Paula Banerjee

The March 2021 killing of six Asian American women in Atlanta followed a year in which the 45^th US President and the right-wing media had gleefully referred to the “China Virus” – exemplifying the tendency in a pandemic to make a scapegoat of the original diseased body. Recent pandemics have all followed the same pattern, with citizens of the Global North quick to dismiss everything from SARS (China) to swine-origin H1N1 (Mexico) as primarily the concerns of impoverished, exotic cultures. This research will ask why such strong emphasis continues to be placed on the location of the diseased body.

Paula Banerjee spent one month at the IWM during 2018 as a Visiting Fellow.