“Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.“
― Arundhati Roy, The Pandemic is a Portal (April 3rd, 2020)
This blog will slowly develop into a space of conversations; a space where I will interview scholars, activists, artists and different critically minded people about what kind of breathable futures they imagine and hope for in the context of current pandemic .
“There is not occupation of territory on the one hand and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.”
― Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (1965, p. 65)
“Having space to breathe, or being able to breathe freely is … an aspiration. With breath comes imagination. With breath comes possibility. If queer politics is about freedom, it might simply mean the freedom to breathe.”
― Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (2010, p. 120)