Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics

This volume explores the variable meanings and discourses of historical and contemporary pandemics to rethink theories and practices of planetary health. Rather than conflating the planetary with anthropogenic climate change, planetary geo-engineering, or the "global," the volume elaborates a version of planetary health humanities that invites decolonial, creative, and pluridisciplinary modes of thinking and sees "health" as a complex non-anthropocentric process that moves within the multiple scales of the planetary. The volume offers new historical trajectories as it considers an eighteenth-century woman author's readings of plague, intersecting narratives of nineteenth-century lactation and vaccination, and the forgotten biopolitics of NASA's Planetary Quarantine Program. It offers accounts of decolonial and oracular planetary health, insists that the role of literature in the health humanities is not merely instrumental, explores viral and planetary co-inhabitations, and scrutinizes inequities faced by global health workers. The volume also includes discussions of cybernetic addiction and the complex entanglements of humans, microbes, and bees. Its concluding interview addresses the concrete impact of current planetary transformations on individual and collective health. Bringing together multiple disciplines, the volume will be of interest to students and scholars in health humanities, literary studies, postcolonial studies, medical history, and narrative medicine.

Heike Härting is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Literatures and Languages of the World at Université de Montréal, Canada. Heather Meek is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Literatures and Languages of the World at Université de Montréal, Canada.

Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Foreword, Dipesh Chakrabarty Acknowledgments Introduction: Intersecting Narratives of Planetary Thought and Pandemics, Heike Härting and Heather Meek Section A: Pandemic Anxieties and Historical Genealogies of Planetary Health 1 "So Spreading and Penetrating a Disease": Margaret Cavendish's Imaginative Landscapes of Plague Heather Meek 2 Lactination: Planetary Bodies and Their Fluid Encounters in the Early Vaccination Narrative Anna E. MacDonald 3 Mobilizing Health between the Global and the Planetary: Apollo 11, Airstream, and NASA's Planetary Quarantine Program Richard A. McKay Section B: Reading Planetary Health Narratives: Epistemology, Theory, and Practice 4 Decolonial Epi-pathographies of Planetary Health: Tragedy, Policy, Art Heike Härting 5 Little COVID-19, All Grown Up in the Planetary: Reconsidering Health Humanities Instrumentalism in the COVID-19 Pandemic Shane Neilson 6 Tiger Symmetries: Pandemic as Gift Larissa Lai 7 Historicizing Planetary Health Policy: Health Work and Wages across Global and Planetary Health Ramah McKay Section C: Pandemic Ontologies, Body Politics, and a Planetary Health Commons 8 Contagious Bodies: A Pandemic of Racism Yasmin Jiwani 9 #Zoombies: Cybernetic Trance in Pandemic Times Samuele Collu 10 Planetary Health (In)humanities: Disordering the Colony Collapse Olivia Banner and Kathryn Whitlock 11 Narrating the Uncanny Triad: Imagining Microbe, Animal, and Human Entanglements within the Planetary Health Humanities Leonie Bossert and Davina Höll 12 Entangled Humanism and Impersonal Circuits of Imperial Power: An Interview with William Connolly Heike Härting and Heather Meek Index