| Summary: | Terrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in order to contain its political energies. InEpidemic Empire,AnjuliFatima Raza Kolb shows that this trope began in responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and tracks its tenacious hold through 9/11 and beyond. The result is the first book-length study to approach the globalWar onTerror from a postcolonial literary perspective. Raza Kolb assembles a diverse archive from colonial India, imperial Britain, French and independent Algeria, the postcolonial Islamic diaspora, and theneoimperialUnited States. Anchoring her book are studies of four major writers in the colonial-postcolonial canon: Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Albert Camus, and SalmanRushdie. Across these sources, she reveals the tendency to imagine anticolonial rebellion, and Musliminsurgencyspecifically, as a virulent form of social contagion. Exposing the long history of this broken but persistent narrative,Epidemic Empireis a major contribution to the rhetorical history of our present moment.
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