Love and Resistance in a Time of COVID: American Studies and Utopic Critique

Black Lives Matter is really an affirmation for our people. It’s a love note for our people, but it’s also a demand. Even if we are going to get an indictment or a guilty verdict, that actually would not provide us with the larger vision of liberation that our communities actually deserve. . . . we deserve to live in a world where we are not murdered. We deserve to live in a world where there’s no impunity, but beyond this question of impunity there are all these structures that are actually doing a disservice to our people.

—Opal Tometi, cofounder of #BlackLivesMatter (2015)

Indicative of noncompliance, suggestive of opposition, and connotative of defiance, “resistance” is a seemingly aspirational, out-of-reach idea in the face of contemporary pandemic polemics, present-day white supremacist politics, and ongoing rights violations. Congruently, these dystopic actualities, dishearteningly experienced and rendered overwhelmingly visible in daily reports of “COVID-related deaths,” “big lie” recounts, “January 6th arrests,” “election integrity” disenfranchisement, and border-enforced catastrophe, render ostensibly impossible an affective turn to love. This current state of US affairs makes decidedly more relevant and correspondingly more accessible less optimistic emotions associated with grief and grievance. As further context and now-familiar recapitulation, in February 2022, an estimated 990,000 Americans have died from SARS-CoV-2. In the months following President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, four states (Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania) engaged ballot recounts that—despite costly expenditure and considerable labor—consistently reconfirmed a Biden presidential victory. Trump’s “big lie” allegation was by no means limited to challenges at the ballot box, as evidenced by the insurrectionist storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021; almost one year after those attacks, 725 individuals have been arrested and investigations concerning other participants is ongoing. And, as 2021 came to a close, nineteen states passed laws limiting access to the ballot.

To pessimistically surmise and depressingly summarize, the start of the second decade in the second millennium uncannily corresponds to what the sixteenth-century social philosopher Sir Thomas More characterized in his fictional satire, Utopia. Published in 1516, Utopia is not surprisingly a “product of its times” via genre, form, and thematic preoccupations. As parodic commentary and learned treatise, Utopia begins in a present marked by multiple civil wars abroad (in Europe), increased monarchical tyranny at home (as emblematized by King Henry VIII’s “divine right” rule of England), and border-crossing religious movement (specifically the Protestant Reformation). Such dystopic imaginaries function as evocative backdrop for the more hopeful visions that dominate More’s most famous work. Consonant with the imperial logics and “New World” vistas of the so-termed Age of Exploration, Utopia repeatedly accesses US namesake Amerigo Vespucci’s travel accounts as the basis for its fictive figurations of an isolated, uncharted island west of Europe.

In an exchange concerning the recently encountered Americas, More writes, “We did not ask if he had seen any monsters, for monsters have ceased to be news. There is never any shortage of horrible creatures who prey on human beings, snatch away their food, or devour whole populations; but examples of wise planning are not so easy to find.”

More’s allusion to “horrible creatures who prey on human beings” unintentionally yet pointedly encapsulates the contemporaneous institutionalization of the transatlantic slave trade and regimented settler colonialism in the Americas. Furthermore, despite the passage of almost five centuries and notwithstanding More’s non-US nationality, Utopia’s overt acknowledgment of presentist monstrosity and concomitant imagining of a nonmonstrous place encapsulates the vexed dimensions of twenty-first-century US nationhood while engendering alternative visions of love and resistance. On one level, such sanguine visions, dialogically connected to this year’s “Creativity within Revolt” conference theme, concomitantly serve as “past is prologue,” “present is epilogue,” and “future as afterword” foundations for this address’s confessedly ambitious consideration of American studies as previously imperial (and correspondingly imperiled) field, currently configured critical interdiscipline, and prospective site of utopic critique. On another level...