Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850-2000 (review)
were penned by Cold Warriors [and] disease-inflected political threats conformed to the specific mechanisms of viral infection" (171). In the wake of the Cold War, the social registers of the outbreak narrative mutate yet again with the HIV/AIDS crisis, where the deterioration of the immune system that is the medical symptom of the virus allegorizes the breakdown of geographical boundaries and the threat of "Africanization" to the developed world—as Wald describes the way this outbreak is imagined, "'African AIDS' realized the vision of a diseased continent as both a Third World present and a First World future" (237). On these terms, microbes, germs, and viruses are not simply biological entities to be apprehended scientifically but rather become symbols for processes of social transformation reinforcing and reinforced by the cultural logic of outbreak. While Contagious bears the best traits of current multidisciplinary approaches to American Studies, combining cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and globalization theory in fruitful and provocative ways, it might share its greatest affinities in terms of theme and critical perspective with Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Like The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Contagious is not only an engrossing study replete with canny, unanticipated readings, but it is also a testament to the social work literary criticism is capable of. Part and parcel of Wald's analysis is what she sees as the ethical reasons for identifying, demystifying, and transforming the outbreak narrative: While the plots describing epidemics might be conventionalized, what we learn from them and how we respond to them can change. In Wald's own words, "It is possible to revise the outbreak narrative, to tell the story of disease emergence and human connection in the language of social justice rather than of susceptibility" (270). By pushing the social possibilities of cultural criticism, Contagious is an object lesson in thinking about our own critical practices and theoretical concepts, and how we might reorient and revitalize them.