{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.022461814914645103, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0008984725965858042, 'mean_word_length': 5.49271137026239, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Rethinking Exceptionalism in an Age of Plague: An Introduction

Our current predicament—in which the entire human species is confronted by the existential crises of climate change, on the one hand, and a seemingly interminable pandemic, on the other—might seem, if nothing else, like an appropriate moment to relinquish any pretense to exceptionalism. How could anyone possibly cling to the fancy of exemption, to what María del Pilar Blanco describes in her article in the following pages as the “dream of untouchability,” in the face of threats that make no distinction among cultures or creeds? And yet, as a number of the contributors to this issue’s “Rethinking Exceptionalism” cluster point out, one of the most distressing paradoxes of this “age of disruption” (Torpey) is the resilience, even the efflorescence, of exceptionalist thought. If both climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic are catastrophes produced and exacerbated by the very global interconnectedness of the contemporary world, the desperate, haphazard, and woefully uncoordinated responses of national governments and international health organizations have too often devolved into or been co-opted by an impulse to monopolize or, worse, monetize resources in the interest of the privileged few. Last year, working under the leadership of my predecessor, Wai Chee Dimock, the PMLA Editorial Board decided to put together the Theories and Methodologies section “Rethinking Exceptionalism” in an attempt to derive an opportunity for critical reflection from a confounding set of circumstances. The novelty of the collective undertaking here is signaled in the title, which is deliberately not circumscribed by the project of rethinking American exceptionalism in particular. Without ignoring the prominence of the United States as a case study, the essays gathered here attempt as a group to rethink exceptionalism at a broader and less settled scale of comparative analysis. There is an enormous and robust body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the topic of American exceptionalism at the intersections of fields including history, political science, sociology, international affairs, public policy, and law. As a point of entry into this sprawling