Planetary precarity and the pandemic

Precarity and COVID-19

As this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing goes to print, fear of the life-changing and life-taking SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads worldwide faster than the virus itself. The volume’s very gestation has coincided with the tightening grip of the current global pandemic, unprecedented in its deadly, unstoppable spread, from which it will take the world months, if not years, to emerge. Planetary precarity, environmental degradation or eco-precarity, and the precarious society or the “precariat”, already looming problems of the new millennium, and for long major areas of concern of researchers everywhere, have been overtaken by this invisible threat that has subjected the health of populations throughout the world to new levels of vulnerability and risk. The chimera of hope offered by a magic vaccination, elimination of the virus or its disappearance, is for many the only way to imagine a far off “new normal” as a new spike or second wave is anticipated, even as this issue of the journal is finalized. Among the perplexed – some even denying – and slow-moving governmental machineries, COVID-19 heightens new and unprecedented forms of precarity – in terms of the medical and human resources urgently needed to fight it and the anticipated economic recession which will follow, amplifying the already existing “great divide”, as Joseph Stiglitz (2015) puts it, between rich and poor, global south and global north, haves and have-nots.

In this totally unexpected context of an international pandemic of massive microbiological risk, the theme of this special issue – “Challenging Precarity” – gains heightened significance, not least because many of the debates and topics that are covered, based on existing theoretical and critical paradigms of this field of research, come to seem even more crucial at a time of the biggest crisis the world has faced since World War II. We are living through what is being called “the COVID-19 era” with a “magnified awareness of catastrophe, the sense of universal vulnerability and new brakes socially and culturally on the ways we live” (Slovic 2020, n.p.). There has been a global shift of research endeavour to prioritize projects that analyse the SARS-CoV-2 virus, to identify its behaviour in order to find a vaccine, examine its social and economic impacts, and assess its consequences in order to move forward with future planning. During the recent national lockdowns these and other issues have been debated in virtual conferences, like the international one held at Auro University in May 2020 on “Imagining the Post-Coronavirus World”, as research communities across the globe unite in trying to find solutions to the public health threat that COVID-19 represents: the threat that we will never not have the virus with us.

Interrogating and challenging precarity

The etymological origin of the word precarious dates back to the Indo-European root *prek- which came into Latin as the term prex, meaning “entreaty” or “pray”, but which is also connected with the word “uncertain”. The original meaning of the term encompasses the notion that something obtained by prayer in uncertain or unstable circumstances is likewise unpredictable – that is, whatever is received proves insufficient, impermanent, or non-durable. The etymological meaning buried in this centuries-old term has been re-enacted and endowed with new meanings in the 20th century, an era of “liquid modernity” characterized by fragmentation, uncertainty, and short-term goals (Bauman [1999] 2000). Precarity today has been caused by the effects of global neo-liberal capitalism in increasing worldwide inequality as “more extensive and less visible patterns of global dispossession” and “relatively unstable and dispersed conditions of deprivation and insecurity gain ground” (During 2015, 1). Climate change in the form of global warming and environmental degradation escalates with the neocolonial exploitation of the earth’s natural resources in impoverished regions of the global south for the benefit of ever-expanding industrial, capitalist societies.

The articles in this special issue are bound together by a strong theoretical reliance on the concept of precarity developed by Judith Butler (2004, 2009) in their interrogation of the multiple and overlapping global processes underlying this relational field. In Frames of War, Butler (2009) distinguishes between precarity and precariousness. Precarity is “a politically induced condition” (25) in which certain populations suffer more than others from failing social and economic networks of support, a state of affairs often caused by failures in the national state; these conditions cut “across identity categories as well as multicultural maps, [ ... ] in [their] capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity” (32). Precariousness is the inherent state of vulnerability and dependence resulting from such inequality, whereby subjects might be exposed to disease, violence, poverty, and civil war. As an extension of the term “precariousness”, by which human life can be understood from a collective, communal, and interdependently political point of view, precarity denotes the individual’s being in danger caused by his or her material existence, in line with Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) vita nuda or bare life. For Butler, all lives are born precarious: that is, vulnerable and hence finite. In sociological terms, precarity derives from (in)action on the part of social and economic systems, usually maintained by nation states which either fail to protect those whose lives are less grievable and thus disposable, or catalyse physical impairment, and ultimately death, through means such as disease, poverty, starvation, or political violence. In the same study, Butler considers the arbitrations of those with power, pointing to the frames established by governmental and mass media discourses whereby some lives are more perceivable as lives and hence more legitimate, and more “grievable” than others.

The operational plasticity of precarity as a theoretical concept of literary and cultural analysis allows for emerging synergies with other modes of methodological enquiry such as subaltern, feminist, postcolonial, environmental, or disability studies which, in turn, have traditionally addressed – and still do address – issues that are framed by familiar categories of analysis such as race, class, or gender, in areas of research that explore unequal power relations. Therefore, precarity is a highly applicable theoretical instrument in the social and political sciences, and one that appears in critical discourses on literary texts in relation to their social conditions of production. While some articles in this issue are framed by Butler’s thinking on precarity, others, such as that by Pilar Royo-Grasa, test Butler’s use of the term against other tenets such as Sunera Thobani’s (2010) and Ida Danewid’s (2017) critiques of “imperial precariousness” as “white amnesia” (Danewid 2017, 1681) and a “western supremacy” that marginalizes precarity’s systemic nature with its roots in colonialism (Thobani 2010, 135).

In many of its operations and impacts, the behaviour of the environmental and social precarity that reflects the uneven development of economic world processes is analogous to that of COVID-19: stealthy, predatory, divisive. As a global condition, precarity has been produced by the utilitarian nature of neo-liberal forces that continue to control economic production and regulate society at a time when the status and function of the welfare state are declining. The pervasive presence of neo-liberalism as an ideology is marked by its anonymity which, according to George Monbiot (2016), “is both a symptom and cause of its power” (n.p.). A naturalizing process, it functions unnoticed. As Monbiot asks: “what greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?” This is apparent in the inequalities perpetuated in the marketplace, the flawed power relations, and global impact and reach by which it appropriates many of the functions of the nation state.

“[T]he zombie doctrine staggers on”, says Monbiot (2016, n.p.), assessing the neo-liberal ideology that governs the lives of the new social class of the precariat: that is, those middle classes of western nations who experience precarity (both as process and condition) with its multiple insecurities of employment and protection (Standing [2011] 2016). If colonialism was symptomatic of increasingly uneven power structures, then neo-liberalism can be seen as replacing it, albeit in new forms and shapes. As Simon During (2015) points out, subaltern crises have not only deepened, but heightened in the present age of neo-liberalism, as “the politics of subalternity were largely absorbed into the machinery of emergent neo-liberal state capitalism” (57), thus increasing the vulnerability of the working class and labourers across the world and converting them into precariats, or denizens of the precarious society. Such a formulation is echoed in Samid Suliman and Heloise Weber’s (2019) thesis that links precarity to a “specific condition of insecurity that emerges from the spatial and temporal restructuring of the relationship between production, politics, and life” (528).

As Guy Standing points out, austerity measures practised since the 2008 global financial downturn have affected all levels of society in most western countries, not just those considered precarious and vulnerable on socio-economic grounds. While the cutting of funds to local councils in the UK, for example, affecting social services, has led to increased drug addiction, homelessness, and knife crime in urban centres, the loss of security in the labour market has extended to the middle classes, and even to some wealthy elites who have become afflicted by uncertainty and loss of purpose, suffering from states of psychological precarity. In the new “dangerous class”, the affluent as well as the economically marginalized are affected, exhibiting symptoms of the precaritization of social and labour rights: drifting, a loss of purpose, alienation from labour, leading to “anomie, uncertain and desperate [ ... ] behaviour” (Standing [2011] 2016, 23).

Pervasive in the contemporary world, precarity operates as what Raymond Williams (1977) called “a structure of feeling” (131), and implements a series of localized and locally differentiated atmospheres and affects. These can be traced in the new mobilities functioning across the social spectrum: at one end of the scale, in the influx of refugees and asylum seekers throughout Europe and the hardening of official attitudes against illegal migration; and, at the other, the superwealthy elites, transnational oligarchs from non-western countries like Russia, China, and Japan, who displace local populations in western metropolitan centres, by moving in and accelerating property price rises. There are also those younger middle-class people who “self-precaritize” in the midst of a housing crisis by normalizing insecure short-term living conditions, as evidence of how “precarious neoliberal subjectivities are reimagined through ideas of individuality and flexibility” (Harris and Nowicki 2018, 389). This category includes labourers in the gig economy, working with zero hours contracts, such as Uber drivers, and those in courier services, operating within contracts which offer flexible working conditions but no long-term employment or financial security in the form of pensions, annual holidays, or salary increases: arrangements that operate by short-termism or getting by, working for immediate financial benefits, rather than undertaking long-term planning. These new contracts are just one example of precarity’s familiar rhythms and fluctuations, its particular temporalities in relation to the past and the future. This cycle, however, differs from others in the magnified planetary scale of provisonality: the increasing discrepancy beween the “have” countries, largely in Europe, and the “have-nots”, usually in the global south, where precarity is a form of systemic failure resulting from a lack of adequate resources, political corruption, civil war, or other types of unrest.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic lie the prospects of “new normalcy”: policies being introduced worldwide to manage a return to full economic production and social life. It is to be hoped that the aftermath of the pandemic will not entail loss of the ground recently gained with the upsurge of awareness concerning environmental regeneration, such as that forged by the indomitable Greta Thunberg and others, that has inspired a generation of schoolchildren to take to the streets to protest at what they see as a depleted planetary heritage. Television screens around the world have promoted this display of youthful leadership as populism has joined forces with established environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace, as a result of popular concern at the indifference shown by many governments or the slowness of groups such as the G8 in taking steps to reduce greenhouse gases and improve the carbon footprint. Literature and art can expose the apparatuses that continue to create new neo-liberal “batches” of refugees, disenfranchised individuals, and precariats as a “global class”, and provide insights that gesture towards understanding of, and dialogue and empathy with, those left on the other side of walls, oceans, or other manifestations of sociopolitical silencing and spectrality.

Precarity can be challenged and resisted by forms of textual representation and discussed in terms of possible resolutions, or alternative world scenarios by which to address loss of individual agency, types of social exclusion, effects of environmental degradation such as the melting of the polar ice caps, and despoliation of Indigneous ecosystems and territories. Foremost among these interventions are the forms of healing, resilience, and resistance represented through literature and art, which can imagine new futures and utopian worlds, or turn to ancestral epistemologies even as they acknowledge current precarious conditions. Literary texts also allude to the affective dimension of precarity, found, for instance, in the reinforcement of ties to everyday routines and common practices. Drawing on the discourses of human rights and the environmental humanities, they consider alternative means of placemaking and dwelling, and the new solidarities and collectivities of environmental and refugee activism; they present new genres and modes, such as testimonial narratives, parodic and subversive revisions, and generic reframings such as futurist and feminist speculative fictions and the postcolonial precarious picaresque.

The work of writers and artists from regions as diverse as Indonesia, Australia, South Africa, the US, Canada, the Caribbean, and New Zealand is discussed in this issue. It embraces the genres of poetry, the novel and climate-fiction (or cli-fi), as well as the artwork of feminist photography. Contributors use the theoretical lenses of ecocriticism, feminism, and vernacular cosmopolitanism, and insights from reparative reading, eco-justice, and Indigenous epistemologies, to address eco-precarity. Their concerns include immiserization, dewilding, environmental degradation and slow violence, as well as social precarity: anti-immigration policies, allegations of poverty porn, and predatory formations. The articles have been selected from presentations made at three international conferences held respectively at the University of Córdoba, Spain in 2018; Auro University, Gujarat, India in 2019; and Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy in 2020 – all organized under the aegis of “Challenging Precarity: A Global Network”.¹

The issue opens with an article by Johan Höglund which aligns the concept of precarity with environmental degradation. The focus is on the escalating climate crisis due to neo-liberal policies that have rendered the lives of humans and non-humans vulnerable. Grounded in a critique of the capitalist underpinning of the global north’s environmental policies and their attendant privileges, also conceptualized by Rob Nixon (2011) as “slow violence”, the article explores the divisions between postcolonial scholarship and ecocritical sociology in discussions pertaining to capitalism’s future. Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker trilogy is examined here with reference to Pramod K. Nayar’s (2019) concept of eco-precarity. Höglund speculates on future wealth (re)distribution against the backdrop of a changed social world order, arguing that Bacigalupi’s novels imagine precarity shifting from the global south to the global north. This article is followed by Sneharika Roy’s provocative and searching exploration of precarity’s contribution to postcolonial writing, through post-structuralism’s emphasis on the question of representation, “so that the act of representing becomes discursively precarious”. With an echo of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ([1988] 1999) seminal essay in her title “Can the Subaltern Sing?” Roy highlights how the subaltern can be silenced by intellectuals speaking from a position of power and privilege, seeing such interventions as “tenuous and discursively precarious”. Roy critiques Walcott’s poem Omeros for its oversimplified view of the labour/writer analogy, its problematizing of women as “beasts of burden”, and (although conscious of his own privilege), the poet-narrator’s simultaneous identification with yet alienation from the subaltern. Since the narrator of the poem acts as a mediating gatekeeper, Omeros, therefore, poses problems for readers by presenting them with a compromised imagining of the subaltern, thus creating a class of precarious readers.

The following articles examine questions about authentic discourse with reference to eco-precarity and the ecological. Ana Maria Fraile-Marcos counterpoints Roy’s claim of discursive precarity, in arguing that stories “constitute discrete epistemologies” that determine how individuals confront “ontological vulnerability and precariousness”. Focusing on Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle (2014), she examines how the novel’s acclamation of empirical truths in the domain of scientific research is undermined by the post-truth discourses of the global marketplace, and suggests that ancestral Indigenous stories can offer ways to interrogate the narratives of western progress. She concludes by asking whether such stories open up a space to imagine an “ecology of knowledges” and ecological sustainability. Fraile-Marcos’s question about the ecological powers of Indigenous storytelling also resonates in John Ryan’s analysis of “ecological precarity” to denote the impact of different modes of environmental destruction and climate change on Indigenous territories, as narrativized by Indonesian poets Taufiq Ismail and Khairani Barokka. Grounded in the environmental humanities, Ryan’s article positions Ismail’s and Barokka’s ecocritical agenda in relation to the need for eco-justice in the face of neo-liberal disruption to ecosystems: deforestation, pollution, biodiversity loss, and Indigenous dispossession. Using the concepts of “immiserization” (Gupta 2016), which connects the fragility of environmental systems caused by neo-liberal practices to human precarity, and “imperial debris” (Stoler 2013), associated with ecological change and catastrophe, he argues that the affective dimension of eco-precarity in the verse of Ismail and Barokka helps revalue Indigenous attachment to the more-than-human world.

Leonor M. Martínez-Serrano, drawing like Ryan on a framework of eco-precarity, builds on post-capitalist “predatory formations” (Sassen 2014) which exert “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) on the vulnerable human and more-than-human world. Focusing on the work of the Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst, she identifies his concern with issues such as the relationship between overpopulation and the radical exhaustion of natural resources. These poems propose an alternative imaginary, based on the exemplary cohabitation of North American Indigenous communities and characterized by a deep respect for nature and awareness of the biocentric interconnectedness of the human and more-than-human world.

In the South African context, Cheryl Stobie explores the representation of precarity in two novels published in 2013, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing, by employing the technique of reparative reading as a means of social justice. Stobie challenges Helen Hester’s (2014) concept of “poverty porn” as used of these novels, and also Brian Bwesigye’s (2013) allegation of “identity wars” between Afropolitans, who pursue their cultural and artistic production either on the continent or overseas. She examines the novels as examples of vernacular cosmopolitanism for the way in which they elicit readers’ sympathies regardless of their cultural and socio-economic position on one side or another of the global haves/have-nots divide.

The last three articles examine particular configurations of text and the conditions of its production in studying cases of environmental and social precarity, and their global or planetary significance. Pilar Royo-Grasa turns to the conditions of forced migration, and two recent refugee tragedies, the 2001 Tampa affair and the 2013 Lampedusa catastrophe, the basis respectively of asylum narratives by the Australian writer, Gail Jones: the 2013 short story, “The Ocean”, and her 2015 novel A Guide to Berlin. Royo-Grasa explores Jones’s fictional representations of refugees and asylum seekers, in particular the ties that bind them to non-refugees in mutually dependent relationships that challenge xenophobia. In her study of feminist art practices, Lisa Bloom also prioritizes forms of textual representation, focusing exclusively on studies of Antarctica to identify a “critical polar aethestics”. The challenge to the masculinized “Heroic Age of Exploration” during an era when the polar ice caps are melting, Bloom claims, is made through a female subjectivity that complicates the human/nature divide and the human/non-human relationship through a rethinking of gender and sexuality. The issue concludes with another study of boundary-crossing in nature and culture: Peter Arnds’s article, “Rewilding the World in the Postcolonial Age: On the Nexus between Cultural Production and Species Politics”, draws on the political framework of dewilding and rewilding to analyse perceptions of the wolf as metaphor in literature. With reference to a variety of texts, Arnds shows that literary affirmations of the extermination and reinstitution of the wolf since colonization define a “dewolfing” to “rewolfing” trajectory that impacts positively on nature and culture.

The articles draw on the changes in precarity studies over the last decade from the beginnings of this field in the social sciences with the examination of insecure labour conditions, laws, vulnerable lives, and environmental degradation, to precarity’s increasing representation in the texts and paradigms of art and literature. The contributors use the political and sociological theories and paradigms of Judith Butler, Zygmunt Bauman, Giorgio Agamben, and others to examine how literature engages with the pressing concern of precarity and precaritization, shaping our understanding to produce counter discourses of resilience and healing. The multiple lenses used to analyse the bourgeois society’s conflictual relationship with global capital and problematic attempts to counter environmental depletion offer new ways to rethink the world-making process, which has contributed to social and individual alienation while also facilitating new forms of community, placemaking, and sharing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janet M. Wilson

Janet M. Wilson is professor of English and postcolonial studies at the University of Northampton, UK and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her research focuses on the white settler cultures of Australasia and the writings of their postcolonial diasporas. She has also published on topics such as refugee writing, the global novel, religious fundamentalism, and Katherine Mansfield. She recently coedited the Routledge Diaspora Studies Reader (2017).

Om Prakash Dwivedi

Om Prakash Dwivedi is associate professor of English and head of the School of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at AURO University, Surat. His research interests focus on Indian writing in English, postcolonial theory and cultural studies. He is the author (with Lisa Lau) of Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (2014) and (with V.G. Julie Rajan) of Human Rights and Postcolonial India (2016). Forthcoming is a book on Critical Traditions in India (co-edited with the late Professor Avadhesh Kumar Singh).

Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández

Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and German at the University of Córdoba, Spain, and has spent research periods at Stanford University and Wheaton College (US) and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). She focuses on the study of literature in English and other cultural forms from postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives, and issues of precarity and other intersecting areas (e.g. inequality, disability, or identity). She is currently co-editing the volume Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World.

Notes

1. The founding of a platform for discussing ideas about precarity occurred during the conference “The Cultures of New India”, hosted at Shri Ramswaroop Memorial University (2017) in Lucknow. The network was established in 2018 at the international conference “Precarity, Populism and Post-Truth Politics” (University of Cordoba, Spain) and consolidated at the conferences,  “Challenging Precarity” (AURO University, Gujarat) in 2019 and “Precarious Lives, Uncertain Futures” (Tor Vergata University, Rome) in 2020.