Rupture and Return: Introduction

Abstract

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• Rupture and Return:Introduction
• Catherine Conybeare

I più dimenticano che quando si esce dal tunnel si esce in un altro versante e in una diversa valle, non nella stessa valle e nello stesso versante dai quali si era partiti. Ignorare questa ovvia verità vuol dire rifiutare ogni e qualsiasi insegnamento contenuto nella crisi.

Most people forget that when you come out of a tunnel, you emerge on a different slope in a different valley, not the same valley and the same slope from which you had set out. Ignoring this obvious truth means refusing any and every lesson contained in the crisis.

in june 2020, chiara gamberale published a book, Come il mare in un bicchiere, that puts on record the uncertainty, the fears, the striving for connection of the first couple of months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book presents a set of freewheeling conversations between the eponymous "Chiara" and her friends; they are interspersed with verbal snapshots of particular moments and thoughts, from one of which my epigraph is taken. I picked up the book at a train station in November 2022 and read it at a gulp. It reminded me of sensations that had become buried as the pandemic restrictions wore on: fear, yes, and agitation, and (paradoxically) sometimes a transfigured calm, but above all an urgent sense that nothing would be the same again. I have read nothing else that captured that moment so well.

Perhaps the image of emerging from a tunnel into a new landscape is obvious, but I found it very striking. (I was reading the book as I traveled down the Ligurian coast, going in and out of tunnels every few minutes.) That was exactly how I had felt in the solitude of lockdown: that those of us fortunate enough to come through the pandemic would recommit to each other and to the world in ways that recognized a whole new landscape. We would beautify that landscape and—as it were—make it sustainable. The protests after the death of George Floyd and the reopening of a wide conversation [End Page 303] around race that should never have been closed were part of the urgency in the new landscape. So was a fresh awareness among many of the needs of the neurodivergent or physically disabled. So was a renewed appreciation for the environment, the beauties of birdsong and of the seasons. Initiatives around social and environmental justice were eagerly taken up, not least by those in our own discipline. Surely the view when we emerged from the tunnel would be of a more socially equitable and environmentally conscious society? Surely we could continue that momentum?

Of course, that is not how it happened. Pandemic restrictions went on for far longer than anyone but the epidemiologists had anticipated. Most of us endured them with either too much family life around us or too little. Almost all of us experienced pandemic-related loss. Almost all of us experienced radical disruptions to our working lives. The energy to envisage something new gradually dissipated in the daily task of managing the present.

Above all, there was no clear moment at which we emerged from the tunnel. The ways in which the pandemic has lingered are very different for different people in different social classes and different parts of the world. And many of those who have had the good fortune to emerge relatively unscathed just want to go back to their familiar lives.

Three years after the original lockdowns, I did not want the promise of a new landscape to evaporate entirely. Nor did I want to let go of that period of disciplinary self-reflection, which seemed to me to transcend the indulgence of academic navel-gazing and to urge us into deeper social engagement and a deeper connection with our contemporary world in all its problems and possibilities.

That is why I commissioned these paragraphoi on the theme of "rupture and return." All seven of the authors seemed to me to have something exciting and important to say, both about the exigencies of the pandemic period and about how we might take from them a different way of conducting our discipline and pursuing...