MFS Modern Fiction Studies

The term natural disaster is ambiguous and its taxonomy limited. Even more perplexing is how to narrate the different kinds of disasters, each demanding a set form and narration strategy. Pallavi Rastogi's Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century engages with the impact of disasters in the postcolonial world. The book examines four catastrophes in southern Africa and South Asia: the medical disaster in South Africa and neighboring Botswana, [End Page 583] the economic disaster in Zimbabwe, the oceanic disaster in Sri Lanka, and the geopolitical disaster in India and Pakistan. Developing the concepts of "Story and Event" (9) and "Disaster Unconscious" (5) to examine the impact of disasters on colonized societies, Rastogi conjoins disaster studies with the realm of literary analysis.

Postcolonial Disaster uses the term postcolonial disaster in reference to the US, but only briefly. In postcolonial discourse, scholars place the US in the domain of the postcolonial world, which is not postcolonial in the same sense as Africa or South Asia. Rastogi's main focus remains on Africa. Only in chapter 4, "Simmer," does she engage with the conflict zone of Kashmir. At the outset, Rastogi defines the term disaster, how she is going to use it, and how disasters disrupt human lives in the postcolonial world, focusing on economic, medical, and AIDS-related issues. Although the book provides a detailed account of the different kinds of disasters that hit Africa, it hesitates to discuss the full implications or impact of western intervention in Africa. Wherever such intervention is pointed out––buried in the main text or in the endnotes––no explanation follows, and the narrative moves on to Africa's internal problems. The book foregrounds its central thesis by focusing on the familiar African problems that are further amplified in the wake of disaster. However, Rastogi's energetic analyses defocus the external economic and military pressures to which Africa is subjected––which suggests that all Africa's problems occur in isolation or originate in Africa itself.

The chapter on medical disasters offers crucial insights into how they surface in Africa. However, Rastogi's emphasis on the story of AIDS and its link to Africa seems problematic. Quoting Jacques Pepin, Rastogi writes that "June 1981 is the official birthdate of the HIV epidemic" (116), and then she reveals the backstory of the epidemic: "AIDS traveled through east Africa in the 1960s and 70s, with the first HIV epidemic reported in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa." Thus, Postcolonial Disaster places the origin or emergence of AIDS in 1960s Africa. Like many other infectious diseases, AIDS travels westward. Further, the book demonstrates how Africans frustrate western efforts to mitigate the impact of AIDS by refusing treatment, arguing that "60-80 percent of the South African population visit traditional healers as their first contact for advice and/or treatment of health concerns" (126). Thus, the book highlights the already well-established tropes of African irrationality and superstition; it does not pay sufficient attention to African distrust of the West and its roots in colonial history, and how it was Africans' lack of financial resources that made them seek traditional healers. Rastogi also points out "the collective [End Page 584] [African] inability to name AIDS as itself is a sickness" (144). This sickness is not unique to Africans; however, they remain trapped in it unlike people in developed countries who have come to terms with AIDS because of massive institutional support. Such selective narratives strengthen Conradian Africa––an Africa that is the den of disease, conflict, and thus disaster. Yet Africa attracts non-Africans (Europeans, Americans, and increasingly the Chinese). In explaining the impact of disasters on Africans, Postcolonial Disaster further embeds them in the anti-Africanist narrative.

I cite one very recent example from India that can help us understand critical situations in Africa. When, during the first wave of Covid-19 pandemic, Indian nurses and doctors went to urban slums to test their Muslim and Dalit inhabitants, they were attacked. The media called...