Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, author of Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020, will be joined in conversation by Leela Gandhi.

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. In Epidemic Empire, Anjuli Fatima 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 global War on Terror from a postcolonial literary perspective. Exposing the long history of a broken but persistent narrative, Epidemic Empire is a major contribution to the rhetorical history of our present moment.

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, where she teaches postcolonial literature and theory and poetry.

Leela Gandhi is the John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University. Gandhi is the author of The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, published by the University of Chicago Press. Gandhi is founding co-editor of Postcolonial Studies and board member of Postcolonial Text.

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