The coronavirus pandemic has inundated the globe with discussions of time. Incubation periods, contagion intervals, exponential growth curves, hospitalization timelines, belated government responses, supply chain delays, limited store hours, paused economies, weeks of quarantine, months of isolation, years to develop and distribute the vaccines, decades of consequences, and millions of lives cut tragically short. These temporalities are ubiquitous and alarming but not distributed or experienced equally (Chirindo et al.). Most of Singapore’s early cases stemmed from overcrowded foreign workers’ dormitories where social distancing was impossible and workers were surveilled by police 24 hours a day (Ng). The Navajo Nation struggled to adequately protect their people through routinized hand washing because many did not have access to clean running water (Lee). Formerly colonized African nations like Zimbabwe and the Central African Republic lacked sufficient medical supplies and expertise to respond in a timely manner to large outbreaks (Baker). And it quickly became apparent that COVID-19 disproportionately took the lives of Black Americans due to the accumulated force of decades of systemic racism (Kendi). Even the ways that nations collectively mourned, or failed to mourn, these untimely deaths become politicized events that marked some bodies as worthy of remembrance and others as forgettable (McElya). The unequal power regimes that pervade healthcare systems, policy decisions, political structures, and economic activities distort the temporal frameworks that give shape to our daily interactions and form an oppressive dynamic that is further amplified in a global pandemic. Crucially, rhetoric operates at this nexus of time and power, both as a tool for facilitating these injustices and as the inventive means to critique, resist, and rectify them. In response to these inequities, rhetorical studies must better account for the multiplicity and asymmetricality of the temporal regimes that structure rhetorical relations and, at the same time, work toward articulating and enacting more just temporal frameworks.
Resisting Temporal Regimes, Imagining Just Temporalities