Plagues

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

After pollution, frogs, stinging gnats, mosquitoes, anthrax, boils, hail, locusts and thick darkness, there descends the infamous tenth plague, the massacre of the first-born. All are marked for death: the heir of the Pharaoh, the maidservant, the captive, even the cattle in the fields. Only the Lord’s chosen nation shall be excepted. The agent of this ten-plague trajectory of mayhem is not easy to discern—sometimes translated as a “destroyer”, sometimes an “exterminating angel”—but its point is unmistakable: the patient demonstration of the sovereignty of the God of the Israelites. Plagues, as soon as they are invoked in ancient times, are lashed to culture and politics. Why? That is the question at stake in this course. This course focuses on the relation between the historical fact of periodic widespread illness (broadly conceived) and its aesthetic representation in Europe and the Americas. If the fourteenth-century “Black Plague” is remembered in the popular and historical imagination as the mother of all plagues, a highly storied and ritualized pandemic that transformed the politics, culture and identity of the West, then it would be the other half of the globe, America, whose very existence as a geopolitical formation would be founded on an even more vicious plague: the toxic cocktail of fever, nausea and sores that, like a slow-moving apocalypse creeping along over centuries, decimated America’s indigenous inhabitants, hobbling entire civilizations, reducing some regional communities by over 90 per cent. It comes as no surprise that history’s victims of European expansion—marginal communities at home and abroad exploited through projects of resource extraction, swept up into economies of slavery—would come to imagine their fate, again and again, in the terms of plagues. How have artists told and shown this story? What are the dominant discourses that animate stories of plagues? What contradictions does this art confront, and what kind of challenges does it offer, or shrink from? This course will examine a range of materials in search for answers, including narrative literature, film, cultural history and critical theory, and the infinite possibilities afforded by urban London and its long history of pandemic, epidemic and endemic disease.