Epidemiological plots and the national syndrome

Abstract

When mass demonstrations against state-sanctioned violence ‘play dead’, they deliver collective judgements on the failure of justice. In this article, I discuss the epidemiological plot, a crisis genre motivated by the idea that the state can be cured through its own processes. This plot is preoccupied with defending the state against viral invasion, moral and medical, and by coercing consensus around what and whom can be included within it. I expand on this in a reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), where a medical-sociological consortium forms to annihilate a foreign threat to national health: vampirism. I suggest that Dracula’s exhaustion of its compliant reader through its proliferation of data offers an analogy for a normative and mainstream socio-scientific literacy that serves, increasingly, as a condition for full participation in public life. I move from this to consider entanglements with the time of judgement in Ashon Crawley’s The Lonely Letters (2020), arguing that these circumvent the progressive historicism of national timekeeping.