On Covid 19, U.S. Uprisings, and Black Lives: A Mandate to Regenerate All Our Relations
A stealthy virus, COVID 19 has evidenced how racial, geopolitical, territorial, social, temporal, and many other boundaries have been agitated to a catastrophic degree by the "interlocking powers of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and capitalism " A biopower that has targeted neglected populations from refugees to people living along and at the borders to residents of nations with strong military and prison industrial complexes, and beyond COVID 19 continues to require an interruption of coloniality, policing, and violence In order to trace the force of such lasting power, Neetu Khanna urges us to turn to the visceral as a logic of decolonization To her, the visceral can become a site for recognizing and undoing trauma, for it allows the centering of "the somatic life of the body as a fundamental site of colonial subjugation and corporeal control " In other words, engaging with the visceral requires both consciousness and liberation to begin with the body: its reflexes, limits, instincts, responses, and needs