The Neo/Bio/Colonial Hot Zone

Abstract

This article explores the proliferation of nonfiction narratives which warn of an impending global pandemic of African origin. Through a reading of four texts — Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague, Richard Kaplan's The Ends of the Earth, and Jeffrey Goldberg's ‘Our Africa Problem’ — the author argues that such pandemic narratives reflect unease about the United States' current and future role in Africa or other non-Western places, after a half-century of largely unsuccessful ‘development’. Second, plague tales reflect anxieties about environmental devastation in Africa and elsewhere. The article concludes that the most frightening aspect of these contemporary ‘plague tales' is the solutions they suggest to the ‘problem’ of a coming plague.