The Plague Years: Reflecting on Pandemics

The Plague Years collects scholarly and essayistic reflections on literary, visual, and sonic representations of the COVID-19 and other pandemics. These are placed alongside poetry and short fiction written in the first two years of quarantine or isolation. This range expresses the intellectual and imaginative struggle and ingenuity entailed in coming to terms with the rampant spread of disease and its emotional, cultural, and political consequences.

The contributions are from diverse contexts: Africa (from Egypt to South Africa), China, Japan, the US, and Scandinavia. They consider some of the array of contemporary engagements: poems translated from Mandarin about the traumas of the frontline, Chinese calligraphic poetry printed on cartons of PPE, comments on the literary history of representing epidemics and pandemics, political analyses of the post-truth present, and the role of life-writing and gaming in an interrupted world. Given the generative and creative obliquity of many of its parts, this collection shifts how one thinks about the diseased present and the archival pasts on which it draws.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of English Studies in Africa.

Michael Titlestad is Personal Professor in the Department of English at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He has widely published in the fields of maritime, South African, and dystopian literature, and he is the editor of English Studies in Africa. His most recent book is Shipwreck Narratives: Out of Our Depth (2021).

Karl van Wyk is Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He began teaching in the English Department at the beginning of 2021. His research and publication interests include postmodern historiography. He is particularly concerned with WWII alternate history and South Africa’s attitudes to, and representations of, apartheid history.

Grace A. Musila is Associate Professor in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the editor of Wangari Maathai’s Registers of Freedom (2020), and the author of A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (2015).