Pandemics disrupt social rhythms. The distancing of interactions, converging of home and workplace, digitizing of relationships, etc. that have accompanied the ongoing pandemic represent new rhythms and mnemonic schisms that will likely separate before, during, and after COVID worlds in the collective memory. The inherent mediation of these experiences in modernity leaves behind digital ether which shape how history will remember the moment. In this era of accelerated globalization and heightened inequality, the central question to consider for a memory-studies analysis of the present is which experiences, beliefs and narratives will shape the dominant memory discourse of the future?
Collective memory before COVID inadequately commemorated the global pandemics of the past. The West’s historical emphasis on the World Wars in the early twentieth century has vastly reduced the memory world of the Spanish Flu to scientific communities. Rather than inform our everyday expectations and equip us to cope with the present pandemic, lessons learned from the Spanish Flu failed to form part of the dominant memory discourse in pre-COVID times. The memory studies approach deconstructs this phenomenon as a factor of lacking discreteness, narrativity, tellability, evaluation, and archives. These tenets can be observed as indexes of the historicity of a moment in real time and will serve as the main points of analysis for this memory-studies framework.
Lacking adequate collective memory of global pandemics, the initial outbreak of COVID triggered a resurgence of xenophobic memory worlds. Western leaders invoked motifs from World War II in public addresses to rally their nations in the face of crisis. Nations in the Global South reported colonial legacies of viral infection fueling anti-European sentiment. The U.S. reports heightened cases of Sinophobia and racial violence since March 2019. Nationalism and otherization became dominant narratives in the analogous memory worlds invoked to frame the collective experience during COVID-19.
Though the inevitable process of narrativizing the present moment still vies with these antagonisms from the top-down, there remain traces of optimism today suggesting that collective memory after COVID could permanently alter our social rhythms to be more ecologically aware and interconnected from the bottom-up. The current global deceleration has not only reimagined ontologies of the human-animal-microbe connection in deep time, but also subjected the entire global population to a profound common experience. COVID-19’s viral memory is discrete, as it is keenly distinguishable from other viral agents in the public eye–lending significant agency to the masses to shape the narrative around the lived experience of this distinct episode in history. This narrative gains tellability as major life moments continue to intersect this pandemic, caching COVID worlds in the anecdotes that shape generational memory. These worlds are likewise cached in the digital ether of COVID’s mediated experiences, which could lend unique evaluative capabilities to the collective memory in hindsight with such unprecedented volumes of archival data. Though each of these tenets exists in tension with the antagonisms of our flawed global systems of power; the discreteness, narrativity, tellability, evaluation, and archives observable from the earliest moments of the COVID pandemic have broadened the horizon of possibilities to imagine a reinvigoration of relationality in anthropological and generational memory worlds that outlasts xenophobic rhetoric in our collective memories to inform a brighter post-pandemic future.
Reference:
Erll, A. “Afterword: Memory Worlds in Times of Corona.” Memory Studies.
2020; 13(5): 861-874.
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