Memorializing the COVID Deaths: The Power and Limitations of Decentralized and Participatory Memory

• In Event: 40411 - Troubling Pasts: Challenges of History and Commemoration

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused mass, excess, and unequal deaths. How to memorialize deceased individuals instead of reducing them into numbers or a monolithic collective concept of “COVID victims”? This paper draws on more than 100 memorialization projects around the world and cultural sociology of production to show how meanings of “memorials” are redefined to include not only the traditional, physical sites in central ceremonial spaces but also decentralized ones, such as temporary art installations, virtual spaces, artistic works, small practices, etc. The mourners also actively participated in the co-creation of memorials and had more agency. Such mass participation in decentralized memorialization made it logistically and symbolically feasible to commemorate countless individuals rather a collectivity. The decentralized and participatory features of the COVID memorialization also resulted from the States’ reluctance to memorialize the COVID deaths due to the lack of symbolic and political benefits. Nevertheless, the decentralized, participatory COVID memorialization projects had their limitations. They inadequately addressed excess and unequal deaths. Except for a handful of memorials driven by activism, they neither held the States responsible for the deaths nor challenged the COVID denialism, conspiracy theories, vaccine rumors, and irresponsible behaviors. Social inequality in deaths and access to healthcare was largely absent from the memorialization. Consequently, the projects sidelined the need of the unrecognized and the vulnerable for more traditional, physical, permanent memorials, which are still believed to demonstrate the States’ and societies’ gravitas about people’s lives and deaths and can facilitate public discussions about the social problems exposed in the pandemic. When the whole world seems to turn the page and forget the pandemic, it might be the right time for us to “recentralize” the memorialization as an essential public occasion for serious reflections and deliberation.

Author

• Bin Xu, Emory University