On Syndemics and Social Change

Should we view the COVID-19 pandemic as an inflection point or as more of the same? Has the newly resurgent pandemic only deepened entrenched socioeconomic divisions or shone a light on them so glaring that structural change ensues? In what ways has the coronavirus sharpened established biomedical and geopolitical borders, even as, qua pandemic, it inevitably crossed them? And to what extent have the devastating effects of this first truly global pandemic been compounded by contemporaneous crises that made 2020 an annus horribilis for so many, although notably not all, of us? What we have all been living through (same storm, different boats) since late December 2019 deserves to be called a syndemic, a term originally introduced by the medical anthropologist Merrill Singer to designate two or more aggregated disease clusters in a given population but now used more loosely to describe any “fractured, stratified convergence of catastrophes.”1 Three 2020 journal publications—Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s “Paravictorianism: Mary Shelley and Viral Sovereignty,” Walter D. Mignolo’s “The Logic of the In-visible: Decolonial Reflections on the Change of Epoch,” and a multiauthored Science Fiction Studies symposium titled “Thinking through the Pandemic”—explore the planetary ramifications of syndemics and the stories we tell about them.These publications identify different sets of convergent crises. Kolb examines the conjunction between “the panicked and highly racialized discourse around disease and epidemic surveillance” and “the global security state that flourished in response to terrorism.”2 Mignolo explores the unprecedented global convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic crisis, while the contributors to the symposium reliably reflect on the “tragic synchronicity” between the viral pandemic and the racial injustice protests following George Floyd’s murder without losing sight of the intensifying climate crisis.3 These variations notwithstanding, the authors all agree that the convergence they describe has worsened the already “unthinkable burdens that continue to fall disproportionately on those to whom colonial modernity, racial capitalism, and neoliberal globalism had already outsourced all the risks in the world.”4The three publications also differ in their conceptions of temporality. Both Kolb and Mignolo are concerned with what the latter calls the “unilinear timeline of Western modernity,” retroactively constructed as an unbroken trajectory of civilized progress from ancient Greece to the modern world.5 Yet Kolb traces a cyclical pattern in which the Greco-Persian Era, the Crusades, and the Romantic/Imperialist Era all connect to our present moment through their shared animation by a xenophobic “terror of Muslims, and the fear of a brown planet,” embedded in “the discourse of a racialized world-ending pandemic.”6 Mignolo, for his part, interprets the unprecedented “extended and intense planetary ‘now’” epitomized by the conjoined viral and financial crises not as a continuation but instead as a “change of epoch,” a breaking point in the global process of Westernizing the planet.7 Focused on “the present continuous and future imperfect,” the symposium contributors on balance treat the current dystopian syndemic as a potentially galvanizing opportunity to “‘emerge on the other side’” into a closer-to-utopian future informed by a “politics of hope.”8 Such narratives of progress, however, leave a lot to the imagination while potentially obscuring the fact that, as Mignolo reminds us, whatever happens next will not be the same everywhere and for everyone.9Finally, the various essays offer different assessments of the possibilities for structural change opened up by syndemics. For Kolb, these possibilities are few, given the persistent dehumanizing and pathologizing of “sick and brown people” over time, where differences are matters more of degree than of kind.10 Mignolo, by contrast, accentuates the prospect of radical change. The glossy Western narrative of modernization, “happiness, development and growth,” he argues, can no longer effectively hide what has always been there: not only “the fear, isolation, despair, [and] broken relationships” among “the numerical majority of the planetary population” but also, and more positively, diverse knowledges, forms of ancestral wisdom, communal healing praxes, cooperative economies, and multiple local temporalities.11 His investment in the restitution of these marginalized forms of knowing, being, and relating conveys his hope that the epochal change he discerns will be for the better, although he does acknowledge at one point, without further comment, that it could be for the worse.12 The symposium contributors concede that the genre of science fiction serves as an imperfect “toolkit of diagnosis and prediction on a planetary scale,” incapable of ever fully making sense of syndemics in their sheer scale, specificity, and unevenness.13 Still, amid an “era of unfolding and overlapping material catastrophes,”14 a number of them surmise that the powerful exercise of imagining better worlds might bring us closer to “seizing control from the closed futures of disaster capitalism” while rebuilding “the narrative of solidarities for possible futures.”15Yet as the current pandemic alone has shown, any such process of imaginative rebuilding assumes that members of the precariat would be inclined to demonstrate an ethos of solidarity, in the interest of healing of all sorts, that the more privileged among us have rarely if ever reciprocated. The enthusiasm with which so many Americans, among others, are embracing a “return-to-normal” narrative offers additional cause for wariness about the prospect of pandemic-induced social progress. The tendency among the global elite to prioritize some people’s suffering, some people’s lives, over others long predates and will likely outlast our current moment of crisis, as will the practice of the few taking advantage of “the unbearable situation of the many.”16 Creative fiction has immeasurable value, not least in its potential to do some of our most inventive dreaming for us. Still, as those of us who inhabit them know full well even if we don’t always say so, cultural and imaginative realms will remain wobbly platforms for transformation unless buttressed by broader structural reforms that might someday relegate catastrophes, convergent, global, or otherwise, to our collective past

Convergence (economics) · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Disease · Economic growth · Geography · Geopolitics · Infectious disease (medical specialty) · Pandemic · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies · Demography · History · Law

• Paravictorianism

  Kolb Kolb•Victorian Studies•2020

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• The Logic of the In-Visible

  Open Access•Walter D Mignolo•Theory Culture & Society•2020

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