Over many decades, "contagion" has been a metaphor of choice for everything from global terrorism, suicide bombings, poverty, immigration, global financial crises, human rights, fast food, obesity, divorce, and homosexuality. Essays examine the language of epidemiology used in the war on terror, the repressive effects of global disease surveillance, and films and novels that enact the perplexities of contagion in a global context. Fear of microbial disaster becomes a framework for larger questions about the nature and location of sovereignty and the related questions of contact and hygienic isolation, fear and invisibility, the hazards of sociability, the security of surveillance, and what a healthy security might mean. Utilizing the cross-disciplinary approach of global studies, contagion emerges as a vexed trope for globalization itself.

Bruce Magnusson is associate professor of politics and the director of global studies and Zahi Zalloua is associate professor of French and general studies, both at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

Contributors:

Alberto S. Galindo, assistant professor of Spanish, Whitman College

Andrew Lakoff, associate professor of anthropology, communications, and sociology at the University of Southern California

Christian Moraru, professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Paul B. Stares, General John W. Vessey Senior Fellow for Conflict Prevention and director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations

Priscilla Wald, professor of English and women's studies at Duke University

Geoffrey Whitehall, associate professor of political science at Acadia University, Nova Scotia

Mona Yacoubian, special adviser to the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention at the U.S. Institute of Peace