This book argues that the catastrophe of COVID-19 provided a momentous time for groups, institutions, and states to reassess their worldviews and relationship to the entire world. Following multiple case studies across dozens of countries throughout the course of the pandemic, this book is a timely contribution to cultural knowledge about the pandemic and the viral politics at the heart of it.
Mapping the various forms of global consciousness and connectivity engendered by the crisis, the book offers the framework of "viral worlding," defined as viral forms of relationality, becoming, and communication. It demonstrates how worlding or world-making processes accelerated with the novel coronavirus. New emergent forms of being global "went viral" to address conditions of inequality as well as forge possibilities for societal transformation. Considering the tumult wrought by the pandemic, Bui analyzes progressive movements for democracy, abolition, feminism, environmentalism, and socialism against the world-shattering forces of capitalism, authoritarianism, racism, and militarism. Focusing on ways the pandemic disproportionately impacted marginalized communities, particularly in the Global South, this book juxtaposes the closing of their lifeworlds and social worlds by hegemonic global actors with increased collective demands for freedom, mobility, and justice by vulnerable people.
The breadth and depth of the book thus provides students, scholars, and general readers with critical insights to understanding the world(s) of COVID-19 and collective efforts to build better new ones.
Introduction: Quagmire, Quarantine, Query
1. Global Crisis: Anthropocene, Animal, Antibody
2. The Foreign Virus: Panic, Propaganda, Prison
3. Flatten the Curve: Control, Capitalism, Community
4. Physical Distancing: Removal, Racism, Refugee
5. Frontline Labor: Service, Solidarity, Socialism
6. Coronapocalypse: Monster, Mystic, Machine
Epilogue: Pandemic, Planet, Pedagogy
Biography
Long T. Bui is Associate Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine, USA. His research explores digital media and popular culture, global Asias, Asian American studies, cultural geography, critical education studies, critical refugee studies, history and memory, race, gender, and sexuality. He is the author of Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory (2018) and Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton (2021).
"A remarkable contribution to the growing field of pandemic studies, Viral World tracks forms of relations constitutive of COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Viral worlding’ is the conceptual frame that illuminates interlaced relationalities, in a book that bridges international politics, theories of global society, and interdisciplinary studies of media."
Bishnupriya Ghosh, Professor of English and Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, and author of The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (2023)
"Rather than present a linear narrative of the pandemic or case studies cropped around national borders, Long T. Bui’s Viral World performs the looping disjointed sense of time emblematic of this crisis. The book ambitiously traverses the world and jumps scales like the coronavirus itself. It is a daring holistic effort that aims to capture the multiple dimensions of COVID-19."
Li Zhang, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies, Amherst College, USA, and author of The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism (2021)
