Pandemic: Invisibility and silence

ABSTRACT

Can the COVID pandemic be understood in any other than ecocritical and decolonial terms? It has brought nothing new except perhaps a certain fatalism in politics, borrowed from eco-catastrophism. Apocalyptic visions of migration, the Anthropocene, pestilence, and neo-populism exacerbate longer-term trends. Religious fanatics with machine guns take whips to outsiders whose gender or skin colour they despise at the behest of billionaire warlords from the Texas border to Kabul. But COVID-19 coincides with some intriguing cultural novelties, most of all a plague of visibility traced here through Ana Lily Amirpour’s film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, paired with a simultaneous mode of disappearance associated with the video image. Hegemonic transitions, the rise of financialization, and extractive postcolonization tie pandemic to fading (and therefore vengeful) American individualism and the rising (and therefore aggressive) Chinese command economy. The virus is occasion for profit: only a new and ecologically scaled cosmopolitanism can save us.

KEYWORDS:

• Coronavirus
• Ana Lily Amirpour
• neo-populism
• information capital
• ecocritique
• decolonizing

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Seán Cubitt

Seán Cubitt is professor of screen studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema Effect (2004), EcoMedia (2005), The Practice of Light (2014), Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (2017), and Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image (2020). He is co-editor of The Ecocinema Reader: Theory and Practice (2012) and Ecomedia: Key Issues (2015) and is series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press. His research focuses on the history and philosophy of media, ecopolitical aesthetics, media technologies and media art history.