ImmUnity and CommUnity
The terms “community” and “immunity” on both local and global scales have become semantically interdependent with unparalleled currency. They have triggered debates about stopping the propelling cycle of immunization that claims to benefit the community and raised concerns about the pressing need to maintain naturally invulnerable societies. Prominent among the theorists who highlight the close and problematic connection between the two notions is Roberto Esposito (2012), who posits that “community” points to difference and that “immunity” designates relation/contagion. The ensuing tension between immunization processes and the communal or the collective thus nourishes the need to define immunization in terms larger than the natural reliance on antibodies that fight external viruses or other threats. The unprecedented interest in the protection of life stems from the growing risk of infectious elements that infiltrate not only the individual body, but also other realms including the body politic and the social body. Each system is forced under the power exercised by globalization and the modern nation-states to close off within its protective boundaries.
As a result, distancing measures in the public sphere do risk fostering separation; however, they cement human bonds as people have come to realize the necessity of preserving their sense of commUnity. A need thus arises to bring into focus the repercussions of distancing bodies and their effects on such naturally interactive facets that are “healthy” for our coexistence as subjects, societies and cultures. Lockdowns, or their imminent recurrence, have in fact set social interactions apart in the spaces that are supposed to promote our commonality as humans. The pervasiveness of immunity as a concept has therefore triggered long-running debates that attest to the shift from the demands for recognition to the ethico-political implications of preserving life. Just as attempts at sustaining life claim to guarantee the individuals` security to keep the community safe, they compromise the very sense of relationality they purport to defend when divisions erupt from within. Procedures relating to administering life through distancing measures end up fostering the forces of separation that warrant our examination of the workings of identity when questions of justice, freedom, otherness and representation are invoked. When sovereign power is instituted through the exclusionary inclusion of the community members who have come to be construed along alterity lines, it becomes all the more pressing to redirect our critical lens to the ways in which immunization takes its toll on the innermost details of the everyday.
Accordingly, this edited collection seeks to raise the following questions linked to the two aforementioned concepts: How do “immUnity” and “commUnity” unveil themselves when we probe into the workings of identity? What connections, and by extension, which values have societies adopted to wrestle with the restrictions of the local/global lockdowns? Has the pandemic fostered mutual closeness or fragmentation between local and global communities? How have literary artefacts investigated the effects of pandemics on cultures? How has the pandemic enhanced the sense of collectivity at home and in the digital space? This volume solicits proposals which cover but are not limited to:
- Pandemics, globalization and the modern nation-state
- The effects of pandemics on individuals, societies and cultures
- Immunization, text and border-crossing
- Immunity, community and identity
§ Immunity, ethics and politics
§ The biopolitics of immunization
§ Pandemics in literature and culture
- Pandemics and digital humanities
- Immunity, community and media
- Community-based Learning
- Immunity, tradition and innovation