Emergence and History: Variola Stories

What does it mean to write histories of global pandemics? As global forms defined by their wide geographic extension, minimal population immunity, and contagiousness, among other criteria, pandemics are notoriously difficult crisis-events to plot temporally or to scale spatially (see Movens, Folkers, and Fauci for criteria). The problem is a conceptual one, for “true emergences” are multitemporal nonlinear occurrences unfolding across different orders of association—biological and ecological, social and political. What happens at one level might not have direct causality or a positive correlation to what happens at another. Such an understanding of emergence as an unprecedented event that cannot be entirely predicted or tracked to one point of origin has settled as an epidemic episteme ever since deadly pathogenic viruses (Hanta, Marburg, HIV, and Ebola) burst onto the scene in the early eighties. Scuttling the post–World War II war on germs, these sudden emergences recast global pandemics as...