The COVID-19 pandemic, an event of global magnitude characterised by extraordinary media coverage, was but one among many epidemic events throughout human history. Societies react and deal with epidemic phenomena with a degree of heterogeneity determined by different material and cultural contexts. Outbreaks penetrate people’s daily lives and the folds of society to a greater or lesser degree: they require new or reinvented vocabulary, enter into conversational exchange, stimulate new types of literary and video-musical production, and are the subject of negotiation between “modern” and “traditional” medical-scientific practices.
Global epidemics like HIV/AIDS, endemic diseases like malaria or Lassa fever, the occasional outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease, as well as the more recent COVID-19 pandemic, have marked the African continent in many different ways and in different epochs. Alongside the purely epidemiological aspects, these events have become the thematic focus of a prolific cultural response conveyed by the media, social media, social interaction, and cultural practices. This response, naturally heterogeneous and complex, has found aesthetic codification (e.g. in literary production and the verbal arts) and linguistic-conceptual codification (e.g., with the creation of neologisms and the metaphoric conceptualisation of epidemic discourse), and is also part of the ideological fabric that sees modern and pre-modern instances contrasting and integrating each other.
The OUTBREAKS! conference intends to focus the discussion on how African societies have experienced, integrated, and interpreted the pandemic phenomena of recent decades in artistic-literary production, language remodelling or adaptation, and cultural negotiation in the medical-curative domain.
Conference convenors and organisers: Flavia Aiello, Gian Claudio Batic, Andrea Brigaglia.