Incontinent Empire- Anjuli Kolb vs Priyamvada Gopal

Claire Chambers writes in Dawn of another Literature Professor's book

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s ambitious debut monograph, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion and Terror 1817–2020. In it, the Pakistani-American scholar ranges over 200 years of history to argue that the West has long used the language of disease centrally in its methods of control.

Kolb is wrong. The West, like the East and the North and the South, has used killing and beating and incarcerating people and confiscating any nice shiny things they might have to change their victims' behavior or otherwise achieve their own material objective. Intensive brain washing, genocide and ethnic cleansing have also been used- which is why Kolb's ancestral Pakistan doesn't have a lot of non-Muslims though they were once the majority of the population. 

The language used by Islam might feature Satan and the poison of 'Westoxification'. That may be because Muslims consider their own people to be ignorant of Science. The West, on the other hand, may believe its people to be skeptical of talk of Satan and a God who really wants to fuck over anybody not of the right sect. Thus a more up to date type of language may be used. But language does not matter. What matters is beating and killing and incarcerating people or ethnically cleansing them the way Pakistan has traditionally done. 

What inspires Kolb’s thesis is Susan Sontag’s argument from Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors about a pervasive and dangerous entanglement of war imagery and medical diction.

But, it turned out, that 'entanglement' didn't matter at all. The AIDS pandemic was contained coz people ignored cretins like Sontag and gave money to Scientists in laboratories.  

According to the renowned American critic,

who was still as stupid cretin because all 'critics' have shit for brains 

similes and metaphors, signs and signifiers act as misleading bridges between wars and pandemics.

Scientists didn't need some silly Sontag to tell them that. 

Kolb extends Sontag’s ideas to talk about the way in which terror and insurgency are widely positioned as a “viruslike” epidemic.

The alternative is simply to say that Pakistan is a rogue state and should be nuked back to the Stone Age. Indeed, that is what Bush's White House told Musharraf who then had to pretend to be on America's side. One result was that a lot of innocent Pakistanis were killed by American drone strikes.  Still, some Pakistanis got paid lots of dollars to go along with this. 

Such imagery of contagion has, she submits, been the defining trope of Islamophobic discourse among imperialists from the 1857 Indian Rebellion onwards.

Rubbish! Killing people or chasing them away is what has worked. On the other hand, it is true that the Hindu Nationalists objected to salutary public health programs during epidemics and used this imaginary grievance to mobilize their ignorant brethren against a paternalistic Administration. Gandhi and his pal Dr. Pranjivan Mehta got terribly exercised about vaccinations and quarantines while Jinnah, quite sensibly, took a more enlightened view. Incidentally, Gandhi was always denouncing all sorts of stuff as 'Satanic'. He truly was a cretin. 

The plain fact is that there have always been plenty of stupid peeps who don't believe the germ theory of disease. Even now, there are crazy anti-vaxxers running amok across the globe. However, as more and more of them drop dead, the problem diminishes. Language does not matter. Dying horribly because you chose to be as stupid as shit is the Darwinian way in which cretins are eliminated from the population. 

For one thing, colonisers traded in the language of Muslim extremism as a “cancer.”

No they didn't. They killed or subjugated the Muslims when they could and took away their nice, shiny, stuff. Very few ordinary people had heard much of cancer till after the second world war. Nixon's 'War on Cancer' is what led to widespread understanding of its aetiology. 

Kolb defeats her own thesis by saying terrorism is viewed both as a cancer- i.e. something which arises endogenously- as well as a plague- i.e. something which is highly transmissible. This shows the woman is as stupid as shit and teaches a worthless subject. Why not simply say 'Terrorism is a birthday cake, a cigarette carton, and also the secret name of my neighbor's cat's Nicaraguan horcrux'? The self-contradiction would not be so apparent. 

She says 'Terrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. 

This is not true. We don't spend a lot of money trying to cure terrorists of their malady. We kill them or Gitmo their sorry asses. We may equally say 'Terrorism is satanic, it is shitty, it is cowardly, it is kray kray, it is ugly and stupid and smells really bad.' In other words, we use words which signify bad things to us to show how we feel about other stuff we don't like.  Equally we might say of a curry which gave us the trots- 'that korma was a fucking ISIS suicide bomber which has wrecked my fucking guts.' 

For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in order to contain its political energies.

No. For thousands of years, killing or enslaving insurgents has contained their 'political energies'. Metaphors achieved shit. 

 In Epidemic Empire, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb shows that this trope began in responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 

But 'the response' to the Indian Mutiny included the intervention of Sikh troops who joyfully plundered Delhi. Does she really think those dudes were saying 'virus' to each other and wagging their turbaned heads knowledgably? 

The trope used then and now has  always been along the lines of - 'kill those fucking cunts! Fuck them over but good! Shove pointed things up their arses. Slaughter them and take any nice shiny things they might happen to own'. 

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.

But 'a postcolonial literary perspective' is an utterly foolish and useless perspective.  It doesn't matter whether we speak of a virus or Satan as motivating those who try to kill us and whom we are trying to kill. The truth is racialist epithets are what have currency on the ground. Thus when the Pakistani Army was perpetrating genocide on the Bengalis, they referred to them pejoratively as rice-eating darkies.

Since Pakistan is the biggest breeding ground for Terrorism and since it is in the interests of Pakistani origin people to try to turn the country away from that path, Kolb should be concentrating on the tropes which occur in the Urdu and Punjabi and Pakhtoon manifestos issued by the militants. But she might herself get fatwa'd if she suggests that non-Muslims aren't actually Satan's minions or that God doesnt not really want you to slay the idolaters and Ahmediyyas and so forth. 

Another example from the present day is the pathologisation of violent extremists as members of an alleged death cult, even as individual perpetrators’ mental ill health is neglected or denied.

Very true! Why do women not offer mental health counselling to violent rapists? Why do they sometimes use violence to defend themselves? How come they go to the police and try to get their assailant incarcerated? They should be helping the rapist get proper counselling and giving them lots of money to eat healthy and holiday in the Maldives. 

A final case in point is a horrible, fake story former American president Donald Trump told while on the election trail in 2016. He claimed that, during the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, Gen John Pershing had shot dead dozens of Filipino Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. Kolb contends that, in marshalling this apocryphal tale, Trump hailed the blood as a prophylactic, inoculating the body politic against the Muslim other.

The Americans did urinate on Korans and bury Muslims with pigs. But dipping bullets in blood or anything else is a bad idea. Your gun might blow up in your hand. Pershing was all about killing anyone who didn't get on their knees to the Yankees. He thought pigs should be roasted and eaten, not wasted on dead dudes. 

Trump, it must be said, was having to play catch up with Obama who snatched Osama and had him killed and dumped in the Sea. Sadly, he could not emulate the great drone-striker and deporter-in-chief and thus got only one term. Indeed, as Biden reminded us earlier this year, it was Trump who did a deal with the Taliban to get American troops out of that quagmire of a shithole. 

Trump's constituency- as everybody knows- aint into 'innoculation'. They want all them rag-heads and Mexicans and furriners to be fucked to death. Why could Trump not deliver on even this entirely reasonable demand? How come Biden and Harris are able to preside over rape camps on the border and thus get all the credit? It's sooooo unfair!  

Trump portrayed his executive order to bar people from seven countries entering the United States as a quarantining.

Obama had previously, entirely legally and justifiably, begun this process. Trump was playing catch-up but botched things. He may have used the word 'quarantining' but it was the wrong word. What he had promised was permanent exclusion.  

In this way, acts of war or hatred are somehow recoded as acts of care.

Coz Trump was all about how we must all cuddle and kiss terrorists- right?  

The malicious “Muslim ban” is twisted into an innocent preventative measure to protect potential hosts from the parasitic invasion of foreign bodies.

Actually, it was a lame alternative to 'fuck them all to death' the way President Harrison promised to do on South Park.  

Kolb is also influenced also by British historian Robert Peckham’s Empires of Panic: Epidemic and Colonial Anxieties, as she examines (neo)colonial anxieties around supposed super-spreader events such as the annual Haj pilgrimage.

Peckham was a Sciencey guy. During the Raj there was no anxiety about the Haj spreading disease. The fear was that the Wahabbis might piss of the Indian Hanafis but Ibn Saud took care of that problem. In return, the Brits tried to ensure that Indians didn't illegally stay on after the pilgrimage. 

The plain fact of the matter was that overpopulated India was the epicenter of diseases not the clean desert air of the two Holy Cities.  Anyway, it was the Hindu Nationalists, not the Muslims, who were the guys who tried to make political capital out of the Raj's salutary public health policies. 

Previous generations of Americans had been galvanised first by so-called Yellow Peril fears (ideas about the threatening movement of non-white Chinese and Japanese bodies) and, later, by terror at communism’s spread.

But they had already been galvanized into killing anybody who had nice land or who objected to being enslaved.  Why pretend that Americans were sweet and loving people constantly cuddling with Native Americans and African Americans and Mexicans and so forth till some nasty peeps started talking about germs and viruses and cancers and plagues? 

By contrast, the people seen as contagious in the 21st century are those almost two billion individuals around the world with affiliations to Islam.

Kolb, it seems, has certainly done well to keep the fuck away from a country with 200 million of them. But the problem is not 'affiliation to Islam'. It is being a Malthusian fucking shithole. The truth is Terrorism is one way out of grinding poverty. The problem is that death soon supervenes. 

Through this lens, it is noteworthy that, in his forthcoming 2022 novel The Body by the Shore, Tabish Khair writes: “Muslims had been replaced by a virus as the global villain ... though with similar effects.”

But, for Muslims, everybody else remains a Satanic force which God will soon help those of the Faith to eliminate once and for all. Still, it is nice to see that an Indian Muslim thinks COVID is as horrible as militant Islam.  

In her powerful introduction, Kolb shows that, far from being eclipsed by Covid-19, the epidemic of metaphors has only accelerated since the novel coronavirus struck. Muslims’ villainisation, she says, has been “exposed and exacerbated” still further by the pandemic. Epidemiological tropes blur distinctions and erase the human, turning others into a single, indistinct mass associated with infectious disease.

This stupid woman won't acknowledge that it was innocent people who looked as though they might have Chinese heritage who faced bullying and harassment after the Wuhan outbreak. 

Kolb investigates the “epidemic empire” in four regions: the South Asian Subcontinent,

which was too large for any consistent public health policy. That's one reason Hindu Nationalist agitations in this respect had little pan-Indian appeal. That is why cow-protection became the first 'mass contact' platform for the INC. 

Algeria,

coz of Camus's the Plague- right? It isn't the case that Algerians speak Arabic and have a rich literary tradition. Perish the thought!

Britain and the US.

Coz them dudes write in English. 

She largely reads against the grain

i.e tells stupid lies 

of classic texts, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Albert Camus’s The Plague and Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers.

So, only White dudes are worth studying- right? The irony here is that because traditional societies rejected the germ theory in favor of some notion of finding an internal balance of humors or male and female energies or New Age stuff of that sort

She also appraises selected works by Salman Rushdie, and surprise bestseller The 9/11 Commission Report with a critical eye, and — more sympathetically — LOOK, Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif’s 2016 debut collection.

Sharif doesn't seem to be in a hurry to leave the land she loathes and get back to Iran. I wonder why.  

Kolb’s readings show how 19th century novels and reports continue to impinge on our current realities, particularly as regards Islamophobia and racism.

Those aren't our current realities. Sciencey stuff matters. Grievance Studies is a nuisance simply.  

Chapter 1, titled ‘Great Games’, deals in part with the Americans’ use of a fake vaccination programme against hepatitis B in northwest Pakistan as a cover for the illegal operation to kill Osama bin Laden.

So, these Americans think it cool to shit on their own country. Obama was a criminal. He illegally killed Osama. String him up! 

The repercussions of this were that many Pakistanis were left without full inoculation once the programme was summarily withdrawn following Bin Laden’s death.

Because Pakistanis are too stupid to vaccinate themselves. America has to come and do it for them. Also why is Biden neglecting to send SEALS to wipe the bums of every Pakistani who disdains such manual labor? The answer, of course, is that he is a big fat RACIST! 

They could be forgiven for

being as stupid as shit- coz they are brown 

subsequently regarding public health measures with heavy scepticism, or from behind the veil of conspiracy theory.

In which case they could also be forgiven for trying to kill every American they can get their hands on- unless it is unsafe to do so.  

Chapter 2 scrutinises cholera’s “Blue Plague” and risks posed by contaminated water. Kolb’s analysis of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s work is an exception to the general rule that in the book’s first half she is interested in colonial literature.

But a guy who is knighted is part of the colonial establishment. Even if he writes in Urdu, it is part and parcel of the discourse of the colonial power.  However, Sir Syed was having to work hard to appease British suspicion of a supposed 'Wahabbi' element among the Sunnis. 

The third chapter, ‘Circulatory Logic’, interprets Stoker’s vampire against the backdrop of fin-de-siècle melancholy about the decline of the Empire.

The thing did not exist. The Empire continued to grow in size reaching a peak two decades later. Stoker was an Irishman who took up the 'absentee landlord as vampire' trope in Irish literature and united it to another Irish theme- the woman drinking the blood of her lover slain by the Sassenach.  

Chapters four and five shift to Algeria and to Camus’s and Pontecorvo’s virologically-inflected creations.

But Cholera and the Plague- which is what Oran had been afflicted with- are bacteria not viruses.  Are all Professors of Literature utterly ignorant? 

The sixth chapter on Rushdie has much to say about contemporary occupation in Kashmir and a horrific “epidemic of blindness”, wherein pellet guns are wielded to take out young protestors’ sight.

Those 'protestors' having previously cleansed Hindu Pundits out of the Valley. What they'd do to Rushdie if they could get their hands on him is well known. What is interesting is that kids are paid to go out and risk getting blinded. That's a swell way to spend money- right?  

Such atrocities are played down in the Indian author’s

Rushdie was British and Pakistani. Now he is American. He was born in India but did not have the option to take Indian citizenship because his dad migrated to Pakistan via Britain.  

mantra from his 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown: “a plague on both your houses.” These accursed houses belong to the occupiers and the Kashmiri insurgents, as though there were moral and firepower equivalence between them.

It is quite true that the Muslims ethnically cleansed the Hindus whereas the reverse did not happen. There is indeed no moral equivalence between the two sides. 

One of the strands in Kolb’s final chapter, ‘Cures from Within’, concerns the black swaths of redaction in The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture (2014).

Coz shitting on America- even if you are an American citizen- is what worthless academics get paid to do- right?  

As can be seen, Kolb’s key texts are cultural as well as literary,

No. They are as stupid as shit. 

and her focus is on metaphor more than disease.

Coz she's got shit in her head. That's a metaphor right there.  

Epidemic Empire is nonetheless an instructive book for people around the world steeling themselves to enter a third year of this seemingly interminable pandemic.

If by 'instructive' you mean 'stupid as shit'- sure. Why not?  

Kolb cuts through martial metaphors to remind us that the present health crisis comes to a war-weary public.

Nonsense! China and India and most parts of the world aren't war-weary at all.  

Exhausted as they already were by over 20 years of the ‘war on terror’,

Which Obama could have ended after killing Osama but didn't because the thing wasn't 'exhausting' at all.  

what the global majority now needs is vaccine equity rather than more sabre-rattling.

Like these cretins could deliver any such thing! What the world needs to do is defund bogus Academic Departments and the Grievance Studies imbecility they foster. 

Apparently Kolb teaches some shit called 'Narrative Medicine'. This is

 is an interdisciplinary field that brings powerful narrative skills of radical listening and creativity from the humanities and the arts to address the needs of all who seek and deliver healthcare. It enables patients and caregivers to voice their experience, to be heard, to be recognized, and to be valued, improving the delivery of healthcare. This evolving transdisciplinary field of enquiry addresses issues of structural inequality and social justice in healthcare.

The Master of Science in Narrative Medicine prepares health professionals, writers, and scholars to apply the skills and values of narrative understanding to improve outcomes for both patients and caregivers. It offers a rigorous and in-depth study of close reading of creative texts, illness and disability narratives, narrative ethics, philosophy, creative writing, and other perspectives. 

The non-degree online Certification of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine is developed specifically for students who seek ways to bring narrative methods into their current careers.

How utterly deluded and narcissistic do you have to be to pay good money for such an entirely worthless type of credential? Why not study 'Twerking Medicine'- an interdisciplinary field that brings powerful booty shaking skills to address the needs of all those who seek and deliver healthcare, pizzas or farts into the lovingly up turned faces of their students? 

Kolb may not be Priyamvada Gopal level toxic- Pakistani women, even if second generation American, have not been able to shake off an ancestral heritage of charm and gentility in favor of JNU type gormless jhollawallah stupidity and shrillness- but her 'Epidemic Empire' is as worthless as Gopal's 'Insurgent Empire.'  I have it on good authority that Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyaya will shortly be issuing her own 'Incontinent Empire' which will consist of her shitting over each and every Chair of Comparative Literature that Ivy League possesses. The Empire strikes back with Montezuma's revenge.