Decolonizing Disease
Pandemics, Public Health, and Pathogenic Novels
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Liverpool University Press
Publishing:28th May '26
£115.00
This title is due to be published on 28th May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.
Decolonizing Disease explores how pandemics both expose and entrench global inequalities. Tracing the environmental, racialized, and (neo)colonial dimensions of public health crises, Claire Chambers examines how pandemics from the 1918 flu to Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and Covid-19 have exacerbated social divisions rather than exerting a levelling effect.
The book interrogates the intersections of disease, the climate crisis, and political fault lines of race, class, and gender. Chambers creates a new framework for understanding ‘pathogenic novels’, fiction that resists colonial legacies while grappling with pandemic-era anxieties. The term carries dual connotations relating to the emergence of diseases and to innovative narrative forms responding to them.
Chambers brings together a compelling range of authors, from Phaswane Mpe to Hari Kunzru, to illuminate how literature has responded to past and present pandemics from twenty-first century perspectives. The writing confronts xenophobia, misinformation, and ecological collapse while envisioning alternative futures.
Decolonizing Disease argues that literature serves as both a critique and a remedy – offering insight, resistance, and the possibility of re-worlding in times of crisis. In an age of epidemiological neoliberalism and post-West global shifts, this urgent study stakes a claim for the role of fiction in challenging systemic injustices and imagining healthier and more equitable futures.
"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
ISBN: 9781836245728
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
320 pages