Being Sleazy . . .

I’m at a professor’s apartment petsitting for a couple of days while she attends a conference. Her place is so nice (and so clean, OMG, so clean) it makes me have fantasies of getting a job. I’m not sure if all assistant professors can afford such a nice place, though. It’s really nice to pretend like I have pets for a change.

I’m sifting through references for the second chapter. My draft of the first chapter still has to make the round of the committee, but my advisor suggested I start reading for the second chapter. Most likely, I’ll be revising the first chapter as I glean comments and questions from my readers and reading for the second chapter at the same time. I’m writing on Maxine Hong Kingston and Helena Maria Viramontes in the second chapter, and I’ve just started going over the critical stuff on Kingston. So many essays and books . . . I need to take a break.

Which makes my mind wander back to last night when I, after reading Inhoon Choi’s novel The Square (something I’ve been meaning to do for ages but have only just gotten around to), realized that I made the most embarrassing mistake a human being can possibly make. I mean, this is a novel I’m interested in. How can I make such a mistake? Basically what I did is I made a factual error in writing a conference paper proposal on The Square and another text. While I need to put in more work on the dissertation, I for some reason thought that I’d be able to write this essay that I want to write on two books I’m really interested in if I made myself write a conference paper to begin with. The conference was a pretty prestigious one, and my proposal didn’t make it in, which didn’t upset me. But the thing is I know one of the conference organizers who would probably have read my proposal and thought that I was the sleaziest reader in the history of mankind.

The protagonist of the novel, a Korean War POW, opts to be repatriated to a “third country” over either the South or the North. At the time of narration, the protagonist is on board the ship that is taking him and a bunch of other POWs to India. And I said he was on his way to Hong Kong. The ship stops by Hong Kong and Macao on its way to India. But Hong Kong instead of India! Next time I run into this conference organizer, if I ever do, I’m definitely going to duck.

Anyway, it’s interesting reading a Korean novel that I read probably sometime in high school again. It reads very differently. I don’t know why I’m suddenly developing an interest in Korean writers. There was this lady who worked with my mom a little bit a while ago whose husband (who recently passed, RIP) was a renowned literary critic (well-known enough that you’d know who he is if I mentioned the name). When I first met her in Seoul where she was visiting for a conference and which was right before I left to study abroad, she asked me why I didn’t do Korean literature. And I’m pretty sure she said it in a way that clearly conveyed  her puzzlement as to why I would want a doctorate in English. I guess it didn’t quite enter her mind that her husband’s primary works were in English literature and not in American literature. They’re the same, right? The Anglo-American continuum.

She’s a nice lady, and I know that she was just puzzled and not judging. But it did make me think of why I’m not doing Korean literature. Frankly, I didn’t like twentieth-century Korean literature at the time. Depressing, depressing, depressing. The colonial period is about subjugation, exploitation, occasionally struggle for liberation; between Independence and the Korean War is about taut ideological battles; nation-reconstruction after the War is about the strenuous fight for democracy and for workers’ and citizens’ rights, about modernization which entails poor folks leaving the countryside and pouring into Seoul, about urban consumerism and those who get excluded from that. The impression I then had about Korean literature was that it was dark, gloomy, and full of hardship. Back then, I wanted none of it. Little did I know that I’d develop an interest in modern Korean literature as I got to understand what criticism meant. Better than never, I guess.

Radical scholarship?

The introduction to the most recent issue of Social Text helped me organize some thoughts I had about the academic climate now and what kind of scholarship I want to do. This issue of Social Text comes out of the Duke LaCrosse players incident. The way this case evolved–from an alleged rape investigation to a case of wrongful criminalization of the innocent–had raised for me a number of complex questions around race, gender, ligitation, and advocacy work. Apart from the issue of what is true and what is not, I found fascinating the contestation of narratives in this case. Is this a story of a woman of color sexually exploited and violated? Is this a story of innocence plagued by ungrounded accusation? Is this a story of civil rights advocacy gone awry? Or, is this a story of protecting individual rights under the law?

Truth be told, I had to hold my breath for a bit when it so turned out that the allegation was proved ungrounded. And I have to say I first thought of the professors and the community activists at Duke who spoke up against the university’s shortcomings on dealing with race and gender. How would I deal with such an outcome if I was in that situation? The self-indulgent me had to put myself in that place.

I appreciated the Social Text introduction because the writers made it very clear that the problem, framed mainly in the media as a problem of this one individual case, is actually much larger. That this one case grows out of a complex matrix of structural problems around race, gender, and class that institutions (not just Duke) need to address. Situtating the problem in terms of the larger history of how certain disciplines were established after the Civil Rights movement and how now there’s a comprehensive backlash against the so-called politicization of knowledge production just made this case much more comprehensible without being reductive. And through instances like this, I come to understand that I will most likely be a leftist academic. Probably with stronger leftist sentiments than most. And while this may sound lame, I don’t see this as a matter of choice. I don’t choose to be a leftist academic. I just am one.

Women of Color conference at Ann Arbor

This looks like an interesting conference. Despite the rapid institutionalization of ethnic studies, it seems like there’s still a lot of tension and dissension when it comes to issues of evaluating academic performance–for one, tenure issues–by scholars of color.

On the one hand, ethnic studies in general is coming under critique for becoming mainstreamed and losing its critical edge (e.g. George Lipsitz’s critique that “ethnic studies seem to be doing pretty well whereas ethnic peoples around the world are faring worse and worse” is a good example). On the other hand, the critique is somewhat premature when one considers that ethnic studies never gained the legitimacy given the more traditional and established, political-interest-free (? what?) disciplines such as history, political science, and what not. I guess in a situation like this, you need to do both however contradictory that may seem. Point out the complacency of institutional ethnic studies, but attend to and support the excellent scholarship that comes out of the field. Is that enough, though?

Split Tongue

Big Hominid made an image for this blog, and I really like it. I think it captures the spirit of the blog well:)

It also reminds me of my, uh, dissertation. I’m working on bilingualism/bilingual subjects in Asian American literature and Latino literature in the postwar era, 1960s-1990s to be more precise. I first got interested in the topic because of the way bilingualism has been medicalized and pathologized in the U.S. People thought that bilingualism induced retardation (i.e. it messes up your cognitive development) and speech pathologies. It has to do mostly with the immigration history and the racialization of certain immigrant groups, because bilingualism, although it is not qualified, refers to immigrant bilingualism (as opposed to elite bilingualism).

So I’m interested in all aspects of language and psychology: language loyalties, language maintenance, language disavowal, loss of language, language “families”, the racialization and medicalization of bilingualism, translation, cultural brokering, etc.

Word on the street has that the noted scholar on Hemispheric studies, Kirsten Silva-Gruez is working on an exciting new book on the history of the Spanish language in the U.S. I think my interest in postwar bilingual education overlaps with part of what she’s doing. Another noted scholar on Asian American studies and comparative ethnic studies, Mae Ngai is also working on language, education, and assimilation in a somewhat different context. She came for a workshop today (paper available here: it is a draft and she asks that it not be circulated or cited). The title of the papers is “Brokering Inclusion,” and she looks at this one particular Chinese family in the late nineteenth century in California who were civil rights advocates and also engaged in some shady brokering business that made them take advantage of Chinese immigrants less acculturated than themselves. I love the way she challenges the standardized narrative of ethnic succession, which argues for greater inclusion for successive generations of immigrants, and tries to look at how exclusion and inclusion work together in this case. The implications of her argument, I think, go well beyond this paper.

The day didn’t start out so well, though. I broke a cup that I really like:(
Friends have told me that this happens when you embark on your dissertation, but I’ve been feeling pretty lonely lately. I don’t know why. So I end up hanging out with people more than I ever used to. While being bugged by the thought that I should be working . . . . And yes, I’m going to see the movie 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days tomorrow.

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 . . .

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 . . .

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.

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.

Ummm

I think I had a “moment” with my advisor in class today. I wouldn’t say it was confrontational, but it was . . . well, a difficult moment. I probably should not have criticized the critic we read in such an ungenerous manner (and also in a way that didn’t make much sense), especially since I’m pretty sure they’re friends, but . . . well . . .

Today’s class was pretty heavy. I still need to unload and decompress some of the things that came up . . . . but I’m overall confused about the state of the field, if I may.

Maybe it’s my beef with postcolonialism as an academic formation that I took out on the work that we read. And the way that now people seem to have no problem with thinking about postcolonial studies in relation to American studies. I’m generally okay with this. But I do have one big concern about the rise of the U.S. empire in American studies. Although I don’t think it intends to do this, I think it in some cases ends up reifying U.S. hegemony. One of the things I think deserves a lot more careful scrutiny is the way the study of the U.S. as an empire assumes that the countries that are said to be in a ex-colonial or a neocolonial relation to the U.S. don’t have any agency in their dealings with the U.S. Which is not to say that U.S. military force and economic dominance puts these countries in a subordinate position in their diplomatic negotiations. No, not at all. But these are much more complicated relations than can be explained through a U.S.-just-reigns-over-everything model. I think this kind of approach unwittingly deprives the countries in a “dependent” relation with the U.S. of agency and ends up reaffirming the U.S. as an empire. Unfortunately, this seems very much a governing trend in American studies now. When I read the essays in an essay collection like Shades of a Planet: U.S. literature as World literature, I can’t help feeling that what they’re arguing for so misses the point. The problem is not that nobody reads American literature as world literature, but that no other literature is read very much at all in the States. In other words, world literature really doesn’t have that much place in the U.S. And I’m remembering Lawrence Venuti’s point that the number of books written in languages other than English that are translated into English is really small. American readers do not read works in translation. There’s no cultural capital for literature written in languages other than, well, maybe a handful.