ABSTRACT

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, essays and memes likened its social and temporal conditions to the zombie apocalypse visualized in popular media. Circulating through Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, dystopian photos and videos of abandoned streets, plazas, and malls resonated with harrowing scenes of attacking hordes of zombies in the Netflix series Kingdeom (2019-2020), whose second season premiered when most Southeast Asian cities experienced lockdowns. Global news agencies reported on the unsettling anxiety about contagion from foreign migrants and tourists, from which, despite intensifying social tensions, many ‘developing’ or ‘emerging’ economies in Southeast Asia derive their vitality. If the scholarship about zombie narratives tends to focus on the docile, subjugated bodies of mass labour, critiques of neoliberal capitalism highlight their insatiable, irrational consumerism. In contrast, this article explores how the steep downturns from travel restrictions and citywide lockdowns to fight the outbreak have exposed the dependency of developmental state capitalism for its rapid pace of material growth not only on the flexibility of migrant labour but also on the contingency of speculative investment from overseas. Whereas state capitalism is typically understood to deploy its resources in protected industries and state-owned enterprises to consolidate its political rule, its use of authority now appears to centre on reducing market risk. The resilient temporality of the novel coronavirus has led to a new cyclical capitalist normalcy of surging, declining, and resurging infections, which governments have struggled to manage through varied forms of lockdown and quarantine such as Circuit Breakers (CB) in Singapore, Movement Control Orders (MCO) in Kuala Lumpur, and Enhanced Community Quarantines (ECQ) in Manila, with the failed aspiration of economic stability.

摘要

在COVID-19大流行开始时，论文和模因将其社会和时间状况比喻为流行媒体中可视化的僵尸启示录。遍历Facebook，Instagram和YouTube的反乌托邦照片和录像，废弃的街道，广场和购物中心，与Netflix系列《金德姆》中恐怖的僵尸袭击场面令人共鸣（2019-2020），当第二个赛季开始时，大多数东南亚城市都经历了封锁。全球新闻机构报道了外国移民和游客对传染病的不安情绪，尽管社会紧张局势加剧，但东南亚的许多“发展中”或“新兴”经济体仍从中汲取了活力。如果有关僵尸叙事的学术研究倾向于集中在温顺，屈服于大众的劳动力之上，那么对新自由主义资本主义的批评就强调了他们永不满足的，非理性的消费主义。相比之下，本文探讨了出行限制和全市范围内爆发疫情的急剧下降如何暴露了发展中的国家资本主义对物质发展的快速依赖，不仅依赖移民劳动力的灵活性，而且依赖于来自海外的投机性投资的偶然性。 。人们通常认为，国家资本主义将其资源部署在受保护的行业和国有企业中，以巩固其政治统治，而如今，其对权力的利用似乎集中于降低市场风险。新型冠状病毒的弹性临时性导致了新的周期性资本主义常态，即感染激增，下降和复苏，各国政府一直在努力通过各种形式的锁定和隔离来进行管理，例如新加坡的Circuit Breakers（CB），