Living in dystopia: Fractured identities and COVID-19

In literary terms, we seem to be inhabiting a post-apocalyptic dystopia. A virus has run rampant across the world. Millions have died. Breathing has become difficult. People often have to wear masks to venture outside. Social gatherings are tightly policed. Our movements are tracked by the state. Meanwhile on social media people share selfies that promote state edicts, and reveal that far from being individualistic, social media exhibit “the group character of online culture” (Wansbrough 2021, 43). But misinformation and anti-vaccination lies also continue to proliferate online. Poorer nations tend to suffer the most as social fractures have become more visible than ever, thus pointing to a continuing neglect of health infrastructure in the Global South. Travel between nations has become nearly impossible, as nation states increasingly adopt fortress mentalities. Reactionary mobs clash with police. What can literature tell us about how this might resonate within postcolonial and decolonial contexts? How might we understand COVID-19 textually? While linking the pandemic crisis to the precarious Global South, Wilson, Prakash Dwivedi, and Gámez-Fernández (2020) point to the therapeutic role of literature, and the “interventions” it can offer in “the forms of healing, resilience, and resistance represented through literature and art, which can imagine new futures and utopian worlds” (442).

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has been framed through apocalyptic cinema, television (Nulman 2021; O’Mahony, Merchant, and Order 2021), and literature (Kaminski 2021; Herrero and Royo-Grasa 2021), its significance to postcolonialism is still being considered. The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact and relationship to postcolonialism has been examined from a number of angles. Kwok (2020), for example, notes the way that colonial prejudices come to the fore, with former President Donald Trump’s characterization of COVID-19 as the “China virus”. Kwok is also keen to accentuate the legacies of colonialism with respect to other pandemic responses, including how immigration is handled amid the crisis. Likewise, Dwivedi (2020) argues that “to see this pandemic through a racial lens alone would be naïve, as it obfuscates the larger issues that have unfolded from the present crisis” (n.p.). Other analyses have focused on healthcare in relation to social media (Roy, Das, and Deshbandhu 2021) in a postcolonial context, while still others have sought to accentuate the role of postcolonial histories in responses to COVID-19 (Anderson et al. 2021), and vaccine distribution. The very term “vaccine imperialism” helps designate the continued legacies of imperialism in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing takes a broadly textual approach in considering the new realities of what seemed the unreality of COVID-19. The eight articles examine art, film, television, and literature, and emphasize the different textual registers of COVID. What does COVID-19 mean for literature? What are the cinematic and artistic antecedents to what online is often labelled as a “boring dystopia”?

Whole Facebook pages and memes are dedicated to charting this “boring dystopia”, which indicates a sort of dreary, depressing but still threatening world, where the possibility of radical political change is repressed, but without the overt spectacular displays of force associated with totalitarian regimes. Mark Fisher (2018), who coined the term, in part meant it to function adjacently to the idea of capitalist realism, which he defined in terms of there being no viable alternative to capitalism (620; see also Hatherley 2021). The causes of capitalist realism include acceptance of neo-liberal measures by both sides of the political divide, Fukuyama’s (1989, 1992) “end of history”, and the union-busting measures that aimed to eliminate collective action. While this end-of-history narrative has been challenged and many now think that capitalist realism is over, the term “boring dystopia” also captures the idea that there are everyday indignities in daily life under the capitalist order. One might, for instance, think of the slogans found on the walls of Amazon warehouses, allegedly meant to inspire the workers who are told that they should “Think Big” while packaging goods (Burin 2019). Although Fisher coined “boring dystopia” to describe neo-liberal Britain, the frequent quiet desolation of the COVID-era years renders the term ever more poignant (Hatherley 2021). After all, people have adapted to the isolation, to rules preventing public and private gatherings. Many of us have become accustomed to QR (Quick Response) codes designed to facilitate tracking the virus and the surveillance considered necessary to containing the virus through contact tracing. Many of us have become even more reliant on the exploitation of the gig economy as food and supplies are delivered on demand. Of course, we were surveilled long before the virus – our data harvested for profit as part of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019) – and the gig economy was nearly synonymous with precarity and contemporary exploitation. But COVID-19 heightens dependence on the gig economy and brings the state into fuller view.

There is, then, a myriad of potential after-effects of COVID-19: economic, political, and psychological, not to mention the consequences for individuals’ health. Indeed, the term “long COVID” denotes COVID’s lingering effects. The term “long COVID” originated as a hashtag on Twitter by user Elisa Perego (Callard and Parego 2021, 2) but soon found currency among medical professionals, governments, and health organizations. Although it refers to ongoing symptoms and health consequences of the coronavirus for individuals, the term could easily be deployed to capture a collective mood of fatigue and anxiety. After all, increasingly we are told to “learn to live with the virus”. As Slavoj Žižek (2020) writes in the second volume of Pandemic!:

We should change our imaginary here and stop expecting one big clear peak after which things will gradually return to normal. What makes the pandemic so unbearable is that even if the full Catastrophe fails to appear, things just drag on – we are informed that we have reached the plateau, then things improve a little bit, but the crisis continues. As Alenka Zupančič put it, the problem with the idea of the end of the world is the same as with Fukuyama’s end of history: the end itself doesn’t end, we just get stuck in a weird immobility. The secret wish of us all, what we think about all the time, is only one thing: when will it end? But it will not end: it is reasonable to see the ongoing pandemic as announcing a new era of ecological troubles. (12)

We are beset by an existential drag, a sense of fatigue whereby initial hopes that the pandemic might be permanently eradicated through social distancing or vaccination have been defeated with COVID-19’s mutations. While relieving for many, new COVID-19 safety measures often increase a sense of despair – that the pandemic will never end, and that things won’t go back to normal. Communities are fragmented. Individuals are grappling with policies of social distancing, and self-isolation. The very terminology here gestures to riven, fractured identities. While there is a rhetoric of “we’re all in this together”, the reality tells multiple different tales, with clear differences in the vaccination rates between the Global South and Global North. Surveillance is part of everyday life, and while these measures are relaxed in some countries, civil liberties groups have voiced concerns (Gregoire 2021). Lockdowns often meant that marginalized members of the community (the poor, the disabled, people of colour) became ever more marginalized. And of course, they are even more marginalized with disparate health outcomes mapping along race and class contours with higher COVID-19 fatality rates for black and marginalized people across the world.

Yet despite the purgatorial “never ending” outlook engendered by the pandemic, we must not lose sight of its incredible acceleration. The global coronavirus pandemic sent shock waves across the world, affecting every nation. After its arrival in late 2019, and spread in 2020, massive transformations occurred. Suddenly the world seemed to reinforce what Byung-Chul Han called a “burnout society” (2015), driven and governed by terms such as “social distancing, quarantine” and “isolation”. Ever more accounts of technological fatigue circulated. Pramod Nayar views this social condition as a mode of “hyperincarceration exclusion” (2020, 2), because it results in the “invisible practices of isolation and exclusion”, as exemplified in the exodus of migrant labourers in India with the declaration of a lockdown. Such images are too easily forgotten.

At first the virus perversely signalled the possibility of a transformation of the economy and changes to production. The state was encouraged to take action. It seemed clear to many that the neo-liberal mantra of “small government” would not suffice. Britain, Sweden, and the US seemed to be punished for their leaders’ “market first” attitudes, with high COVID-19 mortality rates. And it was also clear that if there was any hope for COVID zero, vaccinations would need to circulate among the Global South as well as the Global North, and that geopolitical coordination would be needed to avoid regressive border policies. The hope that the virus would accelerate a political turn towards socialism, or a more benevolent, emancipatory postcapitalism, or even a more caring form of capitalism, almost seems laughable as the wealth of tech giants continues to grow. Sean Cubitt in his article in this issue eloquently makes this case, noting the compatibility between neo-liberal capitalism and the virus. Cubitt writes that “the virus is not its enemy but a savage contingency, precisely the kind of emergency that disaster capitalism wallows in”.

The current pandemic exacerbates precarious global conditions. If there is ever a post-coronavirus period, it will likely spell precarious times ahead for such groups as workers, labourers, and the precariat (Standing 2011). Indeed, there are already job cuts, diminished funding for education, weakening of the economy and the global supply chains, and concomitant individual and social health (mental and physical) disorders. This is a moment of global crisis, and hence it demands deeper attention and careful intervention. Transformation, disruption, and uncertainty are conditions that the world must confront, but they are also the issues explored in postcolonial and apocalyptic literature. One function of art and literature is to offer cultural, political, and literary theory, images of the world, and of possible worlds, namely, how might the world be different. Given the strange temporalities of COVID, being able to textually examine and picture the situation becomes ever more vital, especially within postcolonial situations.

Science fiction (SF) and (post-)apocalyptic horror have emphasized key notions of marginality, and otherness, since Mary Shelley’s ([1818] 2007) Frankenstein – a story about a proto-subaltern figure learning to speak, after being reassembled from identities torn asunder. As Halberstam (1995) notes: “The monster itself is an economic form in that it condenses various racial and sexual threats to nation, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie in one body” (3). The possible racial dimension is accentuated by Shelley when her main character, Victor Frankenstein, contemplates creating a mate:

Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? ([1818] 2007, 139)

It is curious and possibly telling that the threat is posited as coming from populations amid the so-called New World. There is a clear subtext of “miscegenation” and a sense of being “overrun”. But of course, the monster of Frankenstein is in fact Frankenstein, the man. (The pedantic objection that Frankenstein is the scientist and not the creature is not really right – the creature may be a monster but he was made a monster; and his maker was the greater monster.) There is something Malthusian about Frankenstein’s concern and something neo-Malthusian about our present moment, with heavy policing of borders, and “natural immunity” becoming a sort of default for many nations in the Global South deprived of vaccines. It would seem that some populations are regarded as important while others are not, and some populations are regarded as threats by the Global North, thus heightening a situation where “certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler 2015, 33).

Another Frankensteinian connotation is present, though. The narrative that the virus may have escaped from the Wuhan laboratories itself recalls a common reading of Frankenstein, namely the dangers of “playing God”. After all, Frankenstein wished to find a cure for death, but the undead creature signified a horrifying immortality, and the possibility that the dead might replace the living. Something of this theme is also present in Shelley’s (1826) The Last Man, which concerns a disease emerging in the 21st century that leaves only one survivor. It is a much-revisited text amid the pandemic, alongside Camus’s ([1948] 1991) The Plague (itself potentially read from a postcolonial vantage, set in the city of Oran).

While it is no secret that speculative fiction explores potential dangers, often focusing on apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic settings, it can be overlooked how often speculative fiction critiques colonialism.After all, it was the colonial evisceration of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia in Tasmania that in part motivated H.G. Wells to write The War of the Worlds. One particularly striking passage draws attention to the genocide of First Nations People in Tasmania

[B]efore we judge of them [the Martians] too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? (Wells [1897] 2011, 7)

Curiously, then, there is an almost literal self-alienation (if one excuses the pun), a self-identification with the alien invaders. While the other is usually deemed alien – a tendency still present in SF – here the alien is somewhat atypically a stand-in for the European settler-colonialist. As importantly, the apocalypse is induced by colonization.

There is then the very real issues of the post-apocalyptic setting that postcolonial writing addresses. Colonization created various apocalyptic conditions in the continents of Africa, America, and Asia, with famines, genocide, exploitation, enslavement, and the imposition of foreign hierarchies. While the colonial exhibited in much of speculative fiction/science fiction is itself worthy of deconstruction, so too are the explorations of destitution, impoverishment, and fractured identities, recurring themes in postcolonial literature. Postcolonial literature, from this vantage point, already explores pockets of post-apocalyptic survival.

But there is also postcolonial speculative fiction. In fact, Tereza Kuldova’s contribution to the issue explores postcolonial speculative fiction: Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits (2020) and Prayaag Akbar’s dystopian novel Leila (2017). Similarly, Freya Lowden’s and Claire Chambers’s article looks at dystopian fiction from a postcolonial lens, focusing on Bina Shah’s novel Before She Sleeps. Other articles in this issue encounter cinematic works exploring postcolonial settings through speculative fiction: Sean Cubitt’s analysis of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Aleks Wansbrough’s reading of District 9, and Johan Höglund’s exploration of the Netflix streaming television series Betaal. But there are also other navigations of textual form ranging from Pramod Nayar’s examination and close textual analysis of Banksy to Pallavi Rastogi’s meditation on the essays of Zadie Smith.

The problems this issue addresses (ecological, economic, and artistic) are at once textual and existential. All identities are in some sense textual – we are all defined by how we relate to one another and our environments. As such, articles in this issue tackle subjects that are interrelated, whether with ecology, economy, or race and gender (recall that “text” means woven). Each contributor explores the theme of “fractured identities” in a different way, although with significant overlays, intersections, and parallels. A crisis forces us to realize a break within social identity. Given that the self is mediated through a network of relations, ruptures within the social fabric must inevitably engender ruptures within the self. It is from very real social wounds caused by economic disparities, legacies of colonialism, and forms of social alienation that ruptured identities emerge.

In this vein, the issue opens with Sean Cubitt’s evocative and provocative contribution, the hauntingly titled “Pandemic: Invisibility and Silence”, which sets the stage in its exploration of life after the apocalypse. In his article, Cubitt poses the question whether COVID-19 can be understood in decolonial and ecocritical terms. He intimates that there is no other credible way to grapple with COVID-19. The article provides a wide-ranging exploration of ecological thinking, Xi’s China, the aesthetics and materiality of noise, and an analysis of Ana Lily Amipour’s film A Girl Walks Home at Night. Contending that the film captures a type of hybridity between nature and un-nature, and exploring the silence which is inflicted upon the colonized, Cubitt interprets the film as affirming a sort of decolonial aesthetics, with special attention not just on the vampire, but also on the character of the cat.

Tereza Østbø Kuldova draws on the concept of governmentality in her article “Thinking the delirious pandemic governance by numbers with Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits and Prayaag Akbar’s Leila”. The article accentuates the way that the pandemic heightens a sort of metric politics of manipulation and social engineering amid tech neo-feudalism. Controversially, Kuldova positions neo-liberal governmentality as exceeding Soviet measures of control that were exhibited in dystopian classics such as Zamyatin’s We. Instead, Kuldova turns to India and Indian speculative fiction to explore the endpoint of technocratic neo-liberalism.

Freya Lowden and Claire Chambers also draw on dystopian fiction, namely that of Pakistani writer, Bina Shah. In their analysis, “Infection Rebellion in Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps”, they accentuate forms of gendered control. Transposing themes familiar to readers of The Handmaid’s Tale, and indeed viewers of the televisual adaptation, the authors underscore the importance of the theme of rebellion to Before She Sleeps, noting that we are living through the predictions of the speculative fiction genre with increased modes of social repression and rises in domestic violence amid the pandemic.

Extending post-apocalyptic themes, Johan Höglund explores the violence of capitalism and colonialism in the Netflix zombie series Betaal. In “The Adivasi and the Undead: From (Post)colonial Carnage to Necrocene Apocalypse in Betaal (2020)”, Höglund skilfully develops Justin McBrien’s concept of the necrocene through Betaal. The necrocene refers to the destruction of land by capitalist practices and in Höglund’s reading is fused with Jason W. Moore’s concept of the capitalocene, whereby capitalism is the chief engineer of anthropogenetic climate catastrophe. Citing McBrien’s claim that capitalism “necrotizes” the earth itself, Höglund turns to extractive capitalism. Like Cubitt, he focuses on the ecological dimension in his analysis of colonial violence and ecocidal violence.

Aleks Wansbrough also explores the topic of zombies in his article “Septopia and the wastialized Other: Allegorizing neo-liberalism in the age of COVID-19”. Wansbrough draws on Fredric Jameson’s analysis of allegory to make sense of neo-liberalism, class, race, and cinematic texts. Using the concept of septopia, Wansbrough contends that fictive representations of neo-liberalism in Hollywood cinema gesture to current concerns regarding sanitization amid COVID. He notes the way that COVID-lockdown protestors and anti-vaxxers even draw on tropes from Hollywood movies, arguing that both Hollywood and the protestors redirect attention away from the underlying tensions within neo-liberal capitalism even as they seemingly decry them.

While Wansbrough alludes to racializing abjection, Silvia Gerlsbeck goes further in exploring corporeality in her article, “Fragmentations, Phantom Limbs, Re-memberings: Negotiating Bodies, Representation, and Subjectivity in Caribbean British Writing”. Drawing on a rich variety of philosophic and literary traditions in her analysis of Caribbean British literature, Gerlsbeck underscores the traumatic qualities inscribed upon the racialized and othered body, particularly highlighting the diasporic traumas of the Windrush generation. Yet despite noting the fractures of diasporic identity, she nevertheless complicates the picture of identity and the body by concluding that “Caribbean British literature post-Windrush [ … ] negotiat[es] issues of oppression and inferiorization, but also of cultural participation, questions of representation, and theorizations of subjectivity.”

Issues of affect re-emerge in Pallavi Rastogi’s exploration of the underlying causes of what she refers to as “a disorderly world” (indeed, a post-apocalyptic one) in her sensitive analysis of Zadie Smith’s Intimations. In “Flattening the Curse: Cooling Down with Zadie Smith’s Intimations”, Rastogi underscores the significance of reflection, of slowing down or rather cooling down, and highlights the need for empathy. For instance, Smith is able to examine issues from both sides, registering the appeal of Trump as a sort of prophet while also being able to frame him as the treacherous serpent, straight out of Genesis. She argues the necessity for Smith’s endeavour by accentuating form, affect, and politics, challenging us to think about our emotional response to our post-apocalyptic situation.

The issue concludes with a textual analysis of visual art in relation to the pandemic. Pramod Nayar’s contribution, “The Art of COVID-19”, explores the role of parody in the work of the street artist Banksy. Nayar focuses particularly on Banksy’s responses to COVID-19, such as his exploration of the masked nurse. In the work, a child is depicted playing with a nurse figurine, replete with a cape and a mask to prevent COVID. While the more traditionally masculine heroes Spiderman and Batman are shown in the bin, the (literal) elevation of the nurse suggests a change in how heroism is imagined: from saving the world to treating the sick. Nayar, in his exploration of rats in Banksy’s art, notes their ambiguous associations, being historically linked to plague, but also to medical experimentation. As an anagram for arts, rats combine varied connotations. Nayar provides a unique exploration of the fracturing of identity: not in the sense of broken subjectivities or fragmented selves, but in the sense of split identities and meanings in the times of COVID-19.

Taken as a totality the issue maps identity in post-apocalyptic and postcolonial settings. The eight articles help us consider how identities are becoming ever more fractured amid COVID-19, providing an important critical function that connects COVID to other crises whether economic, social, or ecological. The editors owe a great debt to the authors who contributed to this issue, but also the co-editors of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Janet Wilson and Chris Ringrose, who provided invaluable guidance and insight throughout.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Om Prakash Dwivedi

Om Prakash Dwivedi is associate professor of English literature at Bennett University, India. His research interests lie in the field of postcolonial theory, Indian writing in English, and environmental humanities. He is co-author with Lisa Lau of Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (2014), and co-editor of the journal Alterity Studies and World Literature.

Aleks Wansbrough

Aleks Wansbrough is a Sydney-based writer and cultural theorist, who lectures at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney and at Bennett University, India where he is an adjunct professor. The author of Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen: Myths and Allegories in the Digital Age (2021), Wansbrough’s current research concerns the ideology of digital media and film. He is an editor of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture published by Penn State University Press and co-editor of the journal Alterity Studies and World Literature.