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  The questions of where [Covid] came from, and just who is responsible for all this devastation and loss, have assumed outsize importance. This is perhaps why blame has become central to many discussions, with all the problems that brings. People want to know whose fault Covid-19 is. Professors Zhou Xun and Sander Gilman explore this territory in their book 'I Know Who Caused Covid-19’: Pandemics and Xenophobia. The authors examine the experiences of, and attitudes towards, a number of groups that have found themselves in the spotlight at various points: Chinese people, ultra-Orthodox Jews, black and brown people and, finally, Donald Trump-supporting white Americans.

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  'Book of the Day', The Guardian

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  Zhou and Gilman have jointly written a timely, relevant book that looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic ignited xenophobic tendencies long present in society. Though xenophobia is not particular to epidemics and pandemics, such health events are associated with sparking xenophobic rhetoric and discriminatory acts. After engaging with the theoretical notions of nation and community – both social constructs that pandemics put at risk – the authors offer chapters on four demographic groups to consider how they have been (mis)understood during the COVID-19 pandemic: Chinese/Asians, ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim), African Americans and the BAME community, and certain "white" communities Trump emboldened. From associating Asian immigrants with disease . . . to the harm inflicted by the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, the authors examine the complex relationships among public health, race/ethnicity, identity, and the nation . . . Weaving history, public health, and social commentary together, the book reveals the influence of political rhetoric on policies and health behaviors (e.g., masking, vaccinating) as well as assigning blame during pandemics. Recommended.

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  Choice

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  Zhou and Gilman should be congratulated for their deeply intriguing, thought-provoking book, which will appeal and be of great use to a broad general audience, as well as medical and public health practitioners. The cultural contagiousness of xenophobia, of blaming pandemics on non-Western and marginalized out-groups certainly bears witness to a long history of public health, one we have repeatedly witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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  H-Net

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  This book is a timely contribution to contemporary debates about racism and xenophobia, and how to understand them in order to combat them more effectively in the context of this pandemic . . . the book provides a range of evidence on the backstories involved, the histories of pandemics and reactions to them in earlier times. There is a wealth of detail, covering a wide range of materials.

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  Morning Star

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  While still in the midst of a public health crisis, we are fortunate to have two scholars who expertly weave their way through the infectious and symbolic threats that have roiled us all. Mass death and moral panics, scapegoating and the weaponization of past victimhood, examples like SARS, Ebola, and AIDS, communal dynamics around race and religion: all these and more have been scrambled in the great distress of this plague. Through their nuanced analyses, Gilman and Zhou allow us to reconsider these matters and the forces that have distorted and upended attempts to respond to a global pandemic as just that.

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  George Makari, Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine, and author of 'Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia'

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  If information about COVID-19 matters, read this book. Because information is what viruses provide us for better or worse. It is we who bring life to viruses – to the biological information they contain; to our reactions when we believe ourselves invaded; and to our xenophobic responses towards those we in turn blame. Indeed, there are many important lessons in this incisive analysis by Zhou and Gilman – about our sense of self; about our responsibilities and freedoms; about our fears of the foreign; and, above all, about our values and what we desire for the future. It is a brilliant accomplishment!

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  A. David Napier, author of 'The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World'

Zhou Xun (Author)
Zhou Xun is Reader in Modern History at the University of Essex. She has published widely on health, nutrition and ethnicity, and her latest book is The People’s Health: Health Intervention and Delivery in Mao’s China, 1949-1983 (2020). She is also co-editor of Smoke: A Global History of Smoking (Reaktion, 2004).

Sander L. Gilman (Author)
Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture (Reaktion, 2018).