Documenting the mundane in quarantine

ABSTRACT

This autoethnography uses narrative inquiry to make sense of practices normalized during quarantine. It centers my identity as a classed and racialized immigrant in relation to the socioeconomics of quarantine to question seemingly innocent mandates, policies, and practices. The narrative form of the article is influenced by Nathan Hodges’ ‘The Chemical Life.' I use the self-reflexive ‘I' to connect the individual to the social and engage the reader with my routine in quarantine. I also rely on repetition – inspired by Aisha Durham’s ‘On Collards'– to reinforce the normalcy of the quarantine, i.e., what is new for most of us has been the same old for most of us. The repetition combined with understatements attempts to unsettle the novelty of quarantine.

KEYWORDS:

• Autoethnography
• Florida
• immigration
• race
• cultural studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Artist bio

Vishnu Narayanan T. K. is a self-taught artist, specializing in digital/traditional art, character designing, and creative thinking. Contact him for commissions at [email protected]

Notes

1 The sentence on being temporary is from the movie For Here or To Go? (Humnabadkar, 2017). The movie is narrated by an Indian software engineer navigating United States’ immigration system.

2 WhatsApp Messenger is an extremely popular cell phone app among immigrants (Manjoo, 2016). It allows users to send text messages for free over the Internet. It also allows video-calls, but that feature is blocked in Dubai, U.A.E. So, I use WhatsApp in tandem with another app, such as Zoom.

3 The sit-ins organized by college students, such as the one in Greensboro, North Carolina, helped the Civil Rights Movement gain momentum.

4 This is an observation on coming of age in a country where women cover their faces. It is often joked that the sight of a woman in a niqab is terrifying when you are up to no good. You never know if she knows your parents.