Cultural commons: Critical responses to COVID-19, part 2

It feels like we launched Cultural Commons – a short-form section committed to voicing radically contextualist, rapid response analyses – at an opportune moment, just as the world seemed to spin off its socio-political axis amid a global catastrophe. The crisis context of Covid-19 is generating reflections and re-evaluations that are pouring out in myriad forms, and it is now almost impossible to keep abreast of the pace of change and the reach of the virus into every terrain of cultural, political and economic life. The virus has tracked and intensified existing inequalities and injustices, but in doing so seems to have irritated the tectonic plates of racial capitalism, accelerating global and local movements for black liberation in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the United States. [Opening paragraph]