Abstract
In the introduction to their volume, The Cultural Politics of Covid-19, editors John Nguyet Erni and Ted Striphas describe the work as an effort to ‘radically [contextualize] COVID, as well as the broader crucible of issues related to disease, health and wellbeing’ (p. 11). The collection of 30 chapters offers a tremendous contribution toward realizing that goal, articulating both intellectual understandings of and future research pathways regarding the ‘repertoire of key ideas with which to speak and think about a pandemic crisis’ (p. 5). The project addresses these key ideas through racial and socioeconomic factors, the practical and performative responses of individuals, public health officials, and political leaders, and media functions and filters. As a work concerned with culture, it meets our expectations of uncovering the means of cultural production at work during the pandemic. An illuminating pastiche emerges of representation, political and social power, identity, and the signifying practices which attended to each during the pandemic.
The volume has three sections exploring the conceptual, political, sociocultural, and interpretive issues during the COVID-19 crisis. The first section, ‘Racializations’, outlines what Clarke refers to ‘the racialized inequalities of vulnerability’ to infection (p. 41). Silva’s ‘Covid 19 and the mundane practices of privilege’ and Mallapragada’s ‘Asian Americans as racial contagion’ together powerfully illustrate how COVID-19 served as a premise for expressions of privilege and race-based scapegoating. Tackling ‘the myth of covid as a great equalizer,’ Silva explores how the ability to prioritize self-care coping strategies to effect ‘normalcy and entertainment’ was reliant on ‘the labour of another, more hyper-vulnerable population’ (p. 35). Mallapragada demonstrates how mitigation policies were wielded as instruments of discrimination extending ‘a historical pattern where exclusion or restriction of Asian immigration and racist scapegoating of Asian Americans converge and surge during periods of public health crises’ (p. 73). This element of historicization underpins one theoretical preoccupation found throughout the section: the necropolitical structures of social power which broadly contributed to the elevated morbidity rates and social dislocations experienced by working class ‘essential workers’ and communities of colour.
The second section, ‘Media, Data, and Fragments of the Popular’, concerns the extraordinary tensions that arose due to ‘the pandemic’s monumental influence on everyday life – and on the workings of politics and democracy – [and] the deployment of symbolic communication to advance arguments or assertions’ (p. 134). These essays evocatively expound on the meaning-making occurring within daily activities, attempts at palliative care, feints of hope, and frustrations, which, it can be surmised, most people experienced. Second only to its status as a public health emergency, the pandemic was a civil sphere debate contesting communicative legitimacy within issues ranging from medical authority, civil liberties, personal responsibility, the role of technology, and government competencies and purviews. Gilmore’s ‘Predicting covid-19, wearable technology and the politics of solutionism’ is a compelling exploration of ‘how emergent technologies are used to signal supposedly innovative means of solving intractable problems’ (p. 179). Readers will be reminded of how prevalent techno-utopian themes were throughout the pandemic crisis, promising a reconfiguration of society in respect to work life, schooling, and disease management, and other facets of daily life.
‘Un/knowing the Pandemic,’ the third section, examines COVID-19 meaning-making at the level of national cultures and in geopolitical discourses. The essays focus on how definitions of the virus, the veracity of data, the effectiveness of public health directives, and even the breadth of the emergency itself were wrought through the machinations of ‘conflicting global imaginaries and geopolitical rivalry . . . intertwined with a larger project of national and political identity formation’ (p. 327). Here again, readers cannot help but relate the material to their own reactions to the information cacophony ensconced variously in frameworks of race, socioeconomics, nationality, and political and cultural identities. Means and Slater’s essay ‘Collective disorientation in the pandemic conjuncture’ articulates the inadequacy of ‘hypermodern [capitalist] systems’ (p. 312) to respond to the pandemic. The essay further defines a role for cultural scholarship in ‘[(re)-orienting] ourselves toward common horizons, collective agency, and liveable futures’ (p. 314). The wide-ranging sociopolitical discourse these essays explore makes this section especially promising as a resource for future researchers investigating the pandemic’s cultural meaning-making within the global and geopolitical milieu.
I recommend The Cultural Politics of Covid-19 to all readers with an interest in how individuals, social groups, and institutions navigated the pandemic at a discursive and meaning-making level. The topical range will allow an indulgence of specific concerns. And the essays are strong models for constructing a ‘grid of intelligibility’ (p. 1) to describe how culture contributes to and guides public perceptions, discourse and activities. However, I found myself wishing for more framing and metacommentary from the editors. The introduction is an excellent treatise on the value of meaning and culture-based approaches to studying the pandemic, but it does not directly reference the subsequent content. A forward to each section would prime readers on the logic of the section and what the editors felt were the collective conclusions uncovered through putting the essays in dialogue. These criticisms do not detract from the accomplishment the volume represents. I personally gained significant new perspectives on my own pandemic experiences and those of my communities, a result to which all scholarship should aspire. The high quality of the essays and the writers’ cultural research expertise make the book a template resource for essay writing and research foci in any course engaging the question of culture. The Cultural Politics of Covid-19 should find a valued space in the library of anyone researching the cultural dynamics at play in the varied responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and other socially disruptive events.
