Postface

Abstract

This special issue is a timely intervention that both illustrates and assesses the relevance of the class of intellectuals as a class and as a social institution in the contemporary world. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has kept most inhabitants of the world in lockdown for the past year, while this issue of Postcolonial Studies was drafted, has driven home some hard truths. These concern not only enduring patterns of social and economic inequalities and discrimination, as well as the uneven distribution of public health provisions, vaccines and biomedical services, but also intellectual matters. Isolated from the customary social contacts and information flow, many people rediscovered the power of knowledge and ideas as they attempted to grapple with their new virus-stricken global predicament. The primary role of the imagination was highlighted as reading books, playing music and the performing arts became means of daily survival and were taken up on an unprecedented scale. The range and impact of the cultural representations of the pandemic, its origins and effects. moved centre stage in the public debate, showing also their vulnerability to manipulation by panic-mongers and opportunistic politicians. Amateur social and cultural analysts sprouted like much rooms after the rain, spreading intellectual work across a multitude of different and often unexpected locations. Citizens science went global.