Preparing to See Hope: On the Utopic Potentiality of the Stories We Share

ABSTRACT

I framed my response to your presidential address as a letter in hopes that this intimate form will find you and others in the vein of the words you cite from Audre Lorde, "the personal as political.” Writing to you in this way allows me to aspire after the intimacy denied by the virtual 2021 ASA conference, to imagine what it would have been like to be in a shared space, feeling the urgency of your call for "Love and Resistance in a time of COVID.” This letter, then, might be read as a yearning for social and intellectual associations that have been made dangerous, not least by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also by the increased policing of our work as scholars and teachers in a nation and within institutions organized around the violences of settler colonialism and white supremacist politics hostile to the flourishing of minoritized life and knowledges. Let me begin by thanking you for the story of your experience growing up as a mixed-race Cambodian American adoptee in Valdosta, Georgia. Your evocative descriptions helped ground me in time and place, from the significance of Valdosta as a site of "refuge” during the American Civil War to its transformation over the course of Reconstruction and Jim Crow to the 1980s, when it became the scene of the "most formative” years of your childhood. The reflections you shared on the loneliness you experienced, and the painful "lesson of indifference” instructed by your father, who believed it best to keep the racist crimes committed against your family "to oneself simply because ‘no one cared' and doing otherwise would lead to undeniable trouble and unreconciled hurt,” were deeply affecting and illuminating. Your story finds resonance with the work of Leslie Bow, Lee Isaac Chung, and Monique Truong, who elucidate histories of Asian racial formation and sociality in the US South.1 As a recent transplant to Tallahassee, a north Floridian city that often feels like a part of south Georgia, these texts and your words have helped me negotiate the conflicting feelings and palimpsestic temporal geographies of a place I am still trying to make into home