Refereed Articles
“Postcolonial Narrative Prosthesis: Political Metonymy, Defamiliarization, and Somatization.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 19:4 special issue on “Narrative Prosthesis at 25,” edited by Ajitpaul Mangat and Christina Fogarasi. Forthcoming
“Imperial Immunities: Ronald Ross and Arthur Conan Doyle in the Andaman Islands.” Victorian Literature and Culture 55:3 (2025) https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150325100156
“The Plague Ship Narrative: Racialized Quarantine in Anglo-American Texts of 1897.” Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures 3:2 (2025) https://doi.org/10.1353/cusp.2025.a968839
“Children of the Sea: Biopolitics, Einfühlung, and Sympathetic Co-Experiencing.” Journal of World Literature, 10:3 special issue on “Empathy and Border-Crossing,” edited by Arnab Dutta Roy and Shailen Mishra (2025). https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-01003007
“Inscribing the Indus: Hydrological Discourse and Travel Writing in British Sindh.” Victorian Studies 66:3 (2024). https://doi-org/10.2979/vic.00159
“‘On These Little Islands, These Things Happen’: Leprosy, Race, and Postcolonial Fictions of Chacachacare.” Literature and Medicine 40:2 (2022). http://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2022.0033
“Objective Witnesses: Disabling the Posthuman in Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier. ” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 15:1 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2021.5
“Doctored Images: Enacting ‘Pain-Work’ in John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Fortunate Man (1967).” Journal of Medical Humanities 42 (2020). doi: 10.1007/s10912-020-09671-1
Scholarly Reviews
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817-2020. Literature and Medicine (2021) https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2021.0014
Sony Coráñez Bolton, Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines. Critical Inquiry (Winter 2024) http://doi.org/10.1086/727658
Book Project
Parasitic Empires: Infection, Insularity, Inter-imperiality, 1880 – 2022 (In preparation, under advance contract with University of North Carolina Press)
Parasitic Empires takes the figures of the island and the microbial parasite to theorize geopolitical relations between two powerful Anglophone empires: the British and the American. The metaphors of “insularity” or “isolationism” have often been deployed to (mis)represent U.S. foreign policy before the turn of the century and in the interwar years, while post-Brexit United Kingdom asserts its independence from the European continent by emphasizing its status as an “island-nation.” Assembling a vast archive of literary, cultural, and medical documents, Parasitic Empires argues that these claims of insularity are specious; the British and U.S. empires have been entangled and co-dependent in an inter-imperial, “parasitic” fashion since the turn of the century to the present. Ironically, these parasitic relations that give the lie to imperial insularity are often most visible in certain island-like heterotopias: gardens, ships, and brothels, or in literal tropical islands of the Caribbean, Pacific, and Indian Oceans where the two imperial powers have worked together—or at odds—to hold infectious diseases at bay. In other words, the inter-imperial discourses of parasitology, tropical medicine, and bacteriology bespoke a notably parasitic Anglophone imperial formation that was at once local (insular) and global (inter-imperial).
Parasitic Empires—by underscoring the fugitive presence of U.S. imperialism within the British colonial enterprise through health discourses and geopolitics—presents a new way to conceptualize and critique what has emerged in academic spaces as the field of “global Anglophone literature.” It brings into stark relief how the term “global Anglophone” flattens distinctions between colonizer and colonized and, in doing so, also renders invisible the monumental influence that the U.S. empire had on its British counterpart. In fact, at the turn of the century, the term “English-speaking races” was limited to white Britons and Americans to the exclusion of the colonized races; the “global Anglophone” then was white. Medical discourse produced in Britain and America on infectious diseases such as plague, venereal disease, and leprosy played a key role in drawing this color line. My wide-ranging literary and cultural archive comprising both transatlantic and postcolonial authors—including Frances Hodgson Burnett, Henry James, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Bram Stoker, E. M. Forster, Sinclair Lewis, Elizabeth Nunez, Tiphanie Yanique, Albert Wendt, and Natasha Soobramanien—shows that studies in the “global Anglophone” must take into account the current Anglophone hegemon, while also demonstrating the enduring way in which literary authors have depicted Anglo-American imperial geopolitics through the lexicon of infectious disease.
Public-Facing Scholarship and Criticism
“Severances: Memory as Disability in Late Capitalism.” Chicago Review, July 2022.
“Book Reviews: The United States, India, and Global (Anti)Imperialism. Pyriscence, June 2021.
“High Theory” Podcast Discussion on Jasbir K. Puar’s The Right to Maim, April 2021.
Bassam Sidiki 