Part I: Naming

The first, and maybe the last, business of facing the unknown seems to be the naming. I remember listening to the TV anchors in the morning of September 11, 2001, struggling to name what was happening before their eyes. Is this Pearl Harbor, they asked. Antietam? Or Hurricane Andrew? Naming gives us a hook, a context, a place to start the process of comprehension. The literal naming of the virus that has killed 1.92 million people to date was first a matter for scientists—it is a coronavirus of some kind. Then naming was a matter of politics in the United States, where President Trump was determined to Page 4 →give it a name that encouraged racist and xenophobic blame for the virus. Finally, there was modest victory for science as the name that took hold is one that identifies a particular, new coronavirus and links it to the year in which it emerged—hence COVID-19. It is a serviceable name—it is a specific reference to what the virus is and when it came to be, but it doesn’t begin to name what it feels like, how it has changed us, what it has taken from us. It is a name that abbreviates the virus family, but it will explode with meanings across time. It has already become exponentially bigger than the virus itself, and that is saying a lot. In fact, a big part of being human during COVID has been about trying to name, to understand, to contain, to get our arms around something that is at once quite singular—a particular mutation of a common microorganism and spectacularly multifaceted—reaching into nearly every corner of the planet and changing things there.

But even before the naming could take the form of anything like a noun, there was a more inchoate experience of trying to grasp the unknown, trying to feel or sense perimeters of the amorphous. My first fumbling attempts at this led me to the vivid memory of being on an airplane that was on fire. Maybe the most shocking part of that experience was the heavy, dense silence that fell over us after the captain made his succinct, clipped announcement that we were aflame and were going to make an emergency landing. It wasn’t at all like it is in the movies—there was no screaming or running up and down the aisles. There was no activity whatsoever except for clutching. I sat, like the lot of us, in stone silence clutching my children, hardly daring to breathe.

In March 2020 the plane on fire seemed like a decent beginning to try to understand the experience of the pandemic. It captured the facing of a terrifying unknown, the sense of being suspended in time, the experience of waiting for some ghastly, deadly thing to happen, and the fascinating business of witnessing collective (early) acquiescence. As much as anything, I was struck by the relative quietness of the whole thing. There was suffering and fear, and plenty of people had to go out into the unknown every day, but the streets in most places were quiet. I kept asking people—on the phone—if someone had told you that the whole world was going to be shut down over the course of a few weeks in response to a deadly plague, would you have ever imagined it to be so orderly? Or so still, at least at first? Where I live, and where most but not all people live, those who could just went home and hunkered down. I was fearful in Whole Foods and unable to sleep in my soft, familiar bed, but the experience of the empty streets did not match the commotion of the cinematic figures waving their arms and howling their fears that I guess I had imagined a deadly virus sweeping the globe might inspire. I was aware, Page 5 →of course, that my experience was not universal and that it was going to be important to track and to try to understand experiences beyond my own.

In the first section, literary scholar Christopher Matthews reflects on monsters and how the stories we tell create them and help us to manage their presence amongst us. In “This Virus Has No Eyes: Telling Stories in the Land of Monsters,” Matthews tries to capture the experience of grabbing hold of meaning, of a name and of a narrative in the early days of the virus with the help of monster stories. He reminds us that “monster stories are quite often less about the monster itself—the goblins and their backstory—than the human response, good or bad, blinkered or enlightened, to crisis, to transformation, to catastrophe.” He brings us to a sharp call for a conscious knowing—for rejecting a hazy unconsciousness of an unknown beast—to know and to name what it is costing all of us. Literary and visual culture scholar Sara Blair grapples with how we have tried to name the virus by capturing it in images, by visualizing life with COVID. In “Facing Our Pandemic,” she asks, “How do we make sense of the mounting intimate and collective losses, the untold injuries to personhood and human being? . . . How do we give a face to the experience of the pandemic’s violence, or begin cultivating new forms of response to the systemic realities it exposes?” She walks us through a series of powerful images, made mostly by amateur photographers, that work to capture, to show, what it is like to be human during COVID. Blair deftly reveals a kind of complicated renaissance of the portrait as a vivid response to a new, pointed need to see each other and to be seen in the context of both the pandemic and the social justice movement. We need to see the faces hidden behind PPE and the faces scarred by masks, and we need to see the faces of a movement that calls us to acknowledge what has long been in plain sight. In “Living on Loss of Privileges: What We Learned in Prison,” Patrick Bates, Alexandra Friedman, Adam Kouraimi, Ashley Lucas, Sriram Papolu, and Cozine Welch have created (and transcribed) a web series in which formerly incarcerated people respond to the near constant refrain that the COVID lockdowns are like being in prison. This series responds to what could be a galling comparison with compassionate lessons taught by former prisoners on how to manage the experience of losing basic privileges. Artaysia Mallisham talks about the importance of self-care, Romando Valeroso shares his experience of the importance of structure, and Juan Juan Willis describes how important venting was for him—venting through writing poetry and songs. Individually and taken together, these personal accounts offer powerful instruction, and they contribute to the work of naming of this experience. Finally, Michelle McClellan and Aprille McKay share their practicePage 6 → of trying to name the experience of the virus for the future—of collecting artifacts for the Bentley Historical Archive that will tell the story of living through the virus for future historians. In “Not Even Past: Archiving 2020 in Real Time” they share a sampling of the items they’ve collected so far: a photograph of a forty-eight-year-old, beloved campus bus driver named Troy Dixon who was killed by the virus in April 2020; a comedic film made by an undergraduate about the monotony of the lockdown; and the handwritten diary of a professor of music. They also share the challenge of collecting, of naming what we don’t yet fully understand.

Part II: Waiting

Part of the quiet of the first months of the pandemic, for those of us outside of hospitals and clinics, was an unfamiliar kind of waiting—waiting in March and April and May and then June and July and August and then waiting in months that blur together and lose their shape. Waiting that flattened time. Waiting for news, waiting for research, waiting for sick people to get better, waiting for leadership, waiting for an explanation of the deadly social distinctions made by the virus, waiting for grocery deliveries, waiting for a vaccine, waiting for a cure, waiting for test results, waiting for better tests, waiting for no more waiting, waiting for less unrest in the streets, waiting for more unrest in the streets, waiting for a return to normalcy, waiting for a new, better normal.

To be sure, waiting has not been uniform or equitable or even about a clear, familiar passage of time. The essays in this part work to capture pieces of this wild waiting. David Caron leads off this section with “Waiting = Death: COVID-19, the Struggle for Racial Justice, and the AIDS Pandemic,” in which he asks us to think about waiting but also about patience and impatience. He considers waiting in the context of the AIDS crisis and the long civil rights movement against the waiting we are doing now. He beautifully pulls us through multiple kinds of waiting, and then he offers some hope. He writes, “I remember what it felt like to wait with other people—and then to have enough” and reminds us that George Floyd’s murder came, in the midst of so much waiting, as a potent call not to wait for justice for Black Americans. Donald Lopez’s “Buddhism, the Pandemic, and the Demise of the Future Tense,” walks us through a different approach to thinking about biding time—about stopping time. He starts with Buddhist concepts of suffering, explaining that the most pernicious is the suffering of conditioning—the almost unseen Page 7 →habit of always waiting for suffering in the next moment, “over which we have no control.” Certainly this felt resonant in the early months of the pandemic. For those of us who remained healthy and outside of hospitals, the state of waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the virus to darken your own door, was an active, if abstract, kind of suffering. As Lopez describes it, “the fact that we have no control over the future, no matter what models we construct, no matter what scenarios we project, no matter what plans we make” can, once it becomes the focus of our attention, be consuming. It can rob us of our confidence, he writes, of speaking in the future tense. (When I read this in June 2020, I thought I understood what he meant, and then in November and January, as the deaths continued to mount and chaos intensified, I felt this in my bones.) For Buddhists, in Lopez’s formulation, letting go of the future tense is not so much about “living in the moment” as it is about surrendering the self to survive the present. He explains, “As soon as we recognize that we do not exist in the way that we have always imagined, that we do not exist in the way that we imagine ourselves in this year of politics and plague, then the future, and all the horror that it holds, will end.” Waiting, then, is made survivable by reframing our most basic understanding of existence. Visual artist Jim Cogswell’s “COVID Diary: Hands, Nets, and Other Devices” takes another approach to waiting. His first set of images, of hands, was made in the first week of March as the storm approached. He frames them with an homage to their narrative potential. In these images, his hands are not wringing; they are floating among bits of color that look, presciently, like a hybrid of the COVID virus and bullet holes in glass. There is a sense of free fall in these images that is heightened when, inspired by a palimpsest of tragedy, he stretches back to ancient Greece and introduces free-floating fragments of nets into the images in “Nets and Other Devices,” work made in May and June 2020. The conversation he evokes across time, with bits of tragic iconography and neon orange traffic cones, captures palpable sensations of suspended time. This part ends with Amal Fadlalla’s moving “Social Distances in Between: Excerpts from My COVID-19 Diaries.” She reflects on the ways in which waiting out the virus in a home that is not fully a home for a transnational woman of color casts shades of meaning on the now ubiquitous term—social distancing. Comparing her experience of the lockdown in a Midwestern college town to that of her sister, who is a doctor in Saudi Arabia, and her sister in Sudan, who is negotiating the virus and dramatic political transformation, she asks us to think about multiple forms of distance. She explains, “I use ‘enhanced social distancing’ here to highlight myriad other social boundaries and divisions that we have normalized, embodied, and taken for granted over the years.” She shows us Page 8 →the hardening of some of these distinctions as she waits for the crisis to pass, but she also takes us with her as she walks her neighborhood. She shows us, with small interventions and daily familiarity, the process through which some—but not all—of these distinctions loosen as she finds herself walking past “Black Lives Matter” and “We Support That Woman from Michigan” yard signs and connecting to a gardening neighbor aptly named Angel. For her, waiting creates the space for something else to bloom.

Part III: Grieving

11 This is something, but it is not commensurate with the scale of loss. It is not as if grief has been banished, but one of the most remarkable aspects of being human, in the United States, during COVID has been the relative absence of public grief. This is not to suggest that there has not been intense, sustained, wrenching private grief—there have been more than 350,000 occasions for it. But despite the list above, which could be expanded to include many, many more local efforts, we have not—despite the time some have had on their hands—seen the kind of mass outpourings of public grief that have been so central to American civic life in the last forty years.

Where is the grief? And when do we grieve? You might speculate that, because the virus has hit some communities, especially communities of Page 9 →color, harder than others, grief has been segregated, and to some extent this is probably true. But this doesn’t align with the story of public grief in the contemporary United States. A very short version of that story is that after the social disruptions of the Vietnam War, public commemoration experienced a dramatic revival, and shared practices emerged around public memorials that involve the leaving of things at sites of bombings and shootings and car accidents and natural disasters. This has been a remarkably robust, participatory culture of commemoration. (Think flowers and teddy bears and flags at Ground Zero or Parkland or at the site of Michael Brown’s murder.) This practice emerged from the grief of communities of color who lost a disproportionate number of young men to the Vietnam War and has become common practice. It has also been a kind of centrifugal force in a tense and divided nation. We have gotten good at grieving together. We haven’t been able to agree on a lot, but we have shared grief and we have valued collective grieving. The stories behind the fight to build the 9/11 memorials and the fights to build new war memorials on the National Mall reveal a deep investment in shared grief. All of this makes the relative absence of public grief for the nearly four hundred thousand Americans lost to the virus all the more remarkable. If you were told, in 2019, that we would lose the same number of people that we lost on 9/11 every day for months and that the streets would not be flooded with grievers, that the media would not be saturated with stories of loss, that Facebook would not have been turned into a solemn stream of tears, that, in fact, a large part of the population would be denying the fact of these deaths, I am not sure you would have believed it.

Certainly, the scale of the losses is part of the problem. President Trump’s cruel denial of the reality of these losses is also part of the problem. The fact that people are dying in isolation in hospitals also contributes to the muted response. Published photographs of mass graves look like they are from another time and place; it is hard to believe that they were taken here and now. The images of mobile morgues set up in hospital parking lots and on city streets look like they’re trucks lined up at loading docks at Target, not makeshift storage for the dead, not the simple reality of mass death.

I wonder if the enormous energy and passion that millions of Americans gave to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 is linked to all of the free-floating, bottled-up collective grief. The murder of George Floyd before our eyes in an unspeakable nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds unleashed some of this grief, along, of course, with rage that turned out to be impossible to contain. I know that for many the most intense pain of the virus came as the news reports about the racial bias of the virus started to come in. (No, no, Page 10 →no, oh God, please no.) George Floyd is not the first Black man or woman we have witnessed being murdered by the police. These murders have been an open fact of life in the United States since its inception. They have been the subject of periodic public outrage and they have continued. Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice. We knew their names before George Floyd was killed. Was there a connection between the quiet grief Americans were holding in May 2020, the sense of helpless disbelief that the virus really does know how we see each other, and the intense national and global response to Floyd’s murder? The work of movement activists is likely the key driver, but the need for millions to take to the streets, even in the pandemic, could well be linked to the problem of COVID grief. It certainly was a powerful expression of collective grief. When Harris told us that the virus knows how we see each other, she made an argument for the ways in which these griefs are connected. The divisions among us that the virus has required us to see, to feel, to carry inextricably, bind the loud, outraged grief for Floyd and the quiet, camouflaged grief of the souls stored in refrigerator trucks in parking lots across the country.

The essays in this section take up COVID and grief. Suzanne Davis helps us to think about the quotidian nature of mourning in her essay “Grief and the Importance of Real Things during COVID-19.” Davis, a curator at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, takes up three distinct objects to do this because, as she writes, “Historical artifacts—and sometimes an awareness of their absence—can help us make sense of this brutality, acknowledge grief, and find hope in the world.” She walks us through the story of “a painted limestone grave marker in the collection of the Kelsey Museum; a cardboard box taped shut for shipping in 1948 and never reopened, now in my father’s office; and a fork with a wood handle and three spindly steel tines that I use on a daily basis.” She argues that “each artifact encodes trauma and loss, but is also a mechanism for remembrance—becoming a vessel for specific stories of the collective brutality and beauty of life.” Sara Forsdyke turns to ancient history in her essay, “Looking Backward in Order to Look Forward: Lessons about Humanity and the Humanities from the Plague at Athens.” She takes up a plague that killed more than a third of the population of Athens in 430 BCE. Describing the social breakdowns that were more terrifying than the disease, she writes, “One clear lesson is that societies must reinforce institutions of social cohesion that build bonds of familiarity and trust between citizens in order to survive the disruptions caused by pandemics.” William A. Calvo-Quirós’s essay, “Protests, Prayers, and Protections: Three Visitations during COVID-19,” invites us into an intimate community of grievers and Page 11 →thinks about the relationship between grief and grievance. He tracks a resurgence of religious practices related to deities and saints, and tries to capture something of the “innumerable private and public acts of piety, such as virtual masses, rosaries, and Zoom religious events, [that] have populated the news.” He finds saints, in a broad Latinx diaspora, evoked on COVID masks and for the Black Lives Matter movement. He shares his experience of joining a Zoom rosary group—which devotes most of its meetings to requests for prayers for people they know who are suffering from the disease or its brutal social impacts. The final essay in this section is Melanie Tanielian’s powerful “Soliloquous Solipsism: An Attempt to Put Words to a Loss of Words.” She draws us in, with text but mostly with images, to her experience of loss as a loss for words. She writes, “My humanness, like a smartphone losing its battery power one tiny percentage point at a time and diminishing its screen’s pixels, turned pitch black. Grief immobilized years of training in narrating historical deaths with the sole political goal of historical justice, historical accuracy, and meaning making of the historical.” So she turned to making images, images of her body—muted, in pain, and very much alive—to express a private grief that raged within her that the lockdown had unlocked and that could not be abstracted. This work is, in part, about what grief opened up in her, and in that way it puts the question on the table for all of us. What has grief given us? What has it enabled? And what has it taken away? The image that I keep coming back to for grief during COVID is of a free radical slamming around in a body—both loose and trapped, dormant and radioactive, very much alive and heavy with the potential.

Part IV: More Waiting/Sheltering

Of course, as all of this raged around us there has been a whole lot more waiting. Tense waiting. Quiet waiting. Noisy waiting. Homeschooling while working from home waiting. Waiting for work. Waiting for help. Waiting to get a good night’s sleep. Waiting to get out of the house. Waiting for grocery deliveries. Waiting for bleached groceries to dry. Waiting for a vaccine. Waiting for a cure. Waiting for better tests. Waiting for test results. Waiting to see what happens next. And, of course, waiting for the presidential election to come and then waiting for it to be over. And then waiting for it to be over some more. Waiting and sheltering. Hunkering down.

Movement within the waiting inspires Frances Kai-Hwa Wang’s poem, “Finding Home between the Vincent Chin Case and COVID-19.” She opens Page 12 →with the line, “First I heard from the high schoolers at Chinese School that all their parents were stocking up on rice and bottled water.” Her next line is “Then I heard about the fights breaking out in the California Costcos. Don’t mess with Asian Aunties.” She jokes about how “America went crazy for toilet paper” and shares her struggle to feel at home in the state where Vincent Chin was murdered in 1982 by men who were punished with a $3,000 fine. But across the arc of the poem she comes to embrace Michigan as her home, after holding it at arm’s length for twenty years, not because of the rise in anti-Asian violence but because of the pushback against it in old and new media. She writes, “As the hashtags surge #StopAAPIHate #washthehate #IamNotAVirus #hateisavirus #StandAgainstHatred, / And Big Gretch starts trending. / I feel, for the first time in all these years, like I belong here. Like I am not alone here. Like this can be home here.” Daniel Herbert takes up a very different set of questions about waiting at home. He writes about the watching we are doing while we are waiting and the impact the virus has had on the industry and the culture of watching in “Caged with the Tiger King: The Media Business and the Pandemic.” Herbert tracks the impact of the shutdown on all aspects of the media business—production, distribution, and consumption. He writes, “As we imagined how we might conduct ourselves and find relief and even pleasure in a world where public and group interactions appeared threatening, our use of home entertainment—and the business that enables it—seemed more important than ever.” And he asks, “Did Tiger King really offer a picture of Hollywood’s ‘new normal?’” Bringing us through this, he wants to show “how the streaming media practices encouraged and enabled by industrial changes are bound up in other processes of social division.” Certainly there is forbidding resonance in the image of millions of people, myself included, disappearing into the awful world of the Tiger King, which felt like parody, real-time political reporting, salacious gossip, and actual participation in the abuse of vulnerable young people. Tiger King left you wanting more and needing to take a shower and heartbroken, if also temporarily distracted from actual political insanity and abuse and death.

Nick Tobier’s contribution, “Prosthetics for Right Now,” offers a sense of play that is quite distinct from the passive ugliness of the Tiger King. He writes briefly about the ways in which people waiting all over the world tried to connect: “Think about what we saw—either directly or via news. Italians serenading one another from their balconies. New Yorkers nightly at 7:00 p.m. cheering from windows for frontline health care workers.” He asks us to “think about where we were in March 2020. Largely home (if you had the luxury of working from home); hoarding or searching for toilet paper, yeast, Page 13 →flour; thrust into school closures with improvised learning plans; and watching from near and far as COVID cases surged in Detroit, Milan, New York City while Donald Trump insisted that the virus posed no more danger than the seasonal flu.” He recommends Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell on communities forged by disaster, and then he offers a series of practical and impossible designs intended to facilitate community in this crisis. He introduces Solnit to remind us that disaster “shocks us out of slumber—but only skillful effort keeps us awake.”

Part V: Resisting

What we have lost in our public spaces and how we might hope (or work) to reimagine them as more equitable and more just is a central theme in the experience of being human during this pandemic. What we have lost in our domestic spaces is a more intimate and, often, much more pressing question. This part of this volume is written by nine individual authors who are part of a collective project to capture the stories and experience of feminist activists across the globe. The Expanding Global Feminisms Project, supported by the University of Michigan’s Humanities Collaboratory, is building an archive whose purpose is to provide raw material for scholars of women’s movement activism to use in teaching and research. The essays they contribute here draw on these sources and lay out the deadly sharp edges of the gender divide of the COVID experience. They make plain, in indelible terms, another level at which the virus shows us how we see each other.

In her introduction to this section, “COVID-19’s Attack on Women and Feminists’ Response: The Pandemic, Inequality, and Activism,” Abigail Stewart tells us, “The essays . . . consider what the scholars associated with the Global Feminisms Project, regardless of their own national origins and different disciplines, have learned during this period about the situation of women generally, and feminist activists in particular, during this very difficult time.” She promises that the essays in this part demonstrate “the creative, courageous, and forthright way feminist scholars and activists have met the new challenges to women’s lives posed by this global pandemic,” and they make good on this promise. They offer some of the most vivid concentrations of suffering in the pandemic in this volume.

Eimeel Castillo’s essay, “The Virus That Kills Twice: COVID-19 and Domestic Violence under Governmental Impunity in Nicaragua,” tells the story of the violence against women that has been such a crushing part of being human Page 14 →during COVID. She writes, “The impunity and lawlessness that reign in Nicaragua are key to understanding how the pandemic has worsened the already existing epidemic of domestic violence and femicide,” and she demonstrates the invaluable work of women’s organizations as the state takes a repressive turn. Sueann Caulfield, in “Our Steps Come from Long Ago: Living Histories of Feminisms and the Fight against COVID in Brazil,” walks us through “the emergence of a diverse array of women activists at the forefront of efforts to defend vulnerable populations through direct action and political lobbying” in the context of multiple failures of leadership. She shows us how Black feminist, LGBTQ+, and pan-Indigenous organizations have been crucial for vulnerable communities. In “Making Sense of Sex and Gender Differences in Biomedical Research on COVID-19” Abigail Dumes notes the history of inattention to sex and gender in medical research and the relative uptick in interest in gender in COVID-19 research in an effort to understand why the virus is killing more men than women. She advocates for an opportunity to push for more intersectionality in medical research. Marisol Fila also writes about how Black, LBGTQ+, and feminist activism has been crucial in the face of repressive policies that intensify the inequity of the impact of the virus. In “Digital Encounters from an Intersectional Perspective: Black Women in Argentina,” Fila describes the agility with which activists have turned to digital platforms to continue their work. Verena Klein takes up different leadership styles and outcomes along gender lines during COVID in “The Media Discourse on Women-Led Countries in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Using Germany as an Example.” Jayati Lal shows in vivid detail that “the disparate effect of the coronavirus on women workers has also deepened gender inequalities globally.” Her essay, “Coronavirus Capitalism and the Patriarchal Pandemic in India: Why We Need a ‘Feminism for the 99%’ That Focuses on Social Reproduction,” focuses on India but offers global implications for the impact of patriarchy and capitalism on the unjust distribution of the pain of the pandemic. Özge Savaş’s essay, “Whose Challenge Is #ChallengeAccepted? Performative Online Activism During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Erasures,” finds similar themes in Turkey. She describes both the particular vulnerability of women and LGBTQ+ activists and the limitations of online activism, arguing that “we need feminist global solidarity without the erasure of our differences, centering the voices of those whose struggles are compounded by sexist, racist, ableist, capitalist, and xenophobic institutions.” In the last of these compelling essays, legal scholar and activist Abiola Akiyode-Afolabi and anthropologist Ronke Olawale argue that women in Nigeria are experiencing disproportionate vulnerability to the disease and increased domestic Page 15 →violence. They argue that despite “the lockdown, nonprofit women’s organizations in Nigeria supported vulnerable women in the country.” Across these essays there is moving and inspiring evidence of all kinds of existing feminist organizations stepping up to resist the forces that sharpen the gendered edges of the inequities wrought by the virus. All of these women and organizations across the globe are making powerful arguments for not waiting while we are all supposed to be waiting.

Part VI: Not Waiting

Since the beginning of the pandemic, “not waiting” has taken all kinds of forms. French scientists mapped the genome of the virus between January 24 and January 29, 2020.12 Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer set emergency operations into motion on February 28, 2020, and schools were closed on March 13.13 Teachers were back at work, online, within a few days. Unemployed people, 15% of Americans by April, volunteered and advocated for each other in record numbers.14 In June a stunning number of individuals and organizations made impassioned, public antiracist statements. A massive, inflamed political battle was waged—and that too involved waiting. A vaccine was developed in record time; doctors started getting vaccinated in December. Not waiting has been, in other words, intense and tumultuous. The essays in this final part reflect this. They call for mobilizing against racism, for using caution when laying blame, for noticing less obvious forms of prejudice that have been heightened by the conditions of the pandemic, and for acting out.

Lawyer and activist Roland Hwang’s essay “COVID-19 through an Asian American Lens: Scapegoating, Harassment, and the Limits of the Asian American Response,” describes “a second pandemic that Asian Americans face—an epidemic of anti-Asian hate,” and he calls on his readers to push back. He writes, “I am struck by how a portion of the US population is quick to blame Asian Americans for the spread of COVID-19, perpetuating the ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotype, a persistent view of Asian Americans as not quite ‘real’ Americans.” He reminds us of the history of anti-Asian racism and makes it clear that while the current violence and hate is linked to that history, what is happening during COVID is “being choreographed and stoked by President Trump and members of his administration who call the pandemic ‘Chinese flu’ or ‘Kung Flu,’ to pointedly stir up anti-Asian hate to activate a long history of racism.” Hwang calls on us to see this mobilization of racist tropes for what Page 16 →it is and to respond accordingly. Historian David Patterson turns to Rome in 589 CE to think about a history of plagues and our efforts to understand them and to assign blame for them in his essay, “The High Stakes of Blame: Medieval Parallels to a Modern Crisis.” He rejects the impulse of individuals to blame themselves—for getting sick or for getting someone else sick—and reminds us that blaming the other in pandemics has a long history. Christians blamed Jews for a plague in France in 1348, just as Americans have blamed Asians, and Italians have blamed Muslim migrants in 2020. He tells us leaders have long sought to blame God or to duck blame by denying pandemics and writing them out of histories. He concludes that from Rome in 589 CE into the present, “the behavior of a virus is made a proxy of governmental competence: nature is supposed to reflect the excellence of ruling authorities.” Linguists Nicholas Henriksen and Matthew Neubacher call our attention to a less sweeping but still active form of prejudice that has been intensified by the virus. In “Unmuting Voices in a Pandemic: Linguistic Profiling in a Moment of Crisis,” Henriksen and Neubacher note the increased importance of virtual communication in 2020 and explore the structures of linguistic profiling and its relevance amid the pandemic and the social inequality that has come to the forefront. Drawing on their research on Andalusian speakers, they contend that “examining the automatic, split-second judgments we make about a speaker may seem like an inconsequential act of protest, but as we further depend on audio-reliant communication platforms, this represents a crucial step toward continuing our evolution into a less-prejudiced society.”

The final essay in this section and this volume is a dynamic, explosive, inspiring catalog of the work of artists who have decided quite emphatically not to wait, despite closed theaters and galleries and performance spaces, but instead to make and to share and to push for change with their pressing and vivid work. Anita Gonzalez’s “Quarantine Rebellions: Performance Innovation in the Pandemic” is a series of brief essays that “break down how isolation of individuals from their artistic communities has led to creative reflection and eventually direct, embodied political action.” She writes, “Like a blinding light of merciless whiteness, the health crisis and its accompanying economic breakdown revealed cracks and crannies of deeply imbedded inequities, making them clearly visible,” and she tracks how artist after artist has “created powerful movements of change within performance communities and beyond at a time when it is difficult not to be engulfed in isolation and despair.” Gonzalez and these artists leave us not only invigorated but with a new set of intellectual and creative tools for responding to the virus that knows how we see each other.

Page 17 →This volume doesn’t seek to offer a totalizing vision of being human during COVID-19. And it certainly misses big important elements of the experience. Its contributors are all gainfully employed by a big university, and most are riding out the virus in the upper Midwest. These are pretty significant limiting factors to start off with. We don’t include the perspectives of Uber drivers and small business owners and the cleaning staff at nursing homes and people of all faiths or political positions. What we do is seek to give readers a hit of the painful, complicated, fascinating experiences—of the naming and waiting and grieving and resisting and the not waiting—as we are making sense of them from our positions as scholars and eyewitnesses. In this spirit there is one more element of the experience that Gonzalez evokes and that is alive in a number of these essays—Fadlalla, Blair, Davis, Calvo-Quirós, Wang, Caulfield, Savaş—that seems worth including. For all of the bad and the ugly, people across the globe have responded to the pandemic with good. We have cheered hospital workers at shift changes and taped handmade “Thank you, nurses” signs to our windows. Neighborhoods put on stuffed animal scavenger hunts for locked-down kids. Experts and novices figured out how to sew masks and have been cranking them out month after month. In my county, people donated in record numbers to local food banks, and the University of Michigan and the National Guard worked together to distribute the food.15 The owner of a small local tea shop started making 250 lunches a week for public school kids who were missing their school lunch.16 More than five hundred University of Michigan medical students volunteered to provide childcare to frontline medical workers, deliver groceries to vulnerable populations, and sit (virtually and in person) with COVID patients so they would not die alone.17 The list could go on and on and on. Teachers doing drive-bys to wave at their students from their cars; neighbors getting groceries for each other; tidy streets suddenly dotted with “Black Lives Matter” and “Thank You Health Care Workers” signs. The desire of so many to help, to reach out, has been palpable since early March 2020.

As this volume goes to press, it is hard to say where we are. We have vaccines that are reaching a few but are mostly bottled up in bureaucracy. We are seeing the greatest numbers of both cases and deaths at any time during the pandemic. We are seeing the greatest political catastrophes of generations. (My revisions of this introduction were interrupted by a phone call from a friend—“Turn on your TV, armed Trump protesters have taken the Capitol.”) To return to the sketch of a metaphor I began with, I am not sure if we are still on the burning plane waiting for it to land or if we have landed and are just waiting for the ground crew to put out the secondary fire caused by the rough Page 18 →landing. Either way, as the work here makes clear in many different ways, we, collectively, are the ground crew—and we have a clear sense of the work to be done.

January 2021