“It Mattered Not from Whence it Came; But All Agreed it Was Come …”

Abstract

My interest in plague narratives stems from the undergraduate classes I teach on zombie narratives at the University of Oklahoma. Besides its Caribbean genealogies, zombie narratives also draw on the tropes and narrative frameworks of plague narratives. Analyzing opening sequences from two of my teaching texts – Daniel Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year and the cinematic version of Max Brooks’ World War Z – I focus on two aspects that circumnavigate my class discussions of zombie/plague narratives: (i) plague narratives as narratives of media and (ii) plague narratives as expressions of fear and panic about foreignness. In the first thread, I discuss how the progressive shrinkage of space and time through the development of media forms (what is called space–time compression) simultaneously makes information about plagues “viral” while also accelerating the impact of affects like panic. In the second thread, I discuss how plagues always emerge in the popular imagination from what Susan Sontag calls “elsewhere”. Constructions of foreignness and racialization always haunt popular conceptualizations of the plague, as evident in Donald Trump’s notorious stigmatization of COVID-19 as the “kung flu”. Drawing on both readings of the two literary/cinematic texts, I consider how frameworks of mediatized panic and othering often converge during moments of crisis and catastrophe.