9 April 2020 — Tricontinental
Español
Shehzil Malik, Women in Public Places, 2012.
Dear Friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Days, weeks, months, an indeterminate amount of time as the world seems paralysed by the journey of SARS-CoV-2. The lack of certainty increases the anxiety. This virus, as Arundhati Roy writes, ‘seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow [of capital]. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest – thus far – in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt’. Lockdowns have now become almost universal, the planet more silent, the birdsong richer. Arundhati Roy’s cautionary ‘thus far’ is significant as the virus makes its circuit deep into zones of extreme deprivation, into the slumlands of Dharavi (India) and Cidade de Deus (Brazil).
(more…)
