Strangers in Our Own Homes: The pandemic's xenophobic discourse

Abstract

Strangers in Our Own HomesThe pandemic's xenophobic discourse Divya Victor (bio) I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. —gertrude stein As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. —donald rumsfeld i tell my four-year-old that she may, whenever she wants, smile at strangers. I began telling her this a few weeks ago, when we were walking in our neighborhood and she announced to me, with [End Page 5] pint-sized ferocity, "If I see a stranger, I will punch him in his skin." Raised for a third of her life under the mandate of social distancing, my child responded to the emergence of an imagined stranger with violent rejection, a fear as commonplace as it is piercing to someone like me, who is no stranger to being a stranger. When we finally settled on a park bench, I asked her what that stranger would look like. She looked at me confidently and answered, "Like Shere Khan"—the burned beast of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Her fear coiled itself in my lap. I sat with its weight moving within me like an asp. In a study published during World War II, the Austrian sociologist Alfred Schutz defined the stranger as an "adult individual of our times and civilization who tries to be permanently accepted or at least tolerated by the group which he approaches." He cited the immigrant as his main example of the stranger. The feminist scholar and theorist Sara Ahmed argues that dominant cultures imagine the stranger as "a shape that appears to have linguistic and bodily integrity," one that functions as a cipher for the unknowable. The stranger encroaches, breaches, transmits, and transmutes. We recognize strangers by their unrecognizability, and through our misrecognition of them as strangers, rather than as mothers, fathers, children, partners, aunties draped in dupattas, uncles in turbans as bright as summer marigolds—rather than as, simply, beloved. While quarantining with my family in 2020, I became obsessed with the question of how immigrants and their children might move through public spaces in the United States without losing their sense of self, direction, or safety. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a long history of nationalist representations of Asian immigrants as a peril, contagion, infection, or infestation crystalized into the term "China virus," which recalled earlier terms like "Yellow Terror" and "Dusky Peril," as the daily newspaper Puget Sound American collectively dubbed East Asians and "dusky Asiatics" in 1906. More than a century later, I want to understand what it means for Asian American immigrants to be seen as a contagion, a threat, as strangers in our own home. After all, crimes [End Page 6] of violent misrecognition are routinely perpetrated against South Asian Americans. In 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot outside his own gas station in Mesa, Arizona, by a violent racist who mistook him for a terrorist. In 2012, Sunando Sen was pushed under an oncoming subway train during his daily commute in Queens, New York, by a woman who made no distinction between Hindus and Muslims, and blamed both for the September 11, 2001, attacks. In 2017, Srinivas Kuchibhotla was shot at his favorite after-work bar in Olathe, Kansas, by an anti-immigrant nationalist who thought he was an undocumented Iranian. In 2021, five members of the Muslim Afzaal family were mown down by an Islamophobic man in a pickup truck in Ontario, Canada, leaving only the family's nine-year-old son alive. Balbir ji, Sunando da, Srinivas gaaru, and the Afzaal family were strangers in the neighborhoods where they lived, worked, and owned businesses. They were seen and then unseen. First they were "recognized as not belonging, as being out of place," as Ahmed writes, and then they were misrecognized as strangers (a terrorist, "Muslim," "illegal") in a way that led directly to their deaths. Because...