{"id":1775,"date":"2020-03-25T20:20:12","date_gmt":"2020-03-25T20:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/?p=1775"},"modified":"2020-03-25T20:21:20","modified_gmt":"2020-03-25T20:21:20","slug":"love-in-the-time-of-corona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/2020\/03\/25\/love-in-the-time-of-corona\/","title":{"rendered":"Love in the time of Corona"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Excuse this week\u2019s title, but it\u2019s a phrase I\u2019ve kept coming back to over the last week. I was in the short loan section of the library a couple weeks ago and saw a few people had put <em>Love in the Time of Cholera <\/em>on hold, which seemed apt and if anything, a little ironic. It perhaps goes hand in hand with other reports that <em>Pandemic<\/em> is one of the most watched shows on Netflix as of late. It made me think more about dating and long distance relationships in this uncertain time, which, although could be seen as a relatively modern phenomenon, is probably one of the most common types of transnational exchange. If we think about how much of our history is shaped by letters and correspondence, even within our own course and the microhistories, biographies and such we have read- a fair amount has been between people who were in love but could not be together at the time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Artists, politicians, writers have become famous for the sonnets,\nsongs and poems crafted remotely and because of distance. This reiterates the\nimportance of space within a study of global history, how the fact we write history\/books\/letters\napart shapes the way in which we behave together. It begs the question of what\ntime and distance does to writing, and research and the way in which things are\ncomposed. For scholars to work together previously, they would have to relay\ntheir ideas between each other, copy out new findings before hoping that it\nreaches their colleague or friend. The same can be said for academia today perhaps.\nThe situation we find ourselves in will surely change the dynamic of the class\nbecause we are no all sat around a table in St Katherine\u2019s Lodge, instead\nwaiting for the audio feedback on Microsoft Teams to die down, and avoid\ntalking over each other from the comfort of our own homes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But back to the issue of letters, and long-distance transnational\nrelationships. James Joyce wrote famously raunchy letters to his wife Nora Barnacle\n(which are amusing but perhaps not entirely class appropriate), Frida Kahlo\u2019s\nletters exposed her more sensitive side, even exposing Oscar Wilde\u2019s forbidden\nromance with Lord Alfred Douglas. Even my own grandparents. One of my\nlong-standing unfinished projects (maybe I\u2019ll finally get round to it in\nisolation) is digitising the letters my grandparents sent each other when they were\ncourting for a year in 1960. Having both been trained as librarians, the\nletters are very well catalogued. It brings up a question I routinely come back\nto within my research and these blogs, that transnational links are often\npersonal ones. We learn more about these well-known individuals through their\nletters, as the sources are ones not originally intended for the public eye. In\nthis context, we gain a better understanding of their personalities, which contributes\nto a more rounded social and cultural history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A few days ago, a question was posed during one of Boris\nJohnson\u2019s press conferences, following the call he made to essentially put the\nUK in lockdown. If one has a significant other, are they allowed to visit\/hang\nout\/go on as usual? The response that they should perhaps use this as an opportunity\nto test their relationship by moving with each other, seemed blunt. I wonder\nhow many couples will plunge their relationships effectively into the deep end.\nIt also made me think about people now separated, by different cities and\ncountries. How will historians map correspondence in the time of coronavirus? Letters\nare a clear snapshot into how someone is feeling in a particular moment. Yet we\ncannot capture the videocalls, facetimes and other ways in which people date\neach other in this modern age in the same way. Zoom has recorded a spike in its\ndownloads and usage, but these statistics tell us little about the sentiment around\nlove in the time of corona. Are we able to link where these people are calling\neach other, whether or not there has been an increase in letter writing, the\nusage of online dating apps? How will we remember this pandemic in the future,\nin the romance novels, action films and memoirs that are written? I wonder if\nthere will be micro historians who look back to our current social contexts and\nconsider those who behaved and those who transgressed, and their reasons for\ndoing so. &nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Excuse this week\u2019s title, but it\u2019s a phrase I\u2019ve kept coming back to over the last week. I was in the short loan section of the library a couple weeks ago and saw a few people had put Love in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-sD","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1777,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775\/revisions\/1777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}