Sweet Home: Writing from a Known Space

Abstract

Sweet Home: Writing from a Known Space Nic John Ramos (bio) In the thick litany of yet more disasters, epidemics, and catastrophes that have taken place during and since the 2021 ASA conference, Cathy Schlund-Vials’s presidential address offers us a strange, if not queer, clearing in the woods—a “Black mark” made from “poured gasoline . . . in the shape of a cross” burning in the night on the lawn of an eight-year-old mixed-race Cambodian American adoptee with a white father and Japanese mother in Valdosta, Georgia. The image of a “black mark” in the shape of a cross in front of a mixed-race Cambodian American adoptee counters many preconceived notions of who the traditional targets of antiblack racism are, but it is also the strangeness of Schlund-Vials’s rememory of that incident that also opens up a space for us to ask how our distance or estrangement from that experience might produce intimacy. I have met Cathy Schlund-Vials once, probably too brief of a moment for her to remember, and I have never had gasoline poured on my lawn in the shape of a cross or my family’s car keyed with phrases telling us that “God hates mongrels.” And yet, there is something about the isolation she describes that makes that burnt patch of grass familiar to me even if distant. It is not the charred earth we share but all the everyday forms of social distancing imposed on her and her family that gives meaning to a mutual sense of already knowing isolation long before coronavirus (and its now multiple variants) made loneliness and the melancholy it engenders a national mental health crisis. In other words, without diminishing the seriousness of the epidemic, her address highlights the multiple ways the virus has exacerbated the processes of “social distancing” already in play long before this pandemic began. Indeed, Schlund-Vials points to the fact that our seemingly misfit group of academics has known well this feeling of alienation by revisiting past presidential addresses, in particular George Sanchez’s 2001 address about the “social distancing” imposed on society in the wake of Pearl Harbor and September 11, resulting in greater levels of incarceration, surveillance, and policing. Schlund-Vials notes Sanchez’s address is significant in that it represents just one of the [End Page 233] association’s many attempts to turn away from its once previous obsession in exceptionalist narratives bound to the idea of an “American Civilization.”1 Returning to a twenty-year-old address thus not only points to our field’s attention to tracing the profound dimensions of “social distancing” long before the phrase became popular but also points to how certain aspects of this moment are not “unprecedented and unparalleled” but push farther and further the atomization of society along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability to levels once thought “unimaginable.” Notably, Schlund-Vials’s turn toward love in the midst of compounding evidence of its lack signals to all of us that our analysis of social distancing should not stop short of making connections that lead us, at a minimum, to each other, and at most, to different realities. Like Sweet Home in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Schlund-Vials’s “rememory” of her Valdosta home calls attention to how “the most formative” period of her life can haunt while also serve as a means to work and write from a known place. Writing from a known place to me has nothing to do with shared objects, histories, or analysis. It has everything to do with opening up a space to gather others who seek community by writing from a similar but not exactly same place of knowing. There are, of course, many different spaces from which academics write, but there are few opportunities to gather in the way the American Studies Association invites us to. I admit I worry about writing from a known place because my conception of it is largely a metaphysical one. Becoming an academic has necessarily physically and intellectually alienated and defamiliarized me from any physical space or people I might conceive of as being “real” and still “known.” James...