Colonial epidemiology: the poetics and politics of incommunicability in Sartre’s Typhus (1944)

Moving beyond an understanding of colonialism as a metaphor for individual doctor-patient relationships and towards an analysis of the political consequences of colonialism for the operation of disease on specific communities, this article analyses attempted epidemic management via the structural forces of colonial biopolitics. It does so by developing a close reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s posthumously-published screenplay Typhus, through the conceptual lens of what has been termed medical ‘(in)communicability’. The article suggests that Typhus not only makes visible the coercive dynamics of biopower, but contests them through the portrayal of individuals among a colonised population who refuse to subjugate themselves to public health measures imposed by the authorities. By paying attention to racialised inequalities that result from public health measures influenced by the politics of colonialism, Sartre’s text contains prescient lessons for the development of culturally-sensitive global health strategies in epidemic and pandemic management eighty years after it was first written.