CORONALAG: time, place, and power in Pandemic Year One

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the idea of Coronalag, a concept derived from the experience of disaster time in 2020, and one that we hope assists in the ongoing interrogation of time as a venue for the exercise of power in a disaster. First, in introducing Coronalag, we are attentive to disparate experiences of the pandemic across spaces and communities, shared in and among those settings in real time, often through social and other virtual media. Next, we explore the efforts of disaster management officials to manage the lag of time between outbreak, state action, and viable pandemic control. Governmental disaster management in the face of Coronalag was often performed theatrically with hygiene rituals, with reams of data and with daily press conferences all in the service of ‘flattening the curve’. Last, we extend the Coronalag concept to encompass the many extraordinary efforts of people in the United States and around the world to repackage time into increments that captured their frustrations with structures of racism, capitalism, and other forms of oppression. Pandemic time shifted perspectives and opened opportunities for protesters and dissidents to craft new time zones, harnessing the strangeness of disaster time and using it for their own empowerment.

KEYWORDS:

• Coronalag
• COVID
• disaster
• time
• history

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Byerly, “The U.S. Military and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919.”

2. Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 1939. See also: Outka, Viral Modernism.

3. Tomes, “‘Destroyer and Teacher’.”

4. Spinney, “How the 1918 Flu Pandemic Revolutionized Public Health.”

5. Dudziak, War Time.

6. Remes and Horowitz, eds., Critical Disaster Studies.

7. Campolo, “Flattening the Curve.”

8. See: Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time; and also, Schivelbusch, “Railroad Space and Railroad Time.”

9. Gibson, Pattern Recognition, 1.

10. Kantis et al., “Updated: Timeline of the Coronavirus.”

11. Bollyky and Nuzzo, “Trump’s ‘Early’ Travel ‘Bans’.”

12. COVIDCalls, https://covid-calls.com/.

13. COVIDCalls, “Fiction in the Pandemic with Daniel Jose Older and Malka Older,” 9 July 2020, https://covid-calls.com/episode/covidcalls-7-9-2020-fiction-in-the-pandemic-w-daniel-jose-older-and-malka-older/

14. United States Federal Emergency Management Agency, “Unit Four: Emergency Management in the United States,” Emergency Management Institute, nd.

15. See: Knowles, The Disaster Experts.

16. Neal, “Social Time and Disaster.”

17. Wernimont, Numbered Lives. See also COVIDCalls #131, 21 September 2020; Bowe, Simmons, and Mattern, “Learning from Lines”; and COVIDCalls #153, 21 October 2020. https://www.pscp.tv/USofDisaster/1YqKDpgrZaoKV

18. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-establishing-presidents-advisory-1776-commission/