The Diplomatic-Industrial Complex

I’m struck by Parag Khanna’s prescription that the U.S. (already a waning empire) build a “diplomatic-industrial complex” if it wants to stay afloat in the changing world order (where U.S. hegemony is being replaced by a China-EU-U.S. dynamic) in his recent cover essay for the New York Time Magazine. Because the argument that he makes so closely resembles one of the rationales for advocating bilingual education in the 1960s. As I go over the congressional recordings of the Bilingual Education Act (1967), I keep noticing how repairing U.S. relations with South American countries and preparing a pool of bilinguals to work for U.S. diplomacy and business was a key justification for bilingual education. Hector Garcia, founder of the GI Forum and an expert witness at the congressional hearings, went so far as to say that “Texas and the Southwest United States may well be the training grounds for American diplomacy in Latin America.”

The aspiration of the Bilingual Education Act was to take care of social justice and the national interest in education at the same time. It tried to destigmatize the bilingualism of the Spanish-speaking children in schools and in doing so, made the case that the liability that bilingualism has become can be turned into a national asset. Most notably through the national Defense Education Act (1958), the U.S. was at this time trying to invest more in foreign language instruction. (Of course, these educational measures and acts were very much in line with the Cold War ideology of the time.) Investing in bilingual children who already had Spanish, instead of trying to beat Spanish out of these children, seemed like a good way of boosting the country’s level of foreign-language instruction. In the words of another expert witness at the hearing, “there [was] something sadly paradoxical about the schools’ well-meaning effort to make the Mexican-American child “talk American”–to eradicate his Spanish. For they are at the same time working strenuously to teach Spanish to the Anglo-American students, acclaiming the advantage of being able to communicate fluently in a language other than one’s own.”

While this is only a part of the story, pitching bilingual education in terms of how it can contribute to the national interest readily subjects bilingual education, probably the most representative example of multiculturalism in education, to the standard Marxist critique of multiculturalism. That multiculturalism is the social logic of capitalism.

What is so interesting for me in Khanna’s argument is to see a return to the idea that the U.S. needs to fortify its diplomatic, business sector by making it more global after the change in federal attitude toward bilingual education since the 1980s and the overall retrenchment in bilingual education. It raises interesting questions about multiculturalism and capitalism. Does this mean that multiculturalism really profits from capitalism and vice versa? How would one advocate multiculturalism outside of a capitalist frame of reference? Persuasively. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll be picking up Khanna’s book when it comes out in March . . .

What about transnationalism in Asian American studies?

After having been to a rather bizarre talk on the figuration of the Chinese (or the Mandarin) in Western modernist literature which ended with the speaker’s little spiel on the state of transnationalism in Asian American studies, I’m struck by how progressive scholars these days all alike seem to say that scholars in Asian American studies should not only work on Asian “American” texts, histories, and issues but also on “Asian” texts, histories, and issues. I understand that this exhortation is coming from a strong and considered critique of American exceptionalism, but I still find that nudge somewhat bewildering.

Mostly because I’m not sure why the onus is on scholars in Asian American studies to take up the study of Asia. I mean, sure, Asian American history intersects with the history of U.S. military interventions and commerce in Asia, and it makes a lot of sense to look at both China and Chinese America if you were working on the Chinese diaspora (like Ong did in one of her books). But I find something unsettling and uncomfortable about the argument that you need to read both Asian American texts and Asian texts to avoid your project being “too American.” Maybe I’m not getting this because I’m not American.

In addition to not being able to see how working on both Asian American texts and Asian texts alone makes your work less U.S.-centered, I’m also somewhat cautious of  the sudden demand that scholars in Asian American studies avail themselves of Asian texts. For example, there is this passage in one of Sau-ling Wong’s essays where she discusses her experience in a graduate class. She had her graduate class read some Chinese writers. She thought they had to be read in the tradition of Chinese literary history and criticism. However, her graduate students (ain’t going to name names…) showed her how the Chinese writers can actually be read with some well-known Asian American writers. Wong ends the passage with a very generous reflection on the kinds of innovative readings that reading the Chinese writers through Asian American writers allow.

Which is all good and fine. I like such reading practices that create new rubrics of comparison.  But then I can’t help but think of what would be “lost” if such readings ignore the place of the Chinese writer in Chinese history and the ways in which the writer has been discussed in Chinese literary criticism. I can’t help it if I sound a bit old fashioned here. Although I should make it clear that what concerns me is not so much what constitutes good scholarship as who gets to read which writers in what ways. And with what authority. Or maybe I’m just being finicky.

The speaker last night ended his little spiel on the sorry state of transnationalism  on Asian American studies by pointing to the “language problem” of scholars in Asian American studies. They don’t have the languages to read Asian texts. (The speaker himself had spent some years in Beijing and seemed to speak Mandarin.) I understood what he was saying, but then really disagreed with his casting the lack of attention to Asian texts in Asian American studies as a “language problem.” While language can be one of the many reasons why Asian texts are never given the proper scholarly attention that is given to Western classics, it is by no means the most prominent reason. Rey Chow in one of her works mentions that the unequal relations of the East and West will only change when we read Asian literature with the same attention and interest we extend to Western literature. If Asian classics have the same place in modernity as Western classics do, then students would be clamoring to learn Asian languages. The problem is that’s not the case. Compared to Western literature, Asian literature is undervalued, and students and researchers go for the prestigious, well established fields within literary and cultural studies. Which is never East Asian studies. (Just think about the prestige of Shakespeare studies in English.)

Having said all this, I concur with the speaker that it’d be awesome if everybody in English had a language other than English. Like really had a language other than English. Instead of just doing enough to pass the required foreign language exam which is more or less a joke. And having laid out all my complaints about scholars in Asian American studies trying to make it into East Asian studies, I actually am very excited by works by scholars such as Viet Nguyen and Naoki Sakai who bring interesting and innovative insights into reading the literature of the Asian diaspora. I hope more solid scholarship in this area makes me realize how ungrounded and foolish my complaints and concerns are.

The Shadow of Arms

I just finished Suk-young Hwang’s The Shadow of Arms (1985) where the author (a renowned South Korean writer) presents a story of South Korean involvement in the Vietnam War through a Korean army officer who tracks down the black market, the point of convergence for the U.S. army, the Korean army, the South Vietnamese army, and even the NFL. It was really good. I can’t vouch for the English translation (since I haven’t looked at it), but an English translation has been issued by Cornell UP. I had decided to read this and another Korean author’s work on Vietnam (Hyun-suk Bang’s two short stories in Time to Eat Lobsters) after hearing a professor’s talk on comparing the U.S. and Japanese and Korean representations of the Vietnam War a couple of months ago. Finally got around to it this winter. Here’s a good article on Hwang’s novel at Japan Focus if you’re interested. I think the article does a persuasive reading of the (im)possibility of a revolutionary subject in the ascending order of the postwar empire which fosters neocolonialism and subimperialism.

I’m a little heavy hearted since I haven’t yet started on the first chapter yet. But I’ll get around to it. Soon. I’m also grading an undergraduate class on law and literature this semester. It’s taught by someone on my committee and the class partly speaks to my dissertation interests, so it’ll be good.

Post-symposium reflections

The conference on The Transnational Imagination in a Global Ear turned out to be pretty interesting. I got to hear some people whose works I’m interested in talk. Plus, the registration fee was dirt cheap. (They let me register as a graduate student with my U.S. school ID.) I’m glad I went.

Reflections in random order

–Being a leftist is not a minoritarian position in the U.S. academy. In fact,  the neo/conservative and repulican media complain about the liberal bias of American universities. (Liberal/leftist professors are ruining the American education! is the often heard accusation.) Being a leftist is definitely a minoritarian  position in the Korean academy. A holdover from the security state of the 60s and the 70s where being “red” meant being worse than human.

–The intellectual tradition of the Korean Left has produced some strong thinkers. I especially liked Hee-youn Cho’s presentation and questions. He’s someone who is expected to be Korea’s next generation of leftisit intellectual. I could tell that he’s someone who’s been with the democratizing movement and the labor movement in Korea for a long time. And that he knew his Marx back and forth. Very impressive.

–I’ve heard before that the Korean left is very attentive to class issues, very up to date on the newest theories and trends in Marxism/socialism/labor movements/people’s movements, but that it’s bad on everything else which includes gender, sexuality issues and issues of race and ethnicity. I was confirmed of that. They’re pretty bad on gender. (and I doubt that they have much to offer in terms of sexuality, race, or ethnicity.) On the first day, they had one woman presenter paired up with one woman respondent out of the eight presentations and eight reponses that I attended. The women pair so obviously seemed to be tokens. One the second day, they changed the moderator for the panel (there was only one panel the second day) to a woman. My hunch is that Cho, the professor above who heads the Association, switched the moderator from himself to a woman. Mostly likely having noticed the underrepresentation of women on the first day. Ha ha ha. Truth be told, the conference was on the whole a boy’s club.

–There was this really awesome moment when an old man from the (pretty small) audience, introduced himself as an ordinary person off the street who is concerned with the social problems of the present, and then came out as a “commie.” He said that he was almost executed. Some kind of nationalist organization of young men had sentenced him to death. (Probably something that happened decades ago.) Because he’s a commie! He said that a Korean documentary TV show came to interview him but then edited him out. When he inquired into it, they told him they had to edit him out because the “society is not ready” for that kind of stuff. Ha ha ha.

–The panel that generated the most heated and controversial (and the most interesting!) discussion was the last panel on nationalism where they had a historian who recenty has gained a lot of attention with his work on transnationalism speak. I might as well have expected this. How can you not have a heated discussion on nationalism with a room full of Korean leftist intellectuals? I think this was the most interesting part of the conference for me. On the whole, there was a lot of explication of U.S. and European theorists’ work with some scattered attempts to think about the specificities of the Korean situation in terms of applying these theories which was not that interesting to me. The discussion on nationalism, however, brought about very incisive and insightful analyses and comments based on the history of the modern state and of Korean nationalism. Given my disciplinary bias, I personally would have liked to see some nuanced differentiation between the affective aspect of nationalism and the ideological or political aspect of nationalism. The discusssion made no distinction between the two despite the noticeably emotional responses the topic provoked.

Overall it was fun, and I learned a lot. The Korean leftist intellectuals are well attuned to the newest theories and debates coming out of the Left from all over the world. I gleaned a pretty good bibliography. Now I’m headed back to Philadelphia. Heavy work ahead since I took a long break . . .

Symposium: The Transnational Imagination in a Global Era

The Korean Critical Sociological Association is holding a two-day symposium on “The Transnational Imagination in a Global Era” on the 11th and the 12th at Sookmyung Women’s University. Despite its somewhat vague name, the Association used to be an important academic organization (probably still is, I simply don’t know) in Korea’s democratic movement and labor movement in the 80s and early 90s. The panels feature some interesting Korean academics. I think the conference is garnering attention because it brings together a number of well-known sociologist and political scientists to debate on the ongoing controversy between nationalism and transnationalism. I’m planning to go to at least a few sessions since there are a couple of people whose talks I’m interested in.

The Icheon warehouse fire tragedy is really heartbreaking. The media type this as an “underdeveloped-country-type tragedy.” All the lives lost point to the wretched labor conditions in Korea, but the story of an extended family of Korean Chinese who came to Korea in search of a “Korean dream” and became victims in the tragedy especially draw attention to the increasingly visible ethnic stratification in Korea. The foreigners in Korea fall into two groups: the affluent, English-speaking, mostly white professionals and the poor, non-English speaking, mostly brown (and yellow) laborers. At the expense of generalization . . . Korean society loves the former and looks down on the latter. A good number of socially aware citizens and civic organizations are speaking up on the exploitation of foreign workers in Korea, but it still doesn’t seem to be enough.

Korea 2000, the company in the storage business, has insurance for items that are lost in the case of fire but did not think to purchase insurance for people. Apparently, the items they store in their warehouses are more precious than the people who work in the warehouses . . .  Life is cheap in countries driven to develop, and develop, and develop.