Reviewed by:

• The Second Wave: Reflections on The Pandemic Through Photography, Performance and Public Culture by Rustom Bharucha
• Amanda Culp

Rustom Bharucha begins The Second Wave, his insightful and broad “reflections on the pandemic through photography, performance and public culture,” with an acknowledgment of his position in the thick of things: “in medias res” (ix). Written [End Page 247] from Bharucha’s apartment in Kolkata during the catastrophic second wave of the pandemic that tore through India in the spring of 2021, the book contends with the question: how can we write about, reflect on, or make art about an experience as all encompassing—and world-altering—as the COVID-19 pandemic when we are still so fully immersed in its aftershocks? Bharucha’s interest in the middle—in beginning from the space in between—performs a kind of temporal alchemy: reading these essays feels like both an imprint of a particular moment in time and a moment extended. For here I am writing this review nearly three years later, and the world still feels very much in the middle of this crisis, perhaps just further along. We are still suspended between the world before the pandemic and the world that will follow it—on the threshold between an ending and a new beginning.

The Second Wave makes more connections than it does explicit arguments. The book is divided into three essays—“Photography in the Pandemic,” “No Time to Mourn,” and “Endings/Beginnings”—and while each has a distinct focus, the real success of the volume is in its fluidity. In the preface, Bharucha offers instruction as to how best to encounter the work: “Instead of spelling out here how I shift gears from one context to another, I would prefer that you share some of the surprise that I felt on discovering these connections as they came to life in the narrative” (xvii). In the spirit of that directive, I can speak to my own discoveries, which I imagine upon a second reading would shift from another point of relation to the last four years. On this read, what really captured my attention was how The Second Wave expresses liminality, in both the content that it documents and the manner in which that content is communicated. It is betwixt and between genres, somewhere between theory, memoir, and journalistic documentation; disciplines, moving effortlessly through case studies drawn from mythology, visual arts, performing arts, and literature; continents, insisting that a global pandemic be theorized, documented, and responded to from global vantages; and temporalities, a condition that, as I’ve suggested above, will only be enriched the longer it remains in publication.

One of the volume’s greatest assets is the variety of case studies and interlocutors through which Bharucha guides the reader. Those familiar with Bharucha’s earlier writings will find in The Second Wave echoes of other projects: his work with the dancer Chandralekha; his conversations with Komal Kothari, which informed Rajasthan: An Oral History; his study of Tagore’s adoration of Japan in Another Asia; and his decades-long relationship with theatre artist and social activist Maya Krishna Rao. These returns to previous subject matter demonstrate the ways in which a career’s worth of accumulated knowledge can be reoriented by the dramatic upheavals of history. But the work is also incredibly contemporary, situating these previous projects among works from the last four years. In “Photography and the Pandemic,” for example, Bharucha reads a series of photographs taken by Bandeep Singh, who documented migrant laborers’ treacherous journeys home during the lockdowns, in conversation with Soumyabrata Choudhury’s Now It’s Come to Distances (2020).

The Second Wave is also rich with scholarship, mythology, and art from outside a Euro-US base, which is an enormous contribution to theatre and performance studies. The standards of the field are here: Agamben, Barthes, Benjamin, Butler, Derrida, Phelan, Schechner, Sontag. However, Bharucha puts them into conversation with a rich cast of thinkers and artists working in and hailing from South Asia, including Dipesh Chakrabarty, Mahasweta Devi, Usha Ganguly, Arjun Ghosh, Sundar...

 审阅者：

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  《第二波浪潮：通过摄影、表演和公共文化对疫情的反思》鲁斯托姆·巴鲁查 (Rustom Bharucha)
•  阿曼达·卡尔普

鲁斯托姆·巴鲁查 (Rustom Bharucha) 开始了《第二波浪潮》，这是他“通过摄影、表演和公共文化对这一流行病进行深刻而广泛的反思”，并承认了自己在事物最深处的立场：“在媒体资源中”(ix)。这本书是在 2021 年春天席卷印度的灾难性第二波流行病期间，在巴鲁查位于加尔各答的公寓中写成的，它提出了这样一个问题：我们如何才能书写、反思或创作关于一个人的艺术？当我们还完全沉浸在其余震之中时，我们是否能体验到像 COVID-19 大流行一样包罗万象、改变世界的经历？巴鲁查对中间的兴趣——从中间的空间开始——表现出一种时间炼金术：阅读这些文章感觉既像是某个特定时刻的印记，又像是一个延长的时刻。近三年后，我在这里写下这篇评论，而世界仍然感觉正处于这场危机之中，甚至可能只是进一步发展。我们仍然悬浮在大流行之前的世界和大流行之后的世界之间——站在结束和新开始之间的门槛上。

第二波浪潮所建立的联系比明确的论点更多。这本书分为三篇文章——《大流行中的摄影》、《没有时间哀悼》和《结束/开始》——虽然每篇文章都有不同的重点，但本书真正的成功在于它的流动性。在序言中，巴鲁查就如何最好地接触这部作品提供了指导：“我不想在这里详细说明我如何从一种背景切换到另一种背景，我更希望你能分享一些我在发现这些联系时所感到的惊讶：他们在叙述中变得栩栩如生”（十七）。本着该指令的精神，我可以谈谈我自己的发现，我想在第二次阅读时，这些发现会从另一个与过去四年的关系点转变。在阅读本文时，真正引起我注意的是《第二次浪潮》如何在其记录的内容和内容传达方式中表达阈限性。它介于理论、回忆录和新闻记录之间，介于不同流派之间。学科，轻松地通过神话、视觉艺术、表演艺术和文学中的案例研究；坚持从全球角度对全球大流行进行理论化、记录和应对；和时间性，正如我上面所建议的，这种条件只会随着出版时间的延长而变得丰富。

该书最宝贵的财富之一是巴鲁查引导读者的各种案例研究和对话者。那些熟悉巴鲁查早期作品的人会在《第二波》中发现其他项目的回声：他与舞蹈家钱德拉莱卡的合作；他与 Komal Kothari 的对话，为《拉贾斯坦邦：口述历史》提供了信息；他对泰戈尔在另一个亚洲的日本崇拜的研究；以及他与戏剧艺术家和社会活动家玛雅·克里希纳·拉奥 (Maya Krishna Rao) 长达数十年的关系。这些对先前主题的回归证明了职业生涯积累的知识价值可以通过历史的戏剧性剧变重新定位的方式。但这部作品也具有令人难以置信的当代性，将这些之前的项目置于过去四年的作品之中。例如，在《摄影与流行病》中，巴鲁查阅读了班迪普·辛格 (Bandeep Singh) 拍摄的一系列照片，这些照片记录了封锁期间移民劳工回家的危险旅程，并与苏米亚布拉塔·乔杜里 (Soumyabrata Choudhury) 的《现在是远方》(2020) 进行对话。

第二波浪潮还富含来自欧美基地之外的学术、神话和艺术，这对戏剧和表演研究做出了巨大贡献。领域的标准在这里：阿甘本、巴特勒、本杰明、巴特勒、德里达、费兰、谢赫纳、桑塔格。然而，巴鲁查让他们与在南亚工作和来自南亚的众多思想家和艺术家进行对话，其中包括迪佩什·查克拉巴蒂 (Dipesh Chakrabarty)、马哈斯韦塔·德维 (Mahasweta Devi)、乌莎·甘古利 (Usha Ganguly)、阿琼·戈什 (Arjun Ghosh)、桑达尔 (Sundar) ……