Pandemics and Politics

Course Description

Disease has been a part of human experience since human experience began, and people have never stopped trying to understand illness and its relationship to the societies in which they live. In this writing seminar, we will investigate how various societies have grappled with the problem of pestilence, and the cultural and political responses to disease in a number of eras and places. We will examine sources including film, visual art and journalism to unearth both the social response to actual outbreaks and the fictional imagination of contagion.  We will begin by examining contemporary controversies over SARS and pandemic flu, illustrated in metaphorical form by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s film 28 Weeks Later, in which zombies are conceived as a kind of carrier and victim of infection. We will then investigate and compare responses other crisis episodes, which may include the era of AIDS, the plague years of Europe, the effects of smallpox on indigenous American populations, and the Philadelphia Yellow Fever outbreaks of the 1790s, which many contemporaries believed nearly caused the collapse of the United States government. Readings include contemporary accounts from those who survived periods of pestilence (and some who didn’t), as well as modern interpreters of the social meaning of disease,  including Susan Sontag, Wendy Brown, and others.