Life Matters: The Human Condition in the Age of Pandemics (An Introduction)

• Authors: Gabriela Vargas-Cetina , Manpreet Kaur Kang

Abstracts

EN

The world has recently experienced the ravages of the COVID-19 epidemic and new, terrible wars. The pandemic and the wars now being waged show us how fragile human life is on our planet. The facts that the COVID-19 virus came originally from one or more animals that are part of the human food chain, and that the viruses themselves are forms of life very different from plants and animals, have altered our perception of our place in the world. Wars fought in this changed biological context have also shown how precarious the balance of power is in what we have come to see as a global humanity. Scholars in the fields of Humanities and Cultural Studies have risen to the occasion by focusing on the cultural effects of biological and war-time violence-related catastrophes. In this issue of RIAS focusing on the Americas and their influence on the world, we look at the implications of pandemics and wars, and human reactions to similar threats in the past, such as the pandemic of the Spanish flu which decimated soldiers during World War I. And once again, literature comes to our rescue in the time of heightened angst, showing us paths of the mind already present in American literature that may nudge us in a better direction. Existential homelessness, Buddhism, and meditation, also appear here as “life matters,” and that in the double sense: they are both matters of life and signals that life, and especially human life, must matter.

Keywords

EN

COVID-19; pandemic; war; Review of International American Studies; IASA; Introduction

• Publisher: University of Silesia Press
• Journal: Review of International American Studies
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 17-28

Dates

published

2023

Contributors

author

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina

• Autonomous University of Yucatan, Mexico

• https://orcid.org/0000000311740357

author

Manpreet Kaur Kang

• Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University

• https://orcid.org/0000000163751117

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Identifiers

DOI

10.31261/rias.16741

Biblioteka Nauki

35201107