Literary Expressions of the covid-19 Pandemic: irruptions of Otherness In “The Wuhan I Know” (Laura Gao) and “You Clap for me Now” (Darren Smith)

Abstract

In the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic, literature becomes one of the many forms of agency to re-signify the emerging worldview that arose as a result of the pandemic mega-crisis. The crisis uncovered profound changes in human and social
interactions, among them, the processes of oppression and segregation towards immigrants and ethnic minorities were accentuated. Based on the relationship between otherness/pandemic, this paper proposes the analysis of two texts: “You Clap for Me Now”, a poem by Darren Smith, and “The Wuhan I know”, a graphic memoir by Laura Gao. We hypothesize that in both texts, the condition of being other emerges as part of the complex web of the pandemic crisis, revealing the tension between the enduring dichotomy of modernity “self and otherness”. We conclude that “The Wuhan I know” humanizes and constructs an identitary dimension of Wuhan, countering the racist rhetoric of the dominant regimes of representation that emerged during the pandemic. “You Clap for Me Now” creates a social frame in which the figure of the immigrant is deconstructed from a shared metaphorical platform with the pandemic virus.