The social historian Paul Slack notes in Plague: A Very Short Introduction, “Everyone knows something about plague” (2012, xv). Beyond the disease caused by the bacterium yersina pestis, known for its devastating visitations to the medieval and early modern world, the word plague “has long been used metaphorically as the highest standard of collective calamity” (Sontag 1998, 132). For its literal and figurative history, plague has attracted the attention of scholars from a range of fields: epidemiology, history, and literary studies. It has also captured the public imagination. Plague novels—from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1721) to Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947) to Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders (2011)—attract a wide readership. Cinematic representations of plague and epidemic, like Contagion (Soderberg 2011) and 28 Days Later (Boyle 2002), have achieved critical and popular success.
The key contention of my project is that plague deserves more critical attention from scholars in my field, political theory and the history of political thought. My project seeks to expand the canon of Western European political thought by establishing that plague narratives are a productive textual resource for political theorists. Stories of plague highlight normative and political questions about how individuals, groups, and institutions respond and adapt during public health crises. Plague narratives have also given political thinkers a host of contagion metaphors for describing fast-moving and disruptive social and political phenomena (e.g. stock frenzies, religious conversion). This project’s contribution will be to show how plague narratives offer imaginative resources for considering significant questions in political life—those about responsibility, solidarity, mutual care, and security.
In this project, I will focus on three clusters of questions that animate plague narratives, questions that matter to political theorists:
Under conditions of epidemiological disaster like plague, how do political communities assign responsibility or blame? What do these choices reveal about their social dynamics?
When political authorities try to contain outbreaks or ensure stronger immunity for their people, how do their choices strengthen or erode communal bonds?
How is plague-time different from other periods in political life?
This new endeavour is funded by UTM’s Research and Scholarly Activity Fund, in 2019 I taught a seminar (syllabus available in Classroom) that brought together some of the materials that have shaped the outline of this new project.