ABSTRACT

The global COVID-19 pandemic has robbed us of normal life, however ‘normal’ may be defined. Yet it has also (re)activated certain strands of cultural research that attempt to steer a path parallel to that of biomedical research. Why do we need Cultural Studies in the midst of this nightmarish period? Aside from reactivating and thinking with disciplinary specificities, the COVID crisis has fairly quickly prompted a realization from the early days of the pandemic that a situation far exceeding public health has emerged, with frightening epidemiological, social, cultural, and geopolitical implications. We issued a call for critical, short, and punchy thought pieces in May 2020 and received an overwhelming number of responses globally. In this Introduction, we attempt to outline a certain ‘grid of intelligibility’ that can be conferred upon three specific frames unique to the sort of response that Cultural Studies can make to COVID, frames that are shared in different ways among the contributors to this volume. The frames that we focus on include: the articulation of a cultural lifeworld of the pandemic (in a conscious attempt to connect with the lessons about the force of signification and public political deliberation learned from other pandemics, especially global AIDS); the manner in which COVID has been weaponized in government manoeuvres and in virulent forms of racialization; and the affective and bodily registers that mark our collective vulnerability. In this mapping, COVID multiplies semantically, politically, and corporeally. It is hoped that this Special Issue provides not only a sort of memory archive for what the world has gone through in 2020–21, but also hopefully some intellectual guidance for the way forward.

摘要

全球COVID-19大流行夺走了我们的正常生活，但是可以定义“正常”。然而，它也（重新）激活了某些文化研究领域，这些领域试图引导一条与生物医学研究平行的道路。为什么在这个噩梦般的时期中我们需要文化研究？除了重新启动和具有纪律性的思考之外，COVID危机还从大流行初期就迅速促使人们意识到，已经出现了远远超出公共卫生的状况，这在流行病学，社会，文化和地缘政治方面都产生了令人恐惧的影响。2020年5月，我们发出了呼吁，呼吁人们发表重要，简短而有力的思想作品，并在全球范围内收到了绝大多数的反馈。在本简介中，我们试图勾勒出某种“可理解性网格”，可以将其赋予文化研究可以对COVID做出的响应所特有的三个特定框架，这些框架在本卷的撰稿人之间以不同的方式共享。我们关注的框架包括：阐明大流行的文化生活世界（有意识地尝试与从其他大流行，尤其是全球艾滋病中吸取的关于标志性力量和公共政治审议的经验联系起来）；在政府演习和暴力种族化中将COVID武器化的方式；以及标志着我们集体脆弱性的情感和身体注册表。在此映射中，COVID在语义上，政治上和物质上相乘。