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How to represent the apocalypse in the era of pandemics of zoonotic origin? This review of Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary, published by Christos Lynteris on the brink of the COVID-19 epidemic, problematises the tension between a dominant pandemic imaginary, perpetuated by outbreak preparedness policies and the media, and an emergent imaginary, historically and geographically. Through comparisons between past pandemics and the one currently experienced, I sketch shifts in the genre and argue that the novelty of images of human extinction must nonetheless be assessed not only in relation to time, but also in space. (Abstract)
This article is part of the project “Fragments of the Forest: Hot Zones, Disease Ecologies, and the Changing Landscape of Environment and Health in West Africa,” which received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant agreement No. 885120).
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.