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WiSe 20/21: Fear of a Pandemic: Deconstructing Global Diseases in the Modern Era

Edna Bonhomme

Information for students

edna.bonhomme@fu-berlin.de

Comments

Since the rise of Covid-19, confinement has had a complicated dynamic in how people understand the course of the epidemics, elevating new anxieties and fears about global movement. As the number of confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus continues to increase, unprecedented public health policies to stop reduce and socialization has altered mobility. Today, everyone is adjusting to a new era, one where most people have become hyper aware of microbial invasion with old and familiar tales of racial health inequalities, science culture wars, embodiment, immunity, and the fight to breathe. Fear of a Pandemic traces the history of global epidemics from the nineteenth century to the near present by exploring how apprehensions about contagion are tied to racism, migration, and power. The course meditates on this fear through the theory of containment with special attention to racialized bodies in prisons, sanitoriums, and plantations. It is not only the case that non-white people were racialized and perceived to vectors of disease but that their labor was withheld, they were forced to live in segregation, and in some cases, they were experimented upon. By showing the links between public health policies and the containment of the oppressed, the course situates epidemics within the context of the history of slavery, colonialism, experimentation, ghettos, and carceral studies. During the course, we will analyze archival materials that show how cholera, sleeping sickness, influenza, malaria, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and the recent set of coronaviruses are tied to shifting notions of captive spaces and contagion. Using poetry, sound, images, and video, we will collectively engage with non-white, femme, and queer narratives that transcend pathology and confinement and consider how Femmscapes and Afrofuturists generate radical healing practices that circumvent pandemics. close