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.

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 . . .

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

Reading literature

I’ve been reading a lot of fiction lately, both for a class that I’m sitting in on this semester and to make up for my lack of exposure to Latino literature. A work that I really enjoyed and an author I discovered: Carlos Bulosan’s The Cry and the Dedication and Nicholasa Mohr. Bulosan’s novel contributed to my impoverishment toward the end of the month (it was pwetty expensive), but it was worth every cent. It reminded me of Martin Delaney’s Blake a bit (l’d call them literature of organization!), and it helped me clarify some of the things I’ve noted in America Is In the Heart (the place of white and Filipina women in his literary imagination; fraternity, etc.). In its spirit and themes, it also reminded me of some of the postwar Korean literature on the war time and the war experience.

Nicholasa Mohr is a Puerto Rican American author. I think she’s classified as an author of young adult fiction, but her stories are deep and dark. I’m glad I got to know of her works, since it looks like a good part of my dissertation is going to be on Puerto Ricans and Cubans (not to mention Mexican Americans) in the 1960s. I’ve read El Bronx Remembered; am reading In Nueva York; and have borrow directed Nilda.

In terms of criticism, I’m reading (and enjoying reading) political philosophy and theory these days. I like William Connolly a lot. I’ll move on to Wendy Brown after him.

I’m doing this as I nervously await two profs on my committee to get back to me about the draft I sent them. The plan is to revise again after I get their comments and then show this version to the other two senior profs on my committee before I hand it in, but I’m not sure if I’ll have the time to do that. Depends on how quickly they turn around the stuff. Oh well, I’ll do what I can. The proposal is due in a week.

The Square

It’s a Korean novel, or novella, I first read in high school. I think. It was a long time ago. I’ve actually been thinking about this work for quite some time. Since last winter? Maybe? No, it all began in the spring when I met with my advisor and she talked about Richard Kim’s works. What she said reminded me of Choi’s work. The protagonist, a former POW in the Korean War, decides to defect to a Third Country during the POW exchange. In a ship headed to Calcutta, he flings himself into the sea . . .

The novella keeps coming back to me over and over again, though I try to keep it out of my mind. Though it’s a vague feeling, I think I want to say something about current discussions on cosmopolitanism through this novella. Restlss, last night, I finally glanced at the work online. Despite the recurring thoughts on the book, I haven’t reread the book. Not that I have one with me. Or not that the library owns a copy. (which, by the way, is really too bad. Oh, well, not so much my loss, I guess, since I already know the book) I thought I would get one this summer when I was in Seoul. And I didn’t. What’s funny is that I didn’t think about Choi’s work the same way, with the same urgency, I did when I was here. So I didn’t get my lazy ass to a bookstore to pick up a copy. Which I totally should have done. (the online version is hard to read and it has typos, sigh)

I even have a working title for the essay: “Suicidal Cosmopolitanism, Or, What’s Missing in Contemporary Discussions on Cosmopolitanism.” Ha ha! Will I work on it? I don’t know. I have neither the time nor energy for this right now. I think what I’ll do is keep thinking about the issues raised by the novella and by cosmopolitanism . . . and only write about it if the urge becomes so pressing I can’t do anything else.

The novella, much to the detriment of the English reading public, has not been translated. Well, I think it was translated by a priest at a Korean university a while ago, but copies of this English edition are extremely rare. I tried looking it up a couple months ago–to get one for my advisor if there’s one–and found one by a London-based bookseller who was charging 200 pounds for it. 200 pounds . . . that’s like $400, isn’t it?

Matter of diction?

I’m caught up in reading for the upcoming Tepoztlán conference and, hence, falling back in working for the dissertation. Sometimes I just sit thinking what I should be reading. Should I read for the conference because it’s, um, in like five days?, or should I read for the proposal since that’s more important? The quandary so becomes me . . .

I’ve recently read Ariel Dorfman’s Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey. I knew this when I read Eva Hoffman’s beautifully written Lost in Translation, but the thing with bilingualism is it can be so elite. Bilingual writers are usually fully proficient in two or more languages, but in order to be like that, you have to have been afforded the material base to keep up with both languages. So either your parents were diplomats or businessmen or you’re just so linguistically talented that you’ve already become one of those literati figures by the time you start writing about your bilingual childhood or adolescence or career.

And there’s nothing wrong with coming from an affluent family or being linguistically gifted. Moving between languages is still confusing no matter what and the pain of feeling a language slip by you is still acute. But I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a “middle class” in bilingualism. There’s elite bilingualism which has always received attention–best represented by writers such as Nabokov and Conrad–and there’s immigrant bilingualism-the stigma of broken English. Is there a middle ground?

I appreciated Dorfman’s honesty in fessing up to his adoration of English as a child in New York. I related to it. The thing with languages is that it becomes so closely associated with the people using the language and the environment of its acquisition. If you like the people speaking it and if you’re happy in that linguistic environment, you come to adore the language. It becomes precious. When I said to my director before the exam that “I’m not really interested in elite bilingualism,” she kind of frowned at me and said I shouldn’t cross it out like that. True. Maybe she thought my bilingualism was also a kind of elite bilingualism. It probably is.

But for the dissertation, I’m thinking about striking out the word “bilingualism” from the title and the thesis. Making it secondary. It just asks for a lot of explanation that sidetracks me from saying what I want to say. Well, at this point, my sense of what I want to say is still somewhat vague. I’m trying to see what other options I have in terms of word choice. Foreignness is something I’m thinking about now. I’m reading Bonnie Honig’s Democracy and the Foreigner–a book that, I think, closely relates to Doris Sommer’s Bilingual Aesthetics–and trying to see if there’s something I can glean from her discussion of how the idea of foreignness has been and can be deployed in politics.

Language and the Body

I came across Horst Ruthrof’s The Body in Language in the book cart as I was looking for a different book. I ended up reading the whole thing, and it turned out to be more pertinent to my work than I thought it was. The author proposes a “corporeal semantics,” the argument being that language, contrary to what many other theorists of meaning and philosophers of language have argued, is parasitic on the nonverbal.

I got some good bibliography on cognitive semantics, to which Ruthrof resorts pretty frequently in illustratrating the significance of perception in meaning construal. The book also clarified for me the import of the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century philosophy. My advisor had actually mentioned the phrase a couple of times in our discussions–”It’s not enough to just “say” that language is important. We all know after the linguistic turn that language is important. You have to “show” why it’s important and in what “specific” ways it’s important.” I nodded along vigorously guessing at what the linguistic turn means. What else could I have done? Turns out, my guess is not so much off the mark. The linguistic turn refers to the trend in philosophy that views language as the base of all philosophical issues. That is, all philosophical problems are linguitic problems at the core. You can see why such a turn would be criticized as being reductive. But it produced some fascinating bodies of thought on language and its relationship to the world.

There is no way I can read all of that. So I need to focus on those philosophies that are the most relevant to my dissertation. After figuring out what my argument is. I received comments on the draft of the diss proposal about a week ago. The comments were helpful; they coincided for the most part with what I’ve noticed as the shortcoming of the draft. The biggest problem for me now is that I have this disconnect between my argument and the actual chapter contents. I think this is because I subconsciously, or maybe not so subconciously, resist saying that what I’m working on is what I have in my chapters. It’s more complicated than that . . . .

I understand that a concrete argument is not a simple argument. I understand that. Also that a focused argument is not a simple argument. I understand that too. My committee has repeatedly told me to decide what I want to do (instead of trying to do everything and trying to be everywhere). “It doesn’t mean that your argument is going to be simple.” Yeah, I understand. I’m trying to do that. I’m trying to articulate in a simple, clear, clean way what it is that I’m arguing in the dissertation. The eureka moment has  not quite hit me yet. I don’t think. I have a tendency for conceptual thinking that sometimes gets in the way of concretizing my thoughts. “You think too much” is what my present director told me (with a skeptical frown). I really am trying to rein that in.

I’m reading A Thousand Plateaus now after reading (did I really read that book? hmm, I read it in so much as I can read it) Anti-Oedipus. I just finished the chapter on “the postulates of linguistics” (which is the chapter that Ruthrof uses the most when she discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s poststrucuralist semantics) and realized once again that Deleuze and Guattari are very important for me. I’m most interested in their notion of a minor literature–written by a minority in the major language–and the work they say minor literature does–it deterritorializes the major language, but it’s impossible to understand these without having a sense of their overall philosophy.  Seriously, I want to understand D & G. I even checked out Brian Massumi’s User’s Guide from the library.

The next revision is due mid-August. I think I have a sense of where I’m headed for the next revision, which is good.

Driven Out

Jean Pfaelzer on NPR with her new book, Driven Out. So her book is out. Good for her. She seems to be a very conscientious scholar and activist.

FOB

I read David Henry Hwang’s FOB (again? can’t remember whether I’ve read it before or not; for some reason I knew what it was about when I checked it out). I like the way the play directly touches on a pretty sensitive and embarrassing issue: how Asians can be snubbed by Asian Americans who don’t want to be Asian and in whose minds being Asian means not being American.

It’s a result of being disciplined in mainstream ways of conceiving who a normative American is. Asianness just doesn’t fit in the picture of an all-American guy (or girl, to a lesser extent). Hwang pokes fun at Dale, who is, in his words, “making it in America (Act II)” by showing how there’s really not that much that he can “teach” Steve, the FOB.

“I don’t like being alone. You know, when Mom could finally bring me to the U.S., I was already ten. But I never studied my English very hard in Taiwan, so I got moved back to second grade. There were a few Chinese girls in the fourth grade, but they were American-born, so they wouldn’t even talk to me. They’d just stay with themselves and compare how much clothes they all had, and make fun of the way we all talked. I figured I had a better chance of getting in with the white kids than with them, so in junior high I started bleaching my hair and hanging out at the beach–you know, Chinese hair looks pretty lousy when you bleach it. After a while, I knew what beach was gonna be good on any given day, and I could tell who was coming just by his van. But the American-born Chinese, it didn’t matter to them. They just giggled and went to their own dances. Until my senior high in high school–that’s how long it took for me to get over this whole thing. One night I took Dad’s car and drove on Hollywood Boulevard, all the way from downtown to Beverly Hills, then back on Sunset. I was looking and listening–all the time with the window down, just so I’d feel like I was part of the city. And that Friday, it was–I guess–I said, “I’m lonely. And I don’t like it. I don’t like being alone.” And that was all. As soon as I said it, I felt all of the breeze–it was really cool on my face–and I heard all of the radio–and the music sounded really good, you know? So I drove home.” (Grace, Act I)

Grace’s lines around the middle of the play were the most memorable for me. It also reminds me of something a guy in Economics once asked me. He asked me if Korean Americans mistreat Koreans. The South Asian Americans in his program are snobby to the South Asians in the program. And he wanted to know if KA acted the same way toward K. Asked in a very straightforward way. Indirection is apparently not a virture in some programs. And the guy in question is America, just in case there’s any confusion.

Intraracial relations need some more attention. And in that spirit, I really want to go see Dark Matter at the Asian American International Film Festival. The population that has been long regarded transient is coming to influence the demographics of America, or Asian America, more and more, and I think that population needs a bit more representation.