Catastrophe, Care, and All That Remains

Abstract

During 2020 a menacing sense of doom and anxiety proliferated by the Trump administration's shock-and-awe tactics compounded the brutally uneven distribution of exposure, social atomization, precarity, abandonment, and premature death under the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has had especially lethal consequences for those who are impoverished, racially abjected, and deemed violable or disposable within economies of dispossession. For Indigenous peoples under US occupation, the mainstream news coverage of the pandemic's death toll on the Navajo Nation, on Standing Rock, and on other Indigenous nations came and went with little sustained inquiry into the conditions of colonization, critical for understanding the current moment. The obstinate negligence of the CARES Act toward peoples and communities most impacted by the pandemic is only one example of this intensified necropolitics. We focus here on conceptions and mobilizations of care and uncaring, and the catastrophe of the settler-capitalist state at this time. With all the talk about the need for self-care and community care in this period of concentrated epic crises, we ask: How does the discourse of care operate within an imperial social formation? Is an otherwise possible? What are our obligations in kinship and reciprocity? And how do we attend to these obligations in times of imposed distance?