Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Poetics in the Time of Pandemic. There Is Always Going to Be a Before and an After
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'This paper reflects on the impact of lockdown in Sydney on artists and creatives. We share our personal story of how we imagined our lives would be before COVID-19 and the changes we observed after entering in pandemic mode. Intertwining images taken with a mobile phone and text, we offer our observations on the evolving new language that appears around us in supermarkets, on walls and on the footpath: signs determining social interactions and affecting behaviour. We also touch on the idea of how writing can bring us home and make us feel closer to our languages and countries of origin. We underline theatre’s importance to tell stories from the time of the pandemic, when governments have been found wanting due to lack of care of the most vulnerable, in particular First Nations peoples. We reflect on the need for reinvention, accepting change, reassessing our human values and making present our links to the natural world. As the pandemic takes us from one stage to the next, we suggest that creativity is the one possible space that offers relief and hope and opens up possibilities to make sense of our new reality while contributing to a collective sense of humanity. (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon Portal The Great Dis-Equalizer : The Covid-19 Crisis Special Issue vol. 17 no. 1-2 2020 21058007 2020 periodical issue 'The COVID-19 crisis—as much economic and political as biological and affective—is a shared global event that made present the fragility of the world we live in. The crisis was quickly heralded as the onset of a new normal, as media and political elites rushed to reassure us that the pandemic was the ‘great equalizer’ and that we all had to come together in solidarity to defeat the spread of the virus. The tendency to universalize the lived experience of the crisis and living in lockdown by asking people to adapt to the ‘new normal’ by appealing to their sense of vulnerability and affective bonds, only served to underscore that the pandemic did not, in fact, affect people equally. This special issue of PORTAL presents diverse accounts of living in lockdown or through the pandemic in ways that significantly unsettle the narrative of the COVID-19 crisis as the ‘great equalizer.’ The collection hosts a series of self-reflective essays and cultural works that discuss the authors’ individual experiences of the COVID-19 crisis in diverse contexts, including Australia, South and North America, Asia, Africa and Europe. The collection of first-hand narrative accounts aims to contribute to reframing the pandemic as the ‘great dis-equalizer.’' (Nicholas Manganas and Alice Loda, A Borrowed Life: Introduction to the Great Dis-Equalizer—the COVID-19 Crisis editorial introduction) 2020
Last amended 25 May 2023 11:51:27
https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/7505/7654 Poetics in the Time of Pandemic. There Is Always Going to Be a Before and an Aftersmall AustLit logo Portal
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