The Fury of COVID-19: The Politics, Histories, and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus

Vinay Lal

tet 2020 · Pan Macmillan

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‘No one till now has written on the coronavirus against a cultural backdrop as vast as this—crossing centuries, continents and disciplines. This small book will outrun all the repetitive details of the pandemic with which we are being regularly bombarded’ ASHIS NANDY

‘Vinay Lal's 3-D analysis of the what and the why of the COVID experience, is a must read for grasping the finer lines of history, culture and literature invisibly woven into the global response to the pandemic’ GANESH DEVY

‘Lal writes with an ease that is a pleasure to read. This book shows how we can see ourselves in the crisis of COVID-19, in the mirrors of our common, shared but unfinished humanity’ SATENDRA NANDAN

There has never been anything like the Covid-19 pandemic in history. The world as we knew it has changed and the fury of Covid-19 has unleashed new forces, leaving us with an uncertain future. Though its fatality rate, in comparison with some previous epidemics such as the Black Death and the ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918-20, is strikingly low, and though it follows in the path of epidemics such as HIV, SARS, and Ebola, the coronavirus pandemic has produced outcomes which are altogether unprecedented. There is no other instance where the world was, over three months, brought to a standstill and the global economy shuttered. Most countries imposed a ‘lockdown’ and shut down their borders. In Italy and Spain, old people were left to die; in India, millions of migrants took to the road. In some countries rulers have assumed emergency powers. America, the world’s superpower, has been brought to its knees. The economic impact of the outbreak has been shattering; the environmental implications may yet be monumental. Investigating all these trends and the social, cultural, political, and philosophical aspects and implications of the pandemic, this book evaluates the fate of humankind and the earth in its wake.

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Vinay Lal is a cultural critic, blogger, public commentator, and Professor of History at UCLA. His seventeen authored and edited books include The Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the New Global Economy (2002), The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (2005), Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres (2009), the two-volume Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City (2013), and India and Civilizational Futures (2019). His intellectual interests include Indian history, global politics, historiography, popular culture, cinema, Gandhi and the politics of knowledge systems. He blogs at vinaylal.wordpress.com and at abplive.in and has a scholarly YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/dillichalo.