AustLit

'As this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing goes to print, fear of the life-changing and life-taking SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads worldwide faster than the virus itself. The volume’s very gestation has coincided with the tightening grip of the current global pandemic, unprecedented in its deadly, unstoppable spread, from which it will take the world months, if not years, to emerge. Planetary precarity, environmental degradation or eco-precarity, and the precarious society or the “precariat”, already looming problems of the new millennium, and for long major areas of concern of researchers everywhere, have been overtaken by this invisible threat that has subjected the health of populations throughout the world to new levels of vulnerability and risk. The chimera of hope offered by a magic vaccination, elimination of the virus or its disappearance, is for many the only way to imagine a far off “new normal” as a new spike or second wave is anticipated, even as this issue of the journal is finalized. Among the perplexed – some even denying – and slow-moving governmental machineries, COVID-19 heightens new and unprecedented forms of precarity – in terms of the medical and human resources urgently needed to fight it and the anticipated economic recession which will follow, amplifying the already existing “great divide”, as Joseph Stiglitz (2015) puts it, between rich and poor, global south and global north, haves and have-nots.' (Introduction)