A certain form of dispossession takes place when our personal interactions are moved online; when our bodies become projected onto a screen, a simulation of who we are reduced to thousands of pixels; when our bodies are no longer our own and we yearn to be whole again.
I’m explicitly referring to a time when our bodies used to move and sweat together to soca, calypso, or reggae over the blaring speakers of a CD player, a relic of the past. The pandemic took that time away from us, and continues to do so.
For over 20 years, a mall walkers club, organized in a suburb of Toronto, Canada, would meet three times a week, early in the morning, to exercise before any of the retail stores would open. Members were invited through word of mouth. Many were in their 70s and 80s and retired. The mall provided a safe...
University of California Press