13 September 2024 — 12:00 noon — GAR 1.102
Bassam Sidiki (UT English)
“Viral Rivalries: Influenza and Inter-Imperial Prestige in Colonial Samoa”
In this talk, Bassam Sidiki will briefly outline the main argument and structure of his first monograph in progress, Parasitic Empires, which is a cultural history of infectious disease in the Anglophone world in the long twentieth century and a novel theorization of British-US imperial relations in that period. He will then home in on the fourth chapter of the book— about the 1918 influenza pandemic in Western and American Samoa and the resulting inter-imperial disagreements and collaborations between New Zealand, the United States, and the British Empire. Drawing on government correspondence, short stories, newspapers, and physicians’ memoirs and archives which describe New Zealand’s and the United States’ disparate efforts to quarantine their islands from influenza, Sidiki will theorize a “poetics of archipelagic reference” in these documents which is at the same time a “politics of inter-imperial prestige.”
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Bassam Sidiki is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and an affiliate of the MA program in Humanities, Health and Medicine. He holds an MA in Medical Humanities and Bioethics from Northwestern University and a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan. His work focuses on postcolonial and empire studies, health humanities, and disability studies.