‘Covid as Multiplane: Liberty, History and the Pandemic.
As the death toll rises, the monuments to imperialism are coming down. This is no coincidence.
However, the powerful demands for social justice that Covid-19’s manifestly unequal impact has triggered are coming up against a very 21st Century problem. This is the problem that the language of freedom and equality used to express them funnel them directly into the trenches of the same endless, brutally superficial war of conceptual attrition. The assertion that Black Lives Matter is reprimanded on the grounds that ‘all lives matter’; lock-down measures aimed at protecting the community are undermined in defence of individual freedom; Indigenous rights are accused of encroaching on Catholic rights, and so on, and so on...until the material reality of structural injustice has been all but buried under an avalanche of formal equivalences.
But there is at least one way out of this conceptual deadlock. As I’ll suggest in this talk, in order to see it, what we need is a device that allows us to take in the present and the past, the micro and the macro, the periphery and the centre simultaneously. What we need, in other words, is a way of making sense of the last 500 years that is less like ruling a line, and more like constructing a shadow-box, or making a multiplane animation. If a pandemic can be said to have an upside, then, it might be that the Coronavirus offers us that device.
This conversation will be moderated by Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, SOMA Summer Academic Director and Prishani Naidoo, Director os SWOP at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
July 16
12:00 hrs MX
10:00 hrs PST
13:00 hrs ET
Via YouTube Live: https://youtu.be/iY7e9xHRagI
" /> Rose Parfitt who will present:
‘Covid as Multiplane: Liberty, History and the Pandemic.
As the death toll rises, the monuments to imperialism are coming down. This is no coincidence.
However, the powerful demands for social justice that Covid-19’s manifestly unequal impact has triggered are coming up against a very 21st Century problem. This is the problem that the language of freedom and equality used to express them funnel them directly into the trenches of the same endless, brutally superficial war of conceptual attrition. The assertion that Black Lives Matter is reprimanded on the grounds that ‘all lives matter’; lock-down measures aimed at protecting the community are undermined in defence of individual freedom; Indigenous rights are accused of encroaching on Catholic rights, and so on, and so on...until the material reality of structural injustice has been all but buried under an avalanche of formal equivalences.
But there is at least one way out of this conceptual deadlock. As I’ll suggest in this talk, in order to see it, what we need is a device that allows us to take in the present and the past, the micro and the macro, the periphery and the centre simultaneously. What we need, in other words, is a way of making sense of the last 500 years that is less like ruling a line, and more like constructing a shadow-box, or making a multiplane animation. If a pandemic can be said to have an upside, then, it might be that the Coronavirus offers us that device.
This conversation will be moderated by Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, SOMA Summer Academic Director and Prishani Naidoo, Director os SWOP at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
July 16
12:00 hrs MX
10:00 hrs PST
13:00 hrs ET
Via YouTube Live: https://youtu.be/iY7e9xHRagI
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