Poetics of Care

Feminist Studies 46, no. 3. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 717 Anita Girvan, Baljit Pardesi, Davina Bhandar, and Nisha Nath Poetics of Care: Remedies for Racial Capitalism Gone Viral Crisis as Structure, Not Event On March 11, 2020, WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “[rang] the alarm bell loud and clear.” In declaring COVID-19 a pandemic, he iterated that this was “not just a public health crisis,” but a crisis “that will touch every sector.” In this, “every sector and every individual must be involved in the fight,” and we must “all look out for each other, because we need each other.” Since this declaration, the oppressive foundations upon which the pandemic unfolds have become clear— COVID-19 is not “the great equalizer.” The imperatives of being there for each other have weighed disproportionately on Indigenous, Black, and people of color communities (IBPOC).1 The rhetoric of being “all in this together” quickly dissipated during the resurgence of white nationalist populism. Anti-Asian racism is rising, coupled with increasing surveillance of marginalized communities and state-sanctioned brutality toward Black and Indigenous peoples. The proliferation of carceral language is ubiquitous with media using terms like “lockdown,” “solitary ,” and “confinement” to typify public health responses. In the North 1. We note that IBPOC, as a term, is circumscribed by a context that can be flattening and unspecific. We use it provisionally here because it has been taken up as an important political identifier with respect to whiteness. In the context of Canada, sometimes BIPOC is used interchangeably with IBPOC. We use the latter to signal that we are on traditionally Indigenous territories. 718 Anita Girvan, Baljit Pardesi, Davina Bhandar, and Nisha Nath American context, this signals a further marginalization of various IBPOC communities by the nation-state. In order to remedy the inherent sense of insecurity, violence, and disconnection, we are seeking alternative pathways of community and being-in-relation—those that foreground interconnected joy, collaborative interactions that foster and sustain relational care for differences, and openings for revolutionary imaginings. We offer here one such practice and method, which we call a “poetics of care.” The COVID-19 pandemic is aptly described as a crisis, but its temporality extends beyond the present moment, particularly for those marked as nonwhite. This pandemic is enmeshed with histories of viral racism and colonialism, and it is embedded in an ongoing set of structures that uphold “patriarchal white sovereignty.”2 The disposability of Black people killed by the withholding of care and the weight of police violence are relationally connected to: contiguous lineages of transatlantic slavery; ongoing Indigenous dispossession; violence against Indigenous and Black women and LGBTQ2S people; destructive resource extraction; everyday spirit injuries and material losses for marginalized wage workers ; forced refugee movements caused by war and/or famine; the death of bees from pesticides, habitat destruction, and air pollution; and gendered , racialized hierarchies within health care systems as well as farming and food industries. Read through these relational webs of racial capitalism , the COVID-19 pandemic signals how some forms of human and nonhuman life are systemically devalued as “unproductive” and deserving /undeserving of care. This system requires the dehumanization and expendability of racialized “others” in order to be productive and shores up the power of militarized police forces steeped in histories of disposability .3 The choice by an Austin hospital to “make die” Michael Hickson , a COVID-19 patient, grimly exposes the calculus of livable and valuable lives in the context of racist, capitalist health “care.” Robbed of her formal ability to advocate for her husband, Melissa Hickson would attest 2. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty : The High Court and the Yorta Yorta decision,” Borderlands E-Journal 3, no. 2 (2004): 1–9. 3. Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018). See also Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). Anita Girvan, Baljit Pardesi, Davina Bhandar, and Nisha Nath 719 that this forty-six-year-old Black father of five, who had been rendered quadriplegic three years earlier, nonetheless had a life of value. The

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