... global, and therefore not yet a pandemic, it was a Chinese curiosity that straddled oceans. “Coronavirus!,” still morphing from a viral designation into a racial slur. Northern California. I yelled “Fuck you!” back at him, reflexively, and laughing, he stepped into his truck. This essay...

... by the novel coronavirus in the lives of people are multidimensional and constantly evolving. Three recent essays—“Paravictorianism: Mary Shelley and Viral Sovereignty,” by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb; “The Logic of the In-visible: Decolonial Reflections on the Change of Epoch,” by Walter D. Mignolo...

... 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...

... as it solves. These problems are a product of the very generativity of the category of biopolitics itself. In its theoretical flexibility and seem ingly viral productivity, biopolitics as a category presents itself as endlessly malleable and thus theoretically imprecise. This m al­ leability is not only...

... and differs from previous global health calamities. Their contributions revolve in turn around recently published work on the pandemic by other scholars, including Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s “Paravictorianism: Mary Shelley and Viral Sovereignty” ( Victorian Studies , Spring 2020), Walter D. Mignolo’s...

... in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1991 the LA police roadside beating of Rodney King was filmed by George Holliday on a Sony Handycam, creating what many have called the first viral video, which set off an insurrection that remains a vital precedent for current activism against police brutality. The articles surveyed...

..., “Aboriginal Humour.” 44 Behrendt, “Aboriginal Humour.” 45 Gleeson-White, “Going Viral.” 46 Rawson, Wrong Turn , 210 . 47 Bennett, Cambridge Introduction , 10 . 48 Bennett, Cambridge Introduction , 19 . 49 Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill , 36 . 50...

... shames perpetrators to vindicate the victims. 4 In the aftermath of the movement’s explosion, the consequences of the paradigm are clear. On the one hand, the dignifying effects of such a vindication, especially because it tends to happen through the virality of social media, are short-lived...

... catastrophic disease event. For example, George W. Bush's 2002 Smallpox Vaccination Program (SVP) began not in response to any actual cases of smallpox but to national security concerns after 9/11 and anthrax scares, as well as to the potential threat of viral m atter held w ith in laboratories in the US...

... Cleaver's Soul on Ice or to the idea o f "cloth w o un ds" in Jean Genet's Querelle yield unusual insights on masculinity, race, and power. Perhaps the least successful chap­ ter of the book is Stockton's reading of Morrison's Beloved in relation to anxieties about viral contamination, inform ation transfer...

... in C alifornia is Brendan C. Lindsay, M u r­ der State: California's Native Am erican Genocide, 1846-1873 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2012). Ple a s a n t 18 1 17 The local newspaper in Sacramento reported on this viral news sto ry in m id-Septem ber 2015: Stephen Magagnini, "S tu d e n t's...

... as the main hubs of online fan activity.6As fan fiction has become more widely known through academic and popular discussions, online fandom's popularity has exploded. As fannish engagement w ith media texts becomes more wide­ spread (often encouraged by producers as viral marketing), people may often...

... with the metropolis’s mass media. The buzzing began with the New York Times preview titled “A Book So Far Ahead of Its Time, It Took Eighty-Seven Years to Find a Publisher.” Talya Zax’s article introduced a conceit that went viral—that Romance in Marseille resonates with present issues. 5 The two-sentence...

... up to a 100-fold spike in capacity (say if a YouTube video goes viral), infrastructure is oriented tow ard a prediction. The equation that converts an imagined crisis in the future into present capacity is w hy the cloud wastes so much energy: researchers have estim ated that, on average, data...

...” 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...

... shared on social media. This inspired Shabu to sing “Posh Chakae” (“I Will Shower Flowers on You”), which also went viral, launching the genre of trans women’s performances on YouTube. Shabu states that their performances are spontaneous, and they call their ability “God’s gift.” They explained that none...

... fabric o f the hyperm odern and m ulticu ltu ra l city.2Yet RAGE m ay already have happened, the singularly m ultiple, conveniently viral and possibly cur­ able cause o f a fo rm o f vio le n ce e vid e n t in cities fo r years, a lw a ys-alre a d y p receding and produced on screens, already a global-m...