Right from the emergence of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, national governments and international institutions have been relentlessly qualifying it as an “unprecedented” event. We have been told that the virus sees no color or class and that equal sacrifices from each one of us are and continue to be necessary to contain its spread. We have been instructed to look at the virus in scientific, neutral terms as if we had equal chances of being affected by it—as if its routes, that is, did not follow the roots of sedimented histories of oppression, exploitation, dispossession, and structural violence. This forum departs from such narratives to look at how the current COVID-19 pandemic intersects with other pre-existing and enduring pandemics, such as those produced by racism, capitalism, and speciesism. In building on the emerging critiques by Indigenous, feminist, Black, and queer academics, movements, and activists, the contributions it hosts offer multimedia reflections on affects triggered or evoked by the current pandemic, such as rage, fear, despair, restraint, care, and hope. Coming from different parts of the globe and disciplinary approaches, authors convey the “Corona(virus) a(e)ffects” in multisensorial ways, combining written essays, poetry, videos, and photographs. By contextualizing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic within a historical legacy of structural violence within and across species, this forum moves beyond deceitfully single-focus and temporally flat narrations. In so doing, it provides a space for the expression of radical affectivities of dissent and hope that its outburst has arguably made only more visible and pressing.
Corona A(e)ffects: Radical Affectivities of Dissent and Hope
Edited by Mattia Fumanti & Elena Zambelli
This forum looks at how the current COVID-19 pandemic intersects with other pre-existing and enduring pandemics, such as those produced by racism, capitalism, and speciesism. Contributors offer multimedia reflections on affects triggered or evoked by the current pandemic, such as rage, fear, despair, restraint, care, and hope.
Public Space as Infrastructure of Care: The Affective Dynamics of Protomagias Square During the Pandemic
Our contribution puts forward an examination of public spaces as infrastructures of care. The eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the “social distancing” measures imposed by several governments around the world, transformed the very use and conceptualization of urban public spaces. In Athens, Greece, public space, which had already been in different ways at the forefront of multifarious crises since 2010, reemerged, once again, as a critical site of sociopolitical antagonism. Public spaces, such as squares, became central places where people could come together to share knowledge and emotions, collectively alleviate anxieties, and thus (re)negotiate their positionality in the city. Such formations and enactments of social connection, affectivity, and antagonism, reflect the entanglement between everyday life and the political, and also draw attention to the association of public space with practices of care for collective well-being during precarious times. During the ever-increasing securitization and policing of urban spaces in Athens, in which everyday life has come to be ever more permeated by precarity and uncertainty, public spaces have been reenacted as safe and more inclusive environments where people can be and act together. Our contribution also employs a video to render more intelligible the affective interconnectedness of sounds, images, bodies, materialities, and practices in public space. By attending to the affective dynamics of a public square in central Athens, we examine the entanglements between the sociopolitical production of public space and forms of care during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Witnessing a Riot
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has sparked protests and riots around the world. The policing of the pandemic reveals the racial biases inherent to law enforcement and state-led discipline, laying bare ongoing infrastructural inequalities that render racialized subjects more vulnerable to premature death at the hands of police and public health systems alike. With the video embedded in the article, we guide readers through thirty-nine seconds of rioting in Los Angeles on May 31, 2020, shot on a mobile phone and circulated virally on Twitter. The affected body of the witness indexes both the intensity of the event and the embodied experience of the witness, establishing a relation between the two. The experiential aesthetics of the video exceeds the content and this affectivity circulates with its mediation and movement through networked platforms. Such forms of affective witnessing allow for an attunement to political struggle that occurs through what Hortense Spillers would call the analytic of the flesh. Thinking at the intersection of Black studies, affect theory, and media studies, we argue that the flesh is an affective register crucial to the building of global anti-racist solidarities towards abolition.
Feelings, Fascism, and Futures
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed some of the most glaring inequalities within nations and across the globe. While the disruption caused by the pandemic has given rise to hopes for a cultural reset to address these structures of inequality—captured compellingly by Arundhati Roy in her vision of the pandemic as a portal—the sediments of inequality have proven hard to erode. In this contribution, I explore this regressive impulse by honing in on the affect of restraint. While restraint is not ordinarily characterized as such, in the pandemic it has been a defining feature of our lives. However, it was not afforded equally. I begin by showing how restraint has become racialized, serving as a political tool to suppress protests, notably Black Lives Matter. I then move to show how globally, too, there has been an imbalance in who is—and what countries are—expected to practice nonintervention, linking both domestic and international uses of restraint to these preexisting structures of inequality. I end by proffering a vision for how, despite all these obstacles, the pandemic has also offered ways to bypass the state and form new social formations.
Within and Against Racial Segregation: Notes from Italy’s Encampment Archipelago
The pandemic brought migrant farm workers into the limelight once again, as has happened repeatedly in the last three decades, in Italy as in many other parts of the world. Here I examine how intersecting and sometimes conflicting discourses and interventions, that have this biopolitically conceived population as their object, decide upon these subjects’ worthiness of attention, care, and sympathy through criminalizing, victimizing, and humanitarian registers. I reflect on some of the affective dynamics that sustain both the governmental operations through which these populations were (sought to be) managed and reactions against them from a situated perspective, as an accomplice to many of the forms of struggle in which migrant farm workers have engaged in the last decade in Italy. The stage for many such occurrences is what I have elsewhere defined as the “encampment archipelago” that many such workers, and particularly those who migrate from across West Africa, inhabit—labor or asylum-seeker camps, but also slums or isolated, derelict buildings, and various hybrid, in-between spaces among which people circulate.
Bewilderment, Hope, and Despair
This essay is a collective investigation of affective experience, bewilderment, and imagery during the COVID-19 situation in Copenhagen, Denmark through multivocal writing and filmmaking. By letting go of the promises of normality, both in thinking and creating, the writers explore various personal, academic, and aesthetic states of affect—hope, despair, desire, and frustration, like temporary landscapes or glimpses of a new world. Feeding on boredom and fear of being isolated, left inactive and frustrated, naive, or hopeful, this essay points into a different and shivering set of changes, personal and societal, that we are currently facing, and illustrates how such changes, full of pain or despair, might also open new becomings of desire and hope.
Cycles of Quotidian Pandemic Instances: Voice(less) Stories from 1918
By silencing the knowledge of our past, it will not disappear; it transforms into a hum. The hum, as a fluid object of silence can be mournful, can represent absence. The hum that we are neglecting connects with our feelings, registering as cyclic vibrations in contact with parts of the body. The vibrato of the hum speaks of unspoken relations that, according to Tina Campt, unifies quietness with sound, surrounded by affect within a register of meaningfulness. If we don’t dare to remember, some images will enunciate—and speak to—the affective register. With the sonic integration of Radio Influenza, artist Jordan Baseman’s computerized voices narrate stories from 1918 through newspaper fragments. The audible tracks add another register to the vibrations, complicating Paul Gilroy’s “politics of transfiguration,” where the “lower frequency” is purposefully over(p)layed mainly with a different set of forgotten histories suppressed from the war narrative. Hence, the sound is felt from an audible and visual register, enacted at the level of the quotidian narratives of twentieth-century photographs and newspaper stories. If we listen to these quiet photos, to these muffled stories, can we acknowledge that just as sonic vibrations, pandemics tend to come in waves as well? In the end, the 1918 spring influenza outbreak was followed by three waves: the fall of 1918, spring of 1919, and winter of 1919. These waves of history, sound, and pandemics, can push us to resist the neglectfulness and acknowledge what we have unlearned from the cycles of quotidian instances, time and time again.
The Green Color of Grief: Spider-Human Dreams
This essay tries to read the pandemic-afflicted (human) world in terms of post-human translation. In echoing Anna Tsing’s call for “collaborative survival,” it speaks in images of human-spiders in the forest who sense the radical isolation of humans and, thus, loss of proximity. One witnesses ill-treatment of various bodies: those that are economized, racialized, or nationalized. In this way, the essay proposes a post-human approach to distorted intimacies worldwide. It uses multimodal means of reflection: film, photography, sounds, and words. Through such a combination of nonverbal and verbal elements, the essay argues against the divisions of humans-culture-nature. It asks the reader to rethink how we could exist in equal mutuality.
Plants, Vegetables, Lawn: Radical Solidarities in Pandemic Times
This essay presents photos and words illustrating practices of care in homes shared by humans and plants during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on interviews with plant carers, I highlight how humans (re)discovered plants as kin during forced social isolation. I reflect on how plants provided joy, hope, and reassurance during crisis, enabling strong affective bonds with their human carers. I read the creation/cementing of affective bonds between humans and plants for its political significance, and I interrogate the activity of making home/kin with plants as the emergence of interspecies solidarities, which challenge anthropocentric narratives of worldmaking and reinsert non-human beings as central to the making of more just and inclusive futures.
Finding Joy and Elegy: Poetry from Pandemic
Amidst the despair, desperation, death, and economic deprivation of the pandemic, poetry—and creative outlets more broadly—have arisen to assist us in both making sense of the world at large, as well as addressing our own struggles during and from these challenges. This essay seeks to put these works into conversation as part of a process—along with quarantine—of seeding, an opportunity to grow new roots and networks. Drawing from a field of established literary journals and ones established during and explicitly to address the pandemic, the essay aims to begin a process of distilling the ways that even amongst fear and loss we must (and will) find ways to find joy. This requires us to seek out new forms of elegy that elaborate and understand the importance of relations and joys between peoples, and the new relational possibilities that our life holds for us as we move towards a post-pandemic world.