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This conversation was recorded on 17th June 2024. Speakers: Dr Gala Rexer, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Warwick // Dr Alexandre White, Johns Hopkins University // students of the MA
Participants
GR:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Gala Rexer (Interviewer)
AW: ÌýÌýÌý Alexandre White (Interviewee)
A:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Aisha (Student)
G:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Gabriel (Student)
AL:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Alex (Student)
J:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Julia (Student)
GR:ÌýÌýÌýÌý Hello and welcome back to the SPRC podcast. My name is Gala Rexer, I’m a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Sociology Department and a former lecturer at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre at ÂÒÂ×Ðã. Today, we’re welcoming Dr Alexandre White, who’s going to talk to us about his book, Epidemic Orientalism: Race, Capital, and the Governance of Infectious Disease.
But before I’ll say a few more words about Dr White, I want to introduce you to today’s co-hosts on the podcast. With me today are four students from the current MA cohort in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies, whom I was teaching here at ÂÒÂ×Ðã.
A:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Hi, my name’s Aisha, I’m excited to revisit a book that we read in autumn. Ìý
G:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Hi, I’m Gabriel.
J:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý I’m Julia.
AL:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Hi, I’m Alex, thank you so much for coming.
GR:ÌýÌýÌýÌý So, as Aisha already said, we read Dr White’s book as part of a module I was teaching last fall titled ‘The Politics of Health and Medicine: Gender, Race and Nation’ and Epidemic Orientalism was one of the first texts we read, and it turned out to be an excellent framework to think about the politics of health and medicine, colonialism, racism and it, I think, specifically helped us to develop a historical lens on all of these questions, and also, I think, a spatial or a geographic lens. So thank you so much for writing the book.
A:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý A few words about our guest. Alexandre White is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He’s a sociologist, an historian of medicine, race and racism, and empire, and his work examines the social effects of infectious epidemic outbreaks in both historical and contemporary settings, as well as the global mechanisms that produce responses to outbreak.
His first book, Epidemic Orientalism: Race, Capital, and the Governance of Infectious Disease, was published in 2023 with Stanford University Press. We’re delighted to get the chance to talk to Dr White today and discuss with him some of the questions that came up in class. To kick us off, we wanted to know more about the inspiration for the cover of the book that we love so much.
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý First off, thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it and it’s wonderful to be engaging with students from a Master’s programme that I was in over a decade ago, which is depressing to think about but, anyway, but definitely a programme that set me off on the journey that actually led to this book, so I’m immensely grateful to be here.
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý The cover is something that I found when doing research on the book. It’s a cover drawn by a Czech dissident artist named Boris Artzybasheff, and it was in a volume of Life magazine from, I believe, the 1950s on infectious disease threats, and the image itself is called ‘World Map of Tropical Diseases’.
I actually own a copy of the map, it sits above my desk at home, and I just really want to thank Marcela Maxfield and the editors at Stanford for fighting really hard to get it, because it was difficult to get the copyright for it, or the license for it, and I love it. It’s a horrifying image but it’s really interesting. And I’d also really recommend looking at Boris Artzybasheff’s work, he did a lot of kind of anthropomorphising like factory machines and things, and kind of fascinating Marxist, socialist cartoons and stuff, so really cool.
J:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý That’s very interesting. It would make a great poster to have in your room.
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý It does.
J:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Now, I wanted to ask about the writing process of Epidemic Orientalism, and how and where the book, and the main concept it proposes, has travelled since it was published one and a half years ago in early 2023. I assume you wrote it during the height of the Covid pandemic, and then it came out at a time when maybe it seemed like only a few people were still concerned with the pandemic and its ongoing effects, while the majority people wanted to move on and maybe have their life back, after being affected by two to three years of complete disruption.
How was this process for you, writing a deeply historical book that explained in detail the historical and racial routes of all the mechanisms we saw being implemented in 2020: surveillance, data collection, racialised health frontiers? And how has it been perceived since its publication?
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý Wow. I’ll try to keep this to kind of a reasonable length answer; it’s a great question. I started writing this, basically, the first kernels of this book started in about 2014. So this book was my PhD dissertation, which I began a year after... I took a gap year after the Master’s here at LSE and then started up on this project, and this was actually the first... I believe it’s chapter two, the one that mostly focusses on, or mentions, plague and smallpox in South Africa. That emerged from a term paper from a first year PhD course on sociology, race and racism with Dr Ruha Benjamin, and from that paper essentially led to this particular historical interest in International Sanitary Conferences and Conventions and then, from there, ultimately the dissertation project.
I didn’t intend to write this book during a pandemic in the least. The dissertation was finished in 2018 - Ìýand this is where the story becomes rather longwinded – but this project emerged out of a failed dissertation project, a failed prior dissertation project; my first dissertation proposal was to explore through ethnography the long term effects, or the aftereffects, of what we would call social distancing measures, quarantine, isolation, lockdown, in Liberia after the Ebola epidemic; because I saw similar forms of not necessarily racialised quarantine but especially class-based quarantine in Liberia at currently the same time that I was exploring this case of racist quarantining and segregation in South Africa, so I became curious about that.
And at the time - this was 2015 / 2016 - I was like, what is it like to emerge out of an epidemic where you weren’t allowed to shake hands, there were curfews, all the things that literally everyone on the planet is now familiar with but at the time seemed radically alien to me. And after conducting very preliminary research on that in Monrovia, I decided that that project wasn’t going to do anything useful, to actually kind of say anything particularly useful to the people in Liberia.
But what I noticed was that the forms of infectious disease control in the country – and I went after the end of the epidemic – were radically different than the controls that existed at the borders and getting out. This was where I kind of interfaced, upon leaving the country, with all these forms of biosecurity apparatuses to monitor Ebola, even though there were no known cases of Ebola in West Africa at the time, or certainly in Liberia at the time.
But the systems of control, surveillance, sanitary screenings, and things, felt so connected to the work that I had previously done on South Africa that it just naturally germinated into the dissertation that became this book, that looked at this longer history of these International Sanitary Conventions, and the International Health Regulations that ultimately governed both epidemics. And that’s how the book kind of came to be.
I think the reception has been good. I mean writing this book during a pandemic, especially living in the United States during the pandemic which was, in so many ways, I think, a particularly brutal place to live and to bear witness to so much unnecessary death and suffering from the weaknesses of state responses, while actually at the time being at Johns Hopkins actively working on vaccination campaigns, community health campaigns, and things, throughout that period.
I think Epidemic Orientalism was my way of kind of writing my way through the pandemic, revising the dissertation, understanding... I mean I wish that so much of it wasn’t useful for understanding Covid. I didn’t write it as a book for Covid and at first I actually didn’t want to mention Covid particularly at all, and my editors were like, you really will have to grapple with this. Fair enough.
But I’m grateful that it explains, or can help to explain, a lot of the aspects that we unfortunately lived through, and are still living with, but it was not meant to be that. I think the reception has been good, I’m happy with it, I still like the book, and it’s been translated into other languages, so I think there’s wider reception and interest, so I’m grateful to it.
G:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Coming at it from a slightly different angle, you open the book with reference to Shelley’s description of the Plague spreading through colonial exploitation, trade and conquest in Last Man. When reading Epidemic Orientalism in its entirety, my mind was drawn to Stoker’s Count Dracula and how the character is constructed as a moral, physical, and sexual contagion that moves from East to West, and destabilises late-Victorian Britain.
I was wondering if you could speak a bit more to thinking about disease and contagion beyond actual illness, but also encompassing the transgression of boundaries of racial and sexual purity, and whether a concept of the monstrous could be helpful, or is relevant at all, when thinking about this alongside the wider themes of the whole book?
AW: ÌýÌýÌý I think the concept of the monstrous fits in very well. I think it’s interesting, because I was talking about this the other week, when I was actually in Japan talking about a chapter of the book, and I think it’s interesting that for a book called ‘Epidemic Orientalism’ the cover focuses so much on the Western Hemisphere. And that wasn’t necessarily by design, but I like it because I think that... like Dracula, like so many of the kind of Victorian horror stories that I draw from a little bit in this, so much of Epidemic Orientalism isn’t necessarily about, or is certainly not about what the world beyond the Red Sea is, but rather, how the West has come to envision itself relative to the rest of the world, and the damaging effects that these mythic constructions produce, both for the world beyond the West but also the West itself, as it kind of constructs its own vision of itself.
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý So I think the monstrous is something that I’d love to think more about because one reason I was drawn actually to Shelley and not perhaps to Stoker is because in the Last Man, most of which is actually kind of a strange, very dry kind of political drama that takes forever to get to the actual plague - if you’re reading it for the plague, you can skip ahead for quite a while – but I think that what Shelley hints at, or suggests directly to, is the monstrousness within the West, and especially within the British Empire, and the anxieties that are produced from it.
Whereas with Stoker, what I love about Stoker is the alluringness of the supposed monster, which is to say that this is someone who’s different but not that different, but that difference also makes him very attractive and alluring in these ways that also Westerners very… or makes the British male characters especially, very uncomfortable. And so much of the book is about policing Western comfort, and what makes something monstrous.
The Shelley quote at the beginning of the first chapter, I think is something I really enjoyed putting in there, but also something I’d like to read into a lot more. ÌýÌýÌýÌý There are other books that I mention that focus a lot on Gothic horror and epidemics, and also get to kind of aspects of disease and orientalism, but, yeah, I think it was really important to have that in there, to kind of speak to the conscious and unconscious literary aspects of this.
G:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Sticking with the vampire figure, that threat that the vampire, or the monster, can represent across race, class, gender, sexuality, is something we’ve been thinking a lot about in the course as well. I’m thinking about these not as singular categories but also coming into being for each other and rather than separable analytics, one thing in and of itself. Your book adds health as a category to that mix, could you maybe give us some examples of how this co-articulation works in historical or contemporary examples?
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý The Alien franchise I think speaks to this in a host of ways because, like Dracula, there’s a biological enmeshing, or entanglement, of the self and other in a particular way that yields some sort of novel being, and it’s very gendered and sexualised in all these particular ways.
But in the most recent Alien film, these colonists go to a planet and ostensibly they allow themselves to be exposed to the planet, and the planet subsequently releases, or the plants on the planet, or whatever... the flora and fauna release spores that merge with the humans and subsequently create something monstrous, and creates something that’s not only of them but also will subsequently kill them.
So within Alien and, of course, throughout the Alien films, the aliens are always beings that are physically birthed from human beings, so they’re part of... they’re not separate but the horror is actually in the inability to maintain a pure boundary. And I think that Epidemic Orientalism is so much about how can Western nations, and previously, explicitly, European and American empires, seek to maintain a pure boundary of people while allowing for the trade that’s necessary to produce the West as itself: Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, the British Empire. How can we maintain trade and traffic while minimising, actually, the possibilities for these engagements.
And I think that both Alien and Dracula... Dracula doesn’t just engage in sexual and vampiric activities with chaste women in Britain, he also purchases land. There’s a way in which Dracula becomes quite British in his economic activities, that subsequently is also a threat, buying Whitby Abbey, etc. which I think is really interesting, and I think that this economic and physical entanglement has historically been just such an anxiety in the Western world that it’s important to draw from. I hope that answers your question. And I hope I didn’t go too far in some random direction with Alien.
GR:ÌýÌýÌýÌý No, I think it really connected well to a lot of the things we talked about in class and also, with Alien, the question of reproduction comes in, and sort of reproduction as the site of maintaining, or blurring, these boundaries.
A:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý As you just mentioned before, that disappointment in the US Government and unnecessary deaths, and you outlined this belief in the intrinsic superiority of Western healthcare, and how that probably played a part in the delayed adoption of things like masking and social distancing, when we saw that those precautions were successful in other countries, particularly in East Asia.
In your following of Western health policy, why do you think there were those prejudices against those approaches that other countries were adopting? So the UK and the US were so late to do it, where do you think that came from?
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý I’d argue that a lot of it was built into this kind of myth of Western superiority to epidemics. I mean it’s such a flawed myth, one that’s consistently reproduced, but I think there’s a vision, and it’s summed up in, I think, the quotation that I draw from, from former President Trump talking about him witnessing in March of 2020 the freezer trucks full of bodies in Queens, where he says, very frankly and candidly, ostensibly you don’t see this here; you expect to see these images in other places far away.
And I think that that wasn’t necessarily, in any way, a moment of particular self-awareness - evidently from the other activities - but I do think that was a moment when you see that mythology pierced. You saw both Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Donald Trump start espousing tactics and policies that spoke to the exact same sorts of practices that the US and UK vilified and lambasted the South African Government, Thabo Mbeki’s Government, in responding to resisting antiretrovirals coming in to South Africa.
And I think talking about hitting bodies with high beams of light, or Ivermectin being used as a treatment, are not dissimilar from the sorts of flawed responses that were put forward by South African health officials in the late nineties and early 2000s. But those moments were used to build up a vision of the Western world, explicitly, as one that can treat and manage plagues better than anywhere else, such that we don’t really need to change our ways of life during an acute epidemic moment.
But that myth is based not just on some vision of Western superiority in its civilisation, it’s dialectally constructed through Epidemic Orientalism, whereby the flawed, backwards practices of other nations and other regions of the world are out-of-step with what’s happening in the West, and what we really need is for the rest of the world to kind of, in some sort of step-wise pattern, teleologically come to the status of the Western world in order to protect the West.
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý So, I don’t think Epidemic Orientalism can explain every aspect of what happened in the US and the UK during Covid. There’s a host of other factors that are really critical and a lot of other concepts that we need to draw from, but I think that particular period between January and April of 2020, when both nations could have been strengthening the health system and building up strategies and building up resources, but instead chose to close borders and vilify all people of Asian descent, broadly, that’s where I think Epidemic Orientalism can explain a good deal of the pandemic response in the US and UK especially.
J:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý You note in your book that following responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, the IHR is being comprehensively reviewed. You call for the IHR to both confront and rid itself of its imperial mindset and its epidemic orientalism. Based on your discussions with health experts, and your knowledge of the larger public health debates surrounding epidemics, do you think that addressing and getting rid of epidemic orientalism is possible? Additionally, what do you see as the next steps for global systems of disease regulation and public health to take to address and stop the imperial logics that have sedimented the responses to epidemics and pandemics?
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý That’s a great question. There are two things about this that I think are really critical, which is 1) at a very base policy level, we’ve been seeing, over the last two to three years, large scale discussion about a new pandemic treaty, the revising of the International Health Regulations. Ultimately, the pandemic treaty that’s in development, to me doesn’t look that drastically different from the IHRs, in terms of its structure and approach.
So while the IHR is being actively reviewed and revised, we have this other thing that I’m not sure if we’re planning on having it take their place, or if it exists alongside, but it doesn’t strike me that it’s doing things that would necessarily be radically different from revised IHRs. But that being said, for my own sanity I’ve tried to take a bit of a break from following these policies. I’ve written what I planned to write on the IHRs and I don’t have anything new to say, I don’t think.
That being said, the frustrations, and they’re rightful frustrations, with either the lack of ability to gain consensus on a new pandemic treaty or IHRs, the challenges associated especially with access to patents manufacturing processes for vaccines, and the sorts of delivery measures that many nations want to have included in some form of pandemic treaty, to ameliorate the really critical failures in providing especially the Covid-19 vaccines around the globe, those sorts of challenges need to be addressed.
And I think that those particular issues, especially around vaccine stockpiling, or the lack of access to intellectual property rights for vaccine production around the world, speak to the same issues that had previously existed. Now, that being said, every IHR reform took about a decade, so I imagine any new structure will take a similar amount of time to actually be produced.
My vision, oddly perhaps, would be actually for the WHO to have more authority and be better funded and to have more support. The last chapter of the book I would not say is particularly sanguine on non-WHO, especially financial market, responses to epidemic threat. So I think if the WHO had more power and more ability to actually manage an epidemic in a way that could move nation states and the member nations of the WHO to act, this could be a positive thing.
Because I think in the interviews and activities, or the interviews that I’ve done with WHO actors, they’re clearly aware of these issues and I think are... whether or not they use the term epidemic orientalism or not, I think they’ve actively been trying, as I try to demonstrate in one of the chapters, to navigate these challenges and the imperial episteme that exists within the IHRs. So that would be my hope, but I wouldn’t say I’m tremendously optimistic. There are other things that make me optimistic about future epidemic responses, but maybe not at that scale.Ìý
GR:ÌýÌýÌýÌý I think one thing that has been on all of our minds is the situation in Gaza right now, especially when we think about health, access to health, the denial of humanitarian aid, or starvation as a method of war. And we know from Palestinian scholars, such as Ghada Majadle, who has also been visiting us in the health class, that attacks on the Palestinian healthcare system pre-date October of last year.
But we still kind of wanted to ask you, as a historian of health and medicine, if you see some historical continuities similar to the ones that you discuss in your book in terms of the production of difference, racialised difference, I guess, or if you see the situation in Gaza more through a biopolitical / necropolitical lens of total destruction. In general, what are your thoughts, I guess, is what we wanted to ask you?
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý To the extent that the book speaks to this, and I think that the progenitor of Epidemic Orientalism being Edward Said, speaks to this far better than I almost ever certainly will. Speaking from the book, what became so immensely critical, especially in the late 19th century, are the areas around the Red Sea, and the fact that this particular geography was then, is now, and remains, such a site for quantifying / dehumanising lives in a host of different ways for, I think, fundamentally, explicitly, powerful interests in the United States and Europe; less, perhaps, United States in the 19th century but certainly today.
In the first empirical chapter of the book I look at the ways in which the Mecca pilgrimage becomes both a space of great epidemic anxiety, and especially the ports throughout the Red Sea, and obviously into Egypt and through the Suez Canal, become such important sites for cradling the anxieties of disease threat to Europe, especially in kind of crystalising this particular concern of cholera, in particular moving, with being passed from Indian Muslims on Hajj, into the Red Sea area and being transported to European Muslims who would take it on through the Mediterranean.
And the ways in which the policing of disease and the ability to impose a governmental structure, a rigid governmentality, in a sanitary regime became a hallmark of whether or not you were a successful imperial power. And we see this in the ways in which the British and French critique one another’s strategies for quarantine and sanitary controls in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea region; the ways in which both the British and French then subsequently critique the Persian Ottoman Empires in their practices.
So there’s a way in which the management of bodies, and the management of peoples, in this particular geography, especially Muslim bodies but not exclusively, or Muslim people and their bodies, as understood by Europeans or by imperial structures, becomes a certain form of currency of imperial power.
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý At the same time, as we see in the section in that chapter where I look at the International Sanitary Conference in Constantinople, and also Valeska Huber has written on this as well, so I draw a lot on her work in this space - and she’s looking at managing mobilities in the Red Sea space in a host of different ways, not just in terms of infectious disease control, but the ways in which Europe, and European powers, were willing, in the International Sanitary Conferences, to submit large populations to mass death in the event of a threat to Europe.
An infectious disease threat, or a disease threat to Europe, became so abundantly clear in the 1866 International Sanitary Conference in Constantinople, that speaks to the ways in which a history of sanitary control speaks to a history of the disposability of human life in the region, but also, I think, to the important ways in which Middle Eastern peoples, and Middle Eastern subjects, are rendered subjects, and rendered rhetorical objects for Western powers to impose meaning upon.
Once again, I use the term Western not as a factual category but as an analytic category, and the ways in which we’ve seen, I think, hauntingly and horrifying throughout, since October 7th but before as well, the ways in which the horrors and the violence and the murders that are happening in real time are transfigured into particular rhetorical objects for political debate that fails to achieve a meaningful end to this violence, is horrifying, and part of a lot of the wider themes that I talk about in this work.
GR:ÌýÌýÌýÌý Just maybe to follow up on that, I think what’s also really interesting is if you look into the archives of Zionism, health actually figures quite prominently as a site of regulation and as a site of racialisation. So I think in like a perverted and violent way, the ways in which this is now produced in Gaza in the genocidal war is also really interesting as this kind of reversal.
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý And disease control is central to making states, and states are built on exclusions, and disease status, associations with malaria, or whatever disease or mosquitos, or whatever diseases might be the case, are part and parcel, very significantly, of that.
AL:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Thank you so much for coming on this podcast. Our final question, like us you were taught by Paul Gilroy. One of Paul’s methodological insights is, while a critique of racial ordering and white and Western supremacy is, of course, incredibly important, there ought to also be an affirmative, constructive aspect to thinking about these complicated topics: a humanist remainder which helps us go forward beyond injury – I really hope I’ve got that right.
Now, aside from the fact that I think that even writing this book is an example of this kind of humanist remainder, how might you apply this kind of methodology in concert with epidemic orientalism? What ways may we go beyond injury? Were there any examples or, as you mentioned earlier, what does make you feel optimistic about global public health management?
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý Wow. This podcast has been very meaningful because I was a Black Studies major in undergrad and I transitioned to the Master’s in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies and then moved to sociology which, yes, race, ethnicity and postcolonial studies was a Master’s programme within the Department of Sociology, but I found most sociological work, especially in graduate school, to be wanting, relative to the particular concerns that I think are at the core of my work which haven’t always been explicit, or people don’t necessarily grapple with.
So it’s really very meaningful to me that you read my work with a particular interest for the human, for the sorts of questions that emerge from the work that I did in the Master’s programme, and what we learned in that Master’s. I think the question of the human is a really interesting and important one. It’s obviously a concept. Human as a concept was one that was deeply challenging and fraught, given its legacies and histories rooted in enlightenment, and slavery, and colonialism, and a host of different things. But the work of Paul Gilroy, Anthony Bogues, and others, Sylvia Wynter as well, lead me especially to return time and time again to... I can’t shape the human and the importance of centring or attempting a humanistic approach in my sociological and historical work, so thank you for this question.
In thinking about that, very significantly, in how I wrote this book, what I wanted to challenge, fundamentally, and this is where I draw on... Epidemic Orientalism draws so much on Edward Said but it also draws a lot on Stuart Hall’s concepts of discursive frames and things, and I really wanted Hall to be a partner in this in a host of ways; which is to say that I wanted to challenge these forms of difference that had become very, very ossified and were so incredibly durable, or remain very durable, in international infectious disease control rhetoric, and I think we’ll continue to see them time and time again. So I wanted to challenge and unseat these, and problematise them, and parochialise them in a host of ways.
What I’ve seen that makes me optimistic, or hopeful, is basically everything that happened outside of the book during Covid, which is actually the sorts of community structure responses that I saw in... before I wrote the book in West Africa during the Ebola virus, the epidemic, where it wasn’t just the WHO, or Médecins Sans Frontières, or these other actors who are doing case counts and contact tracing, it was teachers and IT professionals working at schools, who were no longer teaching at schools because the schools were closed, who were developing apps that actually were working and mobilising contact tracing structures more effectively, and faster, than what the international organisations were doing. And those who could kind of call an ambulance, if necessary, and develop those structures to aid people.
It was the sorts of responses that emerged in the US, and in Baltimore but also elsewhere. In Baltimore, which I saw first-hand, in the absence of effective public health communication at all times, it was the restaurants that turned into grocery stores for two years and free food pantries, and a host of other strategies whereby food was delivered to elderly folks who’d be risking themselves significantly in going out. It was in those smaller community interactions, and in the ones that I saw across the country, especially in the vaccine delivery response, where community health workers - promotoras in Hispanic communities - were providing clear information but also access to care in ways that the State had not considered, and the State had not organised into its apparatus.
And in the midst of that disappointment of state failure, and state failure at the Federal level and then state failure at each state-by-state level, I saw so much humanity and hope, and the bridging of these fears and anxieties and these epidemic orientalisms that existed across the place, which probably saved so many more lives than would have been lost without them. So that’s really what makes me… that inspires me and makes me if not hopeful, very grateful that people get on with it in the midst of... these large, macro structure issues that I talk about, in the midst of this, people found ways to survive and live, and also suffer at the hands of failed institutions, but also survive in ways that are heroic as well as deeply important.
It’s one thing to kind of focus on the expertise, the medical, the scientific policy expertise that I talk about in this book, but the strategies and politics of survival that were employed by all of us, but people across the world, throughout the pandemic, is its own set... its own important, critical expertise that needs to be recognised, appreciated, and valued in all these different ways.
GR:ÌýÌýÌýÌý We have one last question to end the podcast, because we read the book and we used it so much, we were also wondering what are you working on right now?
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý As you know, if you read it, the last chapter kind of puts forward this concept called necro-finance, and actually what I’ve been working on, what I’ve been working on for the last couple of years alongside a graduate student, who’s now starting up a post-doc at Notre Dame, Dr Pyar Seth, based on research that we conducted on insurance and the trans-Atlantic slave trade... if not a genealogy kind of attempt to historicise and consider the ways in which humans are made into quantifiable subjects not necessarily for the purpose, solely, of financial speculation but actually financial speculation for the financial profit of others.
So we worked on this project to digitise and analyse the archives of Lloyds, the insurance market, which launched last year, and we’re now writing the book on that. If I have hindsight in five or ten years, I think my larger research project is rethinking logics and practices of risk through a postcolonial lens. I guess that’s my bigger project, and how constructions of risk come out of visions of bodily, physical difference, in colonial difference, racial difference, in various moments, and that’s really what the new project is about.
A:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Amazing, well, we look forward to it.
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý Me too.
A:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Thank you so much, Alexandre, for coming on to today. Thank you, Gala, for inviting me and everyone for speaking, and thank you all for listening to the podcast.
AW:ÌýÌýÌýÌý Thanks so much, it was a real pleasure.
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