Excerpts from the conversations with Sunil Amrith, Omar Dewachi, Julie Livingston, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, and Banu Subramaniam

Introduction

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan: We convened this roundtable conversation in February 2021 as an informal dialogue among leading scholars, thinking about the current COVID-19 pandemic as a moment of historical convergences. This pandemic reveals persistent, historical asymmetries and inequities rooted in specific histories of mobility and immobility—migration and displacement, capitalism and globalization, colonialism and decolonization. The roundtable emerged from an editorial the CSSAAME editorial board wrote in May 2020 that reflected on the effects of COVID-19. That editorial noted that the effects of COVID were evident in “the intersecting crises of state violence and economic collapse—along with the multiplex failures of governing institutions” that were evident in all the regions that are addressed by CSSAAME's intellectual project. The pandemic and its multiple, complex manifestations brought “into relief a moment of history characterized by both global interconnection and deep ambivalence about it” and COVID's flattening, universal epidemiology masked and reinforced “systems of exploitation and brutalization that structure our world.”

The conversation that we have captured here reflects the nuanced and thought-provoking ideas and scholarship of the participants—Banu Subramaniam, Julie Livingston, Omar Dewachi, and Sunil Amrith—who all study the body and biopolitics. Their approaches range across global histories of medicine and science, anthropology, and feminist studies of science, environmental and transnational histories of migration, and studies of war and humanitarianism, but they share a broad interest in the shifting power of the state and in consequences of capitalism. Their discussion and lively debate affirms, questions, and speaks to new directions for research and analysis that emerge from this moment racked by deep moral dilemmas and historical reckoning. At a time when the body is at the heart of debates about controlling, containing, and reframing its viral exposures and epidemiological vulnerability, we see that debates about controlling access to therapeutics and immunity, sustaining rapid economic growth, and investing in productive populations are now more open than ever before.

To begin, we posed several broad questions to initiate a discussion among our participants, and to suggest a common perspective, viewing COVID as having specific stages and developments. Imagining it as having a “lifecourse” links complex biological and social phenomena, but also reveals how virality is politically perceived and linked to social and historical conditions.

Our questions were:

1.  How might we consider the link between epidemic and endemic crises, especially drawing from experiences of metabolic risks, embodied pain, toxicity, violence, and stigma that have long and persistent afterlives?

2. Epidemics have also long been associated with moments of dramatic, transformative rupture and of social discontinuities. Yet they can also be viewed as generating impulses toward reconstitution and reorientation, as in the case of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the moral, political, and public health debates it generated and reframed. How might we reconsider this binary between notions of rupture and of reconstitution today in the case of COVID? In other words, how do shifts in notions of a continuous historical timeline also create new possibilities for the future, or of collective forms of futurity themselves? What moral reworkings and realignments may emerge from this pandemic?

3. Finally, there has been a deepening of global biopolitics, international and national surveillance mechanisms, and health-security-focused laws that have implications for mobility, migration, privacy, and safety as legal, moral, and biological justifications have often been conflated. How do we understand these shifts now, as well as past and present responses and resistance in the face of such deepening interventions?

In addition to our participants, we warmly thank our observers, Devon Cheney Golaszewski and Valentina Parisi, who joined us and engaged closely, refining, clarifying, and articulating crucial threads of this roundtable. Their support and input were indispensable.

Banu Subramaniam: Pandemics reveal layers of racialized bodies and dichotomies of biology/culture. I come to this discussion as a biologist and see the unfolding global life of the virus SARS CoV-2 as yet another lesson about our impoverished accounts of the natural world. Coming from feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), I see yet another moment of a reinscription of an abstract binary of nature and culture, rather than understanding the unfolding pandemic as an instantiation of racialized nature-cultures. The pandemic reveals rich and layered sedimentations of race: racialized bodies, racial Others—virus and human alike. From the vantage point of feminist STS, the virus is not “evil,” “Chinese,” or “foreign.” It is a single strand of RNA. Planet Earth in 2020 proved fertile ground because of the world created by some human actions, including the increased colonization of the wild, opening new pathways of viruses into human worlds; globalization hubs that transmit goods and people everywhere; and an impoverished health-care system that renders the virus lethal to some. The pandemic is a racialized nature-culture object par excellence.

In particular, xenophobia and Orientalist discourses have dominated our narratives of the virus and its origins in China. Through the language of “yellow perils” and “yellow alerts” in keeping with Orientalist rhetoric, the virus has been rendered “sneaky,” “cunning,” as “an assailant,” “shifty like a chameleon,” “an invisible enemy that is pure evil,” and called “the Chinese virus,” “the Wuhan virus,” “the kung flu,” and “the anti-Muslim virus.” In India, early during the pandemic, there was an international gathering of the Tablighi Jamaat in a mosque in South Delhi. Despite similar gatherings of Hindu groups, this event generated great publicity as a “super spreader” event. It fed already rising anti-Muslim violence, and claims of a “Talibani crime” and jihad. The leader and some others were charged with manslaughter. A year later, some are still awaiting trial.

The idea of the virus as the enemy has sanctioned militaristic models of immunity: to fight, battle, combat, attack, tackle, defeat, and defend. Coming from a long history of an antagonistic model, the immune system has been considered military central, commanding a hierarchical organizational structure with weapons of offense (e.g., PPE as “armor,” hospitals as “war zones”), medicines as “ammunition ready for deployment,” and “frontline” workers. These concepts represent a racially stratified militarized force of health workers that is “ready for anything.” These metaphors frame our conception of infection and immunity. Responses have also built on these militarized models, through lockdown, quarantine, and armies of scientists. This is based on a self-other model of immunity that renders the virus as the enemy and humans as victims. In fact, in severe cases of COVID, the immune system overreacts and kills, rather than the virus itself. Something more complex is afoot. I feel like we have taken a step back from the flexible bodies discussed by the anthropologist Emily Martin during the HIV/AIDS pandemic to an older model of conceptions of antagonistic immunity/immune systems.

I also want to talk about how zoonotic diseases are not only ubiquitous, but transformative too.

I am struck by how zoonosis—when a disease moves from animals to human—has been represented as an unusual, dangerous event caused by primitive people living too close to nature and eating weird food. In fact, zoonotics are ubiquitous, and three-quarters of infectious diseases are zoonotic spillovers. Zoonotic vectors, like viruses and bacteria, carry genes across species allowing for lateral gene transfer. Evolutionary biologists have long shown that such events have profoundly shaped the evolution of life on earth, including transferring novel and beneficial adaptations across species.

The same biological populations do not present the same mortality/morbidity in the West (e.g., Black and Indigenous populations). Black and Indigenous populations in the West have been hardest hit. The same biological populations in other parts of the world have not shown the same mortality (for example individuals from South Asia and countries in Africa during the first wave have been said to show lower mortality in their home countries than in diasporic populations in the West). Social and national contexts, rather than population or biology, seem to be the key factor.

Further, race emerges as a biopolitical strategy of obfuscation. Some deaths are seen as inevitable and medical languages naturalize and biologize the deaths of marginalized populations in abstract language of “comorbidities,” “biological propensity,” and “genetic predisposition.” This is the repetition of a racialized script during yet another health crisis, while we see little change to health infrastructures between crises.

The language we have used during the pandemic is neither obvious nor inevitable. There are other ways to represent this point: The terminology of physical distancing/cocooning/social distancing have been offered as alternate vocabularies for “pandemic safety.” The continued insistence of alienating language of “social distance,” “lockdown,” and other vocabularies of the pandemic represents an impoverished political leadership, where “physical distancing” became “social distancing.” A robust body politic could have promoted sociality without physicality. This aligns with policy (e.g., bars are open, but schools are closed).

Our focus should not be on the virus, but on systemic issues and oppressive systems that enable pandemics of various kinds. We cannot blame the virus—this misunderstands the role of viruses and bacteria on Earth. Rather, humanity creates a way of life that can render epidemic- and pandemic-prone diseases effective or can help avoid them in the future.

Julie Livingston: I want to address the introductory questions that were a starting point that Kavita posed for us and want to begin by exploring the link between epidemic and endemic crisis in three different ways.

First, the virus helps surface the burden of endemic disease, that is the extant burden of debility and suffering that we accept as the normal “cost of doing business” from the scarred lungs of factory workers and miners to diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension. We know that these underlying burdens of disease map onto political and economic fault lines. This pandemic crisis event shows us an acceleration of “business as usual” in a way that suddenly can't be ignored. That potentially opens political possibilities as well as shuts it down, depending on how it's framed.

Second, we observe how epidemics produce effects across a wider field of disease in ways both predictable and not. I believe strongly that we need to move beyond “case” and “mortality” metrics with which we are obsessed. The AIDS epidemic is my model—the one I've seen up close in southern Africa. What I saw in Botswana was that the AIDS epidemic rebirthed the TB epidemic (although TB had never gone away, but it took on a whole new life as it attached to the AIDS epidemic). The afterlife of the AIDS epidemic helped birth the cancer epidemic. It's true that some of that cancer epidemic would have happened anyway, but it was given new life through its attachment to the AIDS epidemic. While this is shorthand for complex epidemiological and biological processes, what I want to emphasize is that beyond the surfacing of an extant burden of disease, we also see engines of combination/proliferation of disease, even if we do not know exactly where they are leading.

Third, we can already see this through the rhetoric surrounding “Long COVID.” People have survived COVID with brand-new cases of diabetes, damage to heart muscle, loss of hearing, with many other forms of cascading and prolonged symptomatology. This reveals the impoverishment of our health systems. They are simply not designed around the forms of care and mutuality that are required for well-being by people who are grappling with long-term debility. It also helps reframe the relationship between the economic and the biological. For example, our current systems are predicated on the “worthy” versus “unworthy” in relation to labor, and we find this problem being faced very squarely. We have a long future to come even once infection and hospitalization rates subside.

History (and biopolitics 101) tells us the obvious: the economy and population health are two sides of the same coin, not opposing forces, even though they have been rendered that way in the policy and rhetoric around this pandemic. This rendering is purposeful and instrumentalized; it is a convenient political way to manage opposing forces who have different claims on the state—when you have, as we did in the US, a state that decided under the last administration that it was not going to attend to the pandemic at all. Not surprisingly, in the “not tending to it,” some people made a huge pile of money, even as so many others struggled to eat. We have to pay attention to the dramatic upward-sucking of wealth that this produces; it is not accidental. If we are going to have a large population grappling with the sequelae of the virus, some people will also make bank off of their needs. We need to understand those economic interests.

With COVID, we see how industrial practices are productive of this pandemic, just like they have been for many epidemics that have come before it. For example, if we look historically, we can see that gold mining in South Africa produced a massive tuberculosis (TB) epidemic, which is still plaguing the southern zone of the continent. If we look at those industrial relationships under COVID, we can see that the conditions of the possibility are ongoing. Public health needs to be more focused on the upstream causes of these pandemics, including how human action transforms and harms the environment in dramatic ways. We created the conditions of possibility for this pandemic through our industrial practices, which combined the enclosure of some of the last wild places, the evisceration of wild forests, and broad-based industrial agriculture. There are long histories of this—such as sleeping sickness in the Congo in the early twentieth century, when people were driven at the point of a gun or machete to collect wild rubber in environments that they knew were unsafe.  There are many other cases. Remaining wild habitats are complex and under pressure; they house potential zoonotic pathogens, and when agribusiness cuts the forest, it allows those pathogens to move into closer proximity to humans and domestic animals. We saw that with the fruit bats associated with Ebola, where multinational corporations are undertaking a massive land grab in the Mano River region. This dispossesses the people who held customary tenure, but it is also terraforming in ways that pressure wild habitat.

The complete article is freely available at: https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article/41/3/285/286539/COVID-RoundtablePandemic-Biopolitics-Ruptures-and