Viral Stagings Across the Globe: Performing Identity in the Era of COVID-19

Introduction: Placing Performance and the Coronavirus

This special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies is titled ‘Performing Identity in the Era of COVID-19’, and co-mingles our current critical inquiries into the pandemic meaning of ‘performance’’ with our earlier research in global diasporas. While invoking our previous historical context of ‘the era of COVID-19’, we shift focus from migratory liminality to the many ways that we can re-think the notions of performance, performing, and performativity (and the nonperformative) in the context of the global pandemic. Herein, we understand, in the broadest sense, the meaning of ‘performance’, which is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as ‘how well a person, machine, etc. does a piece of work or an activity’. As one might imagine, different cultures define ‘performance’, in various ways, ranging from staged performances to employees’ ‘performance reviews’ to social performances in everyday life. Most recently, upon the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, The Atlantic published a story titled, ‘No One Performed Britishness Better Than Her Majesty: She understood intuitively what an extraordinary force cultural power could be’ (2022). The story’s gripping headline underscores how nationality, duty, patriotism, stewardship, family values, and so on, could be globally performed through racialized privilege even as millions perform grief on a global stage still reeling from COVID-19.

The symbolism embedded in the monarchy is arguably always in the first instance performative – even at the tail end of a global health crisis. In today’s historical context, we speak of an activity that has been ongoing for years and catalysed a radical shift in ‘work’ as we once knew it. It is the constant performance demanded by us when using technology to bridge the humanitarian gulfs generated by social-distancing, closed borders, and mandatory masks. The coronavirus and its global mutations, including its continued presence and after-affects, seem perpetual even as the world reaches a ‘conclusive’ stage. Beyond apocalyptic horror films, few of us ever imagined in our lifetimes enduring a global pandemic of COVID-19’s magnitude. The virus’s global upsurge over the past three years thus compelled us to critically meditate on how it has forced us to publicly behave, perform, in different ways both off and online. It has moreover forced billions to experience limited movement around regional, national, and international borders – something that we were exploring in the context of diaspora studies just before the outbreak of the pandemic.

In June 2019, only months before nations sealed their international borders, the Recalibrating Diasporas Research Cluster, a transdisciplinary affiliation of scholars jointly based at Murdoch University’s School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences (SHASS) and Asia Research Centre, hosted an international conference in Greater Perth, Western Australia. Titled Recalibrating Diasporas: Asia-Pacific and the Spaces Beyond, the event assembled participants from seven different countries and featured keynote speakers Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago, US), Ann McGrath (Australian National University), Gunlög Fur (Linnaeus University, Sweden), and Paul Arthur (Edith Cowan University, Australia). These speakers contributed to the conference’s transdisciplinary sub-topics by addressing threats to humankind rooted in the Anthropocene, mega-wildfires, decimated flora and fauna, and other threats to global ecosystems. Though at that time we spoke of ‘liminal diasporas’ in the Asia-Pacific region and their ripples throughout the globe, our formulation of ‘liminal diasporas’ garnered urgent critical import in the dawning of the COVID-19 era.

Eight months following the international conference, we learned the hard way that this historical moment renders most, but not all, bodies subject to the disciplinary whims of different governmental superstructures in and through the warrants of public health and safety. The body marked positive for a COVID-19 text was denied travel across various borders while being literally required to be masked and ‘perform’ sanitary citizenship. Soon after its detection, COVID-19’s rapid, global spread became the stuff from which dystopic nightmares emerge and terrify us. On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19, a strain of the virus, a global pandemic (Karatas et al. 2022: 692). At that time, there were reportedly 118,000 cases in 114 countries with over 4,000 deaths. As of 18 September 2022, approximately 6,530,000 (over one million more than the population of Sydney, Australia) people have reportedly died worldwide from 612 million recorded coronavirus infections. The virus has since impacted nearly every region of the world and every economic sector, irrevocably transforming humanity and day-to-day existence.

Acronyms including ‘RAT’ (rapid antigen test) and ‘PCR’ (polymerase chain reaction) have become household, workplace, public space and transport colloquialisms. Indeed, since the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, updated terms in addition to virus test acronyms emerged, each with a corresponding impact on the most quotidian aspects of human life. In other words, the virus even ‘infected’ the diurnal lexicon of colloquialisms. For example, terms including ‘lockdown’, ‘social-distancing’, ‘community spread/community transmission’, ‘contact tracing’, ‘flattening the curve’, ‘herd immunity’, ‘self-isolation’, ‘quarantine’, ‘super-spreader’, and ‘WFH’ (work from home) became household parlance. At the same time countless nations, states, and regions activated unpredictable lockdowns, border closures, public safety procedures, and mandated mask use of variable durations and intensities. COVID-19 consequently shifted how we speak, and thus how we perform subjectivity in domestic, professional, social, personal, and digital spheres. This shift occurred while compelling nation-states and regulatory bodies to perform power relations in the name of ‘public safety’ and/or ‘national security’.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, even when governments authorised gatherings in shared spaces, people were worlds apart due to social distancing and other mandated requirements. This epistemic blurring of shared space subsequently birthed new types of inclusion, exclusion, and othering around the opening and closing borders while often targeting ‘Asians’ as common sensical harbingers of the virus. To be clear, people appearing to be of East and South Asian descent endured, and continue to face, atrocious xenophobia and racism. This is amply demonstrated, for example, by flyers that appeared throughout Brooklyn, New York, that claimed, ‘The US won World War II and the Cold War. Are we to succumb to these unhygienic people who spread this disease? [sic]’ (Gairola and Jayawickrama 2021: 2). The centuries-old notion of an Asian ‘yellow peril’, in general, and Australia’s 1901 anti-Chinese ‘White Australia’ policy, in particular, openly targeted Asians across this continent. That is, many bigots felt empowered to act out violent, nationalist xenophobia in Australia, as was the case in the UK, US, Canada, and other post-colonial countries with a settler-colonial past well known for their performances of British Empire pomp and bombasity.

Moreover, despite this global tragedy effecting all of humanity, wealthy, well-resourced countries like Australia and the United States began in 2022 administering a fourth booster vaccine for citizens and permanent residents. This medical prerogative produced and exacerbated the stark divide between countries with respect to healthcare access while underscoring that national economies were more important than workers’ wellbeing. This ‘performance’ of neoliberal hegemony by some privileged nations is exceptionally macabre. Beyond these borders of race, class, and geopolitical sway, COVID-19’s new vocabulary enfolds utterances that are, like all utterances, performative acts expressed in varied ways in myriad historical and socio-political contexts. How we presented ourselves to others rapidly changed as social-distancing and online work compelled us to self-consciously ‘perform’ even the most mundane of tasks online. As such, performances in the digital milieu of COVID-19 enfolded a goliath of extra yet hidden labour in relation to digital technology literacy, caregiving, and self-care. The privilege accorded to in-person presentations, for example, in the realm of tertiary education was suddenly thrust into the digital milieu through (a)synchronous dispatches. At the time of our June 2019 conference, we could never have imagined that, amid severe floods and bushfires, another kind of ‘natural disaster’ would grip humankind – one that would toxify our biological internalities.

While we heaved a heavy sigh of relief that the pandemic had not occurred during the conference, we nonetheless felt compelled to contextualise our conference findings in the surreal, dystopic present to which we all had suddenly awoken some months later. The result was the ‘Liminal Diasporas’ special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing (JPW), in which we formulated the notion of ‘liminal diasporas’ as ‘subjective bodies in motion that are dangerously marked by difference, otherness, alterity, and precarity […] In the age of COVID-19, xenophobia and racism have been amplified globally and produced liminal diasporas as highly precaritised entities’ (Gairola et al. 2021: 5). That is, in recalibrating the meaning of ‘diaspora’ in the era of COVID-19, we alarmingly discovered that Western nations disproportionately rendered migrants from non-Western countries juridically excludable. Migratory exclusion occurred beneath the familiar alibi of public safety and national security. Yet, paradoxically, such exclusion illustrates how ‘necropower takes hold of various bodies and exposes them to conditions that make life highly precarious’ (Sandset 2021: 1414). We have seen this horror stylistically broadcast in popular culture during the pandemic in staples like Netflix’s Squid Games series (2021) in which indebted players must perform against one another to stay alive.

In developing the notion of ‘liminal diasporas’, we curated innovative topics ranging from ‘the intersection of migration and sexuality’ [original emphasis] in queer South Asian Caribbean literature (Foster 2021: 32) to an analysis of AMC’s television programme The Walking Dead. The latter contribution critically evaluates the popular dystopic series as ‘an example of zombie media that extensively represents issues related to power and governance in a post-apocalyptic zombie diaspora’ (O’Mahony et al. 2021: 92). Prompted by horror stories of shut borders, virus tests, and laws banning anyone who tested positive for COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, O’Mahony, Merchant, and Order sought to re-think the symbolism of zombies. For O’Mahony et al, zombies are necropolitical (Mbembe 2019) agents that straddle the border between life and death while functioning as character foils to human refugees who flirt with the threshold of death. They demonstrate that the series ‘offers a metaphor for the potential uses of power in biological, environmental, or natural disaster situations where survivors grapple with scarce resources and the constant presence of death’ (O’Mahony et al. 2021: 89). Suddenly, in this frame, boundaries between our pandemic reality and the zombie apocalypse broke down and felt surreally tangible.

The global rise and surge of the Delta, Omicron, and more recently BA.5 coronavirus variants, has yielded evermore nuances, tensions, and ‘others’ in the management and performativity of identity on the global stage. In Tony Sandset’s words,

health disparities and the COVID-19 pandemic have produced conditions not for living but for dying […] conditions of slow death and necropolitical outcomes are themselves not only the outcomes of a form of “state of exception” but rather through what we can call a “state of acceptance”. (2021:1411)

Yet, in this ‘state of acceptance’, we would observe, there are also performative characteristics at play. For even zombies, hipsters of the living dead, may perform dystopia while reminding us that we can all become infected. Despite becoming sub-human in the eyes of others, neighbours, friends, family, and the nation-state, this ‘state of acceptance’ in the context of zombies is precisely what renders them so desirable in popular culture today. As such, the socio-political stakes of ‘performing identity’ while many of us were viewed as contagion carriers, and thus enemies of the state, are timely research topics in the era of COVID-19.

So, to Speak: Re-Thinking Performance During a Global Pandemic

Judith Butler, world-renowned for her sustained critical meditations on performance and gender identity, who subsequently distanced herself from those very theories, nonetheless sharpens the socio-political stakes for marginalised demographics in the pandemic’s cradle of precarity and exposure. Some bodies, and of course most ‘liminal diasporas’, must perform a certain way to stay alive, or to simply take their next breath (Gairola et al. 2021:5). Butler expounds upon this notion in the context of trans people in an interview with Sara Ahmed, commenting:

If “queer” once sought to provide an umbrella term for nonconforming genders and various sexualities, ones that did not easily submit to categorization, it is now clearly embroiled in a battle of its own. Many trans people, or trans advocates, have argued that queer is exclusionary, that it does not include or describe trans experience […] Some people very much require a clear name and gender, and struggle for recognition on the basis of that clear name and gender. It is a fundamental issue of how to establish and insist upon those forms of address that make life liveable. (Ahmed 2016: 490)

For transgender folks, in other words, resistance of the (cis)gender binary can lead to profound disenfranchisement far beyond transphobic and/ or homophobic slurs. Here, performance can enable life or death, depending on the culture, historical context, geography, and other factors. Labelling oneself, one’s identity, seems to have a certain finality about it however as time moves ever forward, our sense of self and the words we use to describe that self should be allowed the flexibility to change too. There is a certain becoming about performance, including the performance of the self, that needs to be acknowledged.

In the case of both transgender folks and migrants of colour (often from post-colonial nations), a few questions arise that warrant measured critique: What does the opening of borders between (cis)gender roles mean at a time when countries indefinitely sealed international borders? How must those marked by transgressive race and/or gender roles perform differently amid a global pandemic in which certifications, including travel documents, proof of vaccinations and passports, must validate the right to move between spaces? And what about the right to re-enter those spaces if one leaves for extenuating circumstances? In the case of Australia, a federal mandate sequestered the continent from the rest of the world for two long years as national security policies worldwide divided families; travel and flights diminished as the pandemic gripped the globe in unprecedented and unimaginable ways. Federal and state governments here urged citizens and permanent residents to return immediately while advising foreign nationals to return home with only exceptional cases considered for exemptions. Such drastic global disruptions to societies, cultures and nations have led to states of emergency and states of exception becoming the norm.

Radical developments in governmental power have informed both public and private social articulations of freedoms, rights, and choices, locally and globally. As we have seen, this has generated many complications in labour and product supply chains in every corner of the world, only further complicated by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine from 24 February 2022, and earlier from February 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula. We never imagined that our notion of ‘liminal diasporas in the era of COVID-19’ would unfold before our eyes, once again, with the heightened risk of nuclear conflict or during the death of the UK’s longest reigning monarch. The passing of Queen Elizabeth II has become a global media spectacle, re-igniting debates about the performative roles of the British monarchy in Commonwealth nations and the urgency to revisit republicanism and the re-patriation of looted treasures from Africa and South Asia. We simultaneously observe that Russia and the West were engaged in military ‘performances’ widely broadcast around the world as aggressions intensified between neighbouring, east European nations. With the threat of China and its own choreographed shows of military might looming to the north, it became direly evident that performance can be blood-soaked.

Performance has moreover been reconfigured and has become at times improvised, unpredictable and uncontrolled or unplanned. While broadcast and shared ‘performance’ is one feature of pandemic life, we are increasingly positioned to be our own audience, constantly self-conscious of our appearance, actions, behaviour and backdrop. While this special issue expands, and thus contributes to, various considerations of ‘performance’ in the era of COVID-19, producing what we have earlier theorised as ‘liminal diasporas,’ we are particularly interested in critically probing the role of language, human taxonomies, and the media and other communication technologies in (perm)mutations of identity performance. We illustrate that the notion of performance serves as a rubric for understanding this moment in human history. We can consider performance from Richard Schechner’s perspective – that they ‘mark identities, bend time, reshape and adorn the body and tell stories. Performances – or art, rituals, or ordinary life – are made of “twice-behaved behaviours”’ (2002: 22). These ‘twice-behaved behaviours,’ also known as restored behaviours, are actions that we perform more than once (2002: 22).

Schechner argues that performances constitute ‘marked, framed, or heightened behaviour separated out from just “living life”’ and are the kinds of behaviours or rituals for which we train, rehearse and deliver’ (2002: 28). Restored behaviours can be analysed to explore what ‘is performance’ or they can be studied ‘as performance’; what ‘is’ considered to be performance is determined by historical and social conventions and everything else can be studied ‘as’ performance [our emphasis] (Schechner 2002: 30). For example, during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, some restored behaviours became mediated. These were often performed in the home and transmitted via devices into public electronic spheres. Thus, the very notion of a public sphere (and its private counterpart, ‘home’) was redefined during lockdowns, border closures or self-enforced isolation. ‘Home,’ for many, has become an increasingly broadcast environment where intentional (‘is’ performance) as well as accidental (‘as’ performance) performances escape into the virtual online space.

Such experiences of performance in the domestic sphere of home parallel artistic articulations of performance in the public sphere. In the early days of the pandemic, when myriad cities were experiencing lockdowns, there were examples of performance deliberately created (‘is’ performance) and disseminated entirely through online platforms. Casts of musicals such as Hamilton, Come from Away, Les Misérables and Wicked united to record performances on Zoom, which were then shared on YouTube. The Hamilton performance, featured on Some Good News with John Krasinski (Ep. 2 2020), brought together online the original cast of the musical to perform for a child who was unable to see it live because of lockdowns. Within two weeks of the West End closing, the Official London Theatre YouTube account posted a video featuring 70 cast members from productions that had been shuttered singing ‘Do You Hear the People Sing’ from Les Misérables. Many performing arts companies also either made existing recordings of live performances available online or created updated content to share online. The National Theatre in the UK released previously recorded live performances, making each available for free online for one week.

Moving performances of restored behaviours online, including personal and business communications, has also led to typically ephemeral actions and rituals being recorded, stored and disseminated. One of the best-known examples of this is lawyer Rod Ponton, who attended a court hearing in Texas through Zoom with a cat filter over his face. Ponton informed the judge that he was unsure of how to remove the filter, but that he was prepared to go ahead with the hearing, reassuring the judge that he was there live and not a cat. The video, which was released by the 394th District Court of Texas on their YouTube channel, has had over ten million views (as of September 2022). Even without the addition of filters, we can study online communications facilitated through platforms like Zoom ‘as’ performances. Consideration can be given to how we frame ourselves, through the positioning of cameras and figuratively in the choices we make for how we present ourselves, dress and what we show in the background.

There is, moreover, a voyeuristic element to seeing into other people’s homes, not commonly experienced prior to COVID-19, that resurrects, among other things, ‘the male gaze’ wherein:

Curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. (Mulvey 1975: 9)

In a different vein, in April 2020, the ‘Room Rater’ account appeared on social media titan Twitter. This account reviews backgrounds featured in Zoom meetings and interviews, rating décor choices such as books, art, wallpaper, and lighting. Not only must individuals work to curate themselves and their own performances online, they must now be conscious of the expectation and possibility of their real or virtual surroundings being noticed, likely judged, and even recorded and disseminated. With respect to such profound and sudden changes, this special issue explores key aspects of identity and life amid this historically transformative time of viral infection and global insecurity.

Through it all, as educators engaged in research, teaching, and service in the tertiary education sector, online teaching includes mammoth new workloads, including the sudden adaptation to new teaching modes, technologies and ways of engaging a student audience. Moreover, online teaching has meant managing the changing behaviours and rituals of teachers and students alike – both of whom, due to digitised performances – have become performer/ audience members alike. That is, in the era of COVID-19, teachers and students have simultaneously become performers and audience in the context of digital pedagogy. Given these multi-faceted ways of thinking about ‘performance’ and its complicated manifestations throughout the coronavirus pandemic, we resolved to organise the essays into three umbrella topics that focus on three of the most important aspects of identity for cultural and intercultural studies: (1) language; (2) race/ gender/ sexuality; and (3) the digital world. We believe that these are solid platforms to launch our transdisciplinary enquiry into performing identity during a global pandemic and commend our respective authors for lending their voices and original research to this special issue of Journal of Intercultural Studies (JICS).

Contents of Performing Identity in the Era of COVID-19

Part I: ‘Acting Out’: Framing Language and Performance Today

In Part I, Farzana Akhter’s article connects COVID-19 related anti-Asian racism with Meena Alexander’s novel Manhattan Music. Through a close analysis of the novel, as well as examples of hate crimes against Asians around the world between 2020 and 2022, Akhter illustrates that ethnicity and race are still central to the politics of power. That, even if immigrant subjects seek to change their identity, racial prejudice will still classify an ethnic body as the Other and this can lead to ‘hate and scapegoating at times of social unrest, economic adversity, or pandemics’. Martin Roth has explored the idea of performed identity through the hugely successful Nintendo game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, released in March 2020 right at the time the pandemic was closing borders and leading to lockdowns. Roth’s research, using YouTube comments on Let’s Play videos of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, considers how the game allowed Japanese players – many of whom were confined to their homes – to use the game as a ‘sandbox’ to participate in cultural activities such as Cherry Blossom Viewing and the Tanabata Festival.

Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurah and Tanya Notley’s contribution focuses on how Muslim communities in Western Sydney, Australia, utilise communications infrastructure to disseminate accurate, accessible information about COVID-19 for their target audiences. The paper reports on qualitative interviews conducted with six Muslim community members. It reveals that specialised communications practices, developed in conjunction with the social and cultural norms, practices, and needs of those communities, was vital in responding to the crisis and communicating effectively. Finally, Tim Flanagan’s contribution observes that a key feature of the World Health Organization’s (WHO from hereon) response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been to avoid the stigmatisation of any one people with respect to the use of language. Despite these efforts, the increasingly standardised use of language (given the hegemony of English and the development of various voice-recognition technologies) suggests that the danger of stigmatisation may be ever present. Flanagan subsequently argues that Barbara Cassin’s emphasis on the performative nature of language is key to combatting such a danger.

Part II: (En)Acting Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Era of COVID-19

Part II is titled ‘Enacting the Race, Gender, and Sexuality of COVID-19,’ and consists of four contributions which explore the race, gender, and sexuality during the global pandemic. André Dorcé’s paper comparatively examines interconnections between racism, ethnicity, mestizaje, and politics in Mexico of three significant media texts: two films, La Negrada (2018) and Roma (2018), and one television show, Chumel with Chumel Torres (2019). Although these audio-visual texts were publicly released prior to the pandemic, Dorce’s paper explores the perspectives of those who created the texts (such as directors and actors), as well as audience and political commentary, specifically, in terms of racism and intercultural politics in Mexican media. Sarah Courtis, Melissa Merchant, and Ellin Sears’ essay deploys the example of the musical Hamilton in Australia to examine the impact of COVID-19 on staged performances generally and the performance of diversity in this production specifically. As Courtis et al. point out, Hamilton contains complex internal and external interplays of race, ethnicity, cultural politics and diversity in the central story, themes and casting.

Alberto Fernández Carbajal’s contribution unearths the nexus between the becoming of identity within the COVID-19 context. For Carbajal, forced introspection from COVID-19 lockdowns generates a reflective, digital space in which to explore their gender-fluid identity. Finally, the essay co-authored by Catherine Archer, Marianne Sison, Brenda Gaddi, and Lauren O’Mahony reports on a 2020/ 2021 survey of Women of Colour in the Australian workplace. The co-authors discover that participants ‘performed’ their identities while simultaneously managing intersectional issues of racism and sexism further exacerbated by COVID-19. The co-authors discuss additional themes that emerged from the survey while describing the toxic ramifications of gendered othering of Women of Colour for Australian organisations and society throughout the era of COVID-19.

Part III: Pandemic Performing in the Digital Milieu

The last section critically evaluates pandemic performing in an era tainted by COVID-19 but characterised by the digital milieu. Trisnasari Fraser’s paper utilises an autoethnography lens to explore the collaborative process engaged by six art practitioners to produce a performance of ashra baladi, an improvisational form of Egyptian music and dance, during lockdown in Australia in 2020. Fraser’s discussion suggests that the performance was negotiated by practitioners utilising various online and digital technologies to ultimately produce respectful intercultural collaboration and understanding. Tyne Summer unpacks the notion of ‘performance’ in front of video conferencing software. Our COVID-19 ‘Zoom face,’ the uncomfortable relationship with our self-image, is constantly displayed for us and all to scrutinise in the now ubiquitous online meeting paradigm. We are culturally cognizant of the film star’s perfect face, displayed larger than life in cinemas, but when confronted with our own ‘Zoom face’ and that of our colleagues, Summer believes the scrutiny of our imperfections is a recipe for fatigue. Zoom performance and self-monitoring are a new way of being for pandemic life. Rohit Dasgupta, in contrast to Sumner while striking a chord with Fraser, provides a fascinating ethnographic insight into the experiences of queer communities in India during the pandemic.

Dasgupta argues that the ‘patchwork assemblages’ are evocative passages of auto-ethnography laced with theoretical pertinence. He moreover blends his personal recollections of visiting India during the pandemic with interactions with three queer acquaintances who describe their experience of precarity in uncertain times. ‘Patchwork assemblages’ are queer reflections, snapshots of cultural, political, and religious confluence exacerbated by the deep social disturbances of COVID-19. David Wright takes readers on a journey into the world of digital and interactive literary creativity wherein code is an actor in the creative process. Wright suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has ‘catalysed second and third generation electronic literary forms towards an aesthetic of ‘quickness’ facilitated by coded ludic recombination’. For him, digital literature swiftly responds to the pandemic where traditional literature cannot compete. Finally, Arthur and Smith’s paper explores the notion of ‘home,’ privacy and identity, particularly through prisms of power and inequality, via an Australian audio fiction series The Fitzroy Diaries. For them, home represents a space wherein identity can be explored, safely and supportively. However, as the co-authors point out, engagements at the nexus between home and identity depend on location, ethnic background, socio-economic status and several other factors.

Conclusion: From Home Stage to Homepage

The era of COVID-19 has flung us all into ‘conditions of death and disease … created in such a way that particular groups and communities are relegated to zones of living that are not life-giving but conditions of slow death [our emphasis] (Sandset 2021: 1413). In our various ways of re-thinking the meaning of ‘performance’ in the era of COVID-19, we survey three over-arching contexts that inform such zones. Firstly, we explore how language is staged differently in the context of the global pandemic, compelling us to normalise an entirely new verbal lexicon. Secondly, we survey the pandemic’s disturbing impact on socio-political identities rooted in race, class, gender, and sexuality. Finally, we examine how the digital milieu compels us to reorient the inside/outside binary with respect to multilingual subjects, those living with disabilities, those delivering staged performances, and even corresponding audiences. Surveillance and policing, in both formal and informal senses, have also transformed the monitoring of physical movements (such as via tracking apps and other devices) and behaviours (such as mask-wearing, handwashing, and/or physical distancing between people). Such monitoring in some cases has extended right down to an increased consciousness of the very breath one takes, particularly the responsibility of surveilling one’s breath for a contagion invisible to the naked eye.

Writing in the United States, Judith Butler elaborates on the historical context of COVID-19 by critically noting that the public response to the pandemic has been to identify ‘vulnerable groups’ wherein:

The vulnerable include Black and Brown communities deprived of adequate health care throughout their lifetimes and the history of this nation. The vulnerable also include poor people, migrants, incarcerated people, people with disabilities, trans and queer people who struggle to achieve rights to health care, and all those with prior illnesses and enduring medical conditions. The pandemic exposes the heightened vulnerability to the illness of all those for whom health care is neither accessible nor affordable. (Butler and Yancy 2020: 484)

We might here notice that for some of us, ‘performance’ might reveal a mode of privilege in contrast to those who are homeless, branded as ‘criminal’ or ‘terrorist,’ exposed to the calamities of climate change, caught in the meteoric rise of anti-Asian xenophobia and so on in the era of COVID-19. For these any millions of others, the pandemic has severely exacerbated social injustices and inequities while limiting accessibility to and the affordability of anti-virus treatments and remedies.

In sum, COVID-19 has rendered the material body as an organism in constant performative mode while sparking a malleability of the social and cultural body in the digital milieu. We would thus concur with Tony Sandset’s proposition that:

Necropolitics should fix its gaze on the everyday death-worlds created by health inequality and the conditions that foster ill-health and premature deaths across the globe. It is through a chronic state of acceptance that necropolitical conditions are allowed [by us] to continue exciting and thus creating zones wherein people are exposed to conditions not conducive to living but ‘slow death’ [instead] (Sandset 2021: 1414).

We would like to build on Sandset’s important observation of Mbembe’s formulation of ‘necropolitics’ during the pandemic that such zones can and must involve carefully orchestrated rituals and practices that publicly ‘perform’ non-virility. This is because COVID-19’s impact and evolution into increasingly toxic incarnations has rattled people from all levels of society around the world by halting movement and migration between places and shifting focus to digital representations of the self. For many workers then, the reliance on technology increased markedly and in turn has its effect on mediating/ transforming/ regulating identity and/or its performance. For many people who appear to be ‘Asian,’ this means heart-wrenching tolerance of appalling, xenophobic bigotry showcased in public spaces with onlookers casually onlooking like an audience at a boxing match.

However, for all of us, the pandemic has meant a modification of performative gestures at microscopic levels in the name of public safety, national security, and possibly most reprehensible of all, ‘the health’ of the global economy. This underscores the external forces out of our control that have exerted profound influence on the ways in which we act around others and move between the domestic, professional, and public spheres. In closing this opening essay, we ask readers perhaps the most important question of all: in moving forward through this third year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, what role will you play in moving your respective communities forward? That is, how can we re-claim performance as an empowering socio-political tactic to mediate the calamitous impacts of COVID-19 as we head into the fourth year of its assault on our world? In what follows, we offer three transdisciplinary sections that further explore and complicate the notion of ‘performance’ in an era of global pandemic. These sections frame the respective 13 essays from a diverse chorus of authors, book-ended by this opening invitation to readers and an Afterword by Toby Miller.

Acknowledgments

The Recalibrating Diasporas Research Cluster extends thanks for varying intellectual guidance and scholarly support generously offered by: the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, Dhantu Charandasi, Freya Cheffers, Peter Davies, Alasdair Dempsey, Deborah Gare, Helena Grehan, May Joseph, Simone Lazaroo, Samuel Makinda, Paul Marotta, Nilesh Makwana, Toby Miller, Vijay Mishra, Paula Muraca, Dave Perry, Michelle Picard, Stephen Platt, Jenny de Reuck, Edward L. Taylor, Rajeev Varshney, colleagues and attendees who participated in 2019's Recalibrating Diasporas conference, and our ART 208 students at Murdoch University. Finally, thanks to Sally Knowles and Rochelle Spencer for kindly facilitating completion of this essay at the Djilba Writing Away Retreat, 19-23 September 2022, sponsored by the Centre for Responsible Citizenship and Sustainability (CRCS), Murdoch University.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Rahul K. Gairola

Rahul K. Gairola, PhD (University of Washington, Seattle) is The Krishna Somers Senior Lecturer in English & Postcolonial Literature and a Fellow of the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Western Australia. He is co-editor and author/ co-author of five books including Memory, Trauma, Asia: Recall, Affect, and Orientalism in Contemporary Narratives (Routledge, 2021); South Asian Digital Humanities: Postcolonial Mediations across Technology's Cultural Canon (Routledge, 2020); Migration, Gender and Home Economics in Rural North India (Routledge, 2019); and Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belonging (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016). He has also co-edited special issues of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, South Asian Review, and Asiascape: Digital Asia, and has widely published in reputable, peer-reviewed forums. Routledge appointed him Editor of its Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) South Asian Book Series in 2019, the same year The Digital Studio, University of Melbourne, appointed him Digital Champion for the State of Western Australia. He previously taught at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India; and Queens College and York College, The City University of New York, US. Since 2018, he has served as Principal Investigator of the Recalibrating Diasporas Research Cluster based in the School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences (SHASS), Murdoch University. He is a matriculated Lifetime Member of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and is currently working on two major publications for Routledge and one for Oxford University Press.

Lauren O’Mahony

Lauren O’Mahony, PhD (Murdoch University, Western Australia) is a Senior Lecturer in Communications at Murdoch University, Western Australia. Much of her research focusses on Australian women’s literature as well as the analysis of popular television, creativity, media audiences, and creative non-fiction. Her published research has appeared in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, The Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Communication Research and Practice, and Text Journal. Dr O’Mahony has also published chapters in the edited volumes Theorizing Ethnicity in the Chick-Lit Genre (2019), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2021), and Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman (2022). In 2023, Palgrave Macmillan will publish Creativity and Innovation: Everyday Dynamics and Practice, a book that she has co-authored with Dr Terence Lee (Murdoch University) and Dr Pia Lebeck (Murdoch University).

Melissa Merchant

Melissa Merchant, PhD (Murdoch University, Western Australia) is a Lecturer in English and Theatre and Academic Chair of English and Creative Arts at Murdoch University. She is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). Dr Merchant’s most recent research has been divided between contemporary performativity, theatre history and Shakespearean adaptations, including Restoration adaptations and popular culture appropriations. She has contributed to Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Seventeenth Century, Actes des Congrès de la Société Française Shakespeare, Outskirts, and M/C Journal. She has also contributed a co-authored chapter in The Routledge Companion to Disability and the Media (2020) with Professor Katie Ellis, based on research completed as part of a Discovery Early Career Research Project for Curtin University. Dr Merchant has previously taught at Fort Hays State University, at their Shenyang campus in Liaoning Province, China. She is also a professional actress who has performed in cross-cultural collaborations in Southeast Asia in partnership with the University of Malaya and the Temple of Fine Arts, Malaysia.

Simon Order

Simon Order, PhD (Murdoch University, Western Australia) is currently an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at Murdoch University who specialises in two connected fields: First, radio studies, which includes radio production, community media, Australian community radio and radio public policy. Second, music technology studies, which includes user-interface usability, student creativity in sound production studies, music technology in teaching and learning. More recently, his research has become more diverse with work focusing on post-apocalyptic television studies and universal design for online learning events and social mobility in Australia. His professional background includes audio production roles in the British television and music industry, radio station managing, and professional photography. Dr Order continues his professional practice as a composer and producer of electronic music under the artist's name Liminal Drifter. As former Academic Director of Media and Mass Communications for Murdoch University in Dubai, he developed the United Arab Emirates' premier tertiary media education centre. Outside of work, his interests include long distance running, endurance road cycling, science fiction film & television, vampires, and music composition.