Colonial epidemiology

doi:10.3828/jrs.2025.16

Colonial epidemiology

2025-09-12

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Steven Wilson *

DOI：10.3828/jrs.2025.16

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Moving beyond an understanding of colonialism as a metaphor for individual doctor-patient relationships and towards an analysis of the political consequences of colonialism for the operation of disease on specific communities, this article analyses attempted epidemic management via the structural forces of colonial biopolitics. It does so by developing a close reading of Jean-Paul Sartre's posthumously published screenplay Typhus, through the conceptual lens of what has been termed medical '(in)communicability'. The article suggests that Typhus not only makes visible the coercive dynamics of biopower, but contests them through the portrayal of individuals among a colonized population who refuse to subjugate themselves to public-health measures imposed by the authorities. By paying attention to racialized inequalities that result from public-health measures influenced by the politics of colonialism, Sartre's text contains prescient lessons for the development of culturally sensitive global health strategies in epidemic and pandemic management eighty years after it was first written.

Keywords:

Sartre

typhus

colonialism

epidemic

biopolitics

Fanon

communicability

incommunicability

Colonial epidemiology

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