Reflection: Spectacle & Slow Disaster

A Personal Note:

My fascination with infectious disease has evolved over the years from a general fear of viruses and an obsession with the mobile game “Plague Inc.” to a morbid college interview topic and potential field of interest to a professional aspiration and an academic passion. And there’s something incredibly bizarre about studying a historical pandemic from an academic perspective while simultaneously living through what feels like the disaster of the century. Thus, studying the 1918 Influenza Pandemic hits home for me in more ways than one – and I’ve found myself thinking a great deal about where COVID-19 will fit into disaster discourse once the dust has settled. 

A Reflection:

A major theme in the study of disaster is the definition of the very word itself. More specifically, many disaster historians acknowledge a spectrum from spectacle disaster to slow violence and posit theories attempting to distinguish between these two phenomena. And yet – despite the varying theories making sense of slow violence and spectacle disaster, it seems that epidemic disease is consistently the foil. In this sense, the 1918 Influenza Pandemic blurs the line between most understandings of slow violence and spectacle disaster. Perhaps the very nature of infectious disease contradicts disaster theory.   

Perhaps the simplest distinction between slow and spectacle disaster is a temporal one, applying literally the implications of the word “slow” to the spectrum of disaster. Through this lens, a disaster like the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which took place over the course of several hours, easily qualifies as a spectacle disaster. So would Hurricane Katrina, which swept the Gulf Coast in a matter of days. In contrast, instances of slow violence, such as global poverty, would not match the qualification of occurring “quickly, ” and thus, would not be considered a spectacle disaster. This method of defining disaster is not without its flaws – 

disasters like the Chernobyl Nuclear Breakdown blur the line between the two entities – however, this distinction is an effective tool in separating disaster from instances of institutional oppression. In the case of Chernobyl, the disaster can be broken down into components that match this temporal model – the actual explosion (spectacle) and the subsequent generations of nuclear exposure (slow). The 1918 Influenza Pandemic, however, doesn’t seem to fit anywhere on this spectrum. The disaster occurred over the course of about a year, not quite short enough to qualify as spectacle and not quite long enough to be slow violence.  

Another potential differentiation between slow and spectacle disasters relies upon whether or not infrastructural damage occurs. In this model, events like the San Francisco Earthquake and Hurricane Katrina would obviously fall into the category of spectacle disaster, due to the visible damage to property. In contrast, global poverty, bringing with it no object damage but still pain and suffering, would be categorized as slow violence. The Chernobyl disaster would, again, break into two components – one which caused obvious damage to property (spectacle) and one which attacked a population more subtly (slow). And – perhaps unsurprisingly, the 1918 Influenza Pandemic fails to conform to this model. The pandemic certainly did not bring about falling buildings and smoking rubble, yet the physical nature of the disaster was difficult to ignore. The pandemic shut down cities entirely and forced governments to rely on mass graves for corpse disposal, thus altering the infrastructural landscape of society during the disaster tangibly. 

Similar to how the 1918 Influenza Pandemic continues to puzzle biologists with its vast mystery and uncertainty, it seems as though this disaster thwarts most historical understandings of disaster. And perhaps this placement of pandemics at the intersection between slow and spectacle disaster, as the foil to our binary understanding of disasters, sheds light on our innate inability to truly conceptualize the threat posed by illness. The notion of microorganisms fundamentally altering life as we know it is not only difficult to conceptualize but terrifying. And while the 1918 Influenza Pandemic was certainly proof of the disastrous effects of pandemics, it was not largely known by anyone outside of the scientific or historical community until another pandemic, COVID-19, arose. The confusion and fear that shroud infectious disease spread could be just what has kept the 1918 Influenza Pandemic out of the spotlight for so long – and the inability to qualify infectious disease on a widely accepted spectrum of disaster is, potentially, a manifestation of this confusion and fear.