Introduction: Planetary Woolf

Abstract

WE WRITE THIS INTRODUCTION IN A time of global crisis, as the Covid-19 pandemic has closed regional and national borders. Almost simultaneously, the Black Lives Matter movement has ignited global protests against racist police brutality. Although the pandemic has separated people physically from one another, while placing the health of first responders and essential workers at risk, the demand for social justice has drawn many people into the streets. From anti-government protests in Hong Kong to the thousands of global demonstrations in support of BLM, the demand for social justice crosses borders and creates activist communities even in the midst of unprecedented global crises. New technologies allow us to create digital communities and new forms of sociability, even in the wake of the many cancelled or postponed in-person events. In difficult times we, as scholars and common readers of Virginia Woolf, turn to her writing to help us make sense of the complexities of the present moment, particularly as we negotiate the relationships between politics and art and between sociability and solitude in our daily lives....