Microtemporalities of Crisis: Pandemic Diaries and the Scales of Time in Zadie Smith’s Intimations

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-581-2_7How to use a DOI?

Keywords

COVID-19; Intimations; Pandemic; Personal Experience; Planetary History; Slow Violence

Abstract

Crises are usually seen as unforeseen and bracketed in time scale. However, the COVID-19 pandemic not only ravaged throughout the continents by claiming numerous lives, but its shockwave is still felt to this date. This paper examines how the COVID-19 pandemic was not a sudden catastrophe but a prolonged disruption that slowly unfolded violence through inequality, grief, and exhaustion. This study brings Zadie Smith’s essay collection Intimations (2020) as a primary source, which describes life during the pandemic. This study examines both the immediate and long-term effects of the pandemic, showing how Zadie Smith’s Intimations represents the COVID-19 pandemic as a prolonged disruption and how it links individual emotional experiences to structural inequality and social vulnerability. Using a qualitative, text-based approach, the paper applies Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence (2011) and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s idea of planetary history (2021). Nixon’s theory proclaims the gradual effects of crises and their long-lasting impact, while Chakrabarty connects human experiences to deep planetary scales. These frameworks help understand Smith’s experiences as both microtemporal and planetary. Through her description of boredom, worry, and daily struggles, Smith shows how personal experiences were affected and how they can change people’s outlook permanently. The paper presents three major findings: it depicts the pandemic as a slow, consuming force that exposes the fragility of everyday life and draws attention to the environmentalism of the poor. It shows how personal experiences become planetary crises, exposing broader histories of inequality and environmental negligence; and it shows how crises gradually create injustice and force us to question existing systems. The study recommends that crises like the COVID-19 pandemic should not be viewed as isolated or completed; rather should be seen as ongoing, slow, and planetary processes. It gives a framework to understand future global disruption through everyday life.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Mahmuda Sultana Mili
AU  - Fariha Jahan Sathi
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/30
TI  - Microtemporalities of Crisis: Pandemic Diaries and the Scales of Time in Zadie Smith’s Intimations
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Challenges and Trends in Arts and Social Sciences (ICCTASS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 82
EP  - 90
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-581-2_7
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-581-2_7
ID  - Mili2026
ER  -