On pause, an essay on the inverse logics of quarantine and Black asphyxia

ABSTRACT Trump had COVID-19. The world held its breath. We, in very real terms, were on pause. Trump's reality, the reality of millions of Americans and people around the world, was one of quarantine, an existence put on pause. Here, I would like to consider the polyphony of meanings and performances foregrounding our varied understandings of the pause. Trump's pause and our own excavate a stacking of dual existences: one where we are either waiting to die or get sick and another where we are waiting to get better or return to normal. COVID-19 represents an original moment where the reality of incessant dying is remarkable, and the questions asked within critical Black studies regarding the ontological conditions of humanity and the existential necessity of Black death for the flourishing of white life are laid bare. Through its interrogation of the pause, this work treats pausing as a technical, corporeal, material, and racialized assemblage of realities. Though pausing is a technopolitical formation that is immediately apprehended through gaming and game culture, we must push beyond the computational fact of pressing pause to further an imaginary centering the ordinariness of Black death as being in suspension with the extraordinariness of COVID death.