Amidst rising Covid-19 cases and deaths in North America, poet Dionne Brand questioned the political tendency “to manage the pandemic as narrative, as calculus, but not yet as reckoning.” Her question is a counterpoint to narrative approaches like Rosenberg’s and Wald’s, which examine meaning, structure and effect of epidemics on society. Drawing on the case of Ebola survivorship in Sierra Leone, I think through Brand’s assertion: what do narrative and calculative perspectives presume, prefigure and prioritize -- particularly as they relate to temporal and experiential dimensions of disease events and public health crises? I argue that moving beyond the dramaturgical and narrative explanations (and towards reckoning) requires foregrounding relations of power, intersubjectivity, and temporalities that exceed conventional epidemic plot.
Adia Benton
Northwestern University
ISCA Seminar Series Michaelmas 2020
To be held online on Teams (the joining link will be added above)
