The Plague Years: An Introduction

Abstract

This is not the apocalypse. While some of the customary signs are there – deserted streets, masks and hazmat suits, empty supermarket shelves, hospitals and morgues overflowing – the four horsemen are not gathering at the horizon. Yet the pervasive register in reportage and on social media over the last two years has been biblical, as if eschatology dictates that we conceive of the COVID-19 pandemic as, paradoxically, an iteration of the last days. Without making the routine observation that the apocalypse is never now but always deferred, we might wonder why apocalypticism is the default script in relation to immanent disasters and future imaginaries. Until recently, we largely lacked a lexicon and grammar for global contagion, its social and political consequences and its possible containment. Bubonic plague and even Spanish flu are too remote to be serviceable in this respect and, anyway, our epidemiological knowledge has meant that our experience of COVID-19 has been distinct from historical pandemics. HIV, the cause of one of our most recent pandemics, could have been comparable were it not for the medical developments of ARV therapy, which, in many cases, has turned the disease into a chronic illness. It has also proved less likely to mutate than coronaviruses. It is glib and unethical to suggest that this absence amounts to a ‘crisis of representation,’ for the only real ‘crises’ are infection, death and bereavement, in comparison with which the struggle to come to terms with the coronavirus and its effects is at least secondary. Yet, the humanities must concern itself with representation: how the virus, its spread and its effects have been inscribed and understood existentially and mobilized politically. It is too brazen to suggest that the world will never be the same again because the pandemic has only exacerbated existing dynamics: it has fuelled populism, reinforced capitalism and increased the reach of hedge fund managers and others who profit off risk. And climate change – despite a short-lived lull in carbon emissions and a brief flourishing of wildlife in empty cities – is only becoming more evident in its effects and its outcomes increasingly predictable. Much has remained the same. But even as humanity marches unwaveringly (even triumphantly) towards its own destruction, we can acknowledge that representation is integral to both understanding and mobilization, even if not constitutive. It is in this that the current volume coheres: how has COVID-19 entered discourses; on what archives have we drawn in