1st Edition
Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics
This volume explores the variable meanings and discourses of historical and contemporary pandemics to rethink theories and practices of planetary health.
Rather than conflating the planetary with anthropogenic climate change, planetary geo-engineering, or the "global," the volume elaborates a version of planetary health humanities that invites decolonial, creative, and pluridisciplinary modes of thinking and sees "health" as a complex non-anthropocentric process that moves within the multiple scales of the planetary. The volume offers new historical trajectories as it considers an eighteenth-century woman author’s readings of plague, intersecting narratives of nineteenth-century lactation and vaccination, and the forgotten biopolitics of NASA’s Planetary Quarantine Program. It offers accounts of decolonial and oracular planetary health, insists that the role of literature in the health humanities is not merely instrumental, explores viral and planetary co-inhabitations, and scrutinizes inequities faced by global health workers. The volume also includes discussions of cybernetic addiction and the complex entanglements of humans, microbes, and bees. Its concluding interview addresses the concrete impact of current planetary transformations on individual and collective health.
Bringing together multiple disciplines, the volume will be of interest to students and scholars in health humanities, literary studies, postcolonial studies, medical history, and narrative medicine.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Foreword, Dipesh Chakrabarty
Acknowledgments
Introduction, Heike Härting and Heather Meek
Section A: Pandemic Anxieties and Historical Genealogies of Planetary Health
1 “So Spreading and Penetrating a Disease”: Margaret Cavendish’s Imaginative Landscapes of Plague
Heather Meek
2 Lactination: Planetary Bodies and Their Fluid Encounters in the Early Vaccination Narrative
Anna E. MacDonald
3 Mobilizing Health between the Global and the Planetary: Apollo 11, Airstream, and NASA’s Planetary Quarantine Program
Richard A. McKay
Section B: Reading Planetary Health Narratives: Epistemology, Theory, and Practice
4 Decolonial Epi-pathographies of Planetary Health: Tragedy, Policy, Art
Heike Härting
5 Little COVID-19, All Grown Up in the Planetary: Reconsidering Health Humanities Instrumentalism in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Shane Neilson
6 Tiger Symmetries: Pandemic as Gift
Larissa Lai
7 Historicizing Planetary Health Policy: Health Work and Wages across Global and Planetary Health
Ramah McKay
Section C: Pandemic Ontologies, Body Politics, and a Planetary Health Commons
8 Contagious Bodies: A Pandemic of Racism
Yasmin Jiwani
9 #Zoombies: Cybernetic Trance in Pandemic Times
Samuele Collu
10 Planetary Health (In)humanities: Disordering the Colony Collapse
Olivia Banner and Kathryn Whitlock
11 Narrating the Uncanny Triad: Imagining Microbe, Animal, and Human Entanglements within the Planetary Health Humanities
Leonie Bossert and Davina Höll
12 Entangled Humanism and Impersonal Circuits of Imperial Power: An Interview with William Connolly
Heike Härting and Heather Meek
Index
Biography
Heike Härting is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Literatures and Languages of the World at Université de Montréal, Canada.
Heather Meek is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Literatures and Languages of the World at Université de Montréal, Canada.
