Red Alerts: A Reflective Assemblage

Abstract

This article considers the resonances between Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death: A Fantasy” (1842) and our contemporary moment and pandemic context by drawing this story’s central deployment of the colour red into relation with the “red alerts” of twenty-first-century crises. I place “The Masque of the Red Death” in connection with the UK government’s COVID-19 alert level chart, in which red announces the most serious level of risk, as well as the US Homeland Security Advisory System chart produced following 9/11, which the UK alert chart closely resembles. Marshalling Tobias Menely and Margaret Ronda’s work on the cultural meanings tied to the colour red, and Brian Massumi’s reflections on the US Homeland Security Advisory System and contemporary power, politics, and affect, I discuss how the red alerts assembled in this article are each infused with stress, fear and uncertainty and subtended by exclusions and erosions of care.