For a historian with an interest in the intersection of factors that propel an epidemic, 2020 offered a living case study. Edna Bonhomme, a historian of science with a PhD from Princeton, was living at the time in shared housing in Berlin, one of 11.7 million foreigners in Germany. As a person of Haitian descent, she is acutely aware of the complexities of Black life in a country where racism has its own face, similar but also different from anti-Black racism in the U.S.
She began speaking to Black women with different experiences from hers: a kink-positive sex worker from the U.K., an asylum seeker, a cancer survivor, exploring the strange ways that the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns interacted with a wide variety of privileges and privations, histories of oppression and struggle against it.
