Radical Times, Continuities in Struggle

Abstract

Radical Times, Continuities in Struggle Joo Ok Kim (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Mike Murase / GIDRA. The recent AMSJ series On Teaching in the Time of COVID-19 asks how American Studies and related fields attend to this moment of crisis. We might begin with the #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus movement in France, in which Asian-raced peoples digitally highlight their resistance against pandemic-related verbal and physical assaults that associate them with the novel coronavirus. And we might begin there to perceive the transnational histories that inform this crisis. Doing [End Page 39] so discloses overlapping colonialisms in Asia, calling for U.S. military aggressions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (in both known and "secret" wars) to be examined alongside the presence of differentiated Asian diasporas in France and in the United States.1 Learning from #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus, a call to uncouple the contemporary conflation of racial "other" with the virus in this time, also requires the uncoupling from centuries of discourses affixing disease to differentially racialized human bodies, which is also this time. Arundhati Roy's recent naming of the pandemic as a portal for a different future and Saidiya Hartman's meditations on the dramatically disproportioned death toll—"an exclusive tally of loss" accounting for American lives lost in the U.S. wars in Vietnam and Korea—further invites us to consider how the time of "in the Time of COVID-19" registers globally.2 What Hartman calls an exclusive tally of loss, initially observing the media's implicit refusal to consider the deaths of Asian peoples in the wars, registers differently with the current intensified scale of COVID-19 deaths among Black, Indigenous, and Latinx populations. The U.S. wars in Vietnam and Korea, the refugee diasporas from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to the United States, and the militarized logic underwriting the migrations, are also entangled with the police murder of George Floyd. Tou Thao, the Hmong American police officer who stood by as Derek Chauvin killed Floyd, is entwined in this history. The "police action" known as the Korean War, which inaugurated the U.S. security state and extended the infrastructure of militarization to police, is interwoven in this history. The Korean War's imprint on Black communities, and intensified Jim Crow policing throughout the 1950s, is linked to this history. On Toni Morrison's Korean War novel, Home, A. J. Yumi Lee observes Morrison's expansive thinking which "places the contemporary idioms of police and prison abolition and transformative justice in a broader historical and imaginative frame," such that unended, ongoing, endless wars are not conceptually exempted from global protests demanding racial justice.3 Perhaps On Teaching in the Time of COVID-19 asks us, as we negotiate the pedagogical imperatives of teaching, and of learning, to consider the time—refracted, recursive, anomalous—this virus punctures. One example calling attention to this time is the "living data" of COVID Black, a Black digital humanities project which tasks community members and scholars to actively catalogue critical statistics and social stories of Black diasporic communities.4 The urgency of this digital project grasps not only the structured public health inequities for Black communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, but also the renewed global public attention to centuries [End Page 40] of anti-Black violence, an iteration of Hartman's "The Death Toll." As Dorothy Roberts and Ruha Benjamin remind us, in studying the years, decades, centuries of surveillance in this nation-state, whether codified as technology or not, is the application of emerging methods to further the suppression of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian bodies.5 Their scholarship has also informed an open letter by critical public health scholars opposing public facial recognition technology, in response to the novel coronavirus in this time.6 The critical sweep of public health they define is broad, as the facial misrecognition impact of such technology represents an innovated continuation of racist policing and criminalization. The state's logic of racialized criminality, alongside its willful, malignant articulation of racialized disposability, is compounded in the current COVID-19 outbreak at San Quentin, a California prison that has incarcerated—politically quarantined—Black revolutionaries such as George Jackson. The accompanying image, a...