“The Power of Analyzing a Story:” Priscilla Wald on Literature, Science, and the Making of Collective Belief

To Priscilla Wald, all literature is political. This doesn’t mean that all works are written with a goal in mind, but rather that “all art registers its moment in some way.” They bear an imprint of the beliefs of a certain point in time, serving as a window into the zeitgeist of any given point in history. That is the focus of her work: taking a look into literature, science, law, and analyzing what that says about humanity. 

“What I’m really interested in is two things,” Wald said. “How do people come collectively to believe the same things … and how do we see through our stories?” 

Her first book, Constituting Americans, explores three Supreme Court cases: Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia, Dred Scott vs. Sandford, and Downes vs. Bidwell. Wald explained that each of these cases established groups of people as neither citizen nor alien, barring them from sharing their story in court. “I was really intrigued by that category of person and the anxieties that came from that,” Wald described. “What happens when there’s a category of person that the law has made non people? … In what ways do those people then haunt the system and put on display its fragility?,” she questions. 

Wald described how cases like these, and the questions that arose from them, fundamentally expose flaws in the American system. She dedicated her study to sharing the “untellable” stories of these populations, considering the impact that cases such as these had on the fabric of American democracy. “One of the dissenters [to the Dred Scott decision] said ‘what prevents the government from making White men slaves? If we allow this to happen, what are the consequences?’” she said.

After finishing Constituting Americans, Wald found herself immersed in ‘90’s literature and films about emerging infection. Films such as Outbreak and Hot Zone by Robert Preston saturated the mass market at a time when evolving diseases were also a hot button issue. “It led me to this 1989 conference where the concept of emerging infection got defined and put into play,” Wald said. “The idea was [about] communicable disease being a thing of the past. We know how to deal with it.”

This experience led Wald to her second study, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, which theorized the phenomenon of the “the outbreak narrative.” The outbreak narrative stipulates that emerging disease arises from the global south and infects the western world but is eventually contained by the power of medicine. Wald illustrated how this was a widespread belief of the ‘90s, but cracks became evident for Americans as western doctors failed to recognize key components of the spread of diseases. In the case of AIDS, she focused on the lack of recognition of heterosexual transmission or from the medical blood supply. 

Eighteen years after Contagious was published, Wald reflected on how this narrative has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the outbreak narrative encompassed Americans’ collective belief in the power of medicine, many individuals distrusted Western medical institutions during the pandemic. Wald explained that this is because all media was “telling basically the same story” regarding the outbreak narrative while now, with the rise of the internet, there are many different accounts of events. As a result, “people are literally seeing different realities.”

Wald’s current project is titled Human Being After Genocide. She reflects upon the term “mythistory,” which chronicles the mythic elements within the tellings of group histories. Post WWII, she says, there was a collective reflection on the way the Nazis were able to gloss over genocide through communal rituals. To prevent ritualism from justifying genocide once again, organizations attempted to make the concept of the human being itself “sacred” through defining “the human in such a way that we … make it so invaluable that when there are these other crimes against humanity or genocides other nations are compelled to intervene.”  

However, as Wald explains, these new definitions didn’t necessarily serve their purpose.  They didn’t necessarily end racism or cruelty, but they did provoke new conversations about what it means to be human. One of these conversations came in the form of science fiction, which critically examined issues of evolution and colonialism post WWII. In this way, she used the genre as an illuminating means to explore the evolving concept of humanity in the United States. 

In the book section Wald is currently working on, she explores biotechnology and genomic experimentation. Because these types of technology challenge the concept of what it means to be human, many were opposed to their development. In her study, Wald asks “what happens to the science?” — a science abandoned not because of health risks or ethics, but because “it was unsettling our sense of reality.” 

Wald connects these intersections, from the outbreak narrative to mythistory and science fiction, to the idea of storytelling. “You’ve brought certain assumptions, whether you’re aware of it or not, to the experiment, and maybe you’re not getting the results you think you should be getting,” Wald described. 

In her work, she has strived to channel the “power of analyzing a story” throughout her written career, through digging deeper into the belief systems and biases that underlie every creative and scientific work.