{"id":101604,"date":"2020-10-30T23:19:17","date_gmt":"2020-10-30T20:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism\/"},"modified":"2020-10-30T23:19:17","modified_gmt":"2020-10-30T20:19:17","slug":"in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"#In a new book series, Canadian critics grapple with COVID-19 and racism"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_84 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-custom ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<label for=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a239aacd053a\" class=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-label\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/label><input type=\"checkbox\"  id=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a239aacd053a\" checked aria-label=\"Toggle\" \/><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism\/#Misfortune_and_injustice_collide\" >Misfortune and injustice collide<\/a><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-4' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-4'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism\/#Mark_Kingwell\" >Mark Kingwell<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-3\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism\/#Co-opting_the_anti-racism_uprising\" >Co-opting the anti-racism uprising<\/a><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-4' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-4'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-4\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism\/#Andray_Domise\" >Andray Domise<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-5\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism\/#Property_is_the_root_of_discrimination\" >Property is the root of discrimination<\/a><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-4' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-4'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-6\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism\/#Rinaldo_Walcott\" >Rinaldo Walcott<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-7\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism\/#What_the_apocalypse_looks_like\" >What the apocalypse looks like<\/a><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-4' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-4'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-8\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism\/#Andrew_Potter\" >Andrew Potter<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<p>&#8220;<strong>#In a new book <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/watch-movies-tv-seriess\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"8\" title=\"Watch Movies &amp; TV Series\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">series<\/a>, Canadian critics gr<a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/download-scripts-themes-apps\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"9\" title=\"Download Scripts &amp; Themes &amp; Apps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">app<\/a>le with COVID-19 and racism<\/strong>&#8221;<\/p>\n<div>\n                                                                        <em>Inspired by 18th-century<\/em> <em>political pamph<\/em><em>lets such as Voltaire\u2019s <\/em><em>Treatise on Tolerance<\/em><em>, an attack on religious fanaticism that became a French bestseller after the 2015 <\/em><em>Charlie Hebdo<\/em><em> massacre, publisher Dan Wells is launching an ongoing series of book-length essays on contemporary issues, called Field Notes. His prestigious, Windsor-Ont.-based literary press, Biblioasis, is starting with four works addressing COVID-19 and the George Floyd protests: philosopher Mark Kingwell\u2019s<\/em> On Risk <em>(Oct. 13); writer\/activist Andray Domise\u2019s <\/em>On Killing a Revolution <em>(Dec. 10); Black studies professor Rinaldo Walcott\u2019s <\/em>On Property<em> (Jan. 19); and author\/academic Andrew Potter\u2019s <\/em>On Decline<em> (March 9). The following essays explain what the authors set out to do with their \u201cfield notes.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Misfortune_and_injustice_collide\"><\/span>Misfortune and injustice collide<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<h4><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Mark_Kingwell\"><\/span>Mark Kingwell<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h4>\n<p>I started thinking and writing about risk before the global COVID-19 pandemic, but the health crisis added new urgency to the subject. Suddenly odds of infection, numbers of dead, infection rates and flattened curves became part of everyday discourse. This particular risk arose as a <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/social-mediaa\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"1\" title=\"Social Media\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">media<\/a> spectacle, as well as a global affliction. It also offered a rare opportunity to rethink our ideas of justice.<\/p>\n<p>Risks are often considered natural and hence mute or indifferent. A hurricane or a pandemic does not, by itself, discriminate between victims. But identifiable populations suffer more than others, and not for idle or unchangeable reasons. Risk is always political, driven by everything from where and when you live, your gender and skin colour, and how much status or wealth you enjoy (or don\u2019t). Risk forces us into the territory where misfortune and injustice collide.<\/p>\n<p>Risk is a fact of daily life; it <em>is<\/em> life. Mostly we ignore it, or make peace with it, or plan some kind of protection. But these coping opportunities are likewise unevenly distributed. That\u2019s why those \u201cWe\u2019re all in this together\u201d signs are so annoying. Sure, yes, in one trivial sense we\u2019re all susceptible to a disease that does not care about who or what we are. In reality, that disease has drastically uneven effects. That slogan is a bit like saying \u201cAll lives matter\u201d as a reply to \u201cBlack lives matter.\u201d It simply misses the critical point.<\/p>\n<p>The COVID-19 pandemic altered the existential terrain but, more importantly, revealed rotten social conditions. Right now everyone is thinking about risk in a top-of-mind way. Usually you can forget about the risk of dying in a plane crash, say, if you recall that you\u2019re more likely to expire taking a bath. Once the mortal questions of risk are raised, however, it becomes hard to go on in any complacent way.<\/p>\n<p>We sometimes call the forces behind cosmic uncertainty \u201cthe laws of chance.\u201d They aren\u2019t really laws, just hard-won, limited and only partly accurate <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/general\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"3\" title=\"General\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">general<\/a>izations about life. Thinking critically about risk reminds us that flattening the curve of human suffering, creating a better future, is an infinite task.<\/p>\n<p><em>Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor for <\/em>Harper\u2019s Magazine<em>. His 12 books of political and cultural theory include the bestseller <\/em>The World We Want<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Co-opting_the_anti-racism_uprising\"><\/span>Co-opting the anti-racism uprising<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<h4><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Andray_Domise\"><\/span>Andray Domise<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h4>\n<p>The 2020 protests against police brutality, possibly the largest and most widespread protest movement in American history, proceeded with the fury of voices too long unheard. The demand was simple: abolish the police. And the reason was clear: Black Lives Matter. At a grassroots level, the protests caught on like wildfire, rocking white America back on its heels and, for a time, there was a distinct possibility that this was it\u2014the uprising that would finally pull down the decadent structure upholding American imperialism, capitalism and white supremacy had finally arrived.<\/p>\n<p>And then, corporate America arrived to disrupt, co-opt and confuse the message. On Tuesday, June 2, 2020, companies across the globe posted messages of support for the movement for Black lives\u2014in some cases redesigning their social media pages to feature a black square in place of their corporate logo, in others redesigning their user interfaces to point people to music and film associated with Black culture, or posting messages of solidarity.<\/p>\n<p>There was no message in support of police abolition, no initiative to release protesters facing serious federal charges for their participation in the uprising, and most of all, no agreement that the greed of corporate America, the reactionary stalwart of bourgeois society, had itself contributed to the crisis through union-busting, neighbourhood gentrification, exploitative labour practices and extractive relationships with the Global South. By cloaking itself in the veneer of social responsibility, Blackout Tuesday was corporate America\u2019s attempt to not only co-opt the message of the protests, but to enlist celebrities, politicians and the corporate boardroom to snuff out the movement through contradictory messaging and what one activist called the \u201cNGO-ification\u201d of legitimate protest.<\/p>\n<p>This campaign of co-optation has its precedents in North America, including Occupy Wall Street and the African aid movement. It is essential to resist the way such movements are hijacked, diffused into the pathways of conscious consumer choice and electoral politics\u2014and, ultimately, absorbed into the bourgeois mainstream. The moment celebrities and politicians began repeating protest slogans, pairing them with aphorisms like \u201ctangible change\u201d and \u201csystemic reform,\u201d is when the process of co-optation began.<\/p>\n<p><em>Andray Domise is a Toronto-based writer and journalist. He is a <\/em>Maclean\u2019s<em> contributing editor and has spoken on numerous TV panels about the way race is lived in Canada.<\/em><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Property_is_the_root_of_discrimination\"><\/span>Property is the root of discrimination<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<h4><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Rinaldo_Walcott\"><\/span>Rinaldo Walcott<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h4>\n<p>The campaign to defund the police is all the rage these days but is embedded in a deeper set of political demands. There is an urgent need to transform our society beyond its 18th- and 19th-century roots. Abolition is the name these demands go by.<\/p>\n<p>The history of Black enslavement is one that gives Black people a doubled insight on confinement and property, since we were once property ourselves. Our special relationship to property is forged in our resistance to enslavement. We have been, as Fred Moten, the African-American theorist, termed it, \u201claboring commodities.\u201d A significant element of Black people\u2019s resistance to this status culminated in the destruction of property as part of an effort to make our enslavement less profitable and, eventually, useless. And it worked. The breaking of tools, the burning of crops and housing, the sabotage of mills and other large equipment on plantations constituted a counterattack on slavery that was as important as both rebellions and legislation to emancipation in the Americas.<\/p>\n<p>The condemnation of rioting and looting, such as recently occurred during the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests, needs to be explored. Why is it that the sight of a burning building elicits more horror than that of a dying Black man? Why has looting never been understood as what it is, a redistribution of wealth and a rejection of the social systems that lead to gross inequalities and injustice?<\/p>\n<p>At the most basic level, land as property, which is the foundation of modern wealth, sits at the root of contemporary policing and its relationship to Black communities. Rethinking our relationship to property of all sorts is the only way we can actually achieve justice. Black people moved from property to personhood through an abolitionist movement. The abolition of property would rearrange our contemporary lives to produce a more compassionate world.<\/p>\n<p><em>Rinaldo Walcott is a professor of Black studies at the University of Toronto\u2019s Women and Gender Institute. His latest, co-authored book is <\/em>BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom.<\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"What_the_apocalypse_looks_like\"><\/span>What the apocalypse looks like<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<h4><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Andrew_Potter\"><\/span>Andrew Potter<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h4>\n<p>The death of David Bowie in the first week of 2016 was a bad start to a year that quickly got a whole lot worse on every major front. The war in Syria, the Zika virus, terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, the Brexit vote\u2014and then the election of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n<p>Bowie\u2019s death also seemed to mark a turning point in our cultural self-understanding. As a popular meme had it, \u201cI\u2019m not saying that David Bowie was holding the fabric of the universe together but *gestures broadly at everything.*\u201d The end-of-year wraps all declared 2016 as \u201cthe worst . . . ever,\u201d but every year since has also felt like the worst ever, to the point where suggesting this was the apocalypse soon became something of a social media clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n<p>As a lark I started collecting frightening <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/news\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"2\" title=\"News\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">news<\/a> items and posting them on a Twitter thread under the heading, \u201cthis sounds like something that would play in the background during the opening scenes of an apocalyptic thriller.\u201d It was mostly black humour stuff, like the story of the tool-wielding monkeys who were attacking tourists in India. People started sending me links, and a few of them went casually viral. It was fun.<\/p>\n<p>But when COVID-19 hit, joking about the apocalypse stopped being fun. Partly because I was simply scared for my family, but also because I started to wonder <em>if this is what the apocalypse looks like<\/em>. We tend to think of The End as something spectacular, like zombies walking the streets. What if it is not one big event but a long series of smaller ones?<\/p>\n<p>This is close to what the writer William Gibson calls the \u201cJackpot,\u201d a centuries-long process of decline that is just the working out of the deep logic of our civilization. We are in decline, and as much as we are consumed by Trump, the culture wars, even the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to realize that these barely rate as sideshows against the broader forces at play.<\/p>\n<p><em>Andrew Potter is an associate professor at McGill University\u2019s Max Bell School of Public Policy. His books include <\/em>The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p><em>This article appears in print in the November 2020 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s <em>magazine with the headline, \u201cBurning issues.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine <a rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/secure.macleans.ca\/loc\/MME\/head_subscribe\">here<\/a>.<\/em><br \/>\n<span class=\"ctx-article-root\"><!-- --><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">For forums sites go to <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/forum.buradabiliyorum.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>If you want to read more News articles, you can visit our <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/general\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">General category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: black;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/culture\/books\/in-a-new-book-series-canadian-critics-grapple-with-covid-19-and-racism\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;#In a new book series, Canadian critics grapple with COVID-19 and racism&#8221; Inspired by 18th-century political pamphlets such as Voltaire\u2019s Treatise on Tolerance, an attack on religious fanaticism that became a French bestseller after the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre, publisher Dan Wells is launching an ongoing series of book-length essays on contemporary issues, called Field&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":101605,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/FIELD-NOTES-BOOK-SERIES-SEPT30-750x422.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22974,1545,1356,67806,21406],"class_list":["post-101604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-canada","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-editors-picks","tag-systemic-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101604\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}