The Racial Geographies of Covid-19

Abstract

This article argues two things: the Covid-19 pandemic is, like many epidemics before it, characterized by a racialization of disease; that racialization has the effect of obfuscating the larger etiology of viruses, an etiology that is extended ecologically and includes the circuits of capital accumulation. As I seek to show, these two points become apparent in the ways of publicly imagining and narrating the pandemic, which includes the modes of knowledge of virology and epidemiology. Knowledge of the smallest particles, of germs, is bound up in politically urgent ways with racialized conceptions of much larger geopolitical units.

Keywords

• Covid-19
• pandemic
• racialization
• race
• capitalism
• epidemiology