Description
COVID19 has produced millions of global deaths: medical services have been severely challenged and mortuary infrastructure overwhelmed. This paper conceptualises COVID19 as differing from more familiar events – national emergencies and private instances of grief – by three factors: the scale of death; an inability to perform ‘normal’ mourning practices; and the transnational character of the pandemic. As modern practices of death management/mourning are often articulated in the idiom of nationalism, the transnationalism of the pandemic, both epidemiologically and as a shared experience, presents a substantial challenge to existing state-based, nationalists (and increasingly populist) forms of social and political authority. Empirically, this paper looks at two experiences of COVID death related to the UK – of UK citizens abroad and migrant health workers within the UK – to interrogate the political and affective implications of this transnationalism for the (re)making of political community. Overall, it argues that COVID is an experience of ambiguous loss, defying conventional social scripts of grief/death, with the potential to project collective trauma into the future.
