Microbes of Empire

In the ancient world, plague spoke in the language of the gods: it was the natural—which is to say divine—world's way of manifesting a rupture in the social order. The ancients' understanding of the connection between these worlds has been severed over time, but perhaps the contemporary moment can return us to that sacred insight. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has witnessed a proliferation of devastating climate disasters in the form of record-setting temperatures, especially heat waves, and accompanying droughts, fires, hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, monsoons, and landslides. In the analysis that surfaced at the 1989 conference, the new viruses emerged as evidence of the unforeseen and disastrous consequences of that progress: the technological and other advances that contributed to increasing globalization and development practices, including improved transportation that moved people and goods more rapidly around the globe and the settlement of a growing population in previously sparsely inhabited or uninhabited areas around the world. [...]just as the social and global inequities are etched in the health outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic, they are expressed, as the environmental justice movement has shown, in the inequitable distribution of environmental risks: manifestations of the practices of human exploitations intrinsic to colonialism and empire. Writing in Science in 2000, the Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg, who had given a keynote address at the 1989 conference, noted how the very human innovations that had spelled evolutionary success (increased longevity, for example) had "fostered new vulnerabilities: crowding of humans, with slums cheek by jowl with jet setters' villas;the destruction of forests for agriculture and suburbanization, which has led to closer human contact with disease-carrying rodents and ticks;and routine long-distance travel.

COVID-19 and the Language of Racism

On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, murdered George Perry Floyd Jr., and protests erupted in cities and towns across the country. The public health threat of anti-Black police violence in the wake of the pandemic and, more directly, Floyd's murder led many to describe "twin pandemics" of COVID-19 and racism, a framing that circulated widely. As the analysis emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear, these are not separate threats: the disproportionately high morbidity and mortality rates in communities of color clearly manifest the structural racism that is, in turn, foundational for public health disasters. It is not surprising that women-of-color feminism has laid the groundwork for an analysis emerging from a movement inaugurated by three Black women. Our essay builds on that work to explore an emerging vocabulary these insights have generated: the adoption of phrases such as "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" as the lingua franca of mainstream media, which has gone largely unremarked, as well as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary 's redefinition of "racism." We argue for the importance of a changing vocabulary that at once registers and facilitates efforts to address structural racism and the violence it perpetuates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society is the property of University of Chicago and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

COVID-19: Pandemic Reading: a Journal of Literary History, Criticism and Bibliography

In 1832, a global cholera pandemic reached US shores. Like COVID-19, cholera was a wholly new disease in the United States (although considerably deadlier), and it was, like the novel coronavirus, a poorly understood one that disproportionately affected immigrants and African Americans. The cholera pandemic began immediately following Nat Turner’s rebellion, which had triggered a wave of punitive laws against Black Americans. The early 1830s was, in other words, a time of brutal devastation for the African American community, particularly in the South. How, we might wonder, when faced with horrific violence, systemic injustice, and a descending global pandemic, could an enslaved fifteen-year-old Frederick Douglass do anything but despair? Crucially, he did not. Instead, Douglass’s understanding of Nat Turner’s murder, the racist legal retribution that followed, and the horrors wrought by cholera appear in the context of his awakening to the...