Introduction: Iterations of Friendship and Community

Abstract

One of the difficulties we have encountered in preparing this special issue is keeping pace with the COVID-19 pandemic. In the sheer velocity of its unfolding and of the proliferation of stories told about it, it seemed to demand a cognitive and emotional adjustment every few weeks or even days, especially at the onset of the public health crisis. Originally conceived in April 2020, this issue was driven by an impulse toward community in that moment of collective vertigo. We wanted to open a space in which a new community of literary scholars, teachers, and students would bring their unique expertise and imagination to bear on how literature and its study could help us make sense of the loss and trauma we had started to witness all around us. Perhaps we could write our way out of a reality that had started to resemble a prison cell, or at least maintain some form of engaged intellectual community to ward off the terror of our oncoming isolation.

Narrative, we felt, was the key to unlocking the potential and revealing the indispensability of our discipline in the face of our precipitous present. The stories of the pandemic that each of us lived and told defined our shared humanity at a moment of crushing despair. They offered us solace, refuge, understanding, perspective, and empathy. They led us to reasoned judgment, and they drove us mad. They terrified us. Above all, though, they held us together for better or for worse when the ground beneath our feet seemed to have been swept away. In this issue we want to honor those stories.

Taking our cue from Priscilla Wald’s book Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2007), we want more specifically to look into the role and nature of storytelling itself during our time of crisis. As in Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1353), the significance of storytelling as a medium (or perhaps a mirage) of community became heightened during the pandemic. As if to fill the void of our unknowing, or at least the silence, “the pandemic narrative” in its endless iterations became our primary mechanism for mapping our relationship to a changing world. Dancing like shadows on the walls of our digital isolation, the stories to which we were daily exposed of the origin and spread of the deadly disease, of lockdowns and quarantines, of political strife and economic collapse, and most profoundly of human suffering and resilience in the face of crisis became our shared—and contested—reality.

These stories came to us in many forms. There were the facts-and-evidence-based narratives of the medical community and of public health officials; the cynical, self-serving, and conspiratorial narratives of irresponsible public figures around the world; the commercial and often uncritical, distorted, or hysterical narratives of the legacy media; the intimate, human narratives of our literary writers, filmmakers, artists, musicians, game developers, and bloggers; and our own lived narratives as made real by their networked dissemination—all mediated by technologies we had barely begun to comprehend, let alone master. Despite their differences (and distinct relationships with the truth), what all these variants or genres of the pandemic narrative had in common was their mediating function in relation to a traumatic real. They ordered, controlled, and sometimes fabricated the information and thus the version of reality to which their constituencies were exposed; in so doing, they guided our actions both private and public. As such, they played a crucial role in determining our collective response to the pandemic. In this issue we draw on the considerable expertise of literary scholars to study the languages, genres, forms, and social agency of narrative during the pandemic. Who better than scholars of literature to chart the shifting relationship between fact and fiction during a period in which storytelling had become a life-or-death matter? This issue seeks to demonstrate the social value of our discipline and so help immunize it against its own not unrelated collapse.

One of the major themes we explore is the pandemic as a new environment of lived experience in the twenty-first century. As with anthropogenic climate change, the pandemic prompted a reconfiguration of our experience of being-in-the-world. Overnight we became existentially aware of what one of our former students described as our “biocentric embeddedness”—our inextricable biological connection with one another, other animal species, and the invisible airborne particles that saturate our atmosphere. It seemed as if in the practice of merely living, we all became epidemiologists for a while. Situated at the intersection between the life sciences and the humanities, the field of environmental literary studies provides us with an indispensable lens for examining the narrative dimensions of an inherently biological and environmental phenomenon. It is not just that ecocriticism—especially in its response to climate change—models a literary-critical response to the pandemic, or that the field has already generated the critical tools necessary for engaging meaningfully with scientific data, public health issues, national and global policy making, and its own good share of mis- and disinformation. It is also that the pandemic, in our evolving understanding, has been an environmental issue in itself from the start.

Nowhere is this more strikingly the case than in the environments of racial and socioeconomic inequity that the pandemic both laid bare and exacerbated. In the US context, there is zero ambiguity about the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of color—primarily Black, Hispanic/Latino, and Indigenous American communities—due to preexisting socioeconomic inequalities, inequitable access to health-care resources, neighborhood and physical environment factors, and the general decline of public investment in health care and education. Per statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Black, Hispanic/Latino, and Indigenous Americans were up to nine times more susceptible to infection, hospitalization, and death from the disease until the mass distribution of the Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and other vaccines started in December 2020.¹ These facts reflect something of what humanists mean by “institutional racism,” in the domain of medicine and public health. In many of their established forms, the institutional structures that we have inherited, from criminal justice to housing to education to health care, are shaped by the histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, segregation, and race that have defined the United States. This is why they produce what, in the case of the pandemic, the scientific and statistical evidence shows to be racially weighted results.

By the same token, as reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Affairs, and other forums, there is zero ambiguity about the disproportionate mortality rates suffered in Republican counties and states during 2021.² Writing in December of that year, Daniel Wood and Geoff Brumfiel of NPR summarize the data clearly: “Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President Biden.” “In October,” they continue, “the reddest tenth of the country saw death rates that were six times higher than the bluest tenth.”³ State-specific policies regarding mandatory vaccinations, masking, and lockdowns are partly responsible for these figures. The more immediate explanation, however, lies in the difference in vaccination rates between Republican and Democratic voters. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report from December 2021, 59 percent of Republicans had been vaccinated by November that year, in stark contrast to the Democratic rate of 91 percent.⁴

Like institutional racism in medicine and public health, higher mortality rates among Republican voters in 2021 are, we believe, an environmental issue that the study of the pandemic narrative can help us address. In staunchly Republican counties—those pockets of white working-class America where the global outsourcing of labor and manufacturing, corporate agriculture and mining, the fossil fuel industry, the pharmaceutical industry, deeply cynical and mercantile politicians, and a media machine in the service of these interests have produced nothing but landscapes of devastation and despair during the last forty years—it is their lived environments that have caused Americans to lose faith in institutions that have by the evidence of their eyes and lives failed them.⁵ To lose faith in democracy, for all that it promised and failed to deliver. Is it any wonder, then, that so many Americans should have put their trust in a president who suggested drinking bleach as a cure for the deadly disease at the moment of the country’s greatest loss of life? As with Trump, so with the very existence of the virus, let alone vaccines and the legitimate question of individual autonomy in relation to the public good that any mandate over one’s body must compel us to address. Tapping into mass public ressentiment against official sources and institutions of knowledge and building on a foundation of lies, mis- and disinformation, and conspiratorial thinking, the COVID-denial narrative responsible for so much suffering and hardship did not produce the doubt that led to vaccine hesitancy. Rather, it was premised on it. In this issue we maintain a tight focus on the human implications of pandemic storytelling across the lines of race, socioeconomic status, political affiliation, and other fictions that blind us to our ulterior affiliations with and responsibilities to one another.

On a global scale, the issues of race, class, politics, environment, and narrative that the pandemic so clearly exposed in the United States were further accentuated. Like preexisting health conditions at the individual level, preexisting political and economic disparities intensified the effects of the pandemic for billions of global citizens. From Brazil to China, authoritarian leaders either denied the existence of the virus altogether or implemented policies pertaining to public health and the circulation of information that were so repressive as to make the US Right’s paranoid fantasy about the CDC seem reasonable. In both extremes, the results were disastrous for the physical, psychological, and emotional well-being of the public.⁶ Furthermore, disparities in the global distribution of COVID vaccines reflected long-standing inequalities in gross domestic product, income, poverty levels, food and housing security, education, and health-care provision around the world, as derived from the histories of colonialism and capitalism. As of August 2022 the rate of people who were fully vaccinated in Africa, for instance, stood at 21.2 percent.⁷ The global rate is 64 percent.⁸

From the US penal system to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, from the trenches of Mexico’s drug war to Libya’s overcrowded refugee camps and detention centers, the world’s more vulnerable and marginalized populations faced heightened persecution throughout the pandemic. According to an Amnesty International study of twenty-eight countries published in May 2022, “marginalized groups” in those countries—LGBTI+ communities, sex workers, drug users, the homeless, the incarcerated, and refugees from other disasters both natural and manmade—“were disproportionately impacted by Covid-19 regulations that exposed them to further discrimination and human rights abuses.”⁹ In what Wendy Brown characterizes as the “walled states” of the twenty-first century, ethnonationalist ideologies intermingled with public health protocols to produce new, COVID-inflected regimes of what might be considered “medical” or “biopolitical separation,” even “segregation.”¹⁰ In the United States, for instance, the Trump administration invoked, for the first time since it was established, Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act of 1944 to halt all immigration at the US-Mexico border, including for people seeking asylum, while Israel systematically denied the Palestinian populations under its control in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and elsewhere access to vaccines for months after it had fully vaccinated the majority of Israeli citizens.¹¹ As divisions in the United States and around the world continue to harden, and to harden us, maybe such policies will have come to define the generalized condition of our bodies in the world by the time the next disaster hits.

Finally, we explore the impact of the pandemic on the discipline of literary studies in the context of the humanities crisis. Without doubt, the pandemic brought to a head many of the detrimental trends in the humanities that we have witnessed for years and even decades. Our empty campuses read during those early months as dystopian projections of our long-standing enrollment, hiring, and funding issues as our collective well-being and future started to come into doubt. For a while it seemed as if everything were on the table: our jobs, our tenure lines, our salaries, our research funding, our faculty and staff hiring needs, our recruitment initiatives, our ability to support existing students, our PhD and other academic programs, and in some cases even our departments in their entirety.¹² However, while the responses of university leaders varied across states, and even those who were capable of implementing basic public health protocols and supporting their communities made errors of judgment at times, our institutions were resilient.

We of course still need to fix what has long been broken. It comes down to the loss of public trust in the value and relevance of what we in higher education do in the context of debt. For individuals rationally to decide to take on what may be a lifetime of debt to study with us, they must be convinced that we will provide them with the tools necessary to pay that debt off. We can do this, and we do. For an entire society to do so, it must likewise be convinced that what we provide—critical, creative minds equipped with the understanding and tools necessary to meet the challenges of this disastrous century better than us—will benefit it. Our society is far from convinced; indeed, large segments of it have been led to believe the exact opposite. That is partly our failing; we editors have different perspectives on the nature and degree of our responsibility. What we see eye to eye on, however, is that it is certainly our challenge.

In this issue we hope to have articulated some of these concerns and showcased some of the problems faced and the brilliant scholarly and pedagogical work accomplished by scholars, teachers, and students of literature during the pandemic. We believe in the immediate value of this work to society. Now that the issue is in print, though, we realize that we could only ever have made a start here. Our work of reading the pandemic narrative will be with us for the rest of our lives.—Karim Mattar (with Jason Gladstone and Nan Goodman)

Narrative and Literary Studies

Before the coronavirus pandemic began, most of what we would now call pandemic narratives, including narratives about contagion and epidemics of all sorts, fell under the heading of science fiction, along with some fantasy fiction and horror fiction. Bestsellers in these categories included Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969), Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness (1981), and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), to name just a few. There have, of course, always been pandemic narratives that fell outside these genres—Daniel Defoe’s historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), for example, or Albert Camus’s philosophical novel The Plague (1947)—but even here the contagion in question is largely metaphorical. In archival sources one can find occasional eyewitness accounts and memoirs about past pandemics, including the Black Death of 1348–49, the Great Plague of London of 1665–66, and the influenza pandemic of 1918–20, but these have typically taken a backseat to the enormously popular pandemics of our imagination.

When in 2020 the coronavirus pandemic became a reality, however, our relationship to the pandemic narrative changed. Overnight the horrors we had previously imagined became our reality. Overnight plots that had borne only an attenuated relationship to our lives now described our present. Written in real time, these new pandemic narratives no longer helped us escape reality but immersed us more fully in it, filling us with dread. In short, the pandemic narrative had turned from fiction into the medical equivalent of “true crime.”

The truth value of these emergent narratives was reinforced on several levels. Because their representations of scarce medical resources, triage decisions, and illness—sore throats, high fevers, difficulty breathing, loss of smell—reflected our everyday experience, they acquired a mimetic fidelity that earlier narratives, even eyewitness narratives of past pandemics, rarely matched. In representing our everyday experience, moreover, they also seemed unmediated, discursively simple, and just as easily authored by one person as by any other. Finally, to the extent that they resembled aspects of the fictional pandemic narratives of the past, they also took on an air, paradoxical as it was, of universality. Although the details of the true narrative and the fictional narrative differed, many structural features were the same: the futility of initial efforts to contain the contagion, the number of fatalities, the chaos that ensued. Far worse in many cases than what we had imagined, these new pandemic narratives thus seemed doubly true, mirroring the world around us and turning older, explicitly fictional narratives into prophecies.

If this transformation from fiction to chronicle, from fantasy to truth, has altered our relationship to the pandemic narrative, however, our understanding of it remains incomplete. What are the truths of such narratives? Can they be trusted? Does the act of narrating the experiences of the pandemic alter their claim to objectivity? Does this claim lessen the truth of some experiences relative to others? Does their status as potential reports or records give us access to truths we might otherwise ignore?

These and related questions animate the two essays in this section as well as the afterword of this special issue. At the heart of Lennard J. Davis’s essay, for example, is a question about whether pandemic narratives have accurately conveyed the experiences of disabled individuals. For Davis, the answer is complex. On the one hand, he argues, the disabled are invisible in many of these new pandemic narratives. “One group rarely written about in literature in regard to pandemic is the disabled,” he notes. When the disabled do show up, they are what Davis calls “bit players” whose individual disabilities make them indistinguishable from the larger catastrophe unfolding around them.

Even as they disappear into the larger canvas of disaster, however, the disabled, Davis argues, are newly visible in today’s pandemic narratives. In the brutalizing discourse about who gets to live and who should be left to die in the world of scarce resources the pandemic has ushered in, the value to society of the disabled, Davis explains, is no longer covered, as it was in the past, with “a mask of compassion.” Rather, in these narratives people appear willing to say things about the disabled that were off-limits before. “How clear this is can be shown through a simple thought experiment,” Davis explains.

This, we might note, as Pudd’nhead Wilson remarks in Mark Twain’s novel, is a truth that is “stranger than fiction.”

Turning his attention to representations of the pandemic in the board game Pandemic, Andrew L. Gilbert also observes truths and nontruths in equal measure. Gilbert notes how the cooperative nature of playing the game reinforces its air of reality, for example. Requiring that all players interact with each other and work toward the same goal, Pandemic captures the salience of collective suffering and the necessity of collective remedy that only a global disaster could provoke. At the same time, we need to ask in what ways Pandemic and board games like it, including Parasites Unleashed! (2007), Infection Express (2009), and Rattus (2010), do not simply mimic reality but alter it. In playing Pandemic, Gilbert writes, we find that “reality has become gamified,” making us wonder whether the gap between representation and reality has been pried open or slammed shut.

Playing the game, Gilbert also observes, means taking up subject positions that are close to but in the end only adjacent to our own. In Pandemic, for example, we all become problem-solvers, a position we all have held since the pandemic began yet have failed to hold at the same time. Wearing masks, staying home, getting vaccinated—these are all things many of us did to inch our way toward a pandemic solution—but the truth is that most of us were passive recipients and beneficiaries of solutions that others in labs and hospitals provided. Where, then, does the truth of these subject positions lie? Can we read pandemic narratives or play pandemic games as reflections of ourselves? Or should we view them as benign versions of a harsher reality, or even as outright lies? Finally, and most existentially, what does reading narratives about the pandemic mean in a world in which the pandemic, like other catastrophic events, including wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11, invites and resists narrativization simultaneously?

In her masterful afterword Wald reminds us that no matter how difficult it is to narrativize the pandemic or to evaluate the validity of any given pandemic narrative or of pandemic narratives overall, it remains imperative to keep on telling pandemic stories. Wald, who in many ways began this discussion about pandemics and narrative in her book Contagious, long before the coronavirus was part of our lives, addresses how this crisis, like all crises, is a turning point whose solution depends not only on changes in the material world but also on our discourse about them. It matters, Wald insists, how we represent the world around us; thinking in the terms set forth by the essays in this special issue as well as by others, including the Nobel laureate and microbiologist Joshua Lederberg, changes the way we write about microbes and immunology and can change the way we try to prevent disasters they cause. This truth, Wald suggests, also reinforces the importance of what we, as literary scholars and teachers, do, making the analysis of language and literature of the utmost importance and putting the fabled “crisis in the humanities” in a new light.—Nan Goodman

Environmental Literary Studies

There are a number of notable environmental aspects of the coronavirus pandemic and the cultural response to it. In the early stages of the pandemic there were articles and editorials that—impressed by what seemed to be a coordinated global response to the pandemic—wondered if this response could serve as a model for responding to the climate crisis. Of course, as the pandemic developed and vaccines became available, it became clear to others that the responses to the pandemic and to climate change were distressingly parallel. Just as climate change denial has been exacerbated by political interests, so too have many in the United States and elsewhere claimed that the pandemic is a hoax, and, of course, there is widespread and variegated antivax sentiment. The overlap between the responses to climate change and the pandemic was made particularly apparent by the film Don’t Look Up (2021). While the film uses an impending comet collision with the earth as a parallel to the “head-in-the-sand” response to climate change, it struck many commentators as a trenchant critique of our response to the pandemic.

Also of note is the cluster of responses to the origins or outbreak of COVID-19. The theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan marketplace, for instance, prompted speculation that the pandemic resulted from “spill-over” (i.e., of unregulated human-animal contact). In turn, this led to ruminations on the potentially cataclysmic systemic incursions of human settlements into nonhuman habitats. In the United States there were also a bevy of theories about what Trump called “the China virus.” If it was not a liberal hoax, then it must be a Chinese or North Korean bioweapon or else a pathogen that had escaped from a lab. In complementary fashion, Chinese state media have circulated the theory that the US military imported COVID-19 into China. Then there are those in the United States who claim that “Big Pharma” produced COVID-19 to make money off vaccines. The point is that, like the pandemic discourse that intersects with climate change, these origin stories disclose how the coronavirus pandemic intersects with and belongs to longer-running environmental concerns (here ecosystem interface and biotechnology). In the case of the competing origin stories and conspiracy theories about the virus, we can see how the current pandemic highlights the systemic challenges posed by racism, xenophobia, populism, science denial, and the human destruction of nonhuman habitats.

Finally, there is the epidemiology of COVID-19—its distribution, control, and so on—and how it intersects with the concerns of environmental justice. As many have noted, in the United States exposure to COVID-19 and susceptibility to serious or fatal infections disproportionately impacted vulnerable populations that—due to racial, ethnic, class, and other factors—have historically been overexposed to environmental hazards and systematically underserved by preventative health measures and long-term medical care. Moreover, there were stark divides between those with jobs that could be converted to “work from home” and those with jobs that could not. While most of those higher up in the medical profession (administrators, doctors, nurses, etc.) could take reasonable protective measures, other medical workers (orderlies, janitorial staff, etc.) could not. And many in other fields who were deemed “essential workers” (grocery store workers, food chain workers, etc.) were not afforded such protections. Questions of exposure and access only get magnified when the coronavirus pandemic is considered in a global context. Those populations inside the United States (front-line workers etc.) and around the world (poor African nations etc.) that were deemed disposable early in the pandemic were again deemed inessential when vaccines were made available.

All these aspects of the coronavirus pandemic indicate that while it is singular in many ways, it is not isolated from long-running, systemic environmental issues. In notably different ways the two essays in this section address themselves to such intersections. Jerry Zee’s “Surface and Retreat: The China Virus in Three Lunar Years” is “an experiment in figuring the pandemic through its reconfigurations of Chineseness.” This essay—a hybrid of personal reflection, anthropology, and literary criticism—starts with a consideration of the transition of the term coronavirus “from a viral designation into a racial slur.” As Zee notes, this temporal conjunction of virus and race underwrites his essay’s main concern: how “the pandemic . . . is lived . . . as a disorientation of Asian and Asian American life, time, and death.” To study this, Zee tracks the pandemic in lunar years, thereby “offset[ting] the universality of Gregorian time.” Such tracking forces us to consider China as a term that, like the virus itself, has many variants. After an introduction the essay is organized in three sections, each focusing on a single year of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 through 2022. The first such section, “Year of the Rat,” focuses on Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary. Written as a blog in China, it was later compiled, translated, and published as a monograph in the United States. For Zee, the most salient feature of this text is the way that it captures the temporal dislocations that attended the first lockdown of the pandemic: the 2020 lockdown in Wuhan. In Fang’s diary, Zee argues, the city of Wuhan is configured as both “a heroic sacrifice” and “a sacrifice zone.” The next section, “Year of the Ox,” focuses on the complicated dynamics of anti-Asian violence in America’s Chinatowns. Here the concern is policing (as well as overpolicing) and community responses to violence, including those that Zee deems collective efforts “amid the erosions of overexposure and exhaustion and insecurity” produced by “the racial formation of the China Virus.” Finally, the essay ends with the section “Year of the Tiger,” a brief but searing meditation on the way in which, for Asian Americans, the “Chineseness” of the virus renders “every place . . . a scene of possible forced contact.”

Zee notes in passing that the association of Asian bodies in the Americas with disease has a long history. In her essay “Considering Epidemiology’s Need for Literary History,” Kelly L. Bezio attends to a parallel history starting with the observation that many studies have shown a “higher risk of hospitalization and death [from COVID-19] for Black, Latinx, and Asian American persons.” Bezio argues that this “attention to systemic racism as a framework for data collection regarding communicable disease” represents an intersection of the present pandemic and her usual field of study: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black authors. For instance, the disproportionate risk of disease for current ethnic minorities in the United States echoes Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 observations that the housing situation of the enslaved in the Caribbean exposed them to an increased risk of disease and poor health. Bezio identifies two standard ways that this intersection of past and present are understood in literary studies: “genealogical continuity” between present and past and “epistemic contrast” between past and present. Her essay models an alternative to these modes of literary history. It is an example of “literary history as a part of epidemiological sleuthing.” To begin, Bezio explains that in the now-standard “outbreak narrative,” the plot’s linear unfolding (i.e., progress from outbreak to containment) is central. However, narratives that foreground the social determinants of health foreground “backstory, exposition, flashbacks” and other aspects of the narrative that diverge from the progressive unfolding of the plot. As she trenchantly notes, “Linking being unable to catch up on mortgage and rent payments to being cost burdened and subject to a racist legacy of housing policies provides a narrative structure strikingly different from that of a heroic tale of containing an emerging infection.” The essay then focuses specifically on Harriet Wilson’s 1859 Our Nig (a semiautobiographical novel considered one of the first novels published by an African American woman). The novel has long been credited with resisting, undermining, and recasting the conventions of sentimental fiction. Bezio proposes that Our Nig can also be understood as an example of the genre of “the social determinants of health novel” insofar as its subversions of sentimentalism tell a story focused on “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”¹³ Accordingly, the main task of Bezio’s reading of Wilson’s novel is to demonstrate how such a literary-historical reading of Black writing might provide us with perspectives on the present beyond those given to us by the critical paradigms of genealogical continuity or epistemological rupture.—Jason Gladstone

Higher Education and the Profession

This section of the issue started life as a complaint, maybe a diatribe: the story we all know too well at this point, with the pandemic having accelerated (or was it accentuated?) the crisis and all the associated thuslys and suches.¹⁴ That’s what I originally wanted the whole issue to be about, in fact—it was Nan and Jason who put us on the better course of narrative. Now, having had the opportunity to work closely with Henry A. Giroux, Michael Bérubé, Barbara Fuchs, and Christina Katopodis on the essays collected in this section, and having admiringly read the contributions from Lennard J. Davis, Andrew L. Gilbert, Jerry Zee, Kelly L. Bezio, and Priscilla Wald, I think it’s about something else. It’s about educated hope.

In “Fascist Culture, Critical Pedagogy, and Resistance in Pandemic Times,” Giroux offers a big-picture overview of the threats posed to our democratic institutions—not least our educational institutions—by neoliberalism and neofascism. Both in the United States and globally, he shows, market forces and extremist, authoritarian ideologies have combined to undermine public trust and public investment in our independent media, schools, health-care systems, legal systems, electoral systems, financial institutions, and universities over the last forty years. The pandemic brought all this to a head for us and revealed the “culture of cruelty” at the heart of the rightward lurch around the world through this period. More than a medical concept for Giroux, the pandemic also refers to the “ideological and political plagues that emerged as a result of the irresponsible response of the United States and other countries such as Brazil, the United Kingdom, and India to the crisis.” He continues, “Marked by inept leadership rooted in a distrust of science and reason and a blind allegiance to market forces, what emerged over time was unimaginable suffering, massive deaths, and a further legitimation of lies and right-wing violence.” And so it goes.

Throughout Giroux’s writings, the reader is never abandoned to despair. A note of utopian hope—sometimes a restless clamor, like that of the multitude—runs through them. It comes from Ernst Bloch, and the hope that he—a Jew, a German, and a Marxist—was able to carve out of Europe’s decades of darkness in the twentieth century. Also Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and activist, whose notion of a “pedagogy of hope” was premised on a belief in the social agency and emancipatory potential of education, specifically critical education.¹⁵ And James Baldwin, Giroux’s “first teacher,” who while a subject and a witness of history’s atrocities was able to craft a language that taught us all that racism is an illness of the soul—a language that carried within its refinement always a searing indictment of things as they are, and one ultimately of love, liberation, and hope.

In this piece Giroux finds hope in education. He is plainspoken about the economic and political challenges that our public schools and universities face, not to mention the broader culture of racism and cultivated ignorance within which debates about public funding; student tuition and debt; equity, diversity, and inclusion; history and identity; critical race theory; and other topics take place. However, he also sees the energy that educators bring to their role of cultivating civic and democratic literacy, both in the classroom and in other public settings, and of helping instill in society a sense of agency and participation of the sort needed in any functioning democracy. It is the same energy that young people are bringing to demonstrations for Black Lives and for women’s bodily autonomy and that working Americans are bringing to union drives at employers like Amazon, Walmart, and Starbucks. For Giroux, educated hope comes down to hope in the future. It is a pedagogical practice premised on our capacity as educators and public intellectuals to “imagin[e] a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present.” It seems to me that we need, perhaps existentially, to find and to nurture this sort of hope.

Each of the essays in this section and in the issue as a whole is animated by educated hope. In “Academic Labor, Shared Governance, and the Future That Awaits Us,” Michael Bérubé draws on his experience serving in the Faculty Senate leadership at Pennsylvania State University and cochairing the Investigating Committee for the 2021 AAUP report “COVID-19 and Academic Governance” to highlight some of the systemic issues we have faced in higher education for decades.¹⁶ Without doubt, these issues were accelerated and accentuated by the pandemic. Bérubé discusses a series of interviews that he and his colleagues in the Senate conducted with faculty from colleges across the Penn State campuses in April 2020 and focuses on the impact on faculty of poor administrative decisions. Of particular note were administrative plans to return to in-person teaching in Fall 2020, against public health guidelines and with few exceptions; the introduction of a new clause in the contracts of all non-tenure-line faculty that amounted to another turn of the screw of “institutionalize[d] precarity”; and the ignoring of, even contempt shown toward, faculty and student concerns about public safety on campus. Documenting, at the very least, a breakdown in communication between administration and faculty, Bérubé and his AAUP colleagues show in the above-mentioned report that these and worse instances of the undermining of shared governance took place nationally throughout the pandemic. On some campuses it amounted to what the report characterizes as “‘opportunistic exploitations of catastrophic events.’”

English—Bérubé’s home discipline—is naturally implicated in all this. “We can’t,” he gently reminds us, “assess the impact of the pandemic by looking only at literary studies . . . we can’t even assess the impact of the pandemic on literary studies by looking at literary studies alone.” We are indeed part of a much larger system of academic labor, and every aspect of our jobs and our discipline has been impacted by ongoing transformations in this system. Bérubé outlines this trajectory over the last several years and from that perspective issues a call to literature faculty to “get involved in the governance of your institution.” It seems fitting that Bérubé should conclude his essay with a single concrete suggestion.

In “Theater in Lockdown, or a Performance-Studies Paradox,” Fuchs writes from her perspective as a scholar and lover of literature about the impact of the pandemic on the performing arts. She opens with a poignant recollection of the confusion and worry of those first few months, when juggling MLA Executive Council meetings in New York with theater festivals and doctoral exams in Los Angeles upended her professional life. As president of the MLA in 2021, she witnessed firsthand how all our professional lives were upended and was, with the MLA leadership, responsible for our representative professional body’s response to the crisis. Theater was a balm. In her essay Fuchs draws on her experiences of researching and writing a book on theater, of running with a group of colleagues UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics project, and of co-organizing the LA Escena theater festival to reflect on the professional and ethical questions raised by theater in lockdown.¹⁷ The story she recounts is one of professional commitment, critical questioning, responsibility, and care for an art form under duress and is guided by love and expertise.

The paradox of theater during the pandemic is for artists, scholars, and audiences an ethical one. As Fuchs puts it in Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic (2021), the book that came out of her research during this period:

In studying the emergent phenomenon of digital and distanced theater, Fuchs’s research methodologies and sources shifted almost daily as she became newly able to interview actors, directors, and writers online and to access the rapidly growing archives of live and recorded online performances. The nature of theatrical spectatorship had changed overnight and throughout our entire society; performance studies scholarship had to change with it. In the essay Fuchs charts the narrative of scholarly commitment, curiosity, and perseverance that led to her book. She shows us the formation of a question in the real time of the crisis. How, she asks, can digital technologies have been so generative of new artistic forms, offered us unparalleled access and connection, and helped ensure the survival of a craft, while at the same time leaving us feeling more distanced from the rhythms and textures of live performance than ever? Played out on all the stages of our professional lives during the pandemic, what Fuchs calls this paradox of intermediality has already transformed our scholarly work, teaching, and service; our task now is to keep up with it and help shape its future.

Katopodis homes in on pedagogy and discusses her approach to teaching during the pandemic in her contribution, “Teaching for a Habitable Future with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: ‘We’ll Have to Seed Ourselves Farther and Farther from This Dying Place.’” In this essay Katopodis proposes an “ecological” or “habitable pedagogy,” a model that “teaches students how to live in a rapidly evolving world and solve its problems to make our planet habitable for future generations.” It is an active learning-based pedagogy, oriented around creating the learning conditions necessary for strengthening students’ sense of agency, environmental identity, and motivation in response to “the racially unjust, environmentally catastrophic ways of the past.” As with Giroux’s, and likewise inspired by Freire, Katopodis’s is a pedagogy of hope.

The uncanny experience of teaching Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower online in a composition course in Fall 2020 frames Katopodis’s description of her own classroom practices and her presentation of recent educational research from the City University of New York’s Transformative Learning in the Humanities initiative, for which she serves as associate director.¹⁹ From classroom-participation exercises to collaborative grappling with difficult and controversial ideas to community-facing research and assignments, Katopodis breaks down what active learning looks like in practice. “Alive, effective, flowing,” it is the basis of more sustainable relationships with one another in the classroom and of our species with a planet that Lauren Olamina from Butler’s novel dismisses as “this dying place.” The pandemic, for Katopodis, has provided us with an unprecedented opportunity to collectively rethink our educational practices. “Never,” she reminds us, “have so many instructors in higher education—across disciplines, institutions, and national borders—critically reconsidered how we teach.”

The essays collected in this issue demonstrate that the will, the understanding, the imagination, the commitment, and the passion to reconsider our education are there. The pandemic has made doing so an imperative for our institutions, our spiraling democracy, and our planet. We hope in this issue to have contributed to this project.—Karim Mattar

Notes

Works Cited