“Living and Breathing Reconfigurings of the World,” or Thinking in the Time of COVID (original) (raw)

California Italian Studies

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. Arundati Roy Crisis, Contagion, and Care Contagion has perhaps never before preoccupied all corners of the world, all at once, as it has for the past two years and counting. The "virus that knows no borders" has erected palpable ones around all manner of human activity in the name of stopping the spread of COVID-19: from the oft-photographed shower curtain hugs or at-the-window visits between elderly people and their loved ones at the outset of the pandemic, to "shutdowns" that confined the privileged classes to their home offices and computer screens (Fogu, Hom, Ruberto 2019, 3). At the same time, ostensibly prophylactic border closures from countries where the outbreak raged have "mix[ed] up medical and political quarantines" and revealed the ambivalent boundaries between politics and science (Ticktin 2020). The death drive that has long haunted neoliberal governance has come starkly to the fore: people deemed essential to the economy have been revealed to be disposable, forced to choose between life and livelihood. Indeed, for communities of color the world over, livelihood has become a tragic oxymoron, insofar as protecting "a means of securing the necessities of life," as the New Oxford American Dictionary defines it, entails accepting elevated levels of risk to one's health. The languages of health and well-being have shuttled back and forth between biological bodies and economic ones, as the so-called health of the economy requires the sacrifice of human life, its exposure to viral contact and contagion. Yet for all of the boundaries and fissures it has brought into stark relief-from centuries of systemic racism and the brutality of border regimes, to economic inequality, distinctions between "essential" and "non-essential" work, between self and other-the very nature of a pandemic has reminded us of our shared vulnerability, creating an opening that in early 2020 made the waters