In his newest book, Viral World: Global Relations During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Routledge), UCI global and international studies professor Long T. Bui examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected global societies. Using case studies to explore everything from astrology and space colonization to animal rights, zombies, and communities on the frontline of the virus, he explains how individuals and groups devised creative modes of existing and becoming. Below, Bui shares more on the concept of “viral worlding” and how societies adapt and evolve during times of crisis.

Q: Your book introduces the concept of "viral worlding." Can you elaborate on this concept and explain how it differs from traditional understandings of global connectivity and consciousness?

A: The pandemic presented not just a world-altering event but a catalyst for worldmaking. Like so many others, I was interested in how it impacted or affected global societies, but despite countless written pieces on the subject, I needed a holistic view based on the interpersonal and translocal dimensions of the crisis. In terms of planetary connectivity, technology, capital, and media have already produced a global sense of things. As a once-in-a-lifetime existential threat, the novel coronavirus accelerated and accentuated those forms of global relationality, making apparent the ways we as viral beings were all “worlding” and re-creating our social worlds. The book covers everything from astrology to space colonization to animal rights as part of an interconnected yet chaotic picture. Through the concept of viral worlding, I sought to capture the viralized potential for relationality among people, places, and objects. The book captures the proliferating “worlds within worlds” via the viral pathways of COVID-19.

Q: Among the multiple case studies you explored, which one stood out to you the most and why? What significant insights did it provide into the dynamics of the pandemic?

A: The case study that stood out to me is the manner by which the occult seeped into government and public “apocalyptic” reactions to COVID-19. I have a chapter on the “coronapocalypse,” discussing zombie tropes, mysticism, folklore, and monster stories as they weaved themselves into various threads of anti-Blackness, white nationalism, and Christian mythology. With SARS-CoV-2, occultist sentiments “went viral” with the effect of illuminating the paranormal haunted world overlaying the built human one. If the idea of zombie-ism plays on fears of COVID-19 and death by association, determining who gets to live and die, it equally reveals the contagious porous boundary between lifeworlds and deathworlds.

Q: Your book highlights the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on marginalized communities, especially in the Global South. Can you discuss some specific examples of these impacts and the responses from these communities?

A: Much has been said about the success of authorities in South Korea, Uganda, or Singapore in managing the pandemic and less so about how they weaponized anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in service of those goals. Vulnerable marginalized communities challenged queerphobic and anti-gay conspiracy theories by activating rhetoric or mobilizing actions that called out those governing bodies in their targeting of stigmatized othered bodies. By doing so, they “queered” top-down state pandemic rules, exposing the “scared straight” logic of biopolitical control and disease management. Meanwhile, homebound youth activists in Hong Kong utilized online video games like Animal Crossing to evade Chinese Party censors and the surveillance of dissidents/disease. Their stealth proved a major contretemp for the government insofar as protestors organized via a world-building game, playing anthropomorphic animals in a virtual environment. This occurs at a time of online disinformation, when all sorts of non-human animals were being blamed for the zoonotic transmission of humans by SARS-CoV-2. The hunt for enemies, seen and unseen, operated on multiple levels in a massive simulation that was never not real. It became part of our new (and old) realities.   

Q: You analyze various progressive movements in the context of the pandemic in Viral World. How did these movements adapt and evolve during this time, and what were some notable successes or challenges they faced?

A:  Distressed medical staff, factory workers, caretakers, prisoners, refugees and poor youth rallied against the crushing toxicity and world-dominating forces of racism, capitalism, militarism, authoritarianism, sexism, and xenophobia during the pandemic. While converging around say feminist or socialist movements, they were part of an “infectious” movement for justice with the directive to build a better world, or rather worlds, than that in which we are living. These world-changers and actors demanded devised creative modes of existing and becoming that did not cater to systemic violence. In the viral world, global subjects reached toward endless capacities for freedom and solidarity via pandemic consciousness.

Q: The pandemic highlighted existing global inequalities. How do you see the relationship between these inequalities and the emergent forms of global consciousness and activism that you discuss in the book?

A: The pandemic exacerbated preexisting inequalities, but those global inequalities cannot be merely presented as structural problems or cultural deficits. Quarantined individuals at home felt alone and isolated, adrift in the world, as did people forced to work as frontliners. At the same time, they shared pandemic stories through social media and narrated their socially distant lives to strangers and loved ones across borders. A planet under lockdown exhibited a puzzle-like mosaic full of surprises. Worldly humans re-worlded their interactive experiences in a fashion as novel as the mutating virus. This worlding-as-futurity is not some big abstraction when we speak concretely of migrant futures, abolitionist futures, Native and Indigenous futures, Black futures etc. Moving from the question of “whose world is this” to “whose worlds matter” acts as an open horizon for imagining a “post-COVID” future.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from Viral World?

A:  I want readers to understand that while the pandemic radically transformed “our world” as we knew it, it propelled a deeper understanding of the multiple worlds that we have forged together collectively and uniquely. The viral politics of COVID-19 shows just how connected we are today and how fast-paced things are. Viral World responds to the fact that the pandemic didn’t “end” the globalized world. Rather, so many inhabitants of this planet were invested in crafting better worlds or protecting those long threatened. This is what it means to say this was a time of viral worldmaking.