Fourteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

The Coronavirus exposed our ugliest racism. This paper aims to address this racism in relation to the “public”, through two questions: (1) How has the event of COVID produced a biopolitics that transformed the manner minorities negotiate public space? (2) What can spatial practices do to enable minorities to gain more capacity to act, move, and speak in public spaces? The first question may be approached by looking at COVID’s space-time. COVID racism’s “space” manifested most apparently in Pacific Rim cities: From Vancouver to San Francisco to Sydney, Asians are conflated assigned a viral body. In Southeast Asia, migrant workers represent contagion. Wuhanites are ostracised in other parts of China. COVID racism’s history ties into (neo)-colonialism and even an altered Sino-Centrism, and is inseparable from the Transpacific economic and information flows that produced spatial inequity and anxiety over changing perceptions of home. The second question requires us to think how spatial practices relate to long-term ongoing conflicts and inequitable power relations in the Pacific Rim. More than codify a set of behaviour, these spatial practices may have to be experimental to counter the way racism itself evolves along with the Transpacific flows and reterritorialisation. Rather than retreat to insular localisms, it is to experiment on how nuances between different anti-racist struggles across the Pacific can form new commonalities. The above two questions spur another question: How can this paper be a platform for dialogues that can enable the formation of new bodies, actions and concepts to counter racialised public spaces?