Heike Steinhoff: Epidemics and Othering: The Biopolitics of COVID-19 in Historical and Cultural Perspectives

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaped the cultural and social experiences of the past few years. To make sense of the moral panic surrounding the pandemic, Heike Steinhoff (ed.) in her edited reader Epidemics and Othering: The Biopolitics of COVID-19 in Historical and Cultural Perspectives intends to show historical continuities in processes of othering, especially during times of a pandemic. The volume takes its cue in the established cultural studies conversation about the COVID-19 pandemic using Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopolitics”. The term itself is somewhat conflicted as it lacks a full theorization by Foucault. Steinhoff is fully aware of this and concedes from the outset that it “is somewhat elusive but mainly functions to describe a distinct technology of power directed at the regulation of life and populations” (11). In drawing on works by Philipp Sarasin and Achille Mbembe among others, Steinhoff, however, lays out a fully working theoretical framework for the use of the term in the present volume and its connection to biopower and the politics of othering. All the collected essays draw on concepts of “biopolitics and othering to scrutinize the ambivalent mechanisms, modulations, and effects of biopower” (25). The contributors hail from “backgrounds in history, political science, theology, Romance studies, American studies, East Asian studies, anthropology, clinical education, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, literary studies, and media studies” (26). Such a multi-voiced interdisciplinary approach is a welcome invitation for exploring contrasting and at times conflicting views on the pandemic and the history of othering in states of medical emergencies – and this is the special achievement of this edited volume.

Without overarching thematic subdivisions, the introduction is followed by nine chapters and a final roundtable discussion addressing othering processes and biopolitics in various public health contexts. Thematically, however, the book is divided into two parts: literary and historical explorations on public health measurements and pandemics in the Indies, South America, as well as African, and East Asian contexts in the first half of the volume. In contrast, the second half of the book offers more cultural studies-oriented inquiries into individual aspects of the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

From a Romance literary studies perspective, Romano Radlwimmer seeks throughlines between Romanophone COVID-19 fiction and the othering mechanisms in “figurations like the favela” (37) by way of sixteenth-century colonial texts such as the Historia verdadera and the Florentine Codex. Radlwimmer compellingly illustrates “scenarios of coloniality and its practices of biopolitical othering” (48) and shows the long arc of coloniality’s power dynamics in a post-colonial pandemic context. Martin Gabriel maintains a medical historical focus on 18th-century smallpox outbreaks in Guatemala and Oaxaca in Mexico, with a particular interest in anti-contagion measures. His chapter offers an intriguing survey of existing research on the divergent strategies and their different approaches in either marking the colonized Other or promoting the “indigenous peoples’ self-identification as colonial subjects” (60). Similar othering strategies in East Asian communities are at the heart of Anke Scherer’s chapter on the hygienic measures taken to stop the Bubonic plague in Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century. By way of this historical case study, Scherer illustrates how mask-wearing and cleanliness are expressions of “a process of internalization and application of medical knowledge that is an integral part of the country’s [Japan’s] modernization process in the second half of the nineteenth century” (81). In “modern Japan” (ibid.), hygienic modernity is illustrated as an effective strategy in justifying Japan’s colonization of Taiwan and the inherent othering processes of the pre-modern Taiwanese, who clung to traditional Chinese medical concepts informed by, for example, the miasma theory. Claudia Jahnel’s chapter shies away from a more concrete case study and focuses instead on the historicity of othering, in a broader view from the perspective of postcolonial development studies. Her aim is to show how “from the beginning, the colonial Other was considered contagious and dangerous” (103). Jahnel offers a convincing theoretical account of throughlines in racist practices “as a consequence of colonial logics and practices” (101). Right at the end of the chapter, a surprising outlook on “COVID-19 […] as an opportunity for a fresh look at alternative concepts of time and future” (111) or rather “the uncertainty of the futures that were and are anticipated” (112) is suggested. Her chapter thus leaves hope for the ways postcolonial theory can signal “a polyphony of futures” (113), but it fails to illustrate how this can fall into place.

The first move towards a closer study of the COVID-19 pandemic and its sociocultural expressions is offered by Martin Tschiggerl. He looks at the German Querdenker movement and tries to offer “historical classification and contextualization” (119). His historical case study zooms in on anti-vaccination and naturopathic movements, from the German Empire to the heterogenous German Querdenker, by way of the Nazi-era Neue Deutsche Heilkunde. Following a convincing line of argumentation, Tschiggerl manages to illustrate continuities between those movements, especially in the mobilization of “anti-Semitic topoi and practices of othering” (130). Established paradigms from the colonial past also shape Danielle Heberle Viegas’s qualitative study of “commuting patterns” (139) of nature tourists during the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of the so-called Corona Paradise project, a marketing stunt by the beer company of the same name, and the expansion of gated communities in Brazil. Viegas understands these as “hygienist patterns entangled with the history of biopolitics in Brazil” (140). The resultant displacements are proven to connect with “the notion of tropicality in the country” (152) and thus the utopian ideals that fuel the ways “the leading elites […] seek to live in more affluent southern countries” (153). The pandemic made these landgrabbing inroads dramatically more palpable. Video games, digital memes, and the cultural phenomenon of “covibesity” – the mutually reinforced pandemics of “COVID-19 and obesity” (159) – are at the center of Martin Lüthe’s chapter. Using Lauren Berlant’s notion about “affective attachments of ‘cruel optimism’” (160), Lüthe looks at the “intersectional biopolitics of pandemic imaginaries” (162) from a disabilities studies (or more precisely: fat studies) point of view. The American Studies scholar successfully connects the obesity panic of the COVID 19 pandemic with the memefication of video gaming bodies and their connections to culturally established anxieties about “the future of the labor force of digital capitalism” (170). Staying with the digital mediation of bodies, Julia Eckel and Elisa Linseisen tackle a “crisis of copresence” during the pandemic, which foregrounds what they call compresence, “a term that raises notions of togetherness and community and also allows to analyze the pandemic impact on a media theoretical understanding of presence” (176). In their chapter, videoconferencing is identified as a tool of “self-othering” that delivers disappointments by simulating an “insufficient effect of presence” and reduces “‘togetherness’ […to] an aesthetic effect” (184). Their analysis calls effectively into question the much lauded assumed “democratization effects of Zoom” (192) in illustrating how this tool invokes “a potentiality of ‘otherness’” (194). Natalie Pielok closes off this more symptomatic reading of the pandemic and its othering mechanisms by shining a light on the eponymous “Necropolitics of Breathing”. In following Mbembe’s theorem, Pielok studies “the possible disruptive potentials of sound as paraontological unrest” (208) in light of the violence against Black bodies during the pandemic.

The volume concludes with an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion of the interconnectedness of the AIDS pandemic and COVID-19. Conceived of by Heike Steinhoff, the roundtable invites Simon Dickel, Roselyne Masamha, Lennon Mhishi and Florian Zitzelsberger to a more conversational exchange of prompts. This format explores possible futures of solidarity (225), the surge of anti-Asian racism, the use of oral history projects, “infrastructures of bordering and surveillance” (233), and experiences of privilege and difference with the possibility of mobility after the pandemic. As Simon Dickel notes, “[d]iseases affect human beings, and human beings are positioned along multiple axes of difference that need to be considered when addressing narratives of disease” (236). Especially with this achievement, the volume succeeds in bringing innovative formats to the table. In light of numerous publications reworking experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic, Steinhoff’s volume sticks out because of its interdisciplinary endeavor and its focused discussion of the various processes of othering. Even though, in part, the assemblage of diverse views has more of a survey character, it is particularly in the case studies together with the final contrasting discussion that this volume has its strongest moments. It is thus a necessary addition to the academic discourse about the pandemic and should not be absent from current cultural studies curricula.