Nightmare

I slept until almost 1pm today . . . and I woke up groggy and aching all over when a friend called. I had this terrible nightmare. It must have been the Richard Kim novel I read for the class my advisor is teaching. The novel’s about the Korean War.

I was sitting at the end of a table. A lot of people were gathered for a dinner meeting of some sort. The important people were sitting at the other end of the table. The seats were hierarchially arranged. I don’t recall who those people were, but they were old men in suits . . . from the ministry of education. It was some kind of school meeting. There was a minister there. Like a pastor. He was being questioned. Something that the most important man at the table said bugged me. I wanted to disagree. I couldn’t restrain myself, though I knew that it’d be wise to keep my mouth shut. So I said “why?”

I was trying to tell a friend over coffee that the nightmare had to do with the fact that I read this novel and this novel brought home memories I wanted to discard. “What?” she said, “so the novel brought back memories of the Korean War?” Yeah, that’d be awesome. Coz I lived through the War, right? Things that I wanted to avoid for one reason or another seem to be coming back. There’s a reason I didn’t do Korean lit; there’s a reason I wanted to leave the country (at the same time I didn’t want to); and I feel like I’m back in the mess now that people want to talk about the pacific wars, transnational adoption, and what not.

Transnationalism and Rights

I’ve been to a number of really interesting talks this semester. Very boldly, I’m going to extract what seems to be two prominent threads in present scholarship in the humanities and social sciences: transnationalism and rights. Nation and nationalism have become, almost unanimously, undesirable. Local and indigenous have replaced the nation-state as a viable site of resistance to exploitative global capital. Along with that an emphasis on people’s movements, reminiscent of old-school marxism and decoloniztion movements, seems to be coming back. The prominences of rights discourse makes me think of what David Harvey says in A Brief History of Neoliberalism. That an insurgence of the appeal to the judiciary in the face of the neoliberalization of the executive and the legislative is a part of the mechanism of neoliberalism (and hence, not an alternative or solution to neoliberalism–I think this was where he was going).

Although I know I’ll be framing my dissertation in terms of the above two threads, I’m still ambivalent about both. But then again, I’ll have to do a lot more research and reading (something which is not going to happen while I’m writing my diss) before I can make any arguments about either.

Reparation

My interest in reparation is very recent. Actually started with a new professor joining my committee. He works on political and psychical reparation through psychoanalysis. In a way it relates to my work as well since I’m looking at the Bilingual Education Act and the limits of the compensatory logic employed in that legislation. Constantly hearing about reparation and examining it from various angles has definitely made me much more receptive and attentive to the topic. Coming from a culture where legal disputation, an appeal to court, is viewed with distaste and as a last resort, I had to do some extra mental labor to understand reparation. For example, I wasn’t sure to what extent one would have to admit injury or damage to qualify for reparation. In cases where reparation includes more than a compensation of property loss, this concretization of injury becomes more delicate.

Jean Pfaelzer gave a talk at the Law School yesterday based on her new book, Driven Out. It was a part of a law class on tort cases. The claim that I found interesting, and will be thinking about further, is that the Chinese petition for reparation in the Chinese expulsion from Tacoma and Eureka (Wing Hing v. Eureka) is a precursor to the Japanese petition for reparation after the Internment and to subsequent suits for reparation. As it came out in the discussion with the law professor who hosted the talk, it is a big claim and potentially a controversial one. We talked more about it at dinner. I liked the way that Jean was approaching it through the notion of a global identity (obviously based on an idea of transnationalism) and claiming that constitutional rights are applicable to non-citizens when citizenship is blocked by racial discrimination. One law professor mentioned that there’s a law review issue on reparation that approaches the subject through cognitive psychology. That should be interesting to look at.

I noticed that law school dinners are, ahem, much more formal than English dinners. The hosting law professor really presided over dinner, and the dinner was really a continuation of the talk. If there’s a hierarchy in English, that’s nothing compared to the hierarchy in Law school. Everyone had a place and was expected to know one’s place.

And if law is different from English, so is history. I went to another seminar earlier in the day with mostly historians. Historians, on the whole, seem to be invested in empiricism and resistant to theory. I really felt it when one history professor attacked David Scott’s seminal essay, “That Event, This Memory”–an essay I really liked btw–which was one of the assigned readings. It was hard to bear for me, not that I didn’t appreciate the interesting works the historians are doing. The attack on Scott, understandable given where the history prof was coming from, entirely missed the point of Scott’s essay.

I really need to stop going to so many talks and seminars and buckled down to my own work. I wonder if this migration from talk to talk is not a sign of my being lost these days . . . Still I think I’ll go to Saskia Sassen’s thing later in the day. What am I to do with myself?

Deferral

My advisor told me that as I get comments from my readers, I’ll be encountering conflicting comments from time to time. Opposite views on the same thing. I thought I’d be okay handling that. I thought I knew how to deal with comments and critiques. Actually, it’s harder than I thought. One of my committee members thinks my dissertation proposal is too historical and not theoretical enough. And theoretical here, I think, means something very particular.

I’m a little tired of thinking about the diss right now. Thinking alone doesn’t help much. And there is no way that I can do all the research in the next few weeks to make me feel good about the argument I’m making.

So in these moments, I defer thinking about the dissertation by reading works that are not directly related to the diss and things I want to write about (again, not directly related to the diss). Presently, I want to write an essay on cosmopolitanism based on Korean intellectuals during the Korean War. And an essay on the representation of sexual violation and the hazy line between exposé and pornography. And I want to Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals. And Kant. Sounds like I need a break from the diss.

Empire?

Sometimes I wonder what people in the future would think about all the U.S. empire talk that’s currently one of the dominant themes in the humanities and the social sciences in the U.S.

One of the leading scholars in the study of the U.S. empire said in a conference recently that she thinks the term has lost its analytical and critical force. I don’ t think she was suggesting we drop the term, but there was definitely a sense of frustration with the way the study of the U.S. empire was going. Scholars try out a lot of things with empire now: a typology of empire; empire v. imperial formation; examining interimperial terrains, etc. They all seem interesting, and I personally think the study of the U.S. empire is very important.

But I have to confess that there’s something so ridiculous about how U.S. academics (or, at least the ones on the Left) have become a group most “enlightened” on the subject of the U.S. empire. Nows these people have to persuade conservative scholars in the dependent nation-states (for the lack of a better phrase; colonies don’t quite do the job here since the U.S. as an empire is not really an empire based on territorial acquisition) that they are brainwashed in harboring any illusions of liberalism and democracy re the U.S.

Makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. Thing is, I grew up in an environment where there was actually “empire on the streets” to borrow from Fernando Coronil. Student protests against the U.S. empire were not uncommon. And, of course, the idea of the U.S. empire in these protests was pretty fluid. Fluid enough to draw in different groups who could rally under the same banner for the same set of political goals. It’s a strategy of political organization, right?

So imagine my surprise when I first came over to the States and found that U.S. academics had “discovered” the U.S. empire. It was definitely interesting to see how they were so excited about what people in other parts of the world had known all along. Even if they were never heard or taken seriously. But then again, I’ve also come to realize that the term U.S. empire means vastly different things to the academics who study the U.S. as an empire and the protesters who fight the U.S. empire. I just can’ t imagine a U.S. academic in a productive dialogue with, say, a student protester who would have a very simplified and flat idea of the U.S. (not to typify student protesters)

Let me put this into an anecdote form. So the president of the ASA makes a trip to Tokyo annually for the Japanese ASA conference. On her way there she stops by the country where I come from. Because the ASA there doesn’t have enough money to independently sponsor the president’s trip, they add on their thing to the Japanese event. Recently, the president of the ASA, who happened to be one of the most preeminent scholars in U.S. empire, was in this country for a while before moving on to Tokyo. Two groups of people greeted her at the conference here. A group of young students who vociferously shouted down the U.S. empire and a group of old scholars, headed by the president of the ASA of that country, who couldn’t stand the insolence and impoliteness (we’re a very polite people) of the students. The president of the ASA of this country felt the need to make a public apology to the American president of the ASA who was visiting. So he made a point of making a speech of how indebted “we” are to the U.S., how much “we” have to “learn” from the Americans. He must have seemed like a total wacko to the American president of the ASA. Well, is he?

Accommodation with the prevailing dominant ideology–hybridity under hierarchical rule–is often akin to the ressentiment of the humiliated in Nietzsche’s terms, forced into outward shows of servility towards the humiliator who strikes them, but inwardly seething with resentment and the thirst for revenge. What is lacking in these circumstances is not the desire but the opportunity and weapons of resistance. But it is precisely this last line of defence–the domain of self-respect rather than the achievement ethic of self-esteem–which cultural humiliation seeks to extinguish, aiming for fully internalized loyalty to the dominant order so that the subject, literally, has no shame. (Luke Gibbons qtd. in Naoki Sakai) 

Bosteels on The Melancholy Left and Feeling Backward

Blogging before I get back to Lawson Inada’s Legends from Camp.

I went to a talk by Bruno Bosteels on “The Melancholy Left: Specters of 1968 in Mexico and Beyond”. I don’t know much about Bosteels’ work except for the fact that he translates and comments on Badiou’s works, which is something I gathered from listening to other people talk about him when I was at the theory camp at Cornell. I debated quite a bit whether I should go to the talk or not, because I’m feeling very behind in working on my own thing while sitting in on two classes (which means doing all the reading/presentations for both). It’s so easy to lose a lot of time in between classes and lectures, even though they’re really good and intellectually stimulating. It so turned out, though, that Bosteels’s talk helped me understand some comments that my advisor had made way back. Comments I had not understood then, but had kept in mind. More during Q&A rather than during the talk, the place of the subject in the past four decades of theory and politics became clear. Well, clearer than before, that is. What deconstruction did to the idea of a political subjectivity, how that effected the Left, how some theorists on the Left today are trying to come up with a (new?) theory of subjectivity, and so on.

A new book that I want to plug: Feeling Backward by Heather Love. You can read the blurbs to the book here. Diana Fuss calls her the “Marcel Proust of contemporary theory.” I’d be really sad if she leaves the dept. Even if she’s the person on my committee with the least relevance to what I work on, I feel like she understands the way I think and asks helpful questions at the right time. She’s also very down to earth and straightforward, which makes it relatively easy to talk to her about, umm, the dark side of the academy, for the lack of a better expression. I’m actually going to talk to her Thursday about a couple of external dissertation fellowships I’m thinking about applying to. I really want to finish before I need external funding, but I’ve started to become a bit concerned about sixth-year funding now that nobody seems to go out in five years. I want something I can fall back on. External dissertation fellowships seem very competitive and hard to get, but . . . there’s no harm in trying, I guess.

I’m reading a lot of Freud and learning a lot in one of the two classes I sit on. I guess I’m very lucky to be in this class with such a well-known Freud commentator as the professor who’s teaching the class. I still have a hard time orienting my thinking of reparation around the psychoanalytic frame, though. (The prof. is working on reparation now, though we still need to hear more about what that means.) It’ll become better, hopefully, as we have more concrete discussions of reparation in Freud and Klein.

I feel very lonely these days.