1st Edition
The Cultural Politics of COVID-19
COVID-19 isn’t simply a viral pathogen nor is it, strictly speaking, the trigger of a global pandemic. Since the outbreak began in late-2019, an outpouring of clinical and scientific research, together with an array of public health initiatives, has sought to understand, mitigate, or even eradicate the virus. This book represents a snapshot of critical responses by researchers from 10 countries and 4 continents, in a collective effort to explore how Cultural Studies can contribute to our struggle to persevere in a "no normal" horizon, with no clear end in sight. Together, the essays address important questions at the intersection of culture, power, politics, and public health: What are the possible outlines for the panic-pandemic complex? How has the pandemic been endowed with meanings and affective registers, often at the tipping points where existing social relations and medical understanding were being rapidly displaced by new ones? How can societies discover ways of living with, through, and against COVID that do not simply reproduce existing hierarchies and power relations?
The 30 essays comprising this collection, along with the editors’ introduction, explore the formative period of the COVID pandemic, from mid-2020 to mid-2021. They are grouped into three sections – ‘Racializations,’ ‘Media, Data, and Fragments of the Popular,’ and ‘Un/knowing the Pandemic’ – themes that animate, but do not exhaust, the complex cultural and political life of COVID-19 with respect to identity, technology, and epistemology. No doubt, readers will chart their own pathway as the pandemic continues to rage on, based on their own unique circumstances. This book provides critical-intellectual guideposts for the way forward – toward an uncertain future, without guarantees.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Cultural Studies.
1. Introduction: COVID-19, the multiplier
John Nguyet Erni and Ted Striphas
Racializations
2. COVID-19 and the mundane practices of privilege
Kumarini Silva
3. Following the science? COVID-19, ‘race’ and the politics of knowing
John Clarke
4. ‘Give me liberty or give me COVID!’: Anti-lockdown protests as necropopulist downsurgency
Jack Bratich
5. Racism is a public health crisis! Black Power in the COVID-19 pandemic
Lisa B. Y. Calvente
6. Asian Americans as racial contagion
Madhavi Mallapragada
7. COVID-19 and ‘crisis as ordinary’: pathological whiteness, popular pessimism, and pre-apocalyptic cultural studies
Josh Smicker
8. COVID-19 and the affective politics of congestion: an exploration of population density debates in Australia
Sukhmani Khorana
9. The long and deadly road: the COVID pandemic and Indian migrants
Raka Shome
Media, Data, and Fragments of the Popular
10. New normals, from talk to gesture
Chris Ingraham
11. Everyday life and the management of risky bodies in the COVID-19 era
Jeffrey A. Bennett
12. Virus government – A twenty-first-century genealogy of the ‘dusk mask’ as biopolitical technology
James Hay
13. Bio or Zoe?: dilemmas of biopolitics and data governmentality during COVID-19
Yeran Kim
14. Predicting COVID-19: wearable technology and the politics of solutionism
James N. Gilmore
15. Learning from Lana: Netflix’s Too Hot to Handle, COVID-19, and the human-nonhuman entanglement in contemporary technoculture
Fan Yang
16. COVID bread-porn: social stratification through displays of self-management
Ravindra N. Mohabeer
17. Parodies for a pandemic: coronavirus songs, creativity and lockdown
Jon Stratton
18. Fashion in ‘crisis’: consumer activism and brand (ir)responsibility in lockdown
Rimi Khan and Harriette Richards
19. Zombie capitalism and coronavirus time
Elmo Gonzaga
20. No time for fun: the politics of partying during a pandemic
Nicholas Holm
Un/knowing the Pandemic
21. Enduring COVID-19, nevertheless
Rebecca A. Adelman
22. The dead-end of ad-hocracy
Charles R. Acland
23. The spectacle of competence: global pandemic and the redesign of leadership in a post neo-liberal world
Leon Gurevitch
24. The epiphanic moments of COVID-19: the revelation of painful national truths
Mette Hjort
25. Collective disorientation in the pandemic conjuncture
Alexander J. Means and Graham B. Slater
26. Mistranslation as disinformation: COVID-19, global imaginaries, and self-serving cosmopolitanism
Sheng Zou
27. Religion and urban political eco/pathology: exploring communalized coronavirus in South Asia
Asif Mehmood, Sajjad Hasnain and Muhammad Azam
28. Doing cultural studies in rough seas: the COVID-19 ocean multiple
Elspeth Probyn
29. COVID-19 at sea: ‘the world as you know it no longer exists’
Christiaan De Beukelaer
30. Back to the future: lessons of a SARS hysteria for the COVID-19 pandemic
Allen Chun
31. Beyond the crisis: transitioning to a better world?
Ien Ang
Biography
John Nguyet Erni is Dean of Humanities and Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong. Previously, he was Fung Hon Chu Endowed Chair of Humanics at Hong Kong Baptist University. His most recent book is Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights.
Ted Striphas, Coeditor of the journal Cultural Studies, is Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder, USA. He is author of The Late Age of Print and of the upcoming monograph Algorithmic Culture. Twitter: @striphas
