ABSTRACT

Trump had COVID-19. The world held its breath. We, in very real terms, were on pause. Trump's reality, the reality of millions of Americans and people around the world, was one of quarantine, an existence put on pause. Here, I would like to consider the polyphony of meanings and performances foregrounding our varied understandings of the pause. Trump's pause and our own excavate a stacking of dual existences: one where we are either waiting to die or get sick and another where we are waiting to get better or return to normal. COVID-19 represents an original moment where the reality of incessant dying is remarkable, and the questions asked within critical Black studies regarding the ontological conditions of humanity and the existential necessity of Black death for the flourishing of white life are laid bare. Through its interrogation of the pause, this work treats pausing as a technical, corporeal, material, and racialized assemblage of realities. Though pausing is a technopolitical formation that is immediately apprehended through gaming and game culture, we must push beyond the computational fact of pressing pause to further an imaginary centering the ordinariness of Black death as being in suspension with the extraordinariness of COVID death.

摘要

特朗普感染了 COVID-19。世界屏住了呼吸。实际上，我们处于暂停状态。特朗普的现实，数百万美国人和全世界人民的现实，是一种隔离，一种被暂停的存在。在这里，我想考虑意义和表演的复调，这预示着我们对停顿的不同理解。特朗普的停顿和我们自己挖掘出一堆双重存在：一个是我们等待死亡或生病，另一个是我们等待好转或恢复正常。COVID-19 代表了一个原始时刻，不断死亡的现实是显着的，在批判性黑人研究中提出的关于人类本体论条件和黑死病对白人生命繁荣的存在必要性的问题被暴露无遗。通过对停顿的询问，这部作品将停顿视为一种技术的、物质的、物质的和种族化的现实组合。尽管暂停是一种通过游戏和游戏文化立即被理解的技术政治形式，但我们必须超越按下暂停的计算事实，进一步想象将黑死病的普通性与 COVID 死亡的非凡性一起暂停。