declared a nationwide lockdown on March 25 to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Most of the members of the Tablighi Jamaat had left for their homes in India and elsewhere (preachers from more than forty countries had gathered), but some of them carried the infection with them, and the number of infections among those still at the Markaz caused health authorities to declare it a “hotspot.” As Desai and Amarasingam are careful to point out, parallel religious gatherings across the world had seen similar outbreaks of the virus, but in an increasingly Islamophobic India, now ruled by a right-wing Hindu-majoritarian political party, the Tablighi Jamaat meeting was treated as a conspiracy to spread the disease. The police in Delhi and Mumbai instituted cases against the head and members of the Tablighi Jamaat; the Home Ministry revoked the visas of visiting foreign preachers; television news, newspapers, and social media did the rest. The bodies and movements of Jamaatis were now seen as vectors of disease designed to spread the disease across the nation and elsewhere. Anti-Jamaat sentiments were whipped up in ways that both confirmed, and inflamed to a fever pitch, more general anti-Muslim feelings. It took no time for the language of terrorism to surface: a ruling party legislator spoke of “corona terrorism,” and one of their political activists insisted that Jamaat leaders should be treated as “terrorists.” Muslims were attacked, their businesses—particularly if they sold food—boycotted, and social media spread calls to subject Muslims to social isolation. Once again, an epidemic became the occasion to demonize an already beleaguered minority.

In the preface to her Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror 1817–2020, Anjuli Raza Kolb notes that the Tablighi Jamaat event is one more instance of the power with which disease metaphors can be deployed to stigmatize and punish entire populations.Footnote ³ Political actors across the globe routinely deploy such mobile metaphors to foment violence and hate crimes. In recent years, Muslims have faced the brunt of such aggression: as Kolb notes, in the United States, particularly after 9/11, the “idea of contagious disease” has been tied to the “conceptualization of Islam as an anti-Western, antimodern, and rapidly proliferating ideology” (2). And not only in the United States, for the most common figures for terrorism are epidemiological: it is described as “a disease. An infection. An epidemic. A plague” (2). These terms not only generate panic, they deny the need to understand the political and historical reasons—often the actions of nation-states—for the violent acts of nonstate actors. The extirpation of disease-causing agents needs no justification, and that logic extends to all those labeled terrorists (and yes, it is the case that, in so many instances, one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter).Footnote ⁴ Kolb’s book is particularly important in its ability to cure historical amnesia: she traces a long colonial history for the braiding together of the terms contagion and terror. She shows that the vocabulary and tropology of contemporary descriptions of terrorism as a contagion that originates elsewhere (in the “East”) and threatens populations in the “West” was first developed in British India in literary and administrative responses to the 1857 mutiny. The colonizer’s need to insist that the mutiny (now understood by many historians to be the First Indian War of Independence) had no possible political causes or explanations meant that the language of contagion, then being used by epidemiologists studying the spread of cholera, in India and across national frontiers, became the preferred idiom in accounts of the insurrection too.

The epidemiological mode of discovery, description, and analysis, precisely because it begins with the suspicion of a pathogen, moves out into the social world of diseased bodies and communities, and ends in policy recommendations—including social sanctions, confinement, and police and military actions—is powerful enough to reshape conceptions of the world it traverses (epidemics are potentially planetary in scope). In the second half of the nineteenth century, it became one of the principal legitimations of imperialism—benign colonizers needed to identify and check diseases and ameliorate the living conditions of those colonized, while preventing the terrifying spread of contagion into the colonial metropolis. This is, of course, the prehistory of the more liberal vocabularies of the institutions of global health management today, and a history worth reiterating as its structuring assumptions continue to shape inequalities across the globe. Neoliberal world institutions are often neocolonial in their self-conception and discursive habits; they have yet to shed what Kolb terms the “disease poetics” of empire.

This applies not only to neoliberal institutions located in, and acting at the behest of, Western governments. As my opening instance of the pathologizing of the Tablighi Jamaat in India shows, state agencies in the postcolonial global south have no compunction about using vocabularies inherited from imperialists, particularly since these modes of address have been refurbished and refined to serve the interests of the global war on terror. These rhetorical and institutional continuities between colonial and postcolonial forms of governance require us to disinter not only the imbalances of power and the racism that defined colonialism but to be equally vigilant in our analysis of the flows of power that structure postcolonial nations. This is, in the fullest sense of the term, the responsibility of postcolonial criticism—not only to think of the past, but to render visible its malevolent grip over our present. The prospect is daunting, for critics have to learn how to operate at different scales of analysis: political and socioeconomic compulsions are manifest at local, provincial, national, and trans- or inter-national levels. Thus, to understand, as Kolb does, how a vaccination program in Pakistan, funded by the CIA, helped identify and then assassinate Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad requires disaggregating agents and actions that do not fall neatly into place. Agencies internal to an independent nation, Pakistan, worked at odds with each other, apparently to fulfill the covert investigations of the CIA and possibly Saudi Arabian intelligence agencies, and then to help stage an illegal raid by the US military. Most information connected to this operation remains classified, but enough is known to make clear that in our time, too, power flows along networks built by colonialism. Years later, in a statement that confirms rather than denies these networks, the Interior Minister of Pakistan was moved to remind Donald Trump that Pakistan was not “a colony of the United States of America” (32).

Five decades after formal decolonization, to say that the European colonization of large parts of the globe continues not just to haunt, but to structure, flows of natural resources, goods, and peoples within and across nations might seem an overstatement. Skeptics might point to the large number of once-colonized people who are now in positions of great power and prestige in the homelands of their colonizers. This is even more true in the United States, which took over the burden of international “leadership” once European powers were forced to quit their colonies. The corridors of power traversed by these international elites—capitalists, entrepreneurs, bankers, CEOs of corporations, producers of culture, intellectuals, and academics—extend across the globe. If the child of South Asian immigrants, Rishi Sunak, can be Chancellor of the Exchequer in the United Kingdom, it is possible to argue that the tentacles of colonialism have in fact shriveled and that a new meritocracy that rubbishes the racist exclusions of the colonial past is now reshaping postcolonial societies in the West. Capital seems concentrated in China, Korea, and Japan as much as in the United States, and now Asian billionaires compete against, and cooperate with, Russian and African oligarchs. The world has changed and is now flat (to repeat Thomas L. Friedman’s wildly inaccurate metaphor).Footnote ⁵

Much has changed, but too much remains the same. The forms of capitalism brought into being by colonialism restructured the world over three centuries to suit the interests of, first, white Europeans, and then, post-decolonization, of the nationalist elites who benefited from the transfer of power. Colonial powers developed institutions of resource extraction, of the management of finance, and of scientific and technological innovation to enrich the colonizing West; nationalist elites inherited and mastered them, and their descendants now work in tandem with their counterparts across the globe. No matter how wide their cultural and social differences, they share an ease with colonial modes of governance and are comfortable with socioeconomic stratification. They staff international institutions that address inequalities of livelihood and health—they make a difference—but the price of such intervention is a confirmation of the power of the sponsors of these institutions. Those sponsors are resolutely neoliberal in their economic orientation and neocolonial in their conceptions of power across the globe. And they—colonial rulers and neocolonial elites—are fluent in the language of security, militarized borders, and the use of violence against populations who act to redress historical wrongs. They speak as members of state or para-state institutions and are certain about their capacity to distinguish between warranted violence (most often initiated by states) and terrorism. In recent years, more often than not, the agents of terror are seen to be Muslim (few non-Muslims are labeled terrorists, even for identical acts of violence). Their presence is imagined to be so widespread that, as Kolb shows, they are represented in the paranoid form of a relentless epidemic, crossing borders with ease, incubating within supposedly safe spaces, and bursting out in spectacular bouts of virulence. The enemy without is the enemy within, host and pathogen inextricable from each other. The English in India, the French in Algeria, the United States in the global war on terror, now Hindu-majoritarian rulers in India or the Chinese in Xinjiang, all fear the pestilential enemy within and without. In this conception, Islam breeds infection, spreading from its believers into societies where they are a minority presence, making them unpredictable and potentially lethal.

In recent years, colonial epidemiological procedures and rhetoric have been internationalized and revamped to render terrorism pathological. These continuities between colonial and neocolonial practices prompt Kolb to argue—and this is a nice rhetorical irony—that cultural critics in turn need to develop a resistant “epidemiological mode of reading,” one that is as “social, transverse in both time and space, and multifactorial” as the discourses it critiques (9). We might take our clue from Paul Farmer’s insistence that illness is not to be understood only as a problem of pathogens, but as the product of socioeconomic disparities. For Farmer, the “argument that the afflicted deserve access to care … is an argument for social and economic rights.”Footnote ⁶ Farmer has endemic diseases in mind; we might think of parallel arguments with which to examine closely, and refuse, the legitimating assumptions of the various wars on terror that are defined and executed by governments across the world. Kolb points to the way in which state institutions plan “the eradication of microbes, viruses, and human beings” (244)—it is astonishing that this list does not shock—and demonstrates that this array of targets is normalized by the development of epidemiological vocabularies to describe terrorists and insurgent populations. Appropriately, Kolb thinks of such critical responses as being an urgent version of postcolonial forms of critique: the careful analysis of colonial discourse leads us to an equally searching, and resistant, analysis of the deployment of power in once-colonized nations and across the world more generally.

The challenge is enormous, but not to rise to it will be to capitulate to the vindictive, punitive logic that the state-centric imagination uses to define legitimate and illegitimate violence, diseases worth curing and those not, people deserving of protection and those worth eradicating. That is our task at its largest, for under our neoliberal and neocolonial regimes few now speak of redistribution and collective responsibility, only of the imperatives of the security state and the private sector. More locally, in academia today, too many cultural historians and literary critics have retreated into the cozy comforts of post-critique, which is a luxury denied those who do not occupy positions of historically accrued power and privilege. They speak of “reparative” criticism, one that turns away from the capacity of language, including in its literary variants, to dehumanize and pathologize, to demean and maim. They celebrate their attention to the glimmering aesthetic and surface-level pleasures of the text, producing critical readings supposedly at the service of the master’s text (or the mistress’s, for that matter). A book like Epidemic Empire is a superb and timely practical refutation of the ineffectual silliness of the exhortation to not be paranoid about the power of language. Kolb’s archive, stretching back over two centuries, extending across literary, para-literary, biomedical, security, and governmental documents, reaffirms for us the necessity of critique, one informed by the conviction that colonial languages rewrote human possibility in invidious ways and that we are still living with the effects—some weakened, many worsened—of such rewriting. There is much left to reimagine and a future to be won.