Processing mortality data otherwise: making history in a turbulent sea

ABSTRACT

Written in the midst of the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, this piece grapples with the failures of traditional academic history writing to grapple with the affective nature of writing histories. In particular, I interweave narrative forms and also discuss my own effort to work with non-textual and common materials to create other forms of recording and communicating catastrophic histories.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• queer studies
• covid-19
• methods
• history

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Hernandez, et al., “Tracking COVID-19.”

2. Austin, How To Do Things, 6–12.

3. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581.

4. Ibid.

5. The Folger Shakespeare Library is both a rare book library and manuscript archive located in Washington D.C. https://www.folger.edu/

6. Robert Scholes was a literary critic and theorist who worked in semiotics and on modernisms of many forms. He was a member of the Modern Culture and Media department while I was a student at Brown University.

7. I am intentionally echoing Elizabeth Grosz’s phrase, “to make a future that is uncontained by the present” in The Nick of Time, 117.

8. Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, 31; and Figlio, “Getting to the Beginning,” 158, cited in Robinson.

9. Newman, Fetal Positions, 2.

10. Padilioni, “Blackness.”

11. Sharpe, In the Wake. Other kinds of looping and cutting in feminist history and communication include: Tania Perez-Bustos’ work, https://www.taniaperezbustos.co/en (with thanks to an anonymous reader for introducing me to her work), as well as Fotopoulou, “Epilogue: Looping Feminist Threads”; and Juhasz, “Ev-ent-anglement’ and ‘#cut/paste+bleed.”

12. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 29–31.

13. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7–9, 16–17.

14. Dimock, “Genre as World System,” 89.

15. “Decisive Action”; Robinson, “Life in the Time of COVID-19”; Starmer, “We Faced an Unprecedented Crisis”; and Ball, “Why England’s COVID ‘Freedom Day.’”

16. Wells and Kuchler, “US Passes ‘Unimaginable’ Milestone”; and Huang, “A Loss to The Whole Society”.

17. Phillips et al., “Just Unimaginable.”

18. Slater, “As Omicron Variant Spreads.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/12/23/new-england-covid-surge/.

19. “Covid: Omicron Spreading.”

20. Ganz, “Portable Morgues.” https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-covid-portable-morgues-central-florida-surge-20210828-dxblxf4zlbdmhco4by2l3jkqj4-story.html

21. Espinosa et al., “History, Historians.”

22. McGrath “Museums and Social Media,” 164–72.

23. Blei, “When Tuberculosis Struck the World.”

24. See for example: Tomes, “Destroyer and Teacher.” https://doi.org/10.1177/00333549101250S308; or Knowles, “Not to Come Near Our Person by Ten Mile.” https://doi-org.dartmouth.idm.oclc.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.76.

25. See for example, Fairchild and Oppenheimer, “Public Health Nihilism vs Pragmatism.”

26. See for example, Wallace, “Global Health in Conflict Understanding Opposition to Vitamin A Supplementation in India”; and Whooley, Knowledge in the Time of Cholera.

27. The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board 2019 Annual Report warned that the world was at risk for a “fast moving pandemic caused by a lethal respiratory pathogen”. https://www.gpmb.org/annual-reports/annual-report-2019. A different group of 20 experts in various field ran a disaster scenario exercise in the U.S. in October 2019 with a pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus as their test case: Brannan et al., “We Predicted a Coronavirus Pandemic.” https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/07/coronavirus-epidemic-prediction-policy-advice-121172. Health care response planners were similarly calling for increased attention to the risks of respiratory viruses like influenza in 2019 Kain and Fowler, Preparing Intensive Care for the Next Pandemic Influenza. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13054-019-2616-1.

28. Gourley, “Not Unprecedented.”

29. Morrison, “Rememory,” 324. Morrison draws our attention to “history versus memory, and memory versus memorylessness. Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past.”

30. Wernimont, Numbered Lives.

31. See also Liboiron’s, Pollution is Colonialism.

32. Grosz, The Nick of Time, 119.

33. The NeverEnding Story (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088323/.

34. Wernimont, Numbered Lives. Other discussions of the mediating work of grids and tables include: Johnson, “Markup Bodies.” doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472–7145658; Mattern, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt; Siegert, Cultural Techniques; and Vismann, Files.

35. Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 26.

36. https://hop.dartmouth.edu/2022-arts-integration-projects.

37. Dado, “Man Dies After His Family Can’t Find a Hospital Bed.”

38. Dimock, “Genre as World System,” 88, 89.

39. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 11.