Introduction: COVID-19, the multiplier

ABSTRACT

The global COVID-19 pandemic has robbed us of normal life, however ‘normal’ may be defined. Yet it has also (re)activated certain strands of cultural research that attempt to steer a path parallel to that of biomedical research. Why do we need Cultural Studies in the midst of this nightmarish period? Aside from reactivating and thinking with disciplinary specificities, the COVID crisis has fairly quickly prompted a realization from the early days of the pandemic that a situation far exceeding public health has emerged, with frightening epidemiological, social, cultural, and geopolitical implications. We issued a call for critical, short, and punchy thought pieces in May 2020 and received an overwhelming number of responses globally. In this Introduction, we attempt to outline a certain ‘grid of intelligibility’ that can be conferred upon three specific frames unique to the sort of response that Cultural Studies can make to COVID, frames that are shared in different ways among the contributors to this volume. The frames that we focus on include: the articulation of a cultural lifeworld of the pandemic (in a conscious attempt to connect with the lessons about the force of signification and public political deliberation learned from other pandemics, especially global AIDS); the manner in which COVID has been weaponized in government manoeuvres and in virulent forms of racialization; and the affective and bodily registers that mark our collective vulnerability. In this mapping, COVID multiplies semantically, politically, and corporeally. It is hoped that this Special Issue provides not only a sort of memory archive for what the world has gone through in 2020–21, but also hopefully some intellectual guidance for the way forward.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• theory
• AIDS
• multiplicity
• locality
• vulnerability

The panic pandemic

Where even to begin with COVID-19?

On its own, a debilitating and deadly global pandemic is enough to overwhelm – physically, psychologically, spiritually, and intellectually. As of this writing, 117 million COVID cases have been recorded worldwide, and of those cases, more than 2.6 million people have died. Let that sink in for a moment: 2.6 million people, gone – and not just ‘people’ in the abstract, but family members, friends, lovers, mentors, colleagues, acquaintances, public figures, personal connections, and total strangers. Never mind the untold numbers of COVID ‘long-haulers’ whose bodies, seemingly unable to overcome infection, endure protracted suffering; or the billions of people whose daily lives have been turned upside down and inside out socially, professionally, and financially. Who doesn’t long for a day when it will finally be over? And yet, as vaccines finally begin rolling out in the early spring of 2021, we hear it might never get back to normal as the virus continues to mutate, as we struggle with the awful truth that we can still spread COVID despite inoculation, and as new, compensatory habits estrange us, maybe permanently, from once familiar people, places, objects, and practices.

Yes, it is enough to overwhelm, but the COVID pandemic hardly exists in isolation. The world first caught wind of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), a.k.a SARS-CoV-2, a.k.a., COVID-19 in early 2020 as summer wildfires, stoked by climate change, decimated 18.5 million hectares of Australian bush. Ten months later, large portions of the American West similarly went up in flames, the acrid smoke so pervasive that one of COVID’s few pleasures – seeking refuge outdoors – became its own public health hazard. In between, the senseless murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and scores of other Black persons at the hands of U.S. law enforcement reinforced long-standing fears about whether, within cultures of white supremacy, Black lives mattered at all, and if so, how.

The specificity of the U.S. national context should not, however, obscure the linkages between these instances of state-sanctioned violence and those happening in Hong Kong SAR, Brazil, China, India, and elsewhere, nor the broader attacks on democratic processes wrought by reactionary authoritarian regimes across the globe. The deadly insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, inflamed by former President Donald J. Trump, is perhaps the most spectacular manifestation of this tendency, an event that left many observers wondering if the existential dread of 2020 would ever finally lift.

The point here is to recognize the multiplicity of the COVID-19 pandemic – that is, to refuse to accept it as a public health crisis primarily, as though it were somehow separable from these highly charged events; or, in a different vein, to reject the idea that these events were merely the backdrop against which COVID unfolded. COVID-19 was and remains so overwhelming because it is not one thing but many things simultaneously; or rather, because it refers to a series of crises superimposed with such pressure as to leave one wondering where even to begin at all. When we conceived of this project around May 2020, we were fully aware of the importance of a collective endeavour, involving people with varying experiences of COVID-19, to tell us what important social, cultural, political, and discursive markers were emerging to form a sense of the global crisis. In the ten months of preparing this Special Issue, the panic has grown deeper in epidemiological and cultural terms. What is a possible outline of the panic-pandemic complex, with what immediate and longer-term, knowable and unfathomable, consequences? This is an enormous intellectual task for cultural researchers, because as Paula A. Treichler (1999) in her groundbreaking book How to Have Theory in an Epidemic has emphasized, understanding and moving with analytical precision with the complexity of an epidemic – i.e. alongside a biomedical crisis lies the multifarious and disorienting discourses that form a wild ‘epidemic of signification’ – is paramount for any kind of useful cultural research.

At one level, we take stock of the fragile ‘certainties’ that have been circulating since the onset of the COVID global pandemic (Klingsberg 2020). By fragile certainties, we are pointing to the peculiar discursive handles that somehow endow panic with meanings, often at the tipping points where existing social relations were rapidly, and shockingly, being displaced by new ones. The inventory below may easily be dismissed as myths and urban legends, silly stuff held by feeble minds. Yet these fragile certainties, however fleeting and outlandish, help us to trace the contour of a certain popular archive about COVID:

1. COVID-19 is chemical warfare unleashed from a Wuhan lab.

2. A psychic predicted the pandemic in her 2008 book.

3. A COVID infection turns the patient into a zombie.

4. Holding your breath for 10 seconds can act as a test for COVID-19, a test proven valid among elderly persons.

5. U.S. colleges hold ‘COVID-19 parties’ so that students will deliberately get infected.

6. Some churches hold ‘release parties’ for their congregation to gather with food, drinks, and music without observing social distancing rules and without wearing masks.

7. Dean Koontz, in his 1981 novel The Eyes of Darkness, writes of a ‘perfect weapon’ called ‘Wuhan-400,’ which was the 400th visible strain of man-made microorganisms created at the RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan.

8. The coronavirus crisis was deliberately created by telecommunication companies in order to keep people at home while their engineers install 5G technology everywhere.

9. A super-chain in the U.S. recalled a brand of toilet paper because it was contaminated with the virus, as it was made in China.

10. Various theories about how to prevent the virus include avoiding spicy food, eating garlic, and drinking bleach.

11. A ‘miracle mineral solution,’ which is 28 percent sodium chlorite mixed in distilled water, is said to prevent infection. There are reports that it’s being sold online for US$900 per gallon.

12. Because the COVID vaccine injects a small piece of bio-sensing genetic material into our bodies, teaching our cells how to identify the coronavirus and produce antibodies to fight it, the vaccine will alter our DNA and control our minds.

13. Pets will spread the disease since a dog in Hong Kong was alleged to have been infected with the virus (the world’s first such reported case).

14. A COVID-19 vaccine will use microchip surveillance technology created by Bill Gates-funded research.

15. COVID-19 vaccines contain aborted human fetal tissue and will cause female infertility.

16. A vaccine contains animal products and is not halal, causing vaccination hesitation especially among some South Asian communities.

To us, marking the vernacular cultural lifeworld of COVID in this way is useful for pointing out the obvious: much of the pandemic is utterly unknowable and prone to mystification. But more, the unknowable is no laughing matter. Thinking of how this deadly serious issue of knowing/unknowing has spawned a certain landmark tradition in cultural research of public health and epidemics, we recall the work on the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS since some three decades ago, of important voices such as those of Paula A. Treichler, Douglas Crimp, Cindy Patton, Simon Watney, Jan Zita Grover, Gina Corea, Steven Epstein, Leo Bersani, and many more.

In much of the critical scholarship on HIV/AIDS, realizing that a pandemic is ‘cultural’ is far from adequate, because lurking underneath, above, and around the cultural forces is epidemiological work claiming to speak the ‘ultimate truth.’ What is needed is a profound understanding of the imperative to keep deliberating and fighting over the very uncertainties and contradictions in epidemiological work, and how to actively keep alive, even agitate, public debates. Paula A. Treichler (cited in Gates and Leger 2000, p. 393) emphasizes that when fear and confusion reigned in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, patients and activists fought not only on the medical front, but also against the authorities and the media working to foreclose public debates:

An epidemic of a fatal infectious disease is like a war, or a natural disaster, or a huge pile-up on the highway: it cries out for immediate action. In an epidemic, the public health approach also calls for prevention or eradication now to prevent even more cases in the future. Or maybe you’re one of its victims, and see others sick and dying as well. The pressure’s on to do something, make the epidemic stop, right here, right now. There’s an incredible sense of crisis and urgency, whether or not you know how it’s transmitted or who’s at risk, whether or not you’ve identified its cause. With AIDS/HIV, the centrality of sex, homosexuality, and other taboo stuff definitely complicated the sense of urgency and delayed action; but I think those factors also made it even harder to clear a space for deliberation, for really thinking about, “What’s going on here? What do we believe? What does this epidemic mean?”

‘Theory’ matters in the AIDS crisis, Treichler notes, because theory is the very real task of going through the messy processes through which those living with the crisis establish a semblance of certainty, sort things out, and continuously revise their treatment options and the political actions appropriate for the moment. Vitally, as a cultural researcher, Treichler (cited in Gates and Leger 2000, p. 394) has had to

identify a wide spectrum of responses to the urgency of finding treatment, and many different ways of balancing urgency with deliberation—what I’m equating here with “theory.” Often these responses are very sophisticated, which is a lot to ask if you have this thing that’s killing you. For some, it meant saying, “I would rather take this medication than nothing. I’m willing to take that risk. I don’t know if it works, but I would rather do that. And if it turns out that it hasn’t worked, I accept that.” They found a way of dealing with profound uncertainty. Others could not; it was too difficult not to believe that these drugs were going to help. Living with such quandaries is part of what theory means. For me, that’s what the notion of an “epidemic of signification” did. It gave me a handle on the way that different people were producing meanings of the epidemic, quite apart from what might be true or false.

Morbidity and mortality are undeniable, but the struggle for ‘signification’ can steer alternative discursive paths away from dangerously fatal ones, albeit without guarantees. Minimally, calling a pandemic ‘cultural’ requires steadfast diagnostic work and real political conversation about just how medical realities, crises, and even ‘cures’ are publicly produced, not ‘discovered’ in any teleological sense (see also Sterne 2017).

In public debates, therefore, what repertoire of key ideas with which to speak and think about a pandemic crisis, and what gets obscured, has always been part of the necessary intellectual work. In 1987, in the throes of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, Jan Zita Grover published the landmark essay, ‘AIDS: Keywords.’ The piece endeavoured to extend Raymond Williams’ (1983) unique approach to cultural semantics, ‘keywords,’ to the linguistic territory that at once defined and was defined by this seemingly new disease complex. Significantly, ‘AIDS: Keywords’ was out front in recognizing that the bodily and biomedical dimensions of HIV/AIDS could not be bracketed from the terminology conventionally used by the medical establishment, pharmaceutical companies, journalists, activists, lay people, and, of course, persons living with AIDS. ‘The advent of AIDS as a socially meaningful fact in the West,’ Grover observed (1987, p. 17), ‘has generated an enormous outpouring of words’ including AIDS, bisexual, gay community, heterosexual community, patient zero, person with AIDS (PWA), risk, victim, and more. Importantly, words were not an end in themselves. Grover challenged readers to consider how the vocabulary of HIV/AIDS indexed deeper, existential changes to societies beset by the epidemic: ‘The kinds of words that Williams traces were invented or reimagined at the straining points where old social relations were giving way to new ones’ (Grover 1987, p. 17). And so it was for the entries appearing on Grover’s list which, similarly, embodied the tensions, contradictions, confusions, obfuscations, hopes, dreams, fears, desires, and pleasures of living – and perhaps dying – in a world where AIDS had become an inescapable fact of existence. Ultimately, the goal of ‘AIDS: Keywords’ was hopeful, driven by a belief that a close examination of words at the crux of AIDS discourse might one day provoke semantic changes and other adaptations to better ‘fit … reality,’ rather than mere acquiescence to ‘an already authorized tradition’ (Grover 1987, p. 18).

We return to ‘AIDS: Keywords’ inspired by a similar hope: that of identifying, however provisionally, some of the key terms that have come to be associated with the COVID pandemic, terms that may trigger new ways of understanding the human/virus/science/sociality complex. And we turn to it, with Williams’ (1983) work, with due acknowledgment of how a global pandemic stretches the limits of keywords as an interpretive framework. Indeed, it is critical to understand that keywords are neither transcontextual nor translinguistic; the vocabularies identified by both Grover and Williams are bounded in important ways. If nothing else, it is not lost on us that, like this journal, both authors operated exclusively in the English language as a tool and a paradigm, which exerts an undeniable global dominance, even as it hardly exhausts the range of possible cultural-semantic responses to COVID. We offer the following list with that caveat in mind and in recognition, then, of the need to make keywords a more inclusive project moving forward. All this is to say we are keenly aware that there are many excellent analyses out there in other languages, locales, and cultural disciplines that our volume does not capture (cf. Chen and Chua 2020). That said, many of the candidate ‘COVID keywords,’ below, are drawn from the contributions to this volume, whose authors’ collective footprint traverses four continents, multiple languages, and numerous speech communities: antibodies; Asians; asymptomatic; balcony; Black; border; boredom; care; China; conspiracy; climate change; contact tracing; community; coronavirus; cross-species transmission; droplets; essential; flattening the curve; freedom; gym etiquette; hate speech; herd; home; immunity; isolation; isopropyl alcohol; lockdown; long COVID; mask; N95/KN95; pandemic; personal protective equipment; police; quarantine; rapid testing; race/racism; remote; resilience; r-naught (R0); SARS-COV-2; shame; social distancing; solidarity; superspreader; supply chain fragility; toilet rolls; touch; vaccine (nationalism); variant; ventilator; virus; wet market; work from home; Zoom; zoonosis. Let us continue to extend this inventory, in order to keep public deliberations a living process.

COVID is not, in any simple sense, a parallel moment to the HIV/AIDS crisis, nor to the SARS and MERS outbreaks. Intellectual resources produced in and for an earlier time should inspire, yet they should not be approached as if they provided adequate answers to the myriad questions surrounding COVID-19 today. But neither should the current crisis be taken unreflectively as ‘unprecedented’ (cf. Kane 2020). There have been so many assertions of how the world has not seen anything like it. Yet strangely, the unprecedented is often placed alongside the comparable, the manageable, and the familiar. Even if there is no common horizon for these pandemic episodes, there are shared lessons, overlapping tendencies, and eerily similar states of exception.

Our COVID localities

In the vast disorienting space of the pandemic, let us begin again, by remarking on where we have been, locally. At least for us, marking one’s ‘COVID locality’ is one way to sketch some meaning into the world we now live in. One of us resides in Hong Kong. Aside from the disruptions of work, the imminent collapse of the public health system, the restrictions on travel, the rising job losses, the fear of falling ill – and yes, the mortal anxiety of running out of toilet rolls at home, too – the experience of battling the epidemic in Hong Kong has been uniquely overlaid by another battle. COVID-19 came to the city at the heels of months of intense protest, which has been widely reported and discussed as the Anti-extradition Law Movement, against a proposed bill by the government to transfer fugitives to the Mainland. Protesters, as well as the legal profession, journalist organizations, foreign governments, and even business groups feared the erosion of Hong Kong’s legal system and its built-in safeguards, and they warned of the sinister impact of the bill to stifle and arrest voices of political dissent (see Lee et al. 2019, Tai et al. 2019, Chung 2020, Purbrick 2020).

In early 2020, the considerable level of preparedness among Hong Kong residents when facing the coming of COVID harks back to the deep memory of how the city was plagued by the SARS outbreak in 2003. When news of a potentially fast-spreading respiratory disease hit Hong Kong in early 2020, a social habitus with common practices of personal hygiene and other public preventive measures was already in place. Social activities dropped, frequent handwashing was exercised, and masks worn. But in a rather peculiar way, that deep memory contains not only the formation of a public health consciousness, but also that of a public culture of protest. In 2003, just when the SARS outbreak that afflicted the city began to subside by mid-year, the political tension that had been brewing for some time over the government’s attempt to enact Article 23 of the Basic Law – the infamous law that would criminalize treason, sedition, and subversion against the Central People’s government – erupted into a mass demonstration on July 1, 2003, resulting in the government’s withdrawal of the proposed bill. In other words, SARS of 2003 was experienced as a double affliction to Hong Kong. Few of us who lived through it forget the profound sense of a diminishing city marked by the intersection of a biological pathogen and a political disease. This feeling would be repeated in 2020 by another intersection of a protest and an epidemic.

The intervening years between SARS of 2003 and COVID of 2020 were marked by increasing volatility of public dissatisfaction with the government. Democratic fervour gave hope to the local residents after the show of unity in the massive demonstration on July 1, 2003 successfully forced the government to back down on Article 23. Since then, an annual July 1 mass street protest in Hong Kong has become a powerful symbolic event (see Cheng 2005). The small and large-scale protest experience had accompanied the younger generation, who slowly developed a sense of political purpose for resisting what they viewed as suppression of freedom and other social injustices (Erni 2015, Law 2018, Ma 2018, Ip 2019, Ku 2020, Vukovich 2020). Their organizing against educational reforms in 2011 was in many ways a profound turning point that gave birth to a movement culture led by students, culminating in the large-scale Umbrella Movement of 2014. Unfortunately, after 79 days of mass street protests, the movement was dispersed by tear gas, forced dismantling of tents, and mass arrests. Internal fracture began to appear, with a cluster of mainly party elites who defended the traditional model of ‘peaceful, rational, and non-violent’ agitation, in growing distance from a so-called ‘radical’ wing pushing for direct action and ‘leaderless’ forms of protest (Pang 2020). Accompanying this split was the rise of various versions of political ideology referred to as ‘localism.’ An ideology that emphasized not only historical and cultural differences between Hong Kong and the Mainland, localism drew attention to political differences of governmental structures, legal systems, and of course the treatment of those who seek democratic reform and a higher degree of autonomy and political freedom (Ho 2020). The 2019 protests in Hong Kong were thus a bifurcated movement.

Like a disease, political life in Hong Kong has been the case of a chronic battle for hegemony over a people’s self-determination (Ibrahim and Lam 2020). In the protests, whether in 2003 over Article 23 or in 2019 over the extradition bill, the streets resemble a hospital, with scenes of protesters being tear-gassed or struck by police batons replicating the frantic space of the Emergency Room. Remarkably, for many people of Hong Kong, fighting COVID recalls the bonding experience gained from fighting the ‘political disease,’ as community mobilization in the spirit of ‘Hong Kong people saving ourselves!’ has been in place as part of our public culture for some time (see Lee 2020, Wan et al. 2020). Meanwhile, with COVID, as with SARS, the government’s public health control programme has allowed it to fortify its hegemonic authority, deploying the same police force – now donned in epidemic protective gear – already well-trained in crowd control, contact tracing, interfering with the media, issuing public fines, and more importantly, squashing any form of public dissent (see Hui 2020). Hong Kong may be the only city in the world where a mask law and an anti-mask law exist compulsorily at the same time. In July 2020, the Hong Kong SAR government promulgated the Prevention and Control of Disease (Wearing of Mask) Regulation, when the colonial-era Emergency Regulations Ordinance to enact a mask ban during protests invoked by the government in October 2019, was still in place. We live within a formal contradiction. Masking/anti-masking appears as an apt political allegory for a city with a history of double afflictions, as well as a people who know how to double down on their resistance (see Pang 2020).

In the United States, meanwhile, there was little to no public health consciousness to speak of, and it showed. In the early days of January 2020, COVID seemed mostly like some distant ‘thing’ on the news. But as days turned into weeks there emerged a palpable sense that it was closing in: a case here, a few more there, and then – by the third week of January, an outbreak in Seattle, Washington, harbinger of the hot-spots that began cropping up all across the nation. By early March, the state of Colorado, home to the other editor of this Special Issue, reported its first major outbreak. Surprising no one, the incidence was linked to one of the state’s many international ski resorts, which, like most public accommodations in the United States, had virtually no established protocol for responding to a major public health crisis – even for one everybody could see was coming. In the interregnum between the discovery of COVID in Colorado and the state’s first lockdown order (effective March 26, 2020), efforts to prevent the virus’s spread amounted mostly to what journalist Derek Thompson (2020) would dub ‘hygiene theater’: props, scenery, scripts, and stagecraft intended to provide the illusion of exercising some control over this strange and mysterious illness, in the absence of genuine knowledge, widespread testing, and effective prophylaxis. Cafés prohibited reusable mugs out of concern they were potential disease vectors. Bottles of hand sanitizer started appearing on countertops in stores and offices, though often only long enough to be stolen after reports of dwindling supplies. Grocery store shelves, once bursting with merchandise, became eerily sparse as the phrase ‘supply chain fragility’ crept into public awareness. Here and there people could be spotted wearing face coverings, but more often than not they were dust masks purchased from a hardware store. Almost no one knew they were ineffective at stopping the inhalation of viral droplets, the finer points of particulate filtration having never been a serious topic of public conversation. We had spent our time listening to the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) experts, however, who, for decades, had extolled the virtues of hermetically-sealed, climate-controlled buildings. Slowly it dawned on us that we had become victims of our own recirculated air.

It was like living in a protracted plot twist. Familiar figures, objects, practices, landmarks, infrastructures, institutions, and events had become suddenly, jarringly other – no longer as they once were, or had long seemed to be, and now inadequate to maintaining the rhythms and routines that suborned the banality of everyday life (Certeau 1984, Morris 1990, Seigworth 2000). The shutdowns were a way of trying to get a handle on COVID, to be sure, but they were as much a moment of pause to figure out how to retrofit key aspects of life in the United States in such a way as to reflect priorities that should have been in place all along, but were ignored. The move to remote teaching, disruptive though it has been, has nonetheless prompted important conversations about accessibility in education. Similarly, HVAC now seems more a question than a given as ordinary folks debate MERV filter ratings and rediscover the basic function of fresh air. And importantly, mail-in voting, prompted by COVID, has helped enfranchise countless citizens (many belonging to dispossessed populations) who had opted out of electoral politics owing to intimidation, ballot manipulation, calculated suppression, and other nefarious tactics. These revelations have come at the cost of well over a half-million dead and counting.

The pushback has been violent, moreover, with tens of millions of people – emboldened by former President Trump and whipped into a frenzy by conservative media – refusing to accept this moment of reckoning as such, choosing instead to cling to broken ideologies, apparatuses, symbols, and racial and economic hierarchies because they have worked well enough for them despite their obvious state of disrepair and injustice. Put differently, the resistance to progressive causes that has manifested since 2020 – causes like Black Lives Matter, the movement to defund the police, the Green New Deal, and more – instances not only the recalcitrance of white supremacy and environmental backlash in the United States, but also the intensity of the effort to prevent the COVID plot twist from ever really twisting. Little wonder so many on the Right have resisted the facticity of COVID, in addition to the need for lockdowns, the use of protective face masks in public settings, the importance of social distancing, prohibitions against mass gatherings, and more. To them, doing so is a way of denying, albeit indirectly, the uncomfortable reality of the need for deep, structural change throughout the United States.

Back in Colorado the ski resorts have reopened for the 2020–2021 season and, as of early February, 13 major COVID outbreaks have already occurred. The worst thus far has been at Winter Park Resort, where 109 employees tested positive. According to county officials, ‘these cases have not been traced back to transmission through interaction with visitors but, rather, from social gatherings outside of the workplace and congregate housing’ (qtd. in Perrot et al. 2021). The message seems to be that the skiers are safe and, thus, that no one should fear partaking of activities that have earned Colorado a reputation as the state for outdoor recreation and healthy lifestyles. It should be a reminder of the degree to which part of the cost of an elite ‘healthy lifestyle’ is borne, directly or indirectly, by disposable populations with comparatively less access to robust healthcare, adequate housing, and other resources critical for survival during COVID. It is also a reminder that unjust, inequitable, and unhealthy patterns endure, despite whatever plot twist may be occurring.

Readers of this volume, we hope, will provide their own unique, complicated, or twisted encounter with COVID, given their unique local histories and accompanying cultural-political configurations of struggle. Many of the essays collected here showcase this kind of mosaic, with different assemblages that form some kind of outline that helps us to grasp, and remember, the pandemic of our lifetime.

The cultural life of pathogenic diseases

Inasmuch as the COVID-19 pandemic is undeniably a biomedical phenomenon, the preceding discussion hopefully sheds light on some of the singularities of the crisis, and more importantly, on how the singularities can and do intersect. In some sense this is a familiar line of argument, instanced in countless news reports chronicling the virus’ disproportionate impact on historically marginalized communities, as well as in numerous journal issues that have endeavoured to explore COVID from a range of critical standpoints. Collectively, they bear witness to how epidemiological phenomena are rife with all manner of considerations, not least of which are the socioeconomic factors by means of which the virus lands harder on certain bodies.

It is worth reminding that what Cultural Studies brings to the table is a different but related commitment – a commitment to radically contextualizing COVID, as well as the broader crucible of issues related to disease, health, and wellbeing, amounting to what Grossberg (2018, pp. 155–157) has called a ‘diagrammatic analysis’ of an organic crisis. On one hand this represents a call for specificity, or rather, a type of specificity that resists universalizing claims and overarching abstractions. Georges Canguilhem’s (1991, p. 200–201) discussion of eye conditions is instructive in this regard. ‘In order to discern what is normal or pathological for the body itself,’ he writes, ‘one must look beyond the body. With a disability like astigmatism or myopia, one would be normal in an agricultural or pastoral society but abnormal for sailing or flying.’ This is tantamount to saying that the category ‘normal’ – or perhaps any medical reality, for that matter – isn’t so much ontologically given as situationally dependent, suggesting that any change in the situation (i.e. the context) might in turn provoke a transformation of the norm. Canguilhem is also suggesting that ‘unhealth’ isn’t strictly a biological state or condition of the body but a relationship of that body to itself, to other bodies, and to the natural and built environments those bodies inhabit.

On the other hand, the process of diagrammatizing COVID means moving beyond discrete specificities to explore how seemingly disparate events, phenomena, figures, and modes of existence link up with one another. On this point we draw inspiration from Roberto Esposito’s (2011) Immunitas, in which the author traces instances of immunity across medicine, law, religion, society, government, and communication technology. Significantly, Esposito does not treat these as discrete manifestations of immunity but as aspects of an interlocking ‘system of systems’ that condition, but do not uniquely determine, relations of interiority and exteriority, self and other, commonality and exception, susceptibility and resistance, and more (p. 60). That is to say: one cannot think the category of the biomedical but in relationship to all of these other categories – a position reminiscent of E. P. Thompson’s (1961, p. 33) argument that one cannot study ‘culture’ per se but must attend, instead, to ‘the dialectical interaction between culture and something that is not culture.’

So what does it mean, then, to explore and chronicle the cultural worlds of COVID-19 – that is, to examine them not within a general framework of culture, but within the specific framework of Cultural Studies? It is worth acknowledging that Cultural Studies’ interest in the politics of disease, health, and wellbeing has diminished somewhat in recent years (c.f.: Pezzullo 2007, 2012, 2014, Bennett 2009, 2019), and that the energy surrounding those areas of concern has been absorbed by disability studies, science and technology studies, gender and sexuality studies, environmental studies, and neighbouring fields and disciplines. It is a critical time for Cultural Studies – both the field and the journal – to rejoin the conversation.

To approach cultural considerations contextually also means refusing to accept a solid-state definition, or even definitions, of culture. Culture, for Cultural Studies, is a variable and not a constant (Williams 1958, Williams 1983, Grossberg 2010, pp. 169–226, Striphas 2016), one that exists and evolves in relationship to specific geo-historical events and, more abstractly, other existential territories (e.g. economy, law, religion, technology, the war machine, etc.). In facing a deadly disease, one should not, in other words, be addressing the ‘cultural’ aspects without also interrogating how disease, etc. relate to the definitions – indeed, to the very existence – of culture. Once again, as Paula A. Treichler (1999, p. 234) observed with respect to HIV/AIDS:

culture is typically understood within conventional AIDS discourse in the narrowest and most old-fashioned sense: enrichment, civilization, uplifting art, which fork to use. The sensibility of liberal humanism predominates, while vital contributions of feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial writing and theory are absent.

The lesson is not about theory – far from it – but the interlocking relations between the observable materiality of diseases and the equally hard facticity of culture, understood organically. Once again, by ‘theory’ in the epidemic, Treichler was arguing for us not to close down prematurely on public political deliberations on those very interlocking relations. As for Cindy Patton, ‘theory’ was something that helped to reveal how the crisis was ‘invented,’ understood as a necessary but politically invested process (Patton 1990, 2002).

Timberg and Helperin’s (2012) Tinderbox may also be instructive here. Like many Western scholars and journalists before them, Timberg and Halperin endeavour to locate the origins of HIV/AIDS in West Africa: specifically, Cameroon and Congo. Importantly, however, the work parts company with most other ‘first world chronicles’ of so-called ‘African AIDS’ by subverting the typical narrative formula (Treichler 1999, pp. 99–126, Patton 2002, p. 59). Instead of attributing the growth and spread of HIV/AIDS to traditional sexual practices (e.g. non-monogamy), inadequate sanitation, or perhaps a lack of knowledge of (Western) medical science, Timberg and Halperin situate the AIDS epidemic squarely in the problem space of European colonialism. While they are hardly the first to do so (see Treichler 1999: 115), their work is meticulous in showing how colonial-era projects, including missionary work and resource extraction, led to the development of social and physical infrastructure (e.g. densely populated cities, transportation networks) without which HIV was unlikely to have spread far and wide (Timberg and Halperin 2012, p. 51). Thus, they argue, ‘the birth of the AIDS epidemic and colonialism had a more than incidental connection’ (p. 35). They reinforce the point, understated here, by referencing the work of Michael Worobey, a molecular biologist whose research on the evolution of HIV has established conclusively that the virus’ dominant strain first emerged in the Congo River basin between 1884 and 1924, ‘the most rapacious period of German [and Belgian] colonial exploitation in the region’ (pp. 49–50).

There are several points here worth emphasizing. The first is to recognize how modern technology and associated infrastructure reterritorialized the Congo basin in such a way as to diminish the prophylaxis otherwise enforced by the physical landscape. ‘In the precolonial era, a traveller setting off from the spot that would become Léopoldville [now Kinshasa] eventually would have hit natural obstacles in every direction – jungles, waterfalls, mountains, and the Atlantic Ocean itself – that served as firewalls against the spread of diseases' (Timber's and Halperin 2021, p. 63). While it would be reductive to attribute the global HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 20th and 21st centuries singularly to European colonialism, it seems clear the latter was a decisive element in the epidemic’s gradual anthro-medical development as such.

There is, however, a second layer to the colonial story of HIV/AIDS, one that implicates culture (i.e. the keyword, the concept) even more directly. ‘[I]n certain important respects,’ observes Nicholas B. Dirks (1992, p. 3),

culture was what colonialism was all about … The anthropological concept of culture might never have been invented without a colonial theater that both necessitated the knowledge of culture (for purposes of control and regulation) and provided a colonized constituency that was particularly amenable to ‘culture.’

Regrettably, Dirks glosses over the terror and violence that rendered colonial populations ‘amenable’ to the European cultural conquest (Timberg & Halperin 2012, p. 46, Ismail 2015, pp. 139–140, Mbembe 2019). Yet, the point about culture’s entanglement with colonialism remains a critical one. If, on some level, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is traceable to European colonialism, and if the story of European colonialism is, as Dirks contends, a story about the emergence, operationalization, and propagation of the modern culture concept, then one can begin to appreciate the degree to which culture has been implicated in HIV/AIDS from the very beginning – specifically, as a critical element in the articulation of a new disease complex that would only come to be identified as such a century later. Facing COVID, one wonders about its unique cultural entanglements. For instance, does the Wuhan wet market serve as a stand-in for the tropics (see Alberts 2020)? Does calling COVID a ‘Chinese virus’ encode not only Sinophobia but also something more troubling in the Western colonial imagination, such as what Žižek has called ‘racist paranoia’ (see Peters 2020)?

Like the physical landscape, moreover, tropical diseases impeded – but did not completely discourage – the project of culture in Europe’s colonies. ‘Implicit in the history of tropical medicine,’ notes Priscilla Wald (2008, p. 50), ‘is the image of tropical places as dangerous and diseased and of disease as resistant to the civilizing project.’ Tropical medicine thus emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century to compensate for the immunological differences and deficiencies endemic to the European body. ‘Disease,’ Wald (p. 50) puts it, ‘was not on the side of the colonizer’ (see also Patton 2002). Nor was it exactly on the side of culture, either, a concept whose core logics (racial and ethnic difference; spatial and temporal distance; civilizational hierarchy) would not have made much sense absent the condition in which, through medicine, European bodies might hope to achieve some level of resistance to foreign pathogens. The structure of anticipation reverberates today, as the prospect of receiving a COVID vaccine sets in motion all manner of daydreaming about what may be possible, and ‘normal’ again, in the near future, and what it may take to get there. Similarly, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the possibility of medical treatment not only made ethnographic fieldwork (and other types of colonial encounter) more practicable; it was also, on some level, that which enabled would-be colonists to dream in, of, and about culture. ‘Even as much of what we now recognize as culture was produced by the colonial encounter, the concept itself was in part invented because of it (Dirks 1992, p. 3; emphasis added). And it likely would not have travelled much beyond Europe absent the affordances of tropical medicine which, indeed, deserves to be recognized as a major player in culture’s own biography.

These examples are meant to reinforce the argument that epidemiological events and viral phenomena don’t simply occur within culture, as though culture were a container for social and symbolic practices connected, in this particular case, to COVID. They are also offered in the hope of adding depth and dimension to the idea of investigating the cultural aspects of disease, health, and wellbeing. One should resist the temptation to figure culture as though it existed over here, the epidemiological over there, and somewhere in between, a spot of overlap. It is preferable instead to conceive of the one as a condition or ‘grid of intelligibility’ for the other (Foucault 1990, p. 93). Within this grid, we offer the following central narratives: one is about a political diagnosis of COVID, while the other grapples with how it has been lived.

Weaponizing COVID

Like previous global pandemics, COVID has had an unfolding political life. Horrific reports have emerged of state manoeuvres in Syria, Uganda, Israel, Russia, China, etc. to test and restrict rights and liberties, and to sow distrust between countries, in the guise of epidemic control (Griffiths 2020, Human Rights Watch 2020, Jolicoeur and Seaboyer 2020, Todman 2020). Clearly, manoeuvring suggests tricky operations that blur sound health sciences with biopolitical contrivances. Between reaffirmation of basic public health necessities (such as masking, social distancing, sanitation, and provision of medical care) and belligerent assertion of the power to instrumentalize suffering (such as differential provision of medical care, including vaccination, between the loyalist and opposition areas of a country, closing down opposition media, closing down the border to restrict immigrant movement, etc.), some states have exploited the grey line of pandemic management for political gains. Of late, vaccine distribution has gone nationalistic, as was predicted by the World Health Organization (WHO). A case in point is the mysterious failure in mid-February 2021 ‘at the final step’ of negotiations between the Taiwanese government and BioNTech (who has struck a deal with the Shanghai-based Fosun Pharmaceutical Group to bring their vaccine to China). ‘I was worried about interference from external forces all along and there were many possibilities. I was worried about political pressure. We believed there was political pressure,’ said the Health Minister of Taiwan (AFP 2021).

Visions of Orwellian life abound, but they tend to oversimplify things. The warnings about totalizing control can hardly elucidate the profound power struggle taking place between Big Brother and all the Little Ones, for COVID has only reconfirmed the importance of the dematerialized economy held by the telecommunication and digital giants, many of whom hardly share data with the government in a harmonious way (Hogue 2020). Meanwhile, the wireless technology of Apple and Google, with its geo-locating capacity, is not only exacerbating privacy concerns, it is repeating the nightmare of the digital divide whereby infection control among the less or unconnected population (especially the elderly and the disadvantaged) is sorely needed but hardly made easier.

But no insult and victimization have been more direct than in the racialized attacks on specific citizens and migrants. Blatant Sinophobia aside, the spread of hate speech and physical assault of Asians in general attests to the way a virus is weaponized to compound harm (Kaur 2021). Further, in many places, the macabre map of mortality drawn by COVID mirrors the map of structural inequities, where minorities account for a significantly greater share of deaths from contracting the virus compared to the rest of the population. Routinely, physicians have confirmed that COVID fatality is often the result of ‘co-morbidities,’ which point to the way many underlying health conditions – associated with poverty and systemic racialized disparities – are the culprit for what would be labelled, simplistically, COVID deaths (see Ejaz et al. 2020, Sanyaolu et al. 2020). Prevalence of the co-morbidities, such as hypertension, obesity, chronic lung disease, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease point to chances of bodily survivability as much as to the warped vectors of society and economy. In many ways, then, COVID is just the latest realization of the processes and practices relating to what Pezzullo and Depoe (2010) have called ‘everyday death’ (the mirror image of everyday life, in which adverse conditions result in death and dying becoming normalized), or of what Laurent Berlant (2007) has similarly labelled ‘slow death.’

Placing ‘slow death’ within the space of the ‘predictable life,’ Berlant suggests that the constant, numbing attenuation of life – ‘the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence’ (p. 754) – comes across as extreme and ordinary, simultaneously. She speaks particularly of subordination at the physical level, so that an unhealthy body can only be understood as a produced body (specifically, by ‘global/national regimes of capitalist structural subordination and governmentality’) (p. 754). The problem is that those who live with it realize the body in distress, if not also in deterioration, has no choice but to continue to struggle to build a life around it. Hence the slowness of death. Hence the predictability of life. This is perhaps why, when COVID racism and countless other discriminatory acts were stirred, no one was seriously shocked. Not even the victims, especially when they were well acquainted with the ‘social co-morbidities’ that defined their existence. The aftershock of a COVID death, however, often does set sail probing questions about how the ordinary facticity of life has once again ended in tragedy and who is responsible for it, facticity such as the crowdedness of one’s living space, whether one has medical insurance for critical events, whether the nature of one’s work directly puts one in harm’s way, one’s religious affiliation, and the colour of one’s skin.

Yet in some ways, what Berlant alludes to somehow obscures the apparatus of a ‘total continuous war’ operated by many governments. In the tactic of using quarantine laws, for instance, which naturalizes a legally-sanctioned separation, classification, and hierarchization of bodies in confronting an ‘invisible enemy,’ governments are not thinking of, and may even find it impossible to accept, slow death. In a state of exception engineered by the total continuous war against COVID, the exposure to death is often rendered foreseeable (see Dias and Deluchey 2020, see also Assy and Hoffmann 2020, Klingberg 2020). A good number of contributors to this Special Issue speak about the ways in which COVID has been weaponized to escalate existing harms, by states and non-state actors alike. Of these nightmares, racism has been firmly yoked into the history of COVID from the early days.

COVID vulnerabilities

There are many ways to characterize how we have been living through COVID, from enduring social inconveniences, frustrations (and anger) over lockdown orders and travel restrictions, confusion, to separation and boredom. But mourning, we believe, will be remembered as the primary way in which we lived through the crisis. Remembering the horrific figure of 2.6 million-plus who have died from COVID worldwide, we also mourn our existential vulnerability. The ones who live share the same vulnerability as those who have died, because what the coronavirus demonstrates is the profound interdependence of all living species who rely on air to survive. Viruses travel between bodies and across surfaces; their mortal itinerary renders everyone vulnerable in their circulatory path. As Butler (cited in Yancy 2020) puts it:

Vulnerability is not just the condition of being potentially harmed by another. It names the porous and interdependent character of our bodily and social lives. We are given over from the start to a world of others we never chose in order to become more or less singular beings. That dependency does not precisely end with adulthood. To survive, we take something in. We are impressed upon by the environment, social worlds and intimate contact. That impressionability and porosity define our embodied social lives. What another breathes out, I can breathe in, and something of my breath can find its way into yet another person. The human trace that someone leaves on an object may well be what I touch, pass along on another surface or absorb into my own body. Humans share the air with one another and with animals; they share the surfaces of the world. They touch what others have touched and they touch one another. These reciprocal and material modes of sharing describe a crucial dimension of our vulnerability, intertwinements and interdependence of our embodied social life.

Given over to a world of others, taking in, and passing along: through these ordinary acts, we weave an existence not unlike the virus itself. And when the virus infects, our bodies’ organic armies attack back; what results renders who is the host and who is the guest meaningless, in a zoonotic sense. This is why it is all the more important that in mourning the many who have died, we do not forget the political ineptitude and downright stupidity that have criminally allowed the virus to spread to vulnerable populations, nor do we forget the pervasive structural inequalities under which these vulnerable populations live. Those who perish, whether as host or guest in the zoonotic field, are deaths that are preventable. Their deaths more clearly mark their social and economic vulnerability because of prolonged deprivation from adequate health care, housing, and so on. And for the living – including those who survived the infection episode with lingering health problems – they endure what appears to be permanent disruptions. But for the socially vulnerable, these disruptions are much more than social inconveniences, separation, frustrations with quarantine, boredom, etc. They experience the disruptions in the form of unemployment, homelessness, debt, and abandonment; in short, they experience slow death. Sensing and feeling our existential vulnerability as well as the structural injustices, we mourn COVID, but the predominant way in which we do so has not been through grand public rituals, but more through quiet, lingering sadness. The affective and bodily registers are not lost on many of our contributors to this Special Issue, nor on us.

Indeed, the pandemic has been experienced somatically – sometimes deeply and immediately, as in when the symptoms of COVID manifest (or do not seem to abate); and sometimes more indistinctly, in the way all of us have been compelled to adjust habits, routines, itineraries, clothing choices, modes of self-presentation, and more. These bodily experiences, whether palpable or subtle, are anything but innocent. We mean this not only with respect to particular bodies, but also with regard to the ways in which collective changes in bodily dispositions can, like keywords, possibly instance more fundamental changes to shared conditions of existence. This was the primary argument of Elias’ (2000) The Civilizing Process, whose analysis of etiquette books from 16th century Europe explored the connections between the emergence of the purportedly ‘civilized’ subject of Western modernity and new regimes of affect and bodily comportment. It is not insignificant that he coined the phrase ‘structure of feelings’ 15 years before its first appearance in Orron and Williams’ (1954) Preface to Film, nor that he was a keen observer, like Williams, of cultural ‘watchwords’ (Elias 2000, pp. 24, 48).

Equally important is the figure whose work, in Elias’ view, exemplified this new constellation of sentiments and somatic orientations: Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536). Erasmus’ writings are broad-ranging, but central to his repertoire were concerns about disease, public health, and hygiene: ‘Turn away when spitting, lest your saliva fall on someone’; ‘You should not offer your handkerchief to anyone unless it has been freshly washed’ (quoted in Elias 2000, pp. 130, 123). Erasmus also had much to say about the proper places for urinating and defecating (not in public), the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the need for cleanliness and sanitation, and the importance of good ventilation (Cole 1952, p. 530, Elias 2000, pp. 110–111). Notably, Erasmus’ mother had died of plague when he was 13, and later, as an adult, he ‘frequently moved to escape cholera or the plague – both being frequently observed’ in 16th century Europe (Cole 1952, p. 530). Goudsblom (1986, p. 163) contends that ‘fear of embarrassment, rather than a concern for health, was the prime reason’ behind the brand of advice Erasmus was offering. Still, it is difficult to imagine that repeated outbreaks of plague, cholera, syphilis, and other rampaging diseases had no bearing on Erasmus’ views on health and hygiene, nor on public acceptance of the practices he extolled.

Foucault (1977, 2007) makes a similar point. Though it is widely known that he credits Jeremy Bentham for having formulated the panopticon – the prison ‘diagram’ that emblematized bodily discipline – the plague’s contribution to the disciplinary regime is perhaps less well acknowledged. To put it in no uncertain terms: panopticism was prototyped in the plague; or, as Foucault (1977, p. 197) puts it, when officials handed down a plague order, they were issuing ‘a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism’ (see also Foucault 2007, pp. 9–10). Browne (2015, pp. 31–33) further reminds us of how the panopticon was prompted by a voyage Bentham had undertaken in 1785 aboard a ship carrying 18 Black women, all enslaved. While Browne does not address the topic of disease directly, the subject was of paramount concern aboard slave vessels, having much to do with their architecture, their brutal schemes for stowing and managing (terrorizing) human cargo, etc. (see Rediker 2007, pp. 271–276).

The point of this brief historical detour – and, indeed, one of the purposes of this volume – is to conceptualize how pandemics and other disease processes act as contexts, or crucibles, for the emergence of novel structures of feeling and regimes of bodily comportment. This focus should not diminish the aforementioned project of keywords as much as enhance it, by renewing attention to the gestures by means of which are embodied specific modes of being, acting, living, dying, and surviving in the world. ‘[T]he observation of gestures,’ Flusser (2014, p. 142) suggests, ‘allows us to “decipher” the way we exist in the world. One of the implications of this hypothesis is that modifications we can observe in our gestures allow us to “read” the existential changes we are currently undergoing.’ Flusser adds that ‘whenever gestures appear that have never been seen before, we have the key to decoding a new form of existence' (p. 142; emphasis added). He seems to be proposing a project complementary to keywords, ‘key gestures,’ in which new techniques of bodily action (or the transformation of established ones) betoken more abstract adaptations to, and of, our shared conditions of existence.

One gesture that figures prominently in Flusser’s (2014, pp. 91–97) work is deeply pertinent to the situation today: the gesture of turning a mask around – that is, the act of looking at the interior of a mask before affixing it to one’s face. Because Flusser develops the example in relation to Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, the connection to infectious diseases might seem a distant one. The context is telling, however, in reminding us of the complex historical entanglements between disease, masks, and states of exception. Foucault (1977, p. 197–198) observes that, historically, Carnival wasn’t strictly a harvest bacchanalia anticipating the long, cold winter ahead. It was also ‘a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life … ’ Agamben (2005, pp. 71–72) goes even further in suggesting that the ‘legal anarchy’ characteristic of Carnival isn’t reducible to the persistence of ‘ancient agrarian rites’ (c.f.: Bakhtin 1984). Instead, it ‘brings to light in a parodic form the anomie within the law, the state of emergency [i.e. exception] as the anomic drive contained in the very heart of the nomos' (Agamben 2005, p. 72; emphasis in original).

Understood thus, one might better appreciate why the wearing of masks to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19 has become such a cultural-political flashpoint. The gesture occurs at the nexus of three distinct, if related, states of exception, each of which exists in tension with the other two:

1. the legal, epitomized by the figures of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, whose opposition to mask mandates and other public health orders was not only widely embraced by their followers, but was also possibly a synecdoche for the hostility each administration has displayed toward to the rule of law;

2. the pandemic, a modality identified as such by Patton (2011) following the SARS outbreak of 2002–2004, which refers to the complex negotiations around ‘exceptional laws’ and sovereignty that occur when public health crises transcend national borders;

3. and the carnivalesque, which occupies an ambiguous position with respect to the preceding two categories – an apparent other and yet, paradoxically, also evidence of the normalization of a ‘world turned upside down’ (Stallybrass and White 1986).

The controversies surrounding the gesture of mask wearing also signal how the balance of forces between the three states of exception may be in a process of shifting. How else to explain the seemingly contradictory situation in Hong Kong, noted earlier, in which masks are at once mandated for public health reasons and outlawed in cases of political protest? Or similar contradictions in places where face veiling has been banned and criminalized before COVID struck (recall the numerous veil wars in France, etc.)? Or the perverse spectacle of Trump ‘triumphantly’ removing his mask upon returning to the White House following his emergency hospitalization for COVID? It goes without saying that the facemask-as-gesture is nothing less than a remaking of subjectivity in the shifting everyday anthropology of you/me, bareness/veiling, politeness/incivility, compliance/defiance, affectivity/emotionlessness, and so on. Let us remember that, in some ways, each dyad contains a touch of mourning: with the COVID mask, we grieve our separation, lament the lack of decorum and honesty in our leaders, and regret our sociality diminished through concealed smiles, fogged glasses, muffled voices, frustration, hidden sadness, and numbness.

No normal

There are few certainties where COVID-19 is concerned, but here, at least, is one: we are still very much in the midst of the pandemic. As we write these words, friends and family have taken to social media to mark their one-year COVID ‘anniversaries,’ mourning loved ones they have lost; posting pictures of precious objects from a year ago (toilet paper, disinfectant, bread …), objects whose status, though once again banal, seems more fragile than before; worrying about the future of employment; recalling the fear and anxiety of the pandemic’s early days; reflecting, sometimes bitterly, on the acceptance of new customs and routines; for the lucky few, celebrating inoculations; and observing the whiplash-inducing effects of time passing over the course of an exceptional year. Collectively, these posts strike an ambivalent tone, ranging from ‘look how far we’ve come’ to ‘look how much we’ve lost,’ and ‘maybe now we can return to normal’ to ‘how much more must we endure?’ Meanwhile, nations in the Global North are refusing requests from the Global South to temporarily suspend intellectual property rights for COVID vaccines, thus stymieing efforts to produce cheaper, generic versions of these life-saving products (Reuters Staff 2021). As has often been the case with drugs for HIV/AIDS, the very places in which the ‘state of exception’ was prototyped (Mbembe 2019, 66–92) are being treated as if they were economically and epidemiologically unexceptional. Furthermore, with reports now surfacing about how COVID-19 is apt to become endemic (Phillips 2021), even in the wake of widespread vaccination in the Global North, the possibility of life ‘after COVID’ grows evermore faint. At best, it seems, we must learn to negotiate a life, a world, a futurity, with COVID.

Meanwhile, as COVID continues to dominate world news, other important life-saving public health work and scientific research has plowed ahead. The challenges of Ebola, HIV, dementia, diabetes, and many other diseases that plague humankind are just as important, but unfortunately, they fell by the wayside of global consciousness. The unprecedented race to develop COVID vaccines has been touted as ‘truly historic’ by many infectious disease experts and politicians. But how many of us have paid attention to the fact that a vaccine that took scientists years to develop to immunize against Ebola, was finally developed and licensed for use in June 2020, halting the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in West Africa that had claimed thousands of lives since 2014 (Branswell 2020)? Major health organizations have also reported important advances in biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease and ‘game-changing’ developments in the fight against heart and kidney disease associated with diabetes (LaMotte 2020). Going forward with the knowledge of the COVID co-morbidities, as noted earlier, can we afford to neglect the battles in oncology, gene therapies, heart health, and so on in relation to controlling COVID and its present and future variants?

It would be inappropriate, then, to conclude anything. In closing, we merely wish to signal our hope for this Special Issue: to provide some intellectual guidance for the way forward – toward an uncertain future, without guarantees. The essays that follow are grouped into three thematic sections – ‘Racializations,’ ‘Media, Data, and Fragments of the Popular,’ and ‘Un/knowing the Pandemic’ – sections that animate, but do not exhaust, the complex cultural and political life of COVID-19 with respect to identity, technology, and epistemology. We fully expect readers to chart their own pathways through the issue, recognizing the realities of unbundled content, the unique ways in which the pandemic has affected us, and the myriad questions that arise when a new pathogen not only touches us all, but refuses to let go.

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Acknowledgments

John Erni would like to acknowledge the Fung Hon Chu Foundation for its continued and generous support of his research in the humanities. Ted Striphas wishes to thank Phaedra C. Pezzullo for inspiration for this Special Issue, as well as for important conversations and research leads that improved the Introduction. The authors also wish to acknowledge Logan Rae Gomez, Managing Editor of Cultural Studies, for her editorial assistance on the volume.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Nguyet Erni

John Nguyet Erni is Fung Hon Chu Endowed Professor in Humanics, Chair Professor in Humanities, and Head of the Department of Humanities & Creative Writing (2014–2020) at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is an elected Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities, and an elected Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2017–18, Erni served as President of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. A recipient of the Gustafson, Rockefeller, Lincoln, and Annenberg research fellowships, Erni’s work traverses international and Asia-based cultural studies, human rights legal criticism, Chinese consumption of transnational culture, gender and sexuality in media culture, youth consumption culture in Hong Kong and Asia, cultural politics of race/ethnicity/migration, and critical public health. He is the author or editor of 9 academic titles, among them Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights (2019) and Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of ‘Curing’ AIDS (1994).

Ted Striphas

Ted Striphas, Editor-in-Chief of Cultural Studies, is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder (USA), where he also maintains courtesy appointments in Media Studies and Information Science. He is author of The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (Columbia University Press, 2009) and of the forthcoming monograph, Algorithmic Culture. His research interests include: the history of media and communication technology; the politics of consumer culture; the relationship between law and culture; formations of cultural studies; and the genesis of the culture concept. Twitter: @striphas.