Editorial Comment:Pathologies, Performance, and Promiscuous Care Laura Edmondson Susan Sontag's "kingdom of the sick" is ever expanding.1 This special issue on pathologies and performance not only speaks to the COVID-19 pandemic, but was also inspired by my research on how theatre artists and cultural workers in eastern and central Africa confront the insidiousness of state neglect as manifested in chronic and infectious illness and disability. My thinking has been profoundly shaped by their insistence that illness and disease serve as vectors of a stealthy state violence linked to colonial and racist histories. How to grasp the capaciousness of Sontag's kingdom while also attending to these histories? Who is recognized as a member of that kingdom (with its attendant rights and resources), and who languishes in invisibility and neglect? How to transform a system that depends upon state recognition in order to access care? How might theatre and performance contribute to that transformation? Other fields have readily borrowed from theatre and performance studies in their conceptualizations of illness. As Mia Levenson notes in this issue, historian Charles Rosenberg famously argued that epidemics follow a linear dramaturgical structure that adheres to a sense of bounded time.2 In a similar vein, literary scholar Patricia Wald has identified an "outbreak narrative," that is, a "formulaic plot" that begins with identification, proceeds to mass panic and mayhem, and ends with triumphant containment.3 As theatre and performance studies scholars are acutely aware, though, linear plots and narratives domesticate exceedingly complex contexts. Rosenberg's and Wald's influential concepts speak to a privileged understanding of epidemics as singular crises, thus bypassing communities and geographical regions where the boundary between endemic and epidemic is far more unstable and crises are mundane. As medical anthropologist Julie Livingston points out in reference to the zoonotic origins of COVID-19 on a warming planet: "Any dramaturgy that begins in Wuhan takes the epidemic out of the larger flow of historical time. It separates this event as somehow distinct from the massive fires that engulfed Australia …, the Ebola epidemic of 2014, the ongoing Chennai water crisis, or Hurricane Katrina."4 Within contexts of such magnitude, closure is a tantalizing myth—pandemics are never past. Like afterlives of violence, they retreat only to resurface as a new variant. Three of the four essays (Anderson and Ybarra; Gindt; and Nereson) focus on the HIV and AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and thus provide historical specificity to this special issue. These essays eschew the comforts of what Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez calls "nostalgAIDS" and instead ask the poignant question: What do the memories and [End Page ix] losses of the 1980s mean within the context of COVID-19?5 The authors are cautious about drawing too-easy parallels between the two pandemics, citing, for example, Marc Arthur's point that "there was never a race for a cure or vaccine to end AIDS like there is for COVID-19" (Anderson and Ybarra; Nereson); they also emphasize that the HIV and AIDS pandemic is ongoing.6 But the callousness on vivid display in the United States over the past two years, which ensured that COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, the elderly, the immunocompromised, the incarcerated, and the poor, recalls the cruelty of public health policies during the first wave of HIV and AIDS. It is also significant that both pandemics have been marked by a refusal to mourn on a public scale. As over a million US deaths from COVID-19 are glossed over, I am reminded of what David Eng has described in this journal as "the loss—indeed, the refusal—of a public language to mourn a seemingly endless series of excoriated, dead young men" who succumbed to HIV and AIDS.7 Today, untold millions are grieving the loss of their loved ones from COVID-19. Loss is another kind of kingdom—more capacious than we could ever imagine and one we carry in our hearts. What languages might help to clarify, articulate, and remember the depths of that grief? To that end, this issue serves as a testament to the lessons learned from HIV and AIDS. The...
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