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The Visual and Sonic Registers of Neighbourhood Estrangement

2021; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/07256868.2020.1859208

1469-9540

Karma R. Chávez, Anne J. Hill,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

As COVID-19 ravages the United States, calls to police for COVID-related concerns are proliferating. This article asks what happens when a contagious and novel disease creates a context wherein neighbours recognise each other – by sight and by sound – as strangers. Marking the twentieth anniversary of Strange Encounters, we revisit Sara Ahmed’s claim that recognition in embodied encounters produces strangers as figures who are internal to community formation, but who remain outside of an imagined community. This claim enables us to parse the relational dynamics in pandemic time that produce neighbours as strangers through both visual and sonic registers. Ahmed’s theory helps to identify how disease opens opportunities to fracture and retract familiarity in ways that intensify police power and often racialised feelings of ‘stranger danger,’ in effect reordering neighbourly relations.