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Chapter 15 - Malaria Literature

(Post)Colonial Perspectives, Infection, and the Question of Mobility

from Part III - Applications: Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2024

Anna M. Elsner
Affiliation:
Universität St Gallen, Switzerland
Monika Pietrzak-Franger
Affiliation:
Universität Wien, Austria
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Summary

This chapter examines how Bengali authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries use the mosquito to experiment with scale in fiction and poetry. Authors such as Rabindranāth Tagore, Trailokyanāth Mukhopadhyay, Annadāshankar Ray, and Tārāshankar Bandyopadhyāy question both Western medical perception and Western concepts of literary realism by stressing how malaria and mosquitoes escape neat categorizations of meaning. Furthermore, the mosquito in works of poetry and fantasy also shows the interconnection of medical, political, and environmental issues. This chapter uses postcolonial criticism, medical history, and methods drawn from the Health Humanities in order to engage the poetics and politics of Bengali literary interpretations of malaria. By so doing, it stresses the importance of non-Western perspectives to the study of literature and medicine, suggesting that scholarship engage the multiple medical value systems as well as literary traditions that reinterpret and subvert Western tenets of scientific thought.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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