'I Know Who Caused COVID-19': Pandemics and Xenophobia

Description

This book explores prejudice towards groups who are thought to have caused and spread the COVID-19 virus. The book examines four cases around the world: the residents of Wuhan, China; Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in the USA, Britain and Israel; African-Americans in the United States and Black/Asian/Mixed Ethnic communities in Britain; and 'White' right-wing groups in American and Europe. The book examines stereotyping and the false attribution of blame towards these groups, as well as what happens when a collective is actually at fault, and how the community deals with these conflicting issues. This is a timely, cogent examination of blame and xenophobia, which have been brought to the surface by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zhou Xun is Reader in Modern History at the University of Essex. She has published widely on health, nutrition and ethnicity, and her latest book is The People's Health: Health Intervention and Delivery in Mao's China, 1949-1983 (2020). She is also co-editor of Smoke: A Global History of Smoking (Reaktion, 2004). Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of more than ninety books."

'While still in the midst of a public health crisis, we are fortunate to have two scholars who expertly weave their way through the infectious and symbolic threats that have roiled us all. Mass death and moral panics, scapegoating and the weaponization of past victimhood, examples like SARS, Ebola, and AIDS, communal dynamics around race and religion: all these and more have been scrambled in the great distress of this plague. Through their nuanced analyses, Gilman and Zhou allow us to reconsider these matters and the forces that have distorted and upended attempts to respond to a global pandemic as just that.'-George Makari, Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine, and author of 'Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia'