{
  "issue_key": "vol09-no1-2021",
  "volume": 9,
  "number": 1,
  "season": "Spring 2021",
  "year": 2021,
  "sequence": 7,
  "type": "research-article",
  "section": "Research Article",
  "title": "The Colonial Politics of the Plague: Reading Camus in 2020",
  "subtitle": null,
  "slug": "the-colonial-politics-of-the-plague-reading-camus-in-2020",
  "corporate_author": null,
  "authors": [
    {
      "given_name": "Nasser",
      "family_name": "Amin",
      "credentials": null,
      "affiliation": null,
      "email": null,
      "orcid": null,
      "is_corresponding": false,
      "sequence": 1
    }
  ],
  "abstract": "The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has reignited interest in Albert Camus’ 1947 classic The Plague, which charts the relentless course of an epidemic raging through a city in Colonial French Algeria, and contains uncanny resonances with our contemporary situation. Camus speaks of official attempts to initially downplay and then manage the virus; the psyche of the populace under quarantine, with its feelings of aimlessness; the attempts of some to profiteer from the disease; and the fatality statistics broadcast as daily figures. Camus coolly dissects the anguish of separation that millions today have experienced in self-isolation, as social bonds break down and the recourse is to nothing other than inwardness.\n\nThe novel is also of course read as an allegory, of human defiance and solidarity in the face of an insurmountable and unknown enemy. In most contemporary accounts, this is identified with the French Resistance to the Third Reich occupation during the Second World War, in which Camus fought.\n\n2020 will also be remembered as the year when the legacies of the colonial past began to be reckoned with in an unprecedented way, as the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement forced public bodies, companies and educational providers, among others, to grapple with the thorny topic of decolonisation. In that spirit, this paper provides an interpretation that revisits postcolonial critiques, which since the 1970s have challengingly situated Camus’ literature and activism within his wider political commitments to Algerie Francaise. Through literary analysis of the novel, and Camus’ earlier novella The Outsider, this paper serves to explain the erasure or vilification of the native majority within both works in the settlers’ debilitating fear of revolt and upheaval, as the inexorable rise in political consciousness of the Algerian natives was to issue in their ultimately successful war for secession from the French Republic, a fatal denouement Camus did not live long enough to witness.",
  "keywords": [
    "Camus",
    "Algeria",
    "Post-colonialism",
    "Colonialism",
    "France",
    "Algerian War",
    "The Plague",
    "The Outsider",
    "Coronavirus"
  ],
  "first_page": 28,
  "last_page": 38,
  "pdf_start": 28,
  "pdf_end": 38,
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  ],
  "notes": [
    "² A 2006 poll of the most favourite books of novel-reading males in Britain placed *The Outsider* at the top of the list (Higgins 2006)",
    "³ Nietzsche’s cosmological idea that everything is part of a perpetually repeating cycle of events. Nietzsche employs the concept as a personal test for an individual to judge whether they have lived their life to the fullest."
  ],
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