Decolonizing Disease

"Offering a rigorous analysis of how imaginative fiction can both diagnose and resist systemic injustice, Decolonizing Disease draws on a striking range of contemporary international literary voices to trace the racialised, environmental and (neo)colonial dimensions of pandemics mapping continuities between the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Covid-19. Opening up future-facing narrative possibilities, the analysis will provide readers with a compelling and vital account of literature’s power to critique, heal, and reworld public health crises." - Susheila Nasta FRSL MBE, Professor of Modern Literatures and Founding Editor of Wasafiri Magazine

"In Decolonizing Disease, Claire Chambers offers a thoughtful re-examination of how we understand pandemics, public health, and the stories we tell about them. By combining literary studies, postcolonial theory, and medical humanities she reveals how narratives of disease are profoundly shaped by - and in turn shape - systems of power, inequality, and colonial legacy." - Amitav Ghosh

“With her far-reaching and impassioned new book, Decolonising Disease, Claire Chambers draws bold connections between modern pandemics and their social impacts – from Covid-19 to HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and flu – and explores the leading role fiction can play in understanding and critiquing these shocks. Chambers argues that the power of pathogenic fiction lies in its ability to expose how health crises exacerbate and multiply inequality. At the same time, she persuasively shows how the novel can open up renewed possibilities in an era dominated by racialised capitalism and corporate interest.” - Professor Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford, and Director, Oxford Centre for Life Writing

‘Rarely does one encounter a book as urgent, gripping, eloquent, original, and necessary as Decolonizing Disease. Writing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Claire Chambers explores the long history of (neo)colonial inequality, discrimination, and prejudice which has rendered marginalised communities disproportionately vulnerable to illness (Spanish Flu, Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and more besides). Through a series of dazzling readings of recent ‘pathogenic novels’ drawn eclectically from across the globe, Chambers illuminates the significant literary interrogation of disease as always indexing wider inequities of race, empire and biopolitical control. At the same time, she attends to the speculative futures which such fictions also imagine, confronting disease’s imperium with literature’s determined decolonial reckoning. In its vibrant engagement across postcolonial studies, the medical humanities, and literary & cultural critique, Decolonizing Disease is interdisciplinary scholarship at its finest.’
John McLeod, University of Leeds