Exhibition plug—TransPop: Korea-Vietnam Remix

For those who are/will be in Seoul this winter, this exhibition might be something worth catching. TransPop: Korea-Vietnam Remix is an exhibition featuring modern art works by contemporary Korean and Vietnamese artists. It’s at Arko Art Center at Daehakro, easily accessible by subway (blue line, get off at Hyehwa). The exhibition runs until the end of February. Hours are 11am to 8pm, and the center is closed on Mondays and on holidays. There seems to have been other exhibits of this kind with Korean and Vietnamese artists, but this one seems particularly interesting. Especially for those doing comparative work on Korea and Vietnam, this exhibition is something you don’t want to miss.

Check out the article in The Korea Times if you need further persuasion.

Winter break reading

About two hours to go before I head out to the airport. At 4 am in the morning. Whew. Better not to sleep than try to get up.

I’ve been reading some postwar economic histories, mainly of the Pacific but not exclusively, since my dissertation covers the postwar period. If you work on the postwar period, you will inevitably encounter such terms as Fordism, post-Fordism, flexible accumulation, developmentalism, Keynesianism, welfare state, military-industrial complex. So I thought I might as well read some basic, readable economic histories, or works on the political economy, to get the terms down.

So far these are the works I found helpful:

Ravi Arvind Palat’s Capitalist Restructuring in the Pacific Rim (2004):

Very readable. I found this work helpful in getting a broad overview of postwar restructuring in the Asia-Pacific. Also offers a good bibliography. Palat’s critique of U.S. hegemony in the postwar restructuring of the Asia-Pacific is evident in his preference of “military Keynesianism” over Keynesianism. But he also pays considerable attention to bourgeois nationalism in the Asia-Pacific and how different Asian countries developed differently depending on the kind of state craft involved. I especially found Palat helpful in seeing the intersections of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. domestic affairs.

Arif Dirlik, ed. What is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (1998):

Read only a few essays in this collection so far, but I think this is a collection I’ll be returning to. It’s a frequently cited essay collection in Pacific Rim studies. Most essays are critical of how the Pacific Rim is an area studies invention meant to bolster the interests of U.S. and multinational capital. I found Meredith Woo-Cumings’s essay “Market dependency in U.S.-East Asia relations” particularly helpful. Is she related to Bruce Cumings?

Sing Chew and Robert Denenmark, eds. The Underdevelopment of Development: Essays in Honor of Andre Gunder Frank (1996):

This is an essay collection I just picked up because I needed an overview of the dependency school and this collection seemed, ahem, most accessible. Again, I read only a few essays, but I think I gained a basic understanding of the dependency thesis. Amin very helpfully says, “[t]he dependency thesis, like all great (and good) theories, can be summarized in a single phrase: Modern “underdevelopment” is not “historical backwardness,” the result of late and insufficient capitalist development; it is the product of capitalist development, which is polarizing by nature.” George Aseniero’s “Asia in the World System” I found helpful in understanding how the dependency thesis can be applied to Asia.

Samir Amin, Rereading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary (1994):

This is more or less an intellectual autobiography of Amin, and I mostly skimmed the book. It was still helpful since Amin is one of the most influential Marxist economists of the postwar period. His intellectual trajectory, with some exaggeration, is the trajectory of Marxist economics in the postwar era. One of Amin’s major concepts is “delinking” which he defines as “the submission of external relations to the logic of internal development, the opposite of structural adjustment of the peripheries to the demands of the polarizng worldwide expansion of capital.” In my very pedestrian understanding, I think what it means is that you delink the development of the periphery from that of the center and instead of using the development of the center to assess the backwardness of the periphery, you cue in on the periphery and come up with a model of development that is not “catching up” but tailored to the needs of the periphery.  Amin is a historical materialist to his marrows; I cannot help but smile when he says things like “[m]y intellectual concerns have never been narrowly academic. Rather, I have always thought of myself as a militant of socialism and of popular liberation” (which position later excuses the dearth of notes and the abundance of self-reference; something only someone of his caliber can do).

Reading outside of my discipline does from time to time make me think about the significance of literature and culture. But then again, arguments such as Lowe and Lloyd’s in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital that “[t]o pose the argument about transnationalism at the level of commodification not only obscures the practices of exploitation that lead to antagonism, but also ignores the ways in which transnational capital’s exploitation of cultural differentiation produces its own contradictions” reaffirm the importance of reading literature and culture. (It also cautions you against making easy commodification arguments.)

I’ve packed a few books for the trip, and I’m excited to finally read David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, a book that basically everybody cites when they discuss late capitalism. I’m also planning to read Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness. I feel the need to know what orthodox Marxism is.

This post may make it seem as if I’ve done a lot of work recently, but actually no. For the past few days, I’ve been watching a lot of movies and reading for fun. I flew through Ha Jin’s new book, A Free Life. It was a good read. Ha Jin is a good writer, the best of middlebrow literariness as someone put it (am not sure if that’s a praise or a disparagement). Maybe I’ll write a post on it some day . . . Now I have to finish packing . . .

Where to?

No surprises. As was expected. Still disappointing. Or, maybe sad is more like it.

The conservative party is back in rule in South Korea. It’s probably accurate to expect a pretty straightforward neoconservative/neoliberal government in South Korea for the next five years. Where we will be at the end of those five years, who can say. I can’t say that Lee’s election is a mistake. Like so many friends who fretted over the “who else, then?” question, I’m not sure if there was an alternative in this presidential election despite the ridiculous number of candidates. Like so many friends, despite my disagreement with the politics and agenda of the conservative party, I’m not sure if I would have voted for the current party. For the last five years at least, they did so many things wrong. Somehow, they managed to make everybody, left and right, unhappy. If there was one thing that the current government showed skill in it was breeding distrust and hostility. And since the expectations that carried the current president, Roh, to office were high, the disappointment was also crushing.

Still, it’s heartbreaking to see Lee being elected and to see the conservative party takeover. It’s heartbreaking to see the spirit of civil society and the drive for democracy (not only in name but in reality) that gave the liberal party the power of governance roll back due to economic reasons. Lee’s election, I think, attests to the fact that the average Korean feels that it’s hard to make a living. Maybe more so than, say, ten years ago. If voters can say that they elected Lee despite his dubious ethics because they saw the promise of economic growth and stability in Lee, then that means that the primary concern of the majority population is economic stability.

Read the NYTimes article that says that the “firery oratory” of the liberal, nationalistic leaders of the last ten years or so was not enough to keep the liberal party in power in the face of the people’s need for change. The truth in that statement is only skin deep. It reduces the desire for democracy and the sacrifices so many people made to live in dignity to nothing more than a blind subscription to demagoguery. And I find that insulting. Even though I’m not an expert on the subject, democratization in Korea has not been achieved by any political party or any charismatic ideologue. It was the coalition among workers, students, and intellectuals that ultimately brought down the authoritarian regime. It was a long and painful process with a lot of bloodshed and a lot of sacrifices for those who rebelled. That’s why we now proudly call it a people’s movement.

Nationalism might have been mobilized now and then, but what American liberals so often get wrong (and yes, I’m digressing) in their simplistic and reductive understanding of, well, both of nationalism and the Korean situation, is that nationalism has never been something taken for granted by Koreans (or, at least, Koreans who think about this). How can it be when the peninsual is still in the “division system”? When we’re still living in a state of partition? When whatever nation-state that we have now is an incomplete one at best? Even though this is a touchy and complicated question, I think in those cases when nationalism was successfully mobilized after the Korean War and during reconstruction, it was because it became somewhat coterminous with the people’s desire for self-rule and life-sustaining development. I wouldn’t call myself a nationalist, but so many critics of Korean nationalism nowadays are shamelessly ahistorical. Or, they would take established critiques of nationalism (regardless of the context of those critiques) and just apply them to Korea. As if that’d yield any interesting analyses.

Back to the election question: I’m left with a series of questions more than anything else. Why is it that life is still so hard for the average Korean when S. Korea has achieved so much economic development? How come the figures and stats on growth don’t translate into the quality of the majority population’s lives? Why is the labor party so pathetic in Korea? Where did all the good work that people involved in the labor movements in the 80s did (including the critical acumen they brought to bear on political and economic analyses) go? Why is there still so much regional segregation/discrimination in Korea? Is that an abiding colonial legacy or what?

Okay, I guess that was enough ranting on a blog where I’m supposed to chronicle the development of my dissertation.

Seducing Mr. Perfect

Seducing Mr. Perfect, starring Um, Jeongwha and Daniel Henney is I think Korea’s first Korean-English bilingual movie. The version that I watched is by no means a standard edition, so I’m not sure if the theater edition or the DVD edition has any subtitles. But watching the movie without subtitles, I realized that the movie is quite significantly bilingual. It probably had to be since Daniel Henney doesn’t speak Korean. It’s a really cheesy romantic comedy, with a cliche girl-meets-boy plot and quite a bit of bad acting. So I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. Still I found the fantasy of the movie interesting, and the politics of language it displaces worth writing about. It manages to touch on everything that I think is problematic about Korea’s love of English.

To summarize the plot, Um is a mid-to-low level team manager at a Korean firm. An outgoing, chic and sassy woman, her only “fault” is that she believes in love. She’s the giving type and has been wronged by a series of guys who too gladly took advantage of her devotion to them. Daniel Henney is a gyopo (Korean American) who has been assigned by the American head of the firm to head the Korean branch. He holds the exact opposite view of love from Um. It’s a game, and you have to know the rules of the game and play by the rules to come out as the winner.  Somewhere along the line of numerous conflicts, Um gets Henney to be her relationship coach while vowing to herself that she’d prove him wrong by seducing him. As she slowly realizes her growing feelings for him, her ex-boyfriend returns, and Henney is tailed by an American woman (who is his friend but whose relationship to him ultimately remains unclear). All of a sudden, Henney is reassigned to a U.S. branch and as his day of departure is impending, tries to close a deal of merger with a Japanese firm. It comes out that Henney’s grandfather used to work as a laborer for this Japanese firm (a janitor?) and that Henney wants to acquire this Japanese firm as a tribute to his deceased grandfather. Of course, Um steps in with an eloquent speech and makes possible the merger. And Um and Henney themselves merge (metaphorically speaking) as they both come to own up to their feelings for each other.

The movie portrays one of the most common fantasies of Korean romantic comedies: a pretty girl acquiring upward mobility through falling in love with or marrying a rich guy. What I find significant about the movie’s take on this time-old trope, though, is the fact that it sets the trope within the post-IMF social restructuring. While it’s not explicitly stated in the movie, it makes perfect sense to read the Korean firm as having been bought by a U.S. firm when the IMF crisis hit. The U.S. firm assigns a Korean American to be in charge of the Korean branch.It’s a race-based assignment. The cultural brokering in global capitalism makes strategic use of race and gender.

Very summarily put, the IMF crisis brought about a whole series of restructuring in the Korean economy. While the Korean economy has often been looked at as run by elite economic bureaucracies and intimately tied to the state (as most East Asian economies are), Korean firms are said to have voluntarily undertaken serious deregulation to survive the blows of the financial crisis. Which, by the way, tripled the rate of unemployment and pushed a third of the population below the poverty line in its immediate aftermath. American management personnel like Henney in the movie came in and guided the deregulation and restructuring process.  English was always a privileged language in Korea after the Korean war, but the status of the language soared with the need for a bilingual workforce that can mediate the English-speaking managerial class and the Korean-speaking managerial class.

The romance of Um and Henney relocates post-IMF mergers into the realm of the private sphere. The rough edges of the restructuring scene (millions of layoffs and a severe disciplining of labor) disappear into the pretty tug-of-war between the boss and his employee. The gender hierarchy of patriarchy (where it is expected for man to stand over woman) makes invisible what other hierarchies exist between Um and Henney along the lines of nationality and language. At the same time, Korean is feminized and English masculinized as Um wallows in her emotions in Korean and Henney delivers his pragmatics of managing relationships in English. The fantasy of the movie is that Um ultimately conquers Henney through her emotional capaciousness. The last scene where Henney sits cross-legged across from Um’s parents asking for their permission in dating Um shows Korea’s embrace of the foreign element. In fact, it’s not just an embrace but an attempt to make Korean what is American.

Through its fantastical imagination, the movie suggests that in the realm of culture, the Korean economy’s dependency on the U.S. and the privilege of English can be reversed. In the realm of the private sphere, that is. Outside the romantic relationship of Um and Henney the order of things do not change. They need not change. In its uncritical use of the genre of romantic comedy the movie ends up being just another Korean girl’s dream to meet a rich, English-speaking man. Oh, throw in hot in the mix too.

Viramontes on writing

I was born and raised in the U.S., East L.A., Califas, to be more exact, on First Street not too far from Whittier Blvd., close enough to enable me to see the smoke from the Chicano Moratorium riots. I come from a family of eleven, six sisters and three brothers, but the family always extended its couch or floor to whomever stopped at our house with nowhere else to go. As a result, a variety of people came to live with us. Former boyfriends of my sisters who were thrown or pushed out of their homes, friends who stayed the night but never left, relatives who crossed the border and stayed until enough was saved.  . . .
Little did I realize that  this is the stuff good fiction is made of: the stories, the fascination of the subject mater, capturing the moments and fleeing with them like a thief or lover. I began my apprenticeship without even knowing it.
The other thing I remember is my mother. Her relentless energy. She must have been tired a good part of her life and yet she had to keep going and going and going.  I also remember her total kindness, the way a sad story made her cry, the way she always found room somehow  in an already-crowded household for those with the sad stories. The nights she would stay up, a small black and white T.V. blaring, waiting for the girls to come home. The mornings  she would get up, KWKW Spanish radio low, making the big stack of tortillas for the morning breakfast.
These two things, love of stories and love of my mother, or all that seemed female in our household, influenced me to such an extent that it became an unconscious part  of me . . . . .

Family ties are fierce. Especially for mujeres. We are raised to care for. We are raised to stick together, for the family unit is our only source of safety. Outside our home there lies a dominant culture that is foreign to us, isolates us, and labels us illegal alien. But what may be seen as a nurturing, close unit, may also become suffering, manipulative, and sadly victimizing. As we slowly examine our own existence in and out of these cultures, we are breaking stereotypes, reinventing traditions for our own daughters and sons.
. . . . . .
My tio Rogelio was one of those who stayed for years. I became his consentida, he my best friend, until other interests developed in his life. He eventually moved and the distance between his house and mine became so far it took years to get together again. Recently, he visited me and was astonished to find that I spoke only in English. Straightforward, as has always been his manner, he asked me: “Why don’t you speak Spanish anymore?”
Good question. What happened? I did as as a child, I know only from others’ recollection, but what happened? Somewhere, along the educational system I lost it, and with it I lost a part of me. Yes, I can communicate all right now, but to feel that it is my own, to feel comfortable enough to write in it, that’s what I am missing. As a result, I will not be a whole person until I reacquire that part of me. For you see, a good part of my upbringing was in Spanish. Spanish images, words, moods that I feel I must explore before they are buried for good.
Of course English is my language too. I’m entitled to it, though it is the one I have learned artificially. But having Spanish stolen from me is lingual censorship. A repression that reveals to me the power of the language itself.
Consequently, I do not feel comfortable in either language. In fact, I majored in English and acquired a degree to erase what Lorna Dee Cervantes calls “my excuse me tongue.” However,  my English is often awkward, and clumsy, and it is this awkwardness that I struggle so hard with. But isn’t that what writing is all about? The struggle with the word for the perfect meaning? Sometimes my mistakes turn out to be my best writing. Sometimes I think in Spanish and translate. Sometimes I go through the dictionary and acquaint myself with words I wouldn’t otherwise use in conversation. Sometimes I am thrilled by the language and play with its implications. And sometimes I hate it, not feeling comfortable.
And yet, I am amazed when people say one of my greatest strengths is my language. Funny, no? . . . I still say that if my works were translated into Spanish, they would somehow feel better. More, more, what’s the word? At home.

. . . . .

In my case, Faulkner was right; I became a short story writer because I was a failed poet. But when I began to write, I honestly went into it rather blindly. I never once thought of a potential audience. Perhaps just starting out, I didn’t have the confidence to think that people would actually be interested in reading it. I wrote what was natural, personal to me . . .
By that time, I had discovered the Latin American writers: Borges, García Márquez, Rulfo, Yañez, to name a few. Their exploration with form and voice was a thrilling experiment in modern fiction, I felt, and as eager to try my hand at it. It was a rebellion against accepted rules that, in essence, reflected their politics as well. Like Faulkner, they sought to see what they could get away with, and, as a result, gave birth to such a rich texture of literature that it is a sheer celebration to read.
This is where I got my angst for form, technique. But my worldview was obviously a different one because I was a Chicana. Once I discovered the Black women writers—Walker, Morrison, Brooks, Shange, again to name a few—womanism as subject matter seemed sanctioned, illuminating, innovative, honest, the best in recent fiction that I’ve seen in a long time.
Subject matter and form. They met, became lovers, often quarreled, but nonetheless, Helena Maria Viramontes was born.

–From “”Nopalitos”: The making of fiction” in Breaking Boundaries

Formalism

This smart and hot professor whose class I had the chance to take in the summer of 2006 sent me some comments on my proposal. And they were really good. Very, very impressive. I should have guessed since his interests partly overlap with mine. The fact that he was familiar with some of my secondary literature also helped.

His caution that I was reading literary texts made me realize that I need a method of reading that will help me read the literary texts. My interpretive frame as of now doesn’t quite extend to that. The methodology part is what still bothers me even after I’m all set to go for the dissertation. People say the methodology part is the part that you say “how” you’re going to do what you’re going to do after having said “what “you’re going to do. Psychoanalysis and Marxism come up as examples (two extreme poles) of methodology. The catch here is that although you want to have some idea of how you’re going to read your texts, you only really know your methodology after you’ve written your dissertation. If you read the prefaces or introductions to critical texts, you’ll notice that there are a million methodologies.

The prof’s caution prompted me to do some reading on Jakobson, Bakhtin, basically  on formalism. I’ve been interested in Bakhtin for a while, and while his notions of heteroglossia and polyphony get (too) easily applied in criticism in ways that take away from the depth of these notions, I think Bakhtin’s way of thinking and reading might prove helpful to me. And I came across this sentence as I was reading the acclaimed critical biography of Bakhtin by Clark and Holquist: “In The Formal Method [Marxism] is opposed to positivism and to what in the Soviet Union was labeled in the late 1920s as “vulgar sociologism,” the notion that literature can directly reflect such extraliterary factors as ideologies, socioeconomic conditions, or class situations. Indeed, the book maintains thatt literature does not reflect external reality directly at all.” (159) Vulgar sociologism, I guess that was what the prof was warning me against.

Formalism, closely associated with New Criticism, is sometimes a suspect reading practice for left-wing literary critics, mostly because of the way that it has been used to reinforce the distinction between high and low literature and to reproduce the Western canon. Although we all do close reading. (And make a big deal out of it too!) But based on what I’m doing, I think I need to be able to say what the place of literature is in my project. And I need to be able to read them with a close attention to their literariness as well as explain how this literariness figures within my larger argument. I guess I’ll be doing some reading on formalism and linguistics for the next month.

On an unrelated note, I skimmed through Albert Memmi’s Decolonization and the Decolonized, one of his most recent books which I picked up from the library shelves while I was looking for The Colonizer and the Colonized to look up a sentence in the book, and was disappointed. What is up with this book? Memmi says that neocolonialism, vague and abstract enough to be used for everything, has become a catchword for blaming the poverty of the Third World on developed countries. Is it because he is writing from Europe that his argument seems so foreign? I had difficulty in even registering it. I need to take a look at another book by him on the dependent subject, though, since I’m interested in the dependent subject and forms of dependency. I hope that book is better.