Notes on Naming

March 19

Scrolling through news and twitter feeds this morning, I stumbled across Jiayang Fan's story about a racist encounter on the street in the city where she lives.

Went to take out trash.Was talking on phone in Chinese. Man walked by on sidewalk & in interest of social distancing,I said,"sorry, go ahead." "FUCKING CHINESE,"he yelled loud enough I could hear him over aide's voice on phone. I turned to look at him to make sure I heard right

— Jiayang Fan (@JiayangFan) March 18, 2020

Last week [was it only last week?] I listened to an excellent interview on Code Switch with the historian Erika Lee about the ways that current deployments of 'Chinese Flu' or 'Chinese Virus' actually mobilize deep and sedimented histories of prejudice and xenophobia. So the critique of calling Covid-19 the 'Chinese Flu' is something that I've been thinking about - and trying to think how I'm going to present this material to my students in GEO 171.

One of my starting points for teaching the course - an introductory human geography course - is to ask students, "Where are you from?" When we say, "I'm from ____," we're often also identifying ourselves in relation to a particular place: "I'm American," "I'm Chinese," "I'm Californian," "I'm Turkish," etc. All of these point to the way that geography provides a crucial form of social identification. To locate oneself in a particular place [be it as small as a village or as large as a country] is to claim at at least some identification with the traits and qualities that are assumed to be part of that place.

But there are at least two things we don't pay attention to when we rely on these shorthand geographical identities:

1. We don't pay attention to the fact that these geographical identities - these implicit maps of the world - are not natural but in fact the products of human activity; they are not fixed but in fact rapidly changing; they are not single but in fact plural [the privilege of those who can be from many places].
2. And even more troubling in this case: To locate someone - or something - is to draw upon and reproduce a particular model about not just what belongs where but who belongs where.

Viruses don't have nationalities. The lines of human geography don't make sense to them, precisely because a virus doesn't operate in relation to the kinds of geographies that we live on a daily basis. When people choose to identify a virus using a human geography [the 'Chinese Flu,' the 'Spanish Flu'], those names say far less about the virus itself and much more about the social and spatial relations in which those objects are embedded.