This major research paper explores the representations of depression and anxiety, as a consequence of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, in Bo Burnham’s 2021 musical comedy special Inside. I argue that pandemic-induced depression and anxiety are represented through the symbiotic relationship between its formal elements, such as editing style and setting, and its performative content, such as song lyrics and monologues. This relationship between form and content serves to break down the binary between artificial performance and vulnerable, real-life mental illness, thus bringing the two conflicting states together. As opposed to typical inaccurate/negative portrayals of mental illness in North American cinema, Burnham’s Inside demonstrates the experience of mental illness can be normalized in any given context, even within the theatrical artifice of a performance during a global crisis. This normalization furthermore emphasizes the voice of the individual sufferer, thereby outlining the potential of accentuating the individual’s voice in a post-pandemic, mental health care paradigm.

This major research paper explores the representations of depression and anxiety, as a consequence of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, in Bo Burnham’s 2021 musical comedy special Inside. I argue that pandemic-induced depression and anxiety are represented through the symbiotic relationship between its formal elements, such as editing style and setting, and its performative content, such as song lyrics and monologues. This relationship between form and content serves to break down the binary between artificial performance and vulnerable, real-life mental illness, thus bringing the two conflicting states together. As opposed to typical inaccurate/negative portrayals of mental illness in North American cinema, Burnham’s Inside demonstrates the experience of mental illness can be normalized in any given context, even within the theatrical artifice of a performance during a global crisis. This normalization furthermore emphasizes the voice of the individual sufferer, thereby outlining the potential of accentuating the individual’s voice in a post-pandemic, mental health care paradigm.

In recent decades, medical humanities scholars have increasingly looked to patient-authored narratives of illness to help medical practitioners better understand patients’ lived experiences of disability. However, within the medical humanities itself, disabled people remain underrepresented as normative conventions of research and teaching systematically exclude disabled scholars. This paper interrogates the medical humanities’ complicity in reproducing relations of power that reinforce biomedicine’s dominance over disabled people. I adopt a cripistemological approach to centre first-person lived experiences of disability as a way of knowing and examine how knowledge about disability is produced through the academic consumption of illness narratives. Drawing on auto-ethnographic observations as a disabled literary scholar working in the medical humanities, I look at how access barriers and micro-ableism from nondisabled physician-researchers at conferences “other” disabled academics. I explore how access intimacy can be developed in the medical humanities to challenge institutional ableism and build intersectional solidarity with queer, non-white disabled people. I reiterate the need for medical humanities researchers and disability activists to collaborate and create a more caring and inclusive society.

Disease and pain are physiological phenomena, but they also possess social and cultural meanings, with different attitudes toward pain and diseases in different cultures. Using the genealogical method, this paper examines the cultural roots of attitudes toward epidemics, diseases, and the body as they appear in the biblical text, a foundational text in Western culture. Genealogy deals with the past, but its purpose is to understand and critique the current reality. Epidemics in the Bible are perceived as collective punishment for sins, and are also mentioned as one of the punishments predicted for the “End of Days.” Over time, this biblical narrative was expressed in various secular contexts and was even used by the media during the spread of the Covid-19 virus. In the Bible, overcoming an epidemic – or plague – requires a religious act, as part of the general biblical conception that the body, its health, and sickness are related to religious acts. The purpose of bodily afflictions in the Bible is to purify the soul or to lead one to repent. Exploring the biblical narratives related to epidemics enables a renewed examination of values and attitudes on this topic, in Western culture in general, and in Judaism in particular.

Todd Haynes’s 1995 film Safe, starring Julianne Moore as the victim of an illness that no one can seem to understand, is eerily prophetic on two levels: the film speaks to both the effects of climate change on the human mind and body, and a woman’s right to have control over her own medical decisions. With the advent of COVID and monkey pox, along with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the recent closed door talks between Democrats to create a bill to help clean up the environment, a film like Safe shows viewers that there were warning signs almost thirty years ago that trouble was on the hazy horizon. My essay will be a textual analysis of Haynes’s film, how Safe was a cultural representation of the political climate during the 1990s, and how the film’s message is just as relevant now as it was during the Clinton Administration.

At the end of Donald Trump’s presidentship, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) which was published almost 70 years back suddenly became one of the best-selling novels in the U.S. One could postulate that Trump’s various repressive racial policies, totalitarian mindset, shared cultural insecurity of the Americans and Orwell’s broad minacious dystopian vision were the reason behind this hasty popularity. This is the process, I think, by which a book becomes canon by rediscovering its significance in every new ‘turn’ of history. Dorothy M. Figueira’s Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity although was first published in 2002, the book is in similar fashion more relevant at present than ever before especially in the context of India. Why? I would provide an answer to this statement at the end of my discussion.

This book brings a continuous evolution and preservation of refugee community identities, transformation of cultural values and Politicization of linguistic nationalism in Assam and Tripura in postcolonial India. By using primary resources such as central and state government archives, official records, census data, extensive field survey, along with contemporary literature author aims to portray the resistance of refugees for collective community identity and official recognition as a citizen of India. Author tried to question the categorization of refugees' as a fragmented cultural and ethnic identities and present a biased and discriminatory politics of state towards Bengali refugees' in Assam and Tripura during refugee rehabilitation programme. She also highlighted interlinkage of refugee issue also with the identity politics, dispute on boundary demarcations, land resource management and allocation along with preservation of tribal ethnicity and collective community identity values.

The book for review is comprised of eight chapters. Each reverberates around the existence of the Rajbanshi community with their own history, socio-cultural behaviour, and moreover, folktales and folksongs – an oral literature associated with them. As the book is titled the “Rajbanshi Folk Tales and Folk Songs”, the focus is much on that subject matter only rather than on the history of the Rajbanshi community. But unless one gets acquainted with the history of the Rajbanshi community and its own separate socio-cultural identity, one cannot understand the essence of these folk tales and songs associated with this community. So, the author has wisely included a few chapters related to history, location, identity, and language of the Rajbanshi community at the end section of the book.

In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna J. Haraway addresses deeply situated feminist explorations and varied epistemologies and ecologies. It contains figurative criticism of the current environmental crises that forms the emergency of the Anthropocene. Haraway traverses alternative ways of knowing how the subject’s experiences of the past, present, future, gender, culture, race all dissolve into each other and need continuous interrogations to arrive at the evolving notions of subjecthood and environment. The book investigates thematerial semiotics, political histories of different surfaces, mythologies, species, and stories and forces us to establish contact with other existents in search of harmonious ways of survival. In our age when global politics and global capital are operating by destruction and distortion of natural resources, the book emerges as an inevitable counter by product of staying with the trouble.

The novel, Prelude to a Riot by Annie Zaidi is a perfect reflection of today's India where tension between communities is brewing because of the growing divisive politics. The author through her unique style of narration brings to the fore various issues that has shaken the social fabric of contemporary India causing an atmosphere of fear and amongst different sections of people including minorities, the migrant workers, the tribals and the women. Set in an unnamed south Indian town, the novel revolves around two families of wealthy state owners; one Muslim and another Hindu, and shows that how because of the growing divisive politics things have turned scarily problematic for the Muslim family. The author by allowing each character a space to speak their mind in the form of soliloquies brings to the fore the varied forms of nuances and problems existing in today's India and hints at an impending violence.