This is not the apocalypse. While some of the customary signs are there – deserted streets, masks and hazmat suits, empty supermarket shelves, hospitals and morgues overflowing – the four horsemen are not gathering at the horizon. Yet the pervasive register in reportage and on social media over the last two years has been biblical, as if eschatology dictates that we conceive of the COVID-19 pandemic as, paradoxically, an iteration of the last days. Without making the routine observation that the apocalypse is never now but always deferred, we might wonder why apocalypticism is the default script in relation to immanent disasters and future imaginaries.
Until recently, we largely lacked a lexicon and grammar for global contagion, its social and political consequences and its possible containment. Bubonic plague and even Spanish flu are too remote to be serviceable in this respect and, anyway, our epidemiological knowledge has meant that our experience of COVID-19 has been distinct from historical pandemics. HIV, the cause of one of our most recent pandemics, could have been comparable were it not for the medical developments of ARV therapy, which, in many cases, has turned the disease into a chronic illness. It has also proved less likely to mutate than coronaviruses. It is glib and unethical to suggest that this absence amounts to a ‘crisis of representation,’ for the only real ‘crises’ are infection, death and bereavement, in comparison with which the struggle to come to terms with the coronavirus and its effects is at least secondary. Yet, the humanities must concern itself with representation: how the virus, its spread and its effects have been inscribed and understood existentially and mobilized politically.
It is too brazen to suggest that the world will never be the same again because the pandemic has only exacerbated existing dynamics: it has fuelled populism, reinforced capitalism and increased the reach of hedge fund managers and others who profit off risk. And climate change – despite a short-lived lull in carbon emissions and a brief flourishing of wildlife in empty cities – is only becoming more evident in its effects and its outcomes increasingly predictable. Much has remained the same. But even as humanity marches unwaveringly (even triumphantly) towards its own destruction, we can acknowledge that representation is integral to both understanding and mobilization, even if not constitutive. It is in this that the current volume coheres: how has COVID-19 entered discourses; on what archives have we drawn in our accounts; and how has blindness and denial been contiguous with insight and the acknowledgement that our capacities are limited? As we journey through questions of epistemology, we pose new questions concerning the representation of what we know: has the virus, masking and vaccination been aestheticized; have writers cast the present as an exception; how is blame attributed to individuals and nations; how are the frontline and health workers rendered; has the virus impacted material and literary culture; and what ideologies are being articulated in representations? Obviously, no list of questions or collection of essays can be exhaustive. At most one can hope they are somewhat representative; that they offer insights into the questions, discourses and perspectives emerging from various geohistorical locations.
Coming to terms with the virus has stretched the imagination; it is invisible, known only through symptoms, vectors of infection, statistics and the distribution of cases. This results in interpretative latitude. At times it seems, in the words of Laurie Anderson, that language itself has been a virus.Footnote1 Misrepresentation, galvanized by populism, conspiracy theories and regional rivalries, has detracted from science. A vocal constituency has embraced ‘post-truth’ and done the Enlightenment a fundamental disservice with fatal consequences. This is perhaps the best reason to dwell on COVID-19 among the discourses. This activity is not quaint, rarefied or apolitical. Partial or absolute misrepresentation is a matter of life or death.
These essays (generally assays) take different disciplinary approaches to the pandemic. They range from political and social analyses (Bergmann is concerned with the relation between COVID-19 and populism; Moumni explores aspects of the pandemic’s intersection with racism; and Nyanda considers shifts in African sociality in the last two years), archives of representation (Wright on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and Twidle on Camus’s The Plague), dystopian literature and its tropes, which have been constitutive of representations (Warren’s survey of South African dystopian literature; Daniels’ examination of Deon Meyer’s Fever; and Wyrill’s comments on novels by Diane Awerbuck and Russel Brownlee), and the pandemic in particular fields (Yang on Chinese COVID-19 poetry; Mo’s description of the use of Chinese calligraphy on cartons of PPE – including his magnificent, artistic rendering of this practice; Shaw on the depiction of COVID-19 themes on postage stamps; El Maarouf, Belghazi and Fendler on COVID-19 gaming; and Devroop and Titlestad on the sonification of the virus). Some of the essays are writerly, aesthetic enquiries: Murray on a poster campaign in Stellenbosch; Allan’s reading of the present through the 2000s poetry of Angifi Dladla and Mxolisi Nyezwa; and Frenkel’s use of Zadie Smith’s Intimations as an affective mirror); while Oike describes an intimate practice of memory in Ugandan HIV memory books. We – the editors – decided that exegesis, even aestheticized, should be placed in counterpoint with creative engagement. The articles are punctuated with short stories by David Medalie and Kobus Moolman; COVID-19 poems by Dan Wylie; ten Chinese poems (translated by Yanbin Kang); additional poetry by Maren Bodenstein, Sonia Fanucchi, Leanne Stillerman Zabow, Phelelani Makhanya; two paintings by Ingrid Winterbach; and the cover photographic image by Leon Krige. The term ‘multi-modal’ is mawkish, yet the variety of representational practices adopted in this issue gives us a wider view of the tropology of the virus, the lived reality and fear of infection, the experience of isolation, the obfuscation of reality in conspiracy theories, the social changes that have been wrought and the mobilization in the interests of personal and public health. The topic warrants a multiplicity of voices, speaking in different ways.
We owe a debt of gratitude to all the writers, who invested time, thought and emotion in these pieces under difficult circumstances – all were written under lockdown. This issue demanded patience and creativity in equal measure, for which we thank Jessica Jacobs, Mokheseng Buti and the dedicated staff of Taylor & Francis.
Notes
1 Anderson, Laurie, ‘Like a Virus’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvOoR8m0oms. Accessed on 31 July 2021.