Contagion

Health, Fear, Sovereignty

Edited by Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua

Narrated by Alexander MacDonald

Available from Audible

Book published by University of Washington Press

Over many decades, "contagion" has been a metaphor of choice for everything from global terrorism, suicide bombings, poverty, immigration, global financial crises, human rights, fast food, obesity, divorce, and homosexuality. Essays examine the language of epidemiology used in the war on terror, the repressive effects of global disease surveillance, and films and novels that enact the perplexities of contagion in a global context. Fear of microbial disaster becomes a framework for larger questions about the nature and location of sovereignty and the related questions of contact and hygienic isolation, fear and invisibility, the hazards of sociability, the security of surveillance, and what a healthy security might mean. Utilizing the cross-disciplinary approach of global studies, contagion emerges as a vexed trope for globalization itself.

Bruce Magnusson is associate professor of politics and the director of global studies and Zahi Zalloua is associate professor of French and general studies, both at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

Zahi Zalloua is associate professor of French and general studies at Whitman College, author of Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism, and editor of The Comparatist and Montaigne After Theory, Theory After Montaigne.