Contagion, Culture & the Global South

Saurav Kumar Rai, "Literary Depictions of Contagion in Colonial North India."

There is a well-known axiom that “a single death is a tragedy, while a million deaths are statistics.” This observation holds particular relevance in the context of epidemics. Official records and archival data, though rich in quantitative detail, often fail to capture the socio-cultural and emotional dimensions of such crises. In this regard, literature becomes an indispensable source for reconstructing the social history of pandemics. It is within literary works that some of the most nuanced and enduring memories of epidemics have been preserved across generations. This paper seeks to examine select literary representations of contagion in colonial North India, particularly those that reflect the devastating impact of epidemics during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It engages with the writings of prominent Hindi litterateurs such as Munshi Premchand, Phanishwar Nath Renu, Pandey Bechan Sharma Ugra, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, and Harishankar Parsai, among others, to explore how literature reflects as well as conserve the experiences of contagion and suffering.

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Ishani Anwesha Joshi, "The COVID Time: Temporal Movements, COVID-19, and Graphic Medicine."

Time, an inherently unquantifiable construct, is generally rendered intelligible to humans through established frameworks, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, it morphed and fractured collective rhythms, creating isolated bubbles of individual time. The heterotemporal flow of time governed by clocks and calendars gave way to a multiplicity of temporal experiences. While this multiplicity persists even in ‘normal’ times, it is typically relegated to the periphery, overshadowed by the dominant temporal constructs. In the absence of conventional temporal markers, the ‘COVID time’ marked a departure from linearity and revealed the complex economy of experiential time, or as Henri Bergson calls it, durée réelle. Drawing on the above, my talk focuses on how the idea of time and temporality was drastically reconfigured during the COVID-19 pandemic, unraveling the diverse ways in which individuals and communities experienced and navigated these multiple transformed realities. To do so, the talk draws on several comic artists and graphic medical texts to delineate different modes of temporal experience vis-à-vis the disruption of biographical time, loss of referentiality and directionality, strangeness, finitude, stagnation, and the acceleration of time.

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Dilip K Das, "Narrating Spaces of Contagion."

Epidemic, like all events in the world, unfolds in time and space, but it is space that configures our understanding of it and shapes our response to it. We measure the magnitude of an outbreak in terms of its geographical spread, on the basis of which we classify it as epidemic or pandemic. We respond to the crisis it causes by partitioning spaces through quarantine or arresting space in lockdown. In my talk I will attempt to theorize the configuration of space in stories that both derive from and constitute the social understanding of epidemic outbreak. These stories take two basic forms, one treating the outbreak realistically as a natural event, and the other treating it symbolically as a preternatural event.
The limit case for the former is the epidemiological report while for the latter it is the story of divine causation, like the Old Testament story of the ten plagues that God sends to punish the Pharaoh or liturgical stories of the smallpox goddess Sitala in India. How do these stories respond to the crisis of epidemic outbreak, what kinds of meaning do they attribute to it, and how do these meanings configure spaces of contagion, precarity and death? I will try to answer these questions by examining stories of outbreak from India.

Sathyaraj Venkatesan, "Unequal Burdens: COVID-19, BIPOC Communities, and Graphic Medical Narratives."

Although COVID-19 is often described as a “great leveler,” it has in fact disproportionately affected Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), exposing them to higher risks of infection and death. Building on this reality, my talk will closely read selected graphic medical narratives to highlight the lived, emotional experiences of BIPOC individuals. It draws on key concepts such as precarity, syndemics, and intersectionality to frame its analysis. The talk will demonstrate that the health outcomes of BIPOC communities are shaped by interconnected social relations, institutional structures, and enduring racial and colonial histories that continue to influence vulnerability and care.

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