Omschrijving
Belinda Kong examines the Chinese popular culture archive of the 2003 SARS pandemic, from music to television to humor, to show how Chinese people survived the pandemic through practices of community, care, and love rather than solely narrating pandemic life in terms of crisis.
“As we still come to grips with the COVID-19 pandemic, Belinda Kong’s SARS Stories provides a powerful testament to the ways in which cultural discourse—fiction, film, and digital media—shape our understanding of pandemic narratives. In the process, Kong reveals the often tenuous line between the truths conveyed through ‘fiction’ and the lies that sometimes haunt the ‘facts.’”
“As our contemporary pandemic commonsense swings from jingoism to denialism, reading Belinda Kong’s incredibly learned and daring book has been not just enlightening but, dare I say, therapeutic. Kong has taught me to think anew about pandemic epistemologies in relation to race, empire, and power while giving name to my own desire for ‘pandemic prosociality.’ Written with warmth, curiosity, and verve, SARS Stories will speak to anyone and everyone who has tried to make sense of the past several years of pandemic life.”
Belinda Kong is Professor of Asian Studies and English at Bowdoin College and author of Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture.