Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene (Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies) 3031040465, 9783031040467

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GEOCRITICISM AND SPATIAL LITERARY STUDIES

Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene Edited by Shiuhhuah Serena Chou Soyoung Kim Rob Sean Wilson

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies Series Editor

Robert T. Tally Jr. Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of ­innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, ­geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.

Shiuhhuah Serena Chou Soyoung Kim  •  Rob Sean Wilson Editors

Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene

Editors Shiuhhuah Serena Chou Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan

Soyoung Kim Cinema Studies Korea National University of Arts Seoul, South Korea

Rob Sean Wilson Department of Literature University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA, USA

ISSN 2578-9694     ISSN 2634-5188 (electronic) Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ISBN 978-3-031-04046-7    ISBN 978-3-031-04047-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor’s Preface

The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially oriented literary studies, whether operating under the banner of literary geography, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics, geocriticism, or the spatial humanities more generally, have helped to reframe or to transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. Reflecting upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality, scholars and critics working in spatial literary studies are helping to reorient literary criticism, history, and theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a book series presenting new research in this burgeoning field of inquiry. In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary works, the relations between literature and geography, the historical transformation of literary and cartographic practices, and the role of space in critical theory, among many others, geocriticism and spatial literary studies have also developed interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods and practices, frequently making productive connections to architecture, art history, geography, history, philosophy, politics, social theory, and urban studies, to name but a few. Spatial criticism is not limited to the spaces of the so-called real world, and it sometimes calls into question any too facile distinction between real and imaginary places, as it frequently investigates what Edward Soja has referred to as the “real-and-imagined” places we experience in literature as in life. Indeed, although a great deal of important research has been devoted to the literary representation of certain v

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identifiable and well-known places (e.g., Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin), spatial critics have also explored the otherworldly spaces of literature, such as those to be found in myth, fantasy, science fiction, video games, and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is interested in the relationship between spatiality and such different media or genres as film or television, music, comics, computer programs, and other forms that may supplement, compete with, and potentially problematize literary representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the series reveal, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world. The concepts, practices, and theories implied by the title of this series are to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial literary studies represent a relatively new area of critical and scholarly investigation, the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well beyond the recent past, informing present and future work. Thanks to a growing critical awareness of spatiality, innovative research into the literary geography of real and imaginary places has helped to shape historical and cultural studies in ancient, medieval, early modern, and modernist literature, while a discourse of spatiality undergirds much of what is still understood as the postmodern condition. The suppression of distance by modern technology, transportation, and telecommunications has only enhanced the sense of place, and of displacement, in the age of globalization. Spatial criticism examines literary representations not only of places themselves but also of the experience of place and of displacement, while exploring the interrelations between lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable spatial network that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being done in geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is diverse and far reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the mutually impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation, particularly as these effects manifest themselves in works of literature. By bringing the spatial and geographical concerns to bear on their scholarship, volumes in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series seek to make possible different ways of seeing literary and cultural texts, to pose novel questions for criticism and theory, and to offer alternative approaches to literary and cultural studies. In short, the series aims to open up new spaces for critical inquiry. San Marcos, TX, USA

Robert T. Tally Jr

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Shun-Fa Yang (1964–) was raised in a farming family in Tainan, Taiwan, where he learned about the harsh conditions of the land and what it takes to strive in such an environment. After military service, he worked at China Steel Corporation (CSC), where he still works. It was in CSC’s photo club where he learned photography and immersed himself in the world of image making. For over 30 years, he has produced dozens of projects, many of which have been exhibited at major institutions and festivals worldwide, including Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Grand Palais, Paris, Kosovo Biennale, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Lishui Photography Festival, and CO4 Taiwan Avant-Garde Documenta. Yang’s artistic approach evolved from the early pictorial style to a more subjective expression, then to staged photography and digital image manipulations. In recent years, he has been committed to documenting and representing his beloved island of Taiwan. The Island Project was conceived in 2014 and has been Yang Shun-Fa’s ongoing endeavor to this day. The Island Project includes five parts: Homage to Chen Ting-Shih (2014–2015), The Submerged Beauty of Formosa (2014–2021), The Submerged Beauty of Formosa: Defending the Nation, the Land (2017), Taiwan To-Go (2018), and Ocean Theater (2019–).

Taiwan Shiu-mo

YANG Shun-Fa’s “The Submerged Beauty of Formosa” features a series of over sixty landscape photographs of Taiwan’s shiu-mo taken since 2016. As the blue-collar photographer from Kaohsiung notes, “shiu-mo first suggests a ‘sinking and flooded’ (水沒) Taiwan, but it also refers to a unique Taiwanese intervention into the Chinese ‘ink painting’ tradition, shiu-mo hua (水墨畫).” In the tradition of an aesthetic genre that celebrates the inner harmony of the human and nonhuman, Yang insists on capturing the serenity of Taiwan, an island so luscious and pristine that it was named by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century “Ilha Formosa.” This sense of beauty, however, is given a twist when he redefines nature from a landscape of unspoiled wildness bereft of humans to a wasteland abandoned by humans because of overdevelopment. Highlighting the beauty of Taiwan’s flooded coastlines, he asks not only what catastrophes cause the disappearance of humans but, more importantly, whether nature, as Laozi says in Tao Te Ching, is indifferent because even environmental disasters can also be astonishingly beautiful. Posing the question of whether Taiwan is “beautiful or not” (suí-bô,「嫷」沒, Taiwanese dialect), Yang challenges our incentives for environmental protection. Associate Research Fellow Institute of European and American Studies Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

Shiuhhuah Serena Chou

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Contents

1 Introduction:  Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania— Worlding Concepts, Tactics, and Transfigurations against the Anthropocene  1 Rob Sean Wilson Part I Unearthing and Historicizing Regions (deworlding/ dismantling/reworlding life worlds and values (asia reworlding?)  33 2 Geopolitical  Fantasy: Continental Action Movies 35 Soyoung Kim 3 Dan  Dan Mian, Hip-Hop, and Baohaus: Transpacific and Interracial World-Making in Eddie Huang’s Fresh Off the Boat 49 Pin-chia Feng 4 The  Place of Worlding: Subaltern Cosmopolitanism in Central Asia and Korea 71 Hye Young Kim

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5 Filipinese 85 R. Zamora Linmark 6 My  Beast, My Brother, and My Alpha Creation 89 Lucifer Hung Part II Activism, Vision, and Intervention (critical and literary analyses of protests, social movements, and activism as forms of resistance/deworlding/alter-­ worlding; new forms and levels of crossing, contacts, and convergences across disciplines and sites as modes of worlding and reworlding) (worlding as a tactic for resistance and building alternative values and communities toward “other Asias”)  93 7 Violence,  Magic, Certainty: Journalistic Worlding and Middle East War 95 Isaac Blacksin 8 Refugee  Migration Through the Division System: On the Ethics of Copresence in Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean115 Chih-ming Wang 9 The  Crusades and a Marginal History of Islam: Tariq Ali’s Activism and Alternative World in The Book of Saladin137 Pei-chen Liao 10 Zeugmatic Formations: Balikbayan Boxes and the Filipino Diaspora157 Fritzie A. de Mata 11 Call Me Ishimaru185 Karen Tei Yamashita

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Part III Planetary Creation: Critique and Cosmos (reworlding at the Anthropocene/planetary/ environmental level) 199 12 Flow  or Friction? Ecological Transnationalism in Japanese TV Anime201 John Parham 13 Hurricanes  and Kaiju: Climate Change and Toxicity Across the Pacific in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim227 Danielle Crawford 14 Albatross  Unbound: Worlding the Plastic Sea247 Ranjan Ghosh 15 Agrarian  Witnessing and Worlding for the Anthropocene267 William Major 16 Listening  to Archipelago Rains301 Kim Tong TEE 17 Trans-Oceanic Psalm303 Craig Santos Perez  Afterword: Reworlding as Hope in the Anthropocene309 Shiuhhuah Serena Chou Index315

Notes on Contributors

Isaac  Blacksin received his PhD from the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California’s Society of Fellows. He is the co-editor of a special issue of boundary 2 and was previously a contributing editor at Kyoto Journal. His most recent publication is “Situated and Subjugated: Fixer Knowledge in the Global Newsroom,” forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies. Shiuhhuah  Serena  Chou is Associate Research Fellow at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Her interests in scholarship include organic farming discourse and Asian American environmental literature. Her research aims to frame literature, writing, and critique into a knowledge-making ethos adequate to our global-local situation. Such research would theorize an urban-centered future wherein farming and eating, country and city, and earth and place, considered in a far-flung as well as local production and consumption nexus, can be brought into greater public responsibility and transformed in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Chou’s recent publications include Chinatown and Beyond: Ava Chin, Urban Foraging, and a New American Cityscape (ISLE, 2017), “The Good Food Revolution: Will Allen and the African American Urban Farming Tradition” (Review of English and American Literature, 2017), “Pruning the Past, Shaping the Future: David Masumoto and Organic Nothingness” (MELUS, 2009), and “The Secret of Shangri-la: Agricultural Travels and the Rise of Organic Farming” (Comparative Literature Studies, 2013). She is currently work-

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ing on a manuscript about American organic farming literature and culture. Danielle Crawford  is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with Designated Emphases in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Environmental Studies. Her research focuses on environmental disasters and the socioecological impact of U.S. militarization. More specifically, Danielle’s dissertation examines the relationship between weather disasters and U.S. military operations in Asia and the Pacific during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Danielle has taught numerous undergraduate courses based in the environmental humanities, ranging from a class on environmental racism to a course on literature and global climate change and composition courses on disaster. Fritzie A. de Mata  has more than ten years of experience in higher education, from undergraduate teaching and advising, curriculum development, and academic research to leadership development and training, program management, and fundraising. She currently serves as the Associate Director of the Alumni Scholars Program at the Cal Alumni Association at University of California, Berkeley, where she oversees programming that supports students from low-income, first-­generation, and underrepresented communities. She graduated from UC Berkeley and received her doctorate in literature from UC Santa Cruz, specializing in world literature, Asian American studies, and critical theory. Her work as an administrator, teacher, scholar, and mentor is grounded in her commitment to promoting justice and diversity and serving underrepresented communities in education. Pin-chia  Feng is National Endowed Chair of Humanities (2019- –) appointed by the Ministry of Education, and is Lifetime Chair Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU, formerly National Chiao Tung University, NCTU). Currently sShe is the director of NYCU’s Asian American Studies Research Center and Interdisciplinary Medical Humanities Center. Feng was NCTU’s Provost of Academic Affairs, Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Director of the Film Studies Center, President of the Comparative Literature Association of ROC (2004–-2006, 2006–-2008), President of the Association of English and American Literature (2010–-2012, 2014–-2016), convener of foreign literature discipline of Taiwan’s National Science Council (NSC,

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now Ministry of Science and Technology), and a recipient of the 2007, 2010, and 2013 NSC/MOST Outstanding Research Award, the 2015 MOE’s Academic Award, and as well as also the 2020 Outstanding Academic Achievement Award of the Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society of ROC. Feng received herholds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1994). She writes on issues of gender, race, and politics of representation in films, graphic narratives, and medical humanities, as well as in Asian American, African American, and AfroCaribbean literatures. Ranjan Ghosh  teaches and teaches himself in the Department of English, University of North Bengal, India. Passionately committed to interdisciplinary studies, Ghosh works across the disciplines of history, comparative literature, educational philosophy, postcolonial and Global South, environmental studies, critical theory, and continental philosophy, among several other areas. His very recent work—books include Thinking Literature across Continents (with J. Hillis Miller) from Duke University Press (2016), Transcultural Poetics (New York: Routledge, 2017), Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives, ed. (Columbia University Press, 2019), Trans(in) fusion: Reflections for Critical Thinking (New York: Routledge, 2020)— focuses on plastic, plasticity, and theory: The Plastic Turn (Cornell University Press, 2021), The Plastic Tagore (forthcoming), and “Plastic Controversy,” Critical Inquiry, “In the Moment,” 2021, “The Plastic Turn,” Diacritics, October 2021 (Johns Hopkins UP), and “…,” the Minnesota Review, October 2021 (forthcoming, Duke UP). To learn more about his work, visit www.ranjanghosh.com. Hye Young Kim  is an associate researcher at the Husserl Archive at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. She received her PhD in Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and is the author of We as Self: Ouri, Intersubjectivity, and Presubjectivity (Lanham, 2021) and Sorge und Geschichte: Phänomenologische Unterschung im Anschluss an Heidegger (Berlin, 2015). Soyoung Kim  is Professor of Cinema Studies, Korea National University of Arts, and Director of the Trans Asia Screen Culture Institute. Author and editor of numerous articles and books in Korean and English, including “Cartography of Catastrophe: Pre-Colonial Surveys, Post-­Colonial Vampires, and the Plight of Korean Modernity” (Journal of Korean Studies, September 2011) and the Compendium of History of Korean

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Cinema (10 volumes), and co-editor of Electronic Elsewheres: The Production of Social Space (Minnesota University Press, 2009), Korean Cinema in Global Contexts (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming), visiting professor at Duke University, University of California at Berkeley and Irvine, documentary filmmaker of the Exile Trilogy, Women’s History Trilogy, and Viewfinder. Pei-chen  Liao is an associate professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Cheng Kung University and the winner of the 2017 FAOS Innovative Young Scholar Award. Her research interests include contemporary American and British fiction, South Asian diasporic fiction, post-9/11 fiction, and postcolonial and globalization studies. Her publications include ‘Post’-9/11 South Asian Diasporic Fiction: Uncanny Terror (2013, Palgrave Macmillan), Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fiction: Transnational and Multidirectional Memory (2020, Palgrave Macmillan), and essays in books and journals, such as Life Writing, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, NTU Studies in Language and Literature, Review of English and American Literature, and EurAmerica. Hung  Ling (a.k.a. Lucifer Hung, 1971–) is Associate Professor of Gender Studies in Shih Hsin University (Taipei, ROC) and a writer of science fantasy and queer literature. This entity prefers to be addressed as he or they. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Foreign Literature and Languages at National Taiwan University, a Master of Philosophy in Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Changes at Sussex University, UK, and a PhD in Cultural Studies at Chinese University of Hong Kong. His recent publication on theoretical writings include the acclaimed volume Imagine No Family (Taipei, Gaia, 2019), two essay collections on science fiction studies (titles translated in English by author)—The Study Chamber of the Multi-verses: A SFF Notebook of an Infernal Lord (Taipei, Gaia, 2005) and A Book of Connotations on Emergent-Realms of Penumbra (Taipei, Gaia, 2012)—a special issue on paraliterary politics (Taipei, 2019, Chung-Wai Literary Monthly), and several journal papers dealing with interspecies studies, necropolitics, and science fiction and fantasy literature. There is a promiscuous multitude of Lucifer Hung’s creative works, including a farfuture intergalactic epic series, A Cosmic Odyssey (Taipei, Chen-yen and Gaia, 2000–2002, 2016–), and short story collections, including The Year Book 1971: Replicas from Multiverse from 11971 (Taipei, Sharp Point, 2020), Return from the Edgy End of the World (Taipei, Cite, 2002), and

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All Light-Born Ones End in Sparkling Nebulae (Taipei, Gaia, 2008), and a short story/novella collection in both Chinese and Japanese versions, Fugues of the Black Sun (2013). R.  Zamora  Linmark  is the author of four poetry collections, including The Evolution of a Sigh and, most recently, Pop Vérité, all from Hanging Loose Press. He’s also published three novels—The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart (Delacorte Press), Leche (Coffee House Press), and Rolling the R’s (Kaya Press), which he adapted for the stage and had its premiere in Honolulu in 2008. He is the 2020–2022 Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Academy in Andover, where he is at work on a novel and editing No Talk Li’ Dat, a poetry and prose anthology of Hawaii Creole English. William  Major  is the Chair of the Department of English at Hillyer College of the University of Hartford, where he teaches American and environmental literature and writing courses. He is the author of Grounded Vision: New Agrarianism and the Academy, as well as numerous articles in venues such as ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Environmental Humanities, and the Journal of Ecocriticism, among others. His recent work has appeared in Reading Donald Trump: A Parallax View of the Campaign and Early Presidency and in Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment. His current interests include the role of empathy and emotion in teaching and reading. John Parham  is Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Worcester (UK). He has authored or edited six books, including Green Media and Popular Culture (2016) and (forthcoming) the Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. He is co-editor of the Routledge journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. John has published widely on Victorian ecology, contemporary literature, and green media and popular culture. The latter encompasses recent articles on digital Climate Fiction, documentary, and punk and the Anthropocene. His current ­project examines the cultural imagination of photosynthesis in the context of climate change. Craig Santos Perez  is an indigenous Chamoru poet and scholar from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of five books of poetry and the co-editor of five anthologies. He is a professor in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

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Kim Tong TEE  is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung. His fields of interest include modernism, Sinophone and Anglophone Southeast Asian literature, diaspora studies, and translation studies. He is the author of books in Chinese such as Miscellanies: Essaying Sinophone Malaysian Literature (2015), On Sinophone Malaysian Literature (2011), and Studying Southeast Asian Chinese: Essays on Chinese-Malaysian Literature and Cultural Identity (2003). He has also published journal articles in both English and Chinese and several edited volumes. His recent books include a poetry collection, Silently, Like a River, and a story collection, Gecko. Chih-ming  Wang works at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, and holds a joint appointment at National Chiao-Tung University. He is the editor in chief of Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies, published by National Chiao-Tung University Press, and the author of Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013). He guest-edited a special issue on “Asian American Studies in Asia” for InterAsia Cultural Studies (June 2012); co-edited a special issue with Yu-Fang Cho for American Quarterly on “The Chinese Factor: Reorienting Global Imaginaries in American Studies” (June 2017) and, with Daniel Goh, a collection of essays called Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017). His research focuses on Asian American literature and cultural studies in transpacific and interAsian contexts and is finishing a manuscript on the institutional history of foreign literature studies in Taiwan. Rob Sean Wilson  is a Western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in English and was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He has taught in the English Department at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and at Korea University in Seoul as a Fulbright professor and was National Science Council visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University and National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. Since 2001, he has been a professor of American literature, creative writing, and poetics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books of poetry and cultural criticism include Waking In Seoul; American Sublime; Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production; Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary; Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and the New Pacific; and Reimagining the American Pacific: From ‘South Pacific’

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to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. In 2010, his work Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Publication. Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-­Political Activists was published by New Pacific Press in 2010 and reissued on Kindle Books in 2020. He administers two social groups on Facebook called “Beat Attitudes: World Becoming” and “Rethinking World Literature.” His poems have appeared in various journals and magazines, including Poetry, Ploughshares, New Republic, Jacket, the Berkeley Poetry Review, Bamboo Ridge, Tinfish, Segue Munhak, Good Times, and Korean Culture. A dual-language collection of his poetry in English and Chinese called When the Nikita Moon Rose appeared in the Transpacific Archipelagic Poetry Series at National Sun Yat-sen University Press in fall 2021. Karen Tei Yamashita  is the author of eight books, including I Hotel, a finalist for the National Book Award, and, most recently, Sansei & Sensibility, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a U.S. Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor Emerita of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

List of Figures

Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 12.3 Fig. 12.4 Fig. 12.5

Hetalia: 17 ‘faceless’ axis powers gather to discuss global warming202 Hetalia: China watches on as France and the UK’s climate negotiations descend into traditional antagonism 202 The DVD for This Ugly Yet Beautiful World epitomises how environmentally themed anime routinely sexualises female characters211 Images of Earth from space are ubiquitous in Japanese TV anime 217 Jyu-oh-sei. Images of Earth from space come to represent ‘home’ for future humans 218

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania—Worlding Concepts, Tactics, and Transfigurations against the Anthropocene Rob Sean Wilson

You don’t have units plus relations. You just have relations. You have worlding. The whole story is about gerunds—worlding, bodying, everything-ing. The layers are inherited from other layers, temporalities, scales of time and space, which don’t nest neatly but have oddly configured geometries. Nothing starts from scratch. But the play—I think the concept of play is incredibly important in all of this—proposes something new, whether it’s the play of a couple of dogs or the play of scientists in the field. This is not about the opposition between objectivity and relativism. It’s about the thickness of worlding. —Donna Haraway, Logic, Dec. 7, 2019.

R. S. Wilson (*) Department of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_1

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“Like Aimé Césaire, Glissant insists on poetics as a means of building new imaginaries, because of a disillusionment with political processes as a means of change. Poetics, he argues, may be, on the one hand, totally ineffective against oppression, but that also makes them powerful—they are at once outside of the system and within reach of those outside it. As part of his poetic intervention, Glissant has developed a rich repertoire of neologisms, partly influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, but also chaos theory… ‘Glissant’s name for the relations between all things is the world, which appears threefold: as tout-monde (the world in its entirety), écho-monde (the world of things resonating with one another) and chaos-monde (a world that cannot be systematized).’ Together, they represent a different kind of totality—a totality as openness and a temporary product of process: ‘what is totality, once again, and through return, if not the relation of each matter to all others?’” —Glissant, 2009: 16. (Entry on Edouard Glissant. Global Social Theory, online site. https://globalsocialtheory.org/thinkers/edouard-­ glissant-­2/. See further Glissant references below)

Late-Capitalist “Deworlding”: Globalizing Is Not Worlding The place-shattering practices, resource extractions, slow violence, and migratory displacements taking place under the reign of global capitalism go on distending the spatial and temporal sites, scales, and material resources of what we would recognize as dwelling-in-the-world. This telos of globalizing marketized values ends up deforming the moral cultural ethos it takes for such diverse practices to emerge and survive on what Waichee Dimock has described as a “weak planet” of declining democracies, runaway pandemics, unsustainable ecological systems, unstable weather, extreme events, and species extinctions.1 And yet, as this collection, Geospatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, aims to elaborate and exemplify diversely chapter by chapter, we would activate tactics of resilient “worlding” and “reworlding” from coastal California across the transpacific of Oceania to affiliated sites of survivance in Seoul, Taipei, Manila, Kyoto, Honolulu, Sao Paulo, Kolkata, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Santa Cruz, and elsewhere. This push towards “worlding Asia and Oceania” needs to imply not so much another Euro-derived theory universally applied as a worlding of Asia and Oceania as it means to activate

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and elaborate the diverse and situated practices of worlding in Asia and Oceania.2 This collection assumes, argues for, and will attempt to diversely substantiate the difference between the worlding of Asia (of here meaning tactics done to) versus a worlding in Asia (in here meaning tactics diversely enacted by peoples and values in place, situated, and acting on the world). This, broadly phrased, is what Kim Soyoung in South Korea, Rob Sean Wilson in Northern California, and Serena Chou in Taiwan and Los Angeles will elaborate on and have collated diversely in our coedited multisited collection of cultural, literary, and environmental works appearing with Palgrave Macmillan Press in its timely and far-ranging Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies Series edited by Robert T. Tally Jr. from Texas State University in San Marcos. In shifting discursive contexts, Pacific Ocean cultural formations have long designated, at least since the 1980s if not decades earlier, distinctive regions variously called “Asia Pacific” or “Asia/Pacific,” as well as the more emergent framework of “inter-Asia,” or by the enduring environmental framework tied to tectonic plates and climate currents termed the “Pacific Rim.” Such reformations of this vast oceanic region, geography, nation, people, and place are not all that disconnected from earlier Atlantic, Indian, Mediterranean, or Arctic oceanic frameworks and currents of transformation situated within the Anthropocene as our shared planetary epoch.3 As will be touched upon in this introduction and as theorized in a larger forthcoming study by Rob Sean Wilson with the University of Minneapolis Press called “Pacific Beneath the Pavement,” worlding should not be taken as just another gesture, theme, or tactic reflecting world processes of late capitalism as the normative telos within the modernity and extreme weathers of the Anthropocene. Even a recent essay entitled “Border Reading: Epistemic Reading and the Worlding of Postcolonialism” assumes that the very meaning of worlding is all but synonymous with the global-capitalist dynamic of world literature as a hegemonic system centered in the metropolitan marketing and absorbing of the peripheries, even though, as the author rightly argues that we should attend to the “border gnosis” of postcolonial sites like those in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, China, and Singapore, his own studies of the literary humanities would remain affiliated to.4 If the global is not the world as such, as scholars from Eric Hayot (2012), Pheng Cheah (2016), and Bruce Robbins in Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999) and The Beneficiary (2017), among others, have delineated these “cosmopolitics” while advocating postmodern and postcolonial terms of difference, worlding should

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not be equated with these dynamics of neoliberal globalization, which is too commonly assumed as some kind of inevitability. Still, how can creative and research workers in literature, urban, ethnographic, oceanic, or cultural studies actualize these alter-temporalities or posit modes of emergent or altered spatiality “in the era of globalization,” to invoke The Worlding Project (2007) collection’s subtitle that had substantiated these emergent differences between globalization and worlding as a horizon of historical possibility, world-making, life world, values, and world becoming? This large-scale unmaking of the lifeworld (what will here be called deworlding) under the often unjust, naturalized, rapacious, and disruptive spread of globalization is what creative philosopher Jean-­ Luc Nancy is getting at when he contends, in The Creation of the World or Globalization, that “the world has lost its capacity to ‘form a world’ [faire monde]: it seems only to have gained the capacity of proliferating…the ‘unworld’ [immonde].”5 And yet worlding means, as Donna Haraway urges to the trans-species contrary, activating practices and tactics of thickening differences reflecting resilient and interconnected life-survival.6 Still, the very “world” we face nowadays is a strange one imbricated in the dangerous creation and defamiliarizing presence of what Timothy Morton notably calls oblivious “hyperobjects” that decenter and, to an unnerving extent, demean everyday being into uncanny affects of decentering and nonbelonging on a scale that can make the natural sublime of mountain and waterfall seem bypassed as so much romantic sublimation of nature into human-serving landscape. As Morgan Meis summarizes this deworlding framework of mysterious overdeterminations taking place amid the everyday Anthropocene of various “hyperobjects” from decomposing silicon chips and leaking oil spills to animal-human-fused pandemics killing millions from Wuhan and Manhattan to Bombay and South Africa, “What Morton means by ‘the end of the world’ is that a world view is passing away. The passing of this world view means that there is no ‘world’ anymore. There’s just an infinite expanse of objects, which have as much power to determine us as we have to determine them.” “Part of the work of confronting [such] strange strangeness,” as Meis contends, “is therefore grappling with fear, sadness, powerlessness, grief, despair.”7 You would need to resort to a market-­ driven atlas of what Sianne Ngai calls the zany, gimmicky, terrifying “stuplimity” of postmodern-capitalist fecklessness to conjure the bad affects of such worlds that go on unmaking and decreating the natural sublime and its sovereign post-Kantian subject.8

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Instead of surrendering all hope of change to this unmaking world or base un-world (immonde), worlding as such can help to create other forms, possibilities, terms, and values of world-becoming, world-making, and cultural-political dwelling in the world: in effect aiming to reworld the world in some active or gerundive sense of remaking local-planetary being and dwelling that is not just beholden to capitalist temporality, prefabricated identity, or the regulated spatial map-grid of the Mercatorian globe as taken-for-granted horizon or urban life and oceanic belonging. As Édouard Glissant has suggested in his world-making poetics of archipelagic belonging to the island-ocean-planet world of Martiniqueas linked across the Caribbean Sea to Paris and New York and elsewhere, this world echoes shimmering feedback [les échos-monde] at all points of contact and verges on the fruitful chaos of too-plentiful relations [le chaos-monde] and a Tao-like ungraspability. It can also shift into the mobile totality of dwelling-­with and relating-to [la totalité-monde].9 To embrace this interconnected mode of archipelagic belonging and transoceanic worlding is what the ever-relational Glissant has posited (in cultural theory) and enacted (in his literature) as a means of moving these island relations “from ethnopoetics to geopoetics to cosmopoetics.”10 “Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania,” as I would trope this world-­ making dynamic here, seeks to open up different ways of being with others, relating, and dwelling in and across this ocean-interconnected world across the Pacific and Asia, thus opening life-forms to what has been called by cultural critics like Pheng Cheah and Eben Kirksey et al. other “lived local temporalities” and ways of dwelling or “being with” above or below the nation-state, reified regionality, species fundamentalism, hence opposing the world-system of a carbon-fueled, resource-depleting, profit-driven capitalism running down the planet.11 Worlding, posited in this specifically more situated, multicultural, ethnographic, and oceanic sense, will be embraced variously in the chapters in this collection. Worlding can become articulated as what neoliberal anthropologist Aihwa Ong calls an “art of being global” that takes place within globalization without losing cultural-­ political differences that matter; it can be embodied as a practice that can have a worldly impact, in effect activating world-making tactics within the spread of what has been called, in Ong’s coedited Asia-based collection Worlding Cities, “planetary capitalism.”12 More biopoetic forms of multispecies reworlding can indeed occur under the transhuman, postnuclear, microbial, and ocean-entangled sign of what innovative biologist Donna J.  Haraway calls “sympoiesis,” as

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explained more in what follows. Drawing upon research from literary, cultural, urban, and ecological studies, this collection will in effect conjure concepts, tactics, figurations, and warning signs of what “worlding” does, can, or should mean as we go on living inside the “humus” (multiple earth forms) of humanity and as formed by working against Anthropocene compulsions. In a compressed formulation: worlding means the process of making anew or building up the lifeworld into differences that matter— worlding it. This worlding takes place in and as the production of lived resilient diversity. To invoke Nancy again on world-making as a differentiated process of becoming and relating, “The unity of a world is nothing other than its diversity, and its diversity is, in turn, a diversity of worlds” (109). To presume as normative this contemporary period we live through as everywhere tied to the telos of “late capitalism” is to assume the very worldview-effect of historical hopefulness for transformation (late, as in waning) as one laced with the dystopic affect of a systemic death wish (with late meaning over).13 It is as if this system of global-capitalist temporality and spatial displacement might collapse under the far-flung risk, trauma, and precarity of its own contradictions and eruptive riots. This affect often gets narrated apocalyptically as a telos that aggravates the ecological crisis to some kind of total planetary endgame, as in Bong Joon-­ ho’s catastrophic Korean blockbuster of killer capitalism, Snowpiercer (2013). Along such lines, David Harvey calls this relentless depleting of nature’s resources and disrupting of Romantic-era cycles of ecological balance the “fatal contradiction” of neoliberal capitalism depleting a “nature” undergoing states of eco-planetary crisis under the rise of the Anthropocene.14 The worlding eco-crisis we face is more than just “another polluted river here or a catastrophic smog there,” as Harvey satirizes (255) these carbonic-fueled damages, even as he himself (like an eternally critical UK Marxist) looks forward to the revolutionary collapse of capitalism via some “humanist revolt against the inhumanity presupposed in the reduction of nature and human nature to the pure commodity form” (263). The wholeness of the world as everyday American-modern configuration was beautifully assumed as a totality-in-itself by Connecticut-based poet Wallace Stevens: “The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.”15 The Anthropocene bids farewell to that mode of stabilizing nostalgia and the plot of eternal planetary regeneration. Still, any move toward universalizing the telos of late capitalism as a world-making force, what we are calling here the hegemony of its

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“unworlding” effects, would absorb global Chinese or Korean inter-Asian versions of situated locality and modes of global-factory capitalism into its own melancholic temporal horizon of dismantlement, plunder, and ruination.16 Notwithstanding Mainland China’s Bandung-affiliated “One Belt, One Road” infrastructural project to englobe the world into a neo-Silk Road cast across lands and deserts as across world oceans, the funeral rites of lateness and irreversibility shadow more idyllic claims for shared co-­ prosperity or hopes for some kind of a geo-engineered ecological fix. An Anthropocene-haunted film like Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) captures this fatal impact, as suggested, with its closed system of class-­warfare and techno-science catastrophe on train tracks of killer-capitalist destruction, resource depletion, psychotic madness, drug use, and planetary doom.17 Anthropocene dread all the more so gives the lie to General Douglas MacArthur’s triumphalist American free-market claim that “The history of the next thousand years will be written in the Pacific.”18 Even the Asia Pacific has come to be called the “Indo-Pacific” in the wake of Trumpian border-bashing and tariff-enforcing regime to disrupt Global China and “make America Great Again, that is, hegemonic and ruthlessly innocent in its will to domination and stupefying ignorance. We thus go on living through an everyday deworlding across Asia and Oceania: meaning the dismantling of the ecological lifeworld as threatened by multispecies endangerment, environmental destruction, extreme weather events, dismantled health plans and work regimes, resource plundering, and a far-flung precariousness and pandemic cruelty taken as everyday norm. We are speaking here as subjects located within and beyond the devastating impact of Trumpism (cum Putinism in the Russian sphere) in the United States as a world nation: meaning an authoritarian translegal amplification of statist capitalism that embraces America-first profiteering, anti-multiculturalism, de-democratization, financial deregulation, refugee hostility, sporadic war, counterfactual spectacle, and fake-­ news trolling to create social chaos, capitalist capitulation, nuclear trauma, and environmental indifference to global warming.19 The impact of this upon the geomilitary instability of DMZ Koreas North and South and the peaceful coexistence of this “inter-Asian” region cannot be underestimated, even as the two post-Cold War Koreas move toward an “inter-­ Korea” of two (unequal) systems. McKenzie Wark phrases this Anthropocene-cum-denialist effect with postempire mockery while contending in Molecular Red that “the collapse of the Soviet system merely prefigures the collapse of the American one. While the ruins of the former

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are real and poignant,” Wark ruefully urges, “the ruins of the latter have not quite been apprehended for what they are.”20 These worlding and deworlding practices of global capitalism in extremity are still intimately connected across spatial and temporal scales such that the “inter-Asia” or Pacific Rim region—or, as Trump’s regime had renamed it, so as to provoke Rising China as a neomaritime power, a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” region headquartered and secured at Pearl Harbor21—is not that different from the transpacific cargo cults or the transatlantic worlds I have been constructing in quasi-Jeremaic lament.22 “The steel mills of Sheffield and Pittsburgh close down and air quality miraculously improves in the midst of unemployment, while the steel mills of China open up and contribute massively to the air pollution which reduces life expectancy there” (258), as David Harvey puts this far-flung planetary impact, referring to it as a creative-destructive system in Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, from which some of my own premonitions of “late” or “endgame” capitalism have been drawn.23 Asia itself, in all its historical and cultural complexity, as postcolonial Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh has argued in The Great Derangement and shown in his India-based transoceanic novels such as The Hungry Shore and The Glass Palace, has played what he calls a “dual role as both victim and protagonist.”24 That double agency of victim and protagonist can be said of many global players from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the USA and the European Union, though sites as far flung as South Africa and Brazil hardly seem immune from this ironic complicity and contradictory imbrication. Asia itself has been linked to forces and world forms that help generate this very ecological crisis and impact, as Ghosh argues, powering up, in carbon-rife and population-dense urban sites in Burma and India to China, Singapore, Kaohsiung, Nanjing, and Hong Kong, the “unthinkable” climate we face as seeming endgame blocking the imagination with hyperobjects and postnature melancholia. We confront the breakdown of affect, frame, and form.25 In a nexus connecting Hong Kong and Mainland China, as June Wang documents, shanzhai or “fake global cities” have sprung up (at or near Shenzhen) that specialize in commodity production (even in high-end art works) using “high-profile citational practices that borrow symbolic images from established brands and/or advanced cities.” In such sites, as Wang argues, “Worlding city practices, or the art of being global [from below], entails an assemblage of urban initiatives that harness disparate ideas, logics, and techniques from various places” both from

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inside and far beyond China.26 Such urban production dissolves any binary between authentic original and menacing reproduction along a transoceanic factory chain that has become as immune to climate critique as it is to aesthetic anxiety or property claim.

Dynamics of Deworlding, Worlding, Reworlding Worlding means, taken at a basic pragmatic level, a mode of differentiated cultural-biological reckoning posited against the rise of the Anthropocene, as this earth-planetary period is coming to be called, now having left the climate equilibrium of the Holocene abruptly behind. Worlding, in effect, would create varied lived forms and values that serve to challenge the ongoing late-capitalist unworlding of the everyday world: meaning that un-world as Jean-Luc Nancy has called it with disgust, in The Creation of the World, or Globalization. As touched upon earlier, Nancy gestures toward the death-dealing immonde (117) or “glomus” (37) that goes on being delivered by the reign of globalization as a hegemonic world-order, the totality of the world-becoming-market as such. And yet, to presume the anthropogenic form of such “precarious capitalism” as a total telos for the planet, however late or not-yet modern, as Anna Tsing warns in her brilliant study The Mushroom at the End of the World, can block ongoing transhuman or multispecies forms of connecting to “patchy landscapes, multiple temporalities, and shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans: the very stuff of collaborative survival.”27 Such forms of multispecies “reworlding” and co-belonging are still taking place under the sign of what Tsing’s transdisciplinary colleague Donna J. Haraway calls in Staying with the Trouble a cross-cutting process of “sympoiesis.” These are tactics of “making-with” (58) and yokes “for becoming-with” (125) that can create (as a mode of biocultural poesis or remaking) forms and stories of multispecies “ongoingness” (49) that push toward, figure forth, and enact survival amid the late-capitalist ruins.28 In effect, Tsing and Haraway are engaged in the very transdisciplinary process of doing reworlding battle against the deworlding forces of a rule-destroying and treaty-breaking regime as in the United States (as a waning hegemonic force) if not across the planetary world (from Beijing to Brussels and London) riddled as it now is with delocalized, viscous, distended, and transboundary “hyperobjects” and the huge disruptions of the global pandemic of 2020 and 2021 that goes on altering bodies and borders, distorting movements, and shaking up liberal policies like never before.29

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Reflecting upon this one compressed verb of crucial projective definition: worlding means building-up, creating, and making lifeworlds, that is, actively worlding as act of poesis, urban and otherwise. Playing off of my earlier post-Heidegger and postcolonial definition of worlding in The Worlding Project, I would once again offer this summarizing definition: WORLDING (v)—a historical process of taking care, setting limits, entering into, and making world-horizons come near and become local, situated, in/ formed, cared for; instantiated as an uneven/incomplete material-cultural process of world-making and world-becoming.30

Working at the frictional edges of anthropology, natural biology, and economics, Anna Tsing frames these tactics and processes as those of a vast nexus of transhuman “worlding” that go on taking place regeneratively in cross-border liminal or refuge spaces of toxic capitalism. For Tsing, worlding, and what she explicitly terms the transpacific and planetary process of reworlding, means linking overlapping or “multispecies” ontologies that push beyond any human-ego-presumed “Eurochronology” of androcentric authority, as is argued as being central to the spread of world-literary modernity by Eric Hayot in On Literary Worlds (6). “Yet the modern human conceit is not the only plan for making worlds: we are surrounded by many world-making projects, human and not human,” as Tsing affirms (21) in her moving study of matsutake mushrooms as a life form that paradoxically can flourish in between the ruins and toxic pores of capitalist development moving across forests, commodity chains, and auctions of a very transpacific world-making via such exchange.31 Tsing’s entangled worlds hopefully presume multiple, nonuniform worlds working at differing and far-flung scales of interaction, as Tsing affirms in a related collection she coedited with modern Japanese history scholar Carol Gluck called Words in Motion.32 Such a worlding focus, as in Tsing’s study on “the world-building work of fungi,” shows how edible mushrooms manage to survive and flourish amid the death-dealing savaging and salvaging forces of planetary capitalism as everyday norm.33 Worlding here becomes what Yu-Fang Cho tracks, in her Pacific-based discussion of the “U.S. nuclear empire” in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima techno-climate disaster in and across Japan, East Asia, and the vast tidal currents of the Pacific, “an active, critical, and imaginative process that undoes the universalism and historical finality assumed by the term ‘globalization,’ and [projects] a future-oriented, emergent form of theorizing,

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activating, and writing about culture and geo-material politics.”34 Godzilla/ Gojira becomes the recurringly ambivalent figure of nuclear waste and postnuclear possibility for an Japanese/American eco-alliance and world peace. In Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste, Josh Lepawsky has applied such a framework and ethos of “worlding” to trace the globallocal ties and interconnected flows of electronic waste as produced, consumed, repaired, and recycled across “minescapes,” “productionscapes,” and “clickscapes” of electronics, as well as what he calls the “discardscapes” they produce from North America to China, Africa, and back.35 Lepawsky uses “worlding” as both a material practice and as research ethos: “As I use it, ‘worlding’ refers to two things: practices that bring together a jumble of not necessarily like things—people as citizens, consumers, and corporations; materials such as plastics, metals, and glass; energy and information; sites and situations that become connected through the use and disposal of digital technologies—as if they cohered to form a common world [;] and at the same time the research practices that seek to map out and follow the actions of those doing the worlding.”36 Lepawsky keeps asking of this jumbled-together world, What is the right thing to do? This worlding and reworlding of waste matter back and forth across the Americas and across the “garbage patch”-endangered Pacific also marks and mars our diverse and indigenously rich contemporary Oceania, if unmitigated and unacknowledged as an unevenly shared global ethos of waste, precarity, and risk. Globalization still all but unconsciously functions as that “master term” we commonly assume to reduce such a jumbled world to a “world picture” of ongoing capitalist modernity: a worlding of plural worlds into one foreshortened and disenchanted world of late or endgame capitalist modernity connected all the more so now to the rise of “One Belt, One Road” China and the geopolitics of the expansionist USA and European Union.37 The Make America Great ideological posturing of the Trump regime through tariffs and trade wars, even with allies from 2016–2020, may have succeeded ironically in making China great as a global leader in economic free-trade policies across the Asia Pacific regional world.38 Yet “world,” even in this transnational economic instance, remains an open-ended signifier of categorical, tactical, and tropological slipperiness that needs to be disaggregated into differing meanings, at least into what Eric Hayot tracks in On Literary Worlds as, first, “a set of systematic relations,” implying a self-organizing and self-containing totality, and, second, some kind of “ethical imperative” toward modes of more cosmopolitan

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coexisting and world-belonging, as well as, third, “a habitus and ground for human living” in some everyday anthropological sense of lived culture (31). This latter sense is what Nancy in Paris (as well as Glissant in the Caribbean) mean by world as a totality of meaning for those who inhabit such a totality-in-motion. On the island of Tonga, China has been pouring investment resources into infrastructure, aid, and debt structures as tied to the One Belt, One Road initiative and geopolitical linkages unheard of in the American-centric postwar South Pacific hegemony of James Michener and the Broadway musical South Pacific. This cultural world in and across the Pacific is fast diminishing, coming undone, refracting, and dismantling. As lodge owner Ola Koloi warned, these huge China loans should worry every Tongan: “I feel like I’ll be Chinese soon,” she said.39 Worlding as a material everyday practice also is impacted by and has to contend with border-crossing forces and the transnational imagination amplified in an era of relentless mediated transmission, as David Trend tracks in his 2013 study called Worlding: Identity, Media, and Imagination in a Digital Age with its focus upon “virtual” places and rematerializing practices and genres impacting the making of identity. As Trend argues in so many by-now naturalized terms, “Worlding is about the process of change—about the things that influence the boundaries and rules that affect individuals, groups, and the dynamics [of identity-­ creating and place-making] that define their worlds.”40 Concerning sites of indigenous re-articulation, coalition, and emergence, Trend urges, “If a primordial consciousness guides us in the quest to sustain life on the planet, there is ample evidence to suggest that our newest technologies [of world-making or worlding via digitalized interconnectivity] can be of help.”41 In such global-local contexts of interactive communication and coresponsibility, it was in the second or more ethical sense of a lived imperative of quasi-bounded existence that Christopher Leigh Connery and I had deployed “worlding” as a critical tool. We had advocated worlding to enact a cultural-political ethos of situated opposition, throughout our coedited collection The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (2007). Trend’s study Worlding now builds upon this concept in more fluid digitally mediated and techno-ludic ways. Worlding is used not so much as a theme or subject per se: it is a tactic, practice or embodied projection (project) of world-making. This tactic in effect projects forth life-world becoming and building-up, to use that Goethe-like word (bildung) for cultural formation. Worlding (as I phrased it in

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“Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic” to the Worlding Project troping on welting) means a mode of “building up a life-world palpably disclosing its lived-in modalities, boundaries, tactics, and historical processes” of survival and emergence.42 Worlding stands for a range of alter-globalization and situated practices of cultural-political localization practices being projected forward out into and across the everyday world that is riddled and driven by mandates of capitalist dynamism and globalization. Worlding, defined as such an ethos, is built into the very diffracting patterns of the quantum field-theory world, as Karen Barad has beautifully elaborated. As Barad phrases this far-ranging insight into the making of worlding-as-ethos: “Ethics is an integral part of the diffraction (ongoing differentiating) patterns of worlding, not a superimposing of human values onto the ontology of the world (as if ‘fact’ and ‘value’ were radically other). The very nature of matter entails an exposure [and linkage] to the Other.”43 Worlding as an “intra-acting” theorizing, in Barad’s terms of such tactile, dynamic, and multiple experimentation, “is about being in touch,” that is to say, “being responsible and responsive to the world’s patternings and murmurings.”44

Moving from Deworlding to Reworlding Worlding-as-projection and lifeworld experimentation is everywhere shadowed by residual forces and forms of deworlding, as I have suggested in late-capitalist terms, and it also stands in emergent relation to those transformative life forces called (by Tsing, Haraway, Cheah, Barad, et  al) reworlding. That is, worlding takes place amid contrary energies and practices of going and coming, deforming and forming, breaking down and building up lifeworlds. The former process (deworlding) suggests the enduring impacts of empire, colonialism, and turbo-capitalism upon other lifeworlds and threatened ways of being (as Ghosh portrays it through the transoceanic India environmental impacts in The Great Derangement). The latter process (reworlding) suggests, to the affirmative contrary, ways “to produce nuanced and situated tactics to surface alternative imaginings of the world we inhabit,” as Chih-ming Wang shows in his multisited reading of Lawrence Chuah’s diasporic novel Gold by the Inch in the inter-­ Asia-­based collection Worlding Multiculturalisms.45 By contrast, the “world” implied by globalization would aim to be the “most total totality of all,” as Eric Hayot puts this telos of modernity (39) as what capitalism presumes to subtend for the whole planet as a world system—a totality of

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circulation and communication that has marked and marred the emergent concept of “world literature” since its origins in the cosmopolitical theories of Goethe and Marx.46 “Worlding” as a critical practice enacts altered openings of time, space, and consciousness to other values and multiple modes of being, projection, and survival. Spatially, a worlded criticism seeks to form emergent connections to and articulations with region, place, area, and trans-­species forms of being and dwelling on earth and ocean. Temporally, worlding means to allow for other modes of being-in-time other than the instrumentalized “time is money” pragmatism of Benjamin Franklin and the New  York City Wall Street and SF Montgomery Street business-driven heirs to cash-value temporality of risk taking and shorting, as spread across the world. Like The Worlding Project collection, this uncanny new collection Geospatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene aims to undo the hold of what Radha Radhakrishnan has memorably called “globalization as globality,” meaning by that formulation an achieved global order in which counterworldings are seemingly over or irrelevant to this world-becoming-market system.47 Worlding, along these lines of collective creating and projecting, can remain mysteriously gerundive, akin to Charles Olson’s breath-aligned poetic practices of postwar embodiment into “projective” verse, a world-­ forming verb more than pregiven noun, suggesting tactics to counter the norms or ruses of “globality achieved.” In Creation of the World, or Globalization, Nancy tropes the exponential growth of this unified “globality” as what he calls an ugly “glomicity” spreading in form, norm, and value around the world under mandates of globalization. By contrast, the world-forming take takes place in the body’s engaged movement through the world differs: “Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world,” as Rebecca Solnit says in Wanderlust, “of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.”48 Or, as poet Wallace Stevens described his act of walking as remaking the world, “In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;/But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four/hills and a cloud.”49 Worlding can be materialized and troped in disparate ways so as to keep it multiple and emergent, that is, a not worlding is a not fully identified critical object: as a projection of body, community, and place creatively open to the present and future and deterritorializing in ways that are not

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just those of the capitalist libido as “desiring production” system.50 Shir Alon put this open-endedness of worlding in these terms: “The world is temporalized since it is never simply given or present, but is in a constant process of taking shape, a constant process of worlding.”51 Pheng Cheah’s far-reaching—if recursively deconstructive—study What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature marshals philosophical frameworks in theory from Hegel, Marx, Derrida, Arendt, and Heidegger to track the telos of global capitalism and to enrich worlding tactics that would counter this taken-for-granted norm. The Anglophone postcolonial novel is interrogated to show how, as Shir Alon summarizes Cheah’s push beyond capitalist-dominated centers of empire, “the sorry state of a globalized world [would] also carry a normative power to create and shape alternate worlds,” as world “literature [becomes] an inexhaustible resource for world-making.” Postcolonial literature plays a key role in these “counterworlding” processes to those of world-system globalization (193). This happens in such literature by exposing the historical temporality of “unworlding,” but this dynamic also seeks to grasp the “reworlding of the world” via forces tactics of decolonization (219)— embracing not a worldly impulse (as Edward Said affirmed of de-­ orientalizing critical practices) but a worlding ethos as such. This worlding of literature should not be collapsed into the worldly value of circulating inside, or battling for priority, withn a unified market system of capitalist globalization, as Cheah sees happening in “world literature” theorists like David Damrosch or the more post-Marxian-based center-periphery world letters model of Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti.52 Market normativeness is portrayed as just one kind of world-­ making, beholden to the circulation patterns and values of capitalist globalization: hegemonic, this mode has become posited as a model of worldliness and literary world-making. Such global-driven modeling of world literature enacts “modes of world-making that ultimately make us worldless,” Cheah shrewdly laments (192) of this (in effect) deworlding consequence of marketized world literature. Worlding or world-making, understood in the normative value Cheah wants to recover from cultural critics like Goethe and Arendt as cosmopolitical vocation, means “a form of relating, belonging, or being-with”53 in an openly temporal sense felt as a “coming into being.” Worlding as such opens up different ways of being with others and being in the world, in terms and stories of connecting to other worlds and opening everyday life to other lived local temporalities

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and ways of dwelling (as “being with”) above or below the nation-state or the policed and bordered world system. Cheah advises reading postcolonial literatures as forms reaching beyond global-capitalist damage: “We must instead patiently search for extant resources for reworlding the world” (12), viewing worlding as a force immanent to globalization and subtending it with openings to other values. Worlding becomes the vocation of postcolonial world literature read as a world-remaking project beyond colonialism and imperialism, “to exemplify the process of worlding, in the current argot, [to] performatively enact a world” via “taking the world created by globalization” and opening to alternatives of world-making power (211–212). Closer to Proust than to Ben Franklin or Henry Ford, time becomes theorized as a flexible or indeed “inexhaustible” resource to open to other worlds as narrated by postcolonial literature as well as to enact “the emergence of new subjects in the world” via enacting “revolutionary time and worldly ethics as alternative temporalities” (330). Worlding stays tied to meaning (ultimately in Cheah’s critical method) the Derridean figuration of a justice-to-­ come. This is a messianic assumption of transformation deferred as a hope or “gift” of time shorn of immaterial longing or an otherworldly collective telos. Worlding is theorized as an “incalculable force” that can open up or, at times, oppose “progressive projects of world-making” (331). To invoke Shir Alon’s critique of this recursive reading of postcolonial time and narrative form, “The problem, rather, is the sense that Cheah reads postcolonial novels only to unearth, once again, the Derridean philosophical world-model.”

Worlding Asia Models Worlding, as used in a much more Asian-situated multicultural and ethnographic sense tied to urban living across Asia Pacific, can become what Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong call in their urban-sited collection Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global a reflective “art of being global” that takes place without evacuating cultural-political differences that matter. Such urban modes of worlding can have a worldly impact, in effect activating world-making differences within and against the spread of “planetary capitalism” (11). Roy and Ong would affirm ways of being global that imply living (or dwelling, that most phenomenological of verbs) imaginatively in and across Asian-local and Pacific Rim urban sites, “at once heterogeneously particular and yet irreducibly global” (13).

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They see “the worlding city” as a lively, flexible, cutting-edge site of Asian capitalist invention, recognition, and experiment that cannot be reduced to “universal logics of capitalism or postcolonialism” (xv) or any diffusionist vision generated from Western urban centers (Roy, 310) like New York or London or Paris. “Worlding is the art of being global,” the coeditors affirm, seeing Asian cities (like the sites of Singapore, Vancouver, Dalian, Hong Kong, Dubai, Shenzhen, and Delhi) at the situated nexus of multitudinous and constant construction and emergent solidarities or modes of lived sociality, which they call (after Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method [2010]) an “inter-­ Asian” urban referencing.54 For this approach to worlding the city, “neoliberalism” is paradoxically all but adopted as “a set of maximizing rationalities,” urban brands, and pragmatic cultural-political “outcomes” (Ong, 4). In such urban sites along the Pacific Rim like Singapore or Seoul or Dubai, worlding is thus theorized as everyday “art of being global.” In effect, this means adjusting the urban lifeworld to the mandates, terms, forces, and forms of global capitalist real estate, as when Michael Goldman affirms “worlding through speculation and liquidation” (236–237, italics his), transforming urban and rural lands, as what “it would take to turn Bangalore into a European-style world city” (236). Even “eco-city” projects like Songdo International District in South Korea and Clark Green City in the Philippines are said to assemble “the spatialization of worlding practices for countries to leave their mark on the world stage,” which is to say to maximally fit the Pacific Rim locality into the mandates and forms of smart-green globalization.55 As Zack Lee—ironically— describes such eco-cities, “worlding practices and visions intend to create global cities and global citizens but not everyone is able and is intended to take part.”56 “Worlding aspiration” here means, for Pacific Rim cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Singapore, a way to become hubs of financial speculation and world-city power (Helen F. Siu, 131); worlding, in effect, means modeling the future city on such a regulated capitalist grid of urban core empowerment and wealth. As Chua Beng-Huat recounts this “1000 Singapores” dream proposed at the 2010 Venice Biannale, worlding on a world-city becoming-Singapore model thus means “imagining the entire world population of 6.5 billion living and working in 1000 Singapore-size islands, as a solution to global sustainability” (48). In another essay in Worlding Cities, Chad Haines depicts this world transformation taking place in Dubai; here, worlding means installing urban neoliberal dynamism such that, “Inherent in the chasing of the global dream is a

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transformation of self, through wealth, through status, and through the encoding of a rationalist neoliberal self” adjusted to “the malls and workplaces where ‘best practices’ are instituted and regimes of surveillance are implemented” (171) as in Beijing or Singapore. Worlding, as differentiated by the cultural anthropologist of neoliberalism Aihwa Ong in her own introduction to this collection, means heterogeneous “projects and practices that instantiate some vision of the world in formation” (Ong, 11). By this she means a kind of globalism localized and circulated within and across urban sites, especially sites like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai taken as models. As Ong summarizes the utopic dynamism materializing the eco-urban future on the Pacific Rim, “worlding practices are constitutive, spatializing, and signifying gestures that variously conjure up worlds beyond current conditions of urban living” (13). Such worlding practices interreference other Asian sites and inter-Asian practices: a mode akin to what Kuan-hsing Chen (2010) has called using “Asia as method” to interconnect, cross-reference, deimperialize to build up “inter-Asia” local-to-local worlds. Worlding, in inter-Asian cross-referring urban contexts, becomes a way to grasp and reinvent “the making and unmaking of the [totalizing] referent: Asia” (Roy, 309). As Ananya Roy puts this, “worlding is both an object of analysis and a method of deconstruction,” as “inter-Asia” is invoked to destabilize and transform the making and unmaking of urban “Asia” (314) into plural linkages and futures. Other urban sites across this burgeoning Asia see “counterworlding tactics” such as traffic blockages or wildcat strikes, what Roy calls “worlding from below” (Roy, 327). “To ask where Asia ends and begins is thus to pay attention to the unstable space that is ‘inter-Asia,’ to trace the ways in which Asia travels, to make note of how urban experiments rely on the cautionary structure that is Asia,” as Roy affirms (331). This last gesture pushes toward worlding Asia. “Worlding multiculturalisms,” as Daniel P.  S. Goh writes in another Asian-situated literary-cultural collection by this name, Worlding Multiculturalisms: The Politics of Inter-Asian Dwelling (2015), the aim is to challenge the capitalist dialectic of state and society without “losing ourselves completely in the mediated circulations of global capital” (8) or in the normative tactics of postcolonialism. Worlding means “those practices that infuse our arbitrary cultural lives with new things from cultural others in poetic ways to enable us to dwell and be at home with the complexity of the world” (8). Timely and multiple in urban focus and Pacific Rim interactivity, Goh’s collection would activate, across sites from

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Singapore to Bangalore and Dubai, “interventions and interruptions of the dialectic that produce what we call ‘worlding’ moments of multiculturalism” (3). Worlding becomes here a mode of world transformation of the Asian global into dwellable locality and sense of place. The aim of this Worlding Multiculturalisms collection, as it tries to go beyond The Worlding Project and Worlding Cities collections into affirming Asian-sited multicultural tactics and dwelling places of urban and urbane worlding, expressly means “to grapple and understand emergent worlding practices and their emancipatory possibilities” (5). Describing the multicultural politics of urban advocacy, cultural maintenance, and ecological care that resulted in the preservation of Bukit Brown Municipal Cemetery in Singapore that had been threatened with real estate displacement in its rapid urban growth, for example, Terence Chong’s essay in this collection trenchantly summarizes this worlding-­ Asia approach more broadly: “The worlding of multiculturalism is an innovative process that sees the utilization of cultural capital towards the everyday objective of rootedness, belonging, and solidarity” (178). Even within the spread of casino-based capitalism in Macao and shopping-mall culture across urban spaces in Seoul, Vincent Ho and Sung Kyung Ho offer their own essays as interventions wagering that “worlding multicultural” tactics can help to preserve Lusophone and Latinized difference in the first case “to express a multicultural Macanese cultural identity distinct from Chinese and Western civilizational imaginations” (135) or, in the second case, to create public spaces of impure, mixed, or contradictory “dwelling” (that most Heideggerian of Germanic verbs) that allow for recognition of the competing claims of consumers, local residents, officials, and sex workers in the latter Times Square mall case in urban-­ regenerating Seoul (158). This Worlding Multiculturalism collection gestures toward tactics of worlding Asia as a mode of diverse urban dwelling within normative globalization.

Figuring Oceans in the Anthropocene Using the political-economic signifier of Asia Pacific that Marxist and Chinese historian Arif Dirlik and I had as early as 1995 called into question as an ideologically driven, misused, and all-too-economistic sublation of the Pacific Islands into Asia in our coedited collection Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Pacific, I have called this chapter’s elaboration of worlding dynamics, mysteriously, “Worlding America’s Asia Pacific into

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Oceania.”57 Why Oceania? What does a broadly land-based, urban-driven, or mostly terro-centric inter-Asia vision of urban dwelling have to do with the uncanny salt waters, harbors, and far-flung islands of Oceania? Why that salt watery world of the archipelagic Pacific: why now? How can we move from the localist urban scale to the more planetary oceanic scale and still claim some kind of bounded being or dwelling place? In “The Ocean in Us,” an essay in his much-cited We Are the Ocean collection based on the Oceania lecture delivered to the University of the South Pacific in Suva as ecological keynote address, Tongan writer and social anthropologist Epeli Hau‘ofa (1939–2009) pushed toward articulating terms, values, mores, and forms of ecological solidarity under the figure he memorably called Oceania. “And for a new Oceania to take hold,” he urges, “it must have a solid dimension of commonality that we can perceive with our senses. Culture and nature are inseparable. The Oceania that I see is a creation of people in all walks of life.”58 Earlier, debating who belongs to this new emergent Oceania across the Pacific, Hau‘ofa urges that “Oceania refers to a world of people connected to each other. […] As far as I am concerned, anyone who has lived in our region and is committed to Oceania is an Oceanian” (50–51). Belonging to Oceania becomes a matter of political and cultural commitment: not so much the pathos (suffering) or logos (argumentative necessity) as shared ethos of care. Oceania as a mode of dwelling means not only having a sense of history and cultivating caring attitudes and beliefs; it means cultivating a sense of belonging to the planet and ocean as a bioregional horizon of dwelling, sharing, and care. Thinking with and beyond Epeli Hau‘ofa’s big timely vision, Oceania can become for sites in Asia Pacific as well as other urban-charged sites (a) a worlding framework to help forge visions of ecological solidarity; (b) the site of alternative modes of belonging inside Asia and the Pacific, reflecting Pacific and Asia linkages and knowledge formations; and (c) a means that can prove helpful in transforming social and regional practices in the making and shaping of a worlding ecopoetics.59 What has Asia (and, a fortiori, inter-Asia) to do with the ecological well-being of Oceania, its values, and sites as spread across the Pacific to the Indian and Arabian Oceans and vice versa? I want to turn, by way of closing, to invoke two heart-rending scenes from contemporary eco-­ documentaries, Chasing Coral (2017) and Chasing Ice (2012), both directed by Jeff Orlowski.60 In Chasing Coral, the bleaching and dying corals of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef as across broader oceanic spaces of

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the world reflect intimate ties to the well-being and dietary needs of Asia, as various documentary cameras across sites and regions are activated to show this impact.61 In Chasing Ice, the gifted biomorphic photographer Jason Balog uses time-lapse cameras from Greenland and Iceland to Alaska to track the huge melting glaciers and warming oceans of Northern islands and waters, which continue to impact and deform—or “unworld”—the oceans, archipelagos, coastal farm lands, and deltas of India and China and on the Korean peninsula and across the Pacific Islands.62 These dying coral reefs and melting glaciers, as transhuman ecosystems, have destabilizing, far-reaching impacts upon “worlding Asia into Oceania,” as this documentary shows, in a feat of transmorphological and transurban-wilderness empathy. As marine biologist and environmental scientists have recently noted in a study of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, oceanic research “confirms [that] coral reefs and acidic ocean water don’t mix. Increasingly acidic oceans— caused by climate change—will harm coral reef growth over the next few decades if carbon dioxide emissions continue unchecked…Besides their beauty, reefs shelter land from storms, and are also a habitat for myriads of species.”63 “Coral reefs are therefore the most biologically diverse ecosystems of the planet, and provide a number of ecosystem services that hundreds of millions of people rely on,” as Greg Torda of Australia’s Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies has argued: all the world’s oceanic coral reefs are also at risk of bleaching from increasingly warm seawater, as the frequency of severe coral bleaching events has increased nearly fivefold worldwide over the past four decades along with acidification.64 Worlding—whether used as concept, tactic, trope, or warning sign— can help to motivate the preservation, linkage, and projection of endangered being and disrupted dwelling in such human and transhuman worlds. We are living and surviving precariously (if resiliently) across a not-so-lonely planet of corals and glaciers and much else endangered by the carbon-consumptive and resource-depleting system inside the late-­ capitalist Anthropocene. “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time,” Angela Davis advised of this world-transforming necessity, as ever inspiring hope in possibility and change.65 Along these lines of radical possibility running through this collection, worlding (a) makes us aware of the ongoing bio-­ planetary dynamics of deworlding and calls out as well (b) the need for other modes of multispecies reworlding. As legal scholar Jebediah Purdy pungently argues, the central question of living in the Anthropocene may

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come down to this problematic of embracing a world-making dynamic and large-scale questioning: as Purdy summarizes the challenge of the Anthropocene, the “question [is] of what kind of world to make.”66 This collection begins to suggest a worlding ethos tied to an environmental ecopoetic that is needed now and in the future to help respond to and create a more responsive planetary sense of worlding and comodes of sympoetic landed-oceanic becoming across Asia and Oceania. We live in a time riddled by divisions, differences, fractions, fractures, and antagonisms that, while understandably clamoring for recognition and priority, can block the terms, tactics, and forms of transregional, transdisciplinary, and transracial coalitions that are much needed to contend with the challenges—ecological, environmental, global, epistemological, cultural, and political—we now face on a planetary scale that go on ruining the air, water, earth, and living spaces we need to survive in this death-­ dealing era called the Anthropocene. Worlding Asia: Asian/Pacific/ American/Planetary Convergences gathers scholars, writers, filmmakers, and activists from various sites and knowledge formations across Asia, the Pacific, Asian America, Europe, and the Americas to begin to think about, embody, and invoke “planetary convergences.” We aim to theorize, articulate, and realize the tactics, imagination, and frameworks that go into what we call “worlding Asia,” that is, situating Asia within multiple configurations and coalitional forms of creation, world-making, and cosmos-­ making not given over to the commonplace terms of neoliberal globalization. In four thickly global-local sections, called “Unearthing Regions,” “Activism and Intervention,” “Convergences,” and “Cosmos and Creation,” this collection gathers cutting-edge and emergent scholars to reflect upon, challenge, and invoke forms of new knowledge and creation that go beyond the usual divides that would put “Asian,” “Pacific,” “American,” and “planetary” reflection into separate domains. Worlding Asia is a collection that seeks to activate what Norman O. Brown called modes of “metapolitical” unity and renewals beyond dismemberment, “to put thought underground/ as communication network, sewage system, power lines/ so that wildness can come above ground” and disturb the reality principle and academic complacencies on a dying planet.

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Geospatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture: A Rationale We now live in a time of globalization paradoxically riddled by divisions, differences, fractions, fractures, and antagonisms that, while understandably clamoring for identity recognition and regional priority, can block the terms, tactics, and forms of transregional, transdisciplinary, and transracial coalition that are still urgently needed to contend with the challenges— ecological, environmental, global, epistemological, cultural, and political—we face on a planetary scale that go on ruining the air, water, earth, and living spaces we need to survive in this death-dealing era called the Anthropocene. This collection gathers well-known as well as more emergent scholars, writers, filmmakers, and activists from various sites and knowledge formations across Asia, the Pacific, Asian America, Europe, and the Americas to begin to think about, embody, create, and invoke what we could call planetary convergences. The collection thus aims to theorize, articulate, and realize the tactics, imagination, and frameworks that go into what we call, in our subtitle, “worlding Asia in the Anthropocene,” that is, situating this Asia (as tied to Oceania as well) within and across multiple configurations and coalitional forms of creation, world-making, life-affirming, and cosmos-making not given over to the commonplace terms of neoliberal globalization as we have discussed in the foregoing discussion of worlding and reworlding amid the forces, forms, and values of deworlding, as in some unstable and open-ended dialectics and agonistics of antagonism and synergy, flux, and renewal. We depart (as coeditors and authors) from more conventional critiques of power and regions, or nation-state system, and explore instead threats of deworlding and posit emergent possibilities of reworlding (as more fully discussed by Shiuhhuah Serena Chou in her afterword to this collection). The collection in its themes and forms should prove to be timely, necessary, and cutting-edge and have cross-field impact. Given the global crises of authoritarian regimes and the rise of “killer capitalism” (for example, the PRC’s huge environmental and economic impact, leading even more so than the blustering USA into the deadly telos of the Anthropocene), we see the urgency to propose this tripartite dynamic of deworlding/ worlding/reworlding tactics. We effectively would do this through (a) expanding the notion of Asia by bringing in other Asias (e.g., Central Asia and Oceania) into the very regional or nation-based

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framework beyond a China-dominated inter-Asia that is not fully Asian or even Pacific at all except in hegemonic ways of developmental expansion and One Belt, One Road investment and debt formations tied from Africa and the Pacific to Asia; (b) theorizing more planetary and environmental frameworks we still need and are moving toward hopefully as an oceanic, transcontinental, and more planetary “commons” and via these projected quasi-utopic figurations of convergence and linkage in the chapters (and whole worlds) articulated later in this collection and trying not to vanish into the Anthropocene. We are haunted as well by this world-literary passage, from the Babylon version of The Talmud written in the precariously ancient Middle East, invoking the very soul of each person as a “world” interconnected to every other soul as another perishable “world” of fleeting mortal presence, singular ontology, spirit being, and planetary dwelling in the world: “The Babylonian Talmud teaches that all human beings contain a world, whole and complete, and that the loss of a single life is akin to an entire world vanishing away.”67

Notes 1. Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 2. When Tani Barlow, editor of the influential and innovative journal positions (Duke University Press) and long-time Asian scholar, first saw Kim So-­ young’s flyers announcing the Worlding Asia, 1 and 2 conferences at Korea National University of the Arts in mid-November 2020, she responded to my circulation of this call with the rejoinder, “Why not Asianizing the world” [rather than “worlding Asia”]? Her prodding has led to this key distinction here. As for Euro-theory derived models of “worlding” elaborated from Hegel, Marx, Goethe, Arendt, and Derrida, see the top-down theory approach applied in Pheng Cheah’s summarizing study, What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). This collection here will contend that “worlding Asia” takes place against its Euro-theory models, as these are applied by Cheah to an illustrative set of “postcolonial novels” from the Global South, meaning from India to Africa and the Caribbean. More on this below.

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3. For a representative challenge to the Anthropocene as an androcentric and heteronormative framework, from postnuclear and transhuman grounds of queer microbial forms of relationality and invertebrate temporalities and forms, see Eben Kirksey, “Queer Love, Gender Bending Bacteria, and Life After the Anthropocene,” Theory, Culture, and Society online (June 3, 2018) 1–23: http://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/dVTVmExbCUWqXYdYGzw2/full. See also Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s richly historicizing and postcolonial reframing of the Anthropocene into Caribbean “Plantationocene” and sites across Oceania in Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), “Gendering Earth: Excavating Plantation Soil,” 33–62. 4. See Haifa Saud Alfaisal’s essay by this name in Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 7(2) (2017) online. 5. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. by Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 34, 117 fn. 2. Further references will occur parenthetically. Reflecting on Marx’s framework and critique of capitalist-driven globalization, Nancy defines the world more broadly as “a totality of meaning” (41) especially for “those who inhabit it” (42). To create the world actively and as a struggle is Nancy’s aim: “To create the world means: immediately, without delay, reopening each possible struggle for a [just] world…” (54). And again: “The unity of a world is not one: it is made of diversity, including disparity and opposition” (109). 6. See epigraph to this chapter. 7. Morgan Meis, “Timothy Morton’s Hyper-Pandemic,” The New  Yorker online, June 8, 2021: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-­of-­ interest/timothy-­mortons-­hyper-­pandemic. See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 8. See Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 9. In the words of his French translator, Betsy Wing, “[Édouard Glissant’s] world is totality (concrete and quantifiable) [la totalité-monde], echoes (feedback) [les échos-monde], and chaos (spiraling and redundant trajectories) [le chaos-monde], all at once, depending on our many ways of sensing and addressing it.” See Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), xv. Glissant urges the proliferation of worlding-echoes as against chaotic “globality”: “Echos-monde thus allow us to sense and cite the cultures of peoples in the turbulent confluence whose globality organizes our chaos-monde” (94). As J. Michael Dash argues of

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this earth-ocean dwelling poetics, “archipelago has become Glissant’s quintessential concept of dwelling in the world.” See “The Stranger By the Shore: The Archpelagization of Caliban in Antillean Theater,” in Archipelagic American Studies, eds. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 356–357. 10. Édouard Glissant, “Distancing, Determining,” in Poetics of Relation, 142, urging a contrast between “rooted identity” as becoming intolerantly fixed and “relation identity” as becoming-multiple, more ecologically connected to other relations on the planet (146). On Glissant’s approach to intrarelationality and proliferating relation as “what the world makes and expresses of itself,” see Birgit Mara Kaiser, “Worlding CompLit: Diffractive Reading with Barad, Glissant, and Nancy,” Parallax 20 (2014): 247–287. By tactile analogy to Glissant’s mode of worlding, Kaiser invokes Karen Barad’s immersive formulation: “The world theorizes as well as experiments with itself. Figuring, reconfiguring” (207): see “On Touching—the Inhuman That Therefore I Am,” Differences 23 (2012): 206–223. 11. This is what Pheng Cheah tracks in his theory-cum-novel driven study What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016) as the “world-impoverishing and world-alienating” effect of capitalist globalization (96) as challenged by the more “worlding” forms of postcolonial novels. For post-Heideggerean tactics of worlding within modernity, see also Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (2012). Further references will occur parenthetically. 12. See Anna Roy and Aihwa Ong, eds. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (Chicester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 11. For broader applications of “worlding” as “a word, an argument, and a possibility” to a range of digitally impacted sites and forms from videogame communities to internet shopping to world travelling, see David Trend, Worlding: Identity, Media, and Imagination in a Digital Age (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2013), viii ff. 13. See Annie Lowrie, “Why the Phrase ‘Late Capitalism’ is Suddenly Everywhere.” The Atlantic online, May 1, 2017: https://www.theatlantic. com/business/archive/2017/05/late-­capitalism/524943/. 14. David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 246. Further references will occur parenthetically. 15. Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose (New York: Vintage, 2011), 249. 16. See Annie Lowrie, “Why the Phrase ‘Late Capitalism’ is Suddenly Everywhere.” The Atlantic online, May 1, 2017: https://www.theatlantic. com/business/archive/2017/05/late-­capitalism/524943/. 17. For a far-ranging infrastructural as well as ideological critique of this Chinese formation, see Mercy A Kuo, “One Belt, One Road: A Convergence

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of Civilizations?: Insights from [interview with] Tamara Chin,” The Diplomat online, May 24, 2017: https://thediplomat.com/2017/05/ one-­belt-­one-­road-­a-­convergence-­of-­civilizations/. See also the historical scope of sublimated world domination as portrayed in Tamara Chin, Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). For a reading of Snowpiercer along these lines, see Rob Sean Wilson, “Snowpiercer as Anthropoetics: Killer Capitalism, the Anthropocene, Korean Global Film,” boundary 2, 46 (2019): 199–218. 18. Jinah Kim, Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 5). What Kim terms the “dread forwarding” of war trauma is compounded by the ecological dread-forwarding of the Anthropocene effects in the Pacific. 19. As the Australian journalist Chris Ulmann said in summarizing Trump’s alliance-shattering impact upon the G20 summit of political leaders in Hamburg, Germany, in July 2017, “We learned that Donald Trump has pressed fast-forward on the decline of the United States as a global leader. He managed to isolate his nation, to confuse and alienate his allies and to diminish America.” Harriet Sinclair, “Report Goes Viral After Calling Donald Trump the ‘Biggest Threat to the West,” Newsweek, July 9, 2017 online. https://www.newsweek.com/journalists-report-calling-trumpisolated-and-freindlessviral-video-633962. 20. McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015), xii. 21. On this unexplained emergence in the Trump discourse during his first Asia visit, see Tracy Wilkinson, Shashank Bengali, and Brian Bennet, “Trump’s New Foreign Policy Touts a Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” Los Angeles Times online, November 7, 2017: http://www.latimes.com/ nation/la-­fg-­trump-­indo-­pacific-­20171108-­story.html. 22. On this “Jeremaic” prophetic genre of denunciation as an American critical and lyrical form of geopolitical transfiguration and critique, see the Bob Dylan Chap. 5  in Rob Sean Wilson, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics (2010). 23. For a comprehensive overview of ecological and geopolitical consequences arising from global capitalist-driven PRC, see Arif Dirlik, “The Rise of China and the End of the World,” https://www.academia.edu/27368023/ The_Rise_of_China_and_the_end_of_the_world. 24. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 92. 25. Environmental disasters may just create further market opportunities for another mode of “disaster capitalism” cum enforced “austerity” to proliferate from Bangladesh and Beijing to West Virginia and back, as Harvey

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notes (2014: 249). Naomi Klein documents and contests such views in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 106–110. Further references will occur parenthetically. 26. June Wang, “Worlding Through Shanzhai: The Evolving Art Cluster of Dafen in Shenzhen, China,” in June Wang, Tim Oakes, and Yang Yang, eds., Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and Aspirational Urbanism (Routledge: New York, 2018), 125–127. 27. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015, 20). Further references will occur parenthetically. 28. Donna. J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Further references will occur parenthetically. 29. See Timothy Morton’s cognitive mapping of this distended eco-­planetary sublime in all its ugliness and danger, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology at the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 30. See Rob Sean Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery, eds., The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (Berkeley and Santa Cruz, CA: North Atlantic Books and New Pacific Press, 2007), 216. On the phenomenological origins of “worlding” in Heidegger and later postcolonial transformations of this approach in Spivak and Said as well as post-9/11 geopolitical formations of “world literature” canons, see Theo D’haen, “Worlding World Literature,” Recherches Littéraires/Literary Research 32 (2016): 7–23. 31. For a historically rich literary-modernist and inter-Asian approach to this “transpacific” dynamic of cultural and material exchange, see Steven Yao, “Oceanic Etymologies: Shanghai and the Transpacific Routes of Global Modernity, Verge 3 (2017): 77–106. 32. See Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds., Words In Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 15. 33. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 139. 34. “Remembering Lucky Dragon, Re-membering Bikini: Worlding the Anthropocene through Transpacific Nuclear Modernity,” Cultural Studies 33 (2018): 127. 35. Josh Lepawsky, Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 1–48, 129–149. 36. Ibidem, 5–6. 37. See Arif Dirlik, “The Rise of China and the End of the World,” based on lecture at University of British Columbia, February 27, 2016:

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https://www.academia.edu/27368023/The_Rise_of_China_and_ the_end_of_the_world. 38. “Fifteen Asia-Pacific countries on Sunday signed the world’s biggest free trade deal, seen as a huge coup for China in extending its influence. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) includes 10 Southeast Asian economies along with China, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia, with members accounting for around 30 percent of global GDP.  First proposed in 2012, the deal was finally sealed at the end of a Southeast Asian summit as leaders push to get their pandemic-hit economies back on track.” See Alice Philipson and Martin Abbugao and their AFP analysis based in Singapore, “World’s Largest Trade Agreement Signed in Coup for China,” November 14, 2020: https://news.yahoo.com/huge-­a sian-­t rade-­p act-­s igned-­0 02503549. html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6L y9uZX dzLmdvb2dsZS5jb20vYXJ0aWNsZXMvQ0FJaUVJaFVLUTg5X2lsZHp2ckgzRWxGTW9FcUdRZ0VLaEFJQUNvSENBb3dudk9UQ3pDSGpxa0RNS0hMd0FZP2hsPWVuLVVTJmdsPVVTJmNlaWQ9VVMlM0Flbg&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAGR3WG6sJzIP MPOrewQBUtPvsHATUt72JMagfq17Qvr t6yM2F6EH5KWbK2 GXIYrLqsPSJV99veYxJJNHFmm2wF8r1bGNC-­e Af09tm06Ne3-­ WSQTF8RbccCAnKaz9Hlound9NSAO1hCDf9R176zhgaZPtXNj5XjWDiY09_QP5pcd2. 39. See “China’s Largesse in Tonga Threatens Future of Pacific Nation,” Associated Press, July 10, 2019: https://www.staradvertiser. com/2019/07/09/breaking-­news/chinas-­largesse-­in-­tonga-­threatensfuture-­of-­pacific-­nation/. 40. See David Trend, Worlding (Boulder, Colorado and London: Paradigm, 2013), 5 and ff. 41. Trend, Worlding, 170. 42. See Rob Sean Wilson, “Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic,” The Worlding Project, 213, 216. See also Rob Sean Wilson, “Worlding Space, Worlding Time: On the Making of ‘The Worlding Project.’” Talk at Cultural Studies Center Twentieth Anniversary, October 21, 2008. University of California at Santa Cruz: https://www.academia.edu/1505561/ WORLDING_SPACE_WORLDING_TIME_On_the_Making_of_The_ Worlding_Project. 43. Karen Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Indifference: Dis/Continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-­ Come,” Derrida Today 3 (2010): 265. Emphasis mine. 44. Karen Barad, “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am,” Differences 25 (2012): 207.

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45. Andy Chih-mng Wang, XXX, in Goh, Daniel P.  S., ed., Worlding Multiculturalisms: The Politics of Inter-Asian Dwelling (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 21. 46. See the overview of this globalizing-worlding dynamic as a European center-periphery contradiction in Marko Juvan, “Worlding Literatures between Dialogue and Hegemony,” Comparative Literature and Culture 15.5 (2013): https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-­4374.2343. 47. See Radha Radhakrishnan, History, the Human, and the World Between (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). In Creation of the World, or Globalization, Nancy tropes the exponential growth of this unified “globality” as what he calls an ugly global “glomicity” (37) spreading as form and value around the world under the mandate of globalization. 48. Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2001), 29. 49. Wallace Stevens, “Of the Surface of Things,” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1971), 57. 50. Worlding remains underspecified and untranslated, close perhaps to Nancy’s preferred French term mondialisation as meaning “world-forming” (117), if echoing that Germanically freighted noun-become-verb from Heidegger’s existential ontology “welten.” 51. Shir Alon, “The Becoming Literature of the World: Pheng Cheah’s Case for World Literature,” Los Angeles Review of Books online, December 19, 2016: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/becoming-­literatureworld-­pheng-­cheahs-­case-­world-­literature/. 52. See Pheng Cheah, “What Is a World?: On Literature as a World-Making Activity,” Daedalus, Vol. 137, Summer 2008: 26–38. 53. “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature,” New Literary History 45 (2014), 319. 54. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xv, 5. 55. See Zack Lee, “Eco-cities as an Assemblage of Worlding Practices,” International Journal of Built Environment and Sustainability 2 (2015): 183–191. (Lee draws his concept of Asian-based “worlding” from Ong.) 56. Ibidem, 186. 57. See Rob Sean Wilson and Arif Dirlik, eds., Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 58. See Epeli Hau’ofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008). 56. 59. See the fuller elaboration in Rob Sean Wilson, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) on Hau’ofa’s “counter-conversion” from a Pacific ­developmental telos to an oceanic polytheism and more bioregional modes of planetary belonging, 119–142.

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60. See the two eco-planetary documentaries directed by Jeff Orlowski, Chasing Coral (Netflix Documentary: 2017) and Chasing Ice (Exposure Production. National Geographic. 2012). 61. To quote from Andrew Lapin’s National Public Radio article on Chasing Coral (2017), “Scientists are unequivocal about the cause of the [coral] bleaching: Our oceans are warming, because they are absorbing more and more greenhouse gases as humans release massive, harmful amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. The more they heat up, the more algae the coral polyps must release to ensure their own short-term survival—but coral can’t survive long-term in such warm temperatures. It’s estimated that close to half of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef alone have died in the last 18 months.” See Andrew Lapin, “‘Chasing Coral’: Documentary Vividly Chronicles a Growing Threat to Oceans,” National Public Radio online, July 13, 2017: http://www.npr.org/2017/07/13/536644965/ chasing-­c oral-­d ocumentar y-­v ividly-­c hronicles-­a -­g rowing-­t hreat-­ to-­oceans. 62. Since 2000, sea temperatures around Korea have risen 1.3 degrees Celsius, resulting in a huge decrease and loss of marine creatures, including dietary species like snow crab, squid, mullet, and abalone, to name just a few in this cuisine-rich context in Seoul: see Eun-ju Chyung and Si-soo Park, “Rich Marine Species Vanish with Climate Change, Korea Times, July 25, 2017: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/ nation/2017/07/371_233516.html. 63. See Doyle Rice, “Coral Reefs at Severe Risk as World’s Oceans Become More Acidic.” USA Today online (March 14, 2018): https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/science/2018/03/14/coral-­r eefs-­s evere-­r iskworlds-­oceans-­become-­more-­acidic/425017002/. 64. See Doyle Rice, ibidem, 2018. 65. Quotation from a 2014 lecture at Southern Illinois University. See McKenzie Jean-Philippe, “9 Essential Angela Davis Books to Add to Your Shelf,” Oprah Daily online, June 8, 2020: https://www.oprahdaily.com/ entertainment/books/g32803115/angela-­davis-­books/. 66. Jebediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 267. 67. Sanhedrin Talmud, 37a.

PART I

Unearthing and Historicizing Regions (deworlding/dismantling/reworlding life worlds and values (asia reworlding?)

CHAPTER 2

Geopolitical Fantasy: Continental Action Movies Soyoung Kim

Geofantasy Elsewhere I grew up in a military dictatorship during the Cold War era, in which restrictions were imposed not only on freedom of speech but also on freedom of travel. Hence, when I was a teenager, I occasionally went to Kimpo International Airport simply to watch an airplane take off. The wind felt harsh in the remote airport field. I took a deep breath and was amazed to glimpse a runway and a couple of airplanes in the air. Up to the early 1980s, international travel was only allowed for the privileged, workers sent to “the gulf boom,” or soldiers sent to Vietnam.1 Their potentially enriching experiences were, however, seldom used as distinct opportunities to learn about other cultures in Asia. Travel was purely an issue of economic gain. Crossing a border by land into the Asian continent (initially via Northeast China) was also impossible from a South Korean geoperspective because of the Cold War and the partition. Because the northbound direction was blocked to the South Korean part of the Korean

S. Kim (*) Cinema Studies, Korea National University of Arts, Seoul, South Korea © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_2

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peninsula, no travel was possible over land or sea to Eurasia, including China, the Soviet Union, and more distant locations. The new Asia Highway project follows exactly the routes that were once completely blocked. Since we were denied the experience of travel, we entertained ourselves by playing a globe game. As we turned the globe around, our fingers would land on random points, such as Mongolia, Russia, or Nigeria. This game actually sparked my desire to be somewhere other than where I was. Writing about this particular geofantasy constitutes an endeavor to elucidate the desire to be elsewhere that also existed in public fantasy, as expressed in films of the period.2 I often reflect on the remnants of the past and try to understand the ways in which authoritarian modalities have been haunting and affecting the pores of everyday life and myself. The recent emergence of studies on fascism and the mass dictatorship of South Korea is, of course, related to this concern.3 As for the notion that mass dictatorship directly encompasses a certain constellation of political order involving material and psychical reality, I would like to focus on the peculiar public fantasy manifested in a group of films during the 1960s and 1970s, products of the dictatorship era. This group of films is known as Dairyuk Hwalkuk (continental action cinema), Manchu Dairyuk Mul, Manchu Western, or Manchu Hwalkuk. Mostly set in certain places, such as the current Northeast China (formerly Manchuria and, even earlier, Manchukuo) and favoring places such as the vast fields of Manchuria, the Soviet–Manchuria border, Harbin, and Shenyang (also known as Bongchon), these films borrowed some “generic” motifs of the Western, such as expansive, untamed frontiers, hybridized cowboy costumes, horse riding, and showdowns. This is why this group of films is referred to as “Manchu Western” or “Continental Action.” Set in the colonial period, these films evoke the battleground of the anti-Japanese armed resistance (toklipkun) in exile in Manchuria as the frontier to host the Western genre. The book A Study of Japan’s Counterinsurgency in Manchukuo (with special reference to the inner structure of the anti-Japanese armed resistance in Manchuria)4 reveals the very close connection between the anti-­Japanese armed resistance and diasporic Korean peasants in Manchuria. This view represents a revision of previous historical writings that mostly focused on the anti-Japanese armed resistance in the wilderness of Manchuria. Furthermore, it presents a broader picture in which Manchuria constitutes a significant part of modern Korean history involving ordinary people.5 Another important book on this issue is East Asian Diaspora and

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City: Joseon People in Early Twentieth Century Manchuria. The book departs from previous studies of Korean diasporas in Manchuria to approach them in the context of multiethnic composites in cities (Shenyang, Changchun, and Harbin), where they interacted with both Chinese and Japanese. From a global perspective, Manchuria from the early twentieth century was perceived as the frontier of Asia, or the Asian West, where six supposed races (Manchu, Mongolian, Russians, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese) should live in harmony. Owen Lattimore referred to Manchuria as a “cradle of conflict” in 1932.6 The continental action films chose Manchuria before and after Manchukuo (1932–1945) as their setting. According to Prasenjit Duara’s book Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern,7 Manchukuo offers a unique historical laboratory in which globalizing forces are mediated by East Asian modernity. Where these films are shot, however, is truly “inauthentic” space. Because of the Cold War, it was not possible to visit the former wilderness of Manchuria or the cities of Shenyang, Changchun, and Harbin. Hence, these films were shot in obscure regions of South Korea. Some low-­budget continental action films do not even make the pretense of being filmed on “the continent.” They are typically unfamiliar local landscapes dotted with huts and horses, simulating those found in American Westerns.8 They are also characterized by strangeness, since the local landscape frequently includes foreign entities, such as cowboys. The mixed sense of familiarity and unfamiliarity is precisely the modality of affect-invested location shooting. It is a suspended disbelief kind of embodiment-representation for audiences whose connection to Manchuria is often through family oral histories of migration. Many Koreans moved to Japan and Manchuria, in all approximately 3.5 million toward the end of colonial rule or 14 % of the total population. Of these, 700,000 returned and a million remained overseas. Continental action films offer a series of very interesting frameworks to complicate the notion of national cinema and were pejoratively considered nonnational (mukukjok) cinema. Moreover, they challenge the claim that the Western is a quintessentially American genre, as also occurs in the 1971 Ferdinando Baldi Spaghetti Western Blindman, which incorporates the codes of the Japanese blind samurai film series. The action movies of the non-West, known as Manchu Westerns, mimic and borrow motifs and conventions of the Western during the Cold War era. In so doing, they

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challenge not only the nativist notion of national genres but also constitute a model of a low-budget trans/national filmmaking before the current transnational capital dictates of remakes and coproduction. Manchuria, in the popular imagination, is apt to offer the public a fantasy of trans-Asia beyond the national because it was indeed, as described by Prasenjit Duara, a “transnational phenomenon.” Before focusing on wider categories, such as transnational and trans-Asia, it might suffice here to define Manchuria as a laboratory of multiethnic mixing and coercion in the formation of East Asia modernity. Manchukuo was also understood as a land of opportunity by Koreans. Later dictator Park Junghee was one of those who recognized the opportunity for upward mobility and attended the military academy in Manchukuo. The use of location in this genre of film is intriguing. It functions as a kind of topographic space that can represent not only the three-­dimensional shape of a landscape on a two-dimensional surface but a space of imagination. In general, location shooting is the practice of filming in an actual setting, rather than on a sound stage or back lot. There is a commonly held notion that greater realism can be achieved in a “real” place. Location shooting is also used to economize budgets. In Dairyuk Hwalkuk, the location is, at best, suggestive. This suggestibility acquires the status of imagined reality by drawing on historical popular knowledge about Manchuria, the Korean diaspora of the resistance army, and peasants. I also grew up hearing from my mother about the immense horizon and the sun over it in Manchuria. She went there to visit her father, who had fled to Harbin. She often told me that the color of the sun that she saw from the trans-Manchuria train window became the reigning color of her life. She also added that she saw dead bodies in the fields. She was seven years old in 1942 when she went there, just after the outbreak of the war. This imaginative landscape involving Northeast Asia and beyond constitutes a politically charged public fantasy. First, it invokes a history of resistance, even though it could also be regarded simply as nostalgia. Second, this particular fantasy of Northeast Asia encompasses a desire to be elsewhere, a drive to go against the prohibitions imposed under the political conditions existing then. Third, it is possible to see the proliferation of imagined Manchuria as trapped in the Park Junghee regime’s modernization project, which, it has been argued, was modeled after Manchukuo, as well as the Japanese Meiji Restoration. In other words, it could constitute proof of the internalization of the official narrative of

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colonial resistance in the nation-building process. Some films fit into this complicit mirror structure, but some do not. Generally, Soviet-Manchurian Border tends toward being confirmative of the state ideology, whereas Break the Chain refuses to be complicit with it.

Identification Trouble in an Imagined Landscape David Harvey, in response to the question of how he chose to become a geographer, makes the following remark: When I was a kid, I often wanted to run away from home but every time I tried, I found it very uncomfortable, so I came back. So I decided to run away in my imagination, and there at least the world was a very open place, since I had a stamp collection, which showed all these countries with a British monarch on their stamps, and it seemed to me that they all belonged to us, to me. (Spaces of Capital)9

At some point in our lives, most of us have experience the urge to run away from home in our imagination and collect something that could serve as a substitute for something else (although perhaps not for a British monarch). This form of geographical imagination is interesting when one must imagine both a redrawing of the map of Asia to cope with aggressive globalization by finance capital and new regional networks, such as forming regional nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) against ecological catastrophe or to aid trans-Asia migrant workers, inter-Asian intellectual networks, and cultural coproductions. From a South Korean perspective, this newly drawn map of Asia in progress should be neither a successor to the East Asian tribute-trade system nor a continuation of an East Asian coprosperity sphere. Regarding the Cold War–era map of East Asia, it has been pointed out that the United States mostly took over what Japan had abandoned. Despite a brief postcolonial enthusiasm that Southeast Asia derived from the shared spirit of independence from 1945 to 1949, the Korean cognitive map over Asia was altered to position the Pacific at the center of the world in the 1950s. In this sense, continental action cinema, whatever minor mode it took, partly reoriented the oppressive regime of imagining the military regime from the Pacific to Manchuria. In this light, it could be argued that the continental action genre sustained a type of Asianism of its own. With regard to the recent return of Asianism, Shin Gi-Wook offers the following explanation:

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“Asianism in Korea’s Politics of Identity” approaches Asianism from four distinct periodizations: precolonial, colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War. Whereas the discourse of Asianism played a significant role during both the precolonial and colonial periods, it was in great decline during postcolonial period because of ideological (capitalist vs. communist) and national (Korea vs. Japan) divisions in the postcolonial period that disrupted the (re)emergence of any form of Asianism in Korea. In addition to local nationalist politics, U.S. foreign policy in Asia adopted the principle of bilateralism.10

The absence of Asianism both in state doctrine and academic analysis lasted through the postcolonial period up to 2003, when President Roh Moo Hyun declared the era as one of Northeast Asia. Popular culture, such as that embodied by the movies of the 1960s and 1970s, has, however, sustained its own version of Asianism. Among continental action movies, I would like to start with two films, one by Lee Manhui entitled Break the Chain and the other by Im Kwontaek11 entitled An Eagle in the Wilderness, even though these two films are not considered to be representative works by these two very important filmmakers. It is also worth noting that one of the first continental action movies was made by Jung Changhwa,12 who later worked with Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong. His Hong Kong film, Five Fingers of Death (1972), was a major hit in the United States and makes an appearance as the so-called five-point-palm exploding-heart technique in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 2. He also made Skyline (Jipyongson 1961), which was set in Harbin, China. Jung Changhwa points out that this film opened the door to moving Korean films to the continent (dairyuk).13 The continental action (hwalkuk) is intriguing in the history of geopolitics. Because it refers back to the pre-Cold War Japanese Empire era in Manchuria, it involuntarily reveals the geographical blockage that the contemporary political system notoriously installed under the rubric of anticommunism, the consequent anticommunist part of Asia, and the provocation of colonized sentiment. Audiences must have lamented something along the lines of “We wish we could be there!” This kind of film was often viewed by male members of the lumpen-proletariat class whose memory of Manchuria was either direct (some might have been born there) or indirect but all the same quite real as an immediate ancestral space. It might have felt like a simple repetition of the official history of the resistance army that had been taught in primary school. It is also true

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that people often love to see a transmedia adaptation of what they already know. Break the Chain ends with three men who disappear into the horizon of the wilderness. One of them states, “I have lived enough in darkness. But now I follow the trail of the sun.”14 They not only refuse to join the resistance army but also to accept national identity wholeheartedly. Throughout the film, there is a process of identification for the three men that concerns what and who belongs where and how. As the film mixes the Western with continental action, as well as burlesque comedy, there is a constant diffusion of identity that disables a stable interpellation or naming. In most continental action films, the protagonist usually turns out to be either part of the resistance army or at least to be sympathetic toward it. However, in Break the Chain, the three men are far from the conventional representation of the resistance army and its allies. Continental action films tend to work toward the privileged identity of a resistance army member who is ready to die for the greater nation. However, in this film, the men choose to remain outlaws. What should be stressed is that this film was made in the early 1970s, when a coercive hypernationalist project was being carried out by the state. This film actually responds negatively to the project by detouring into the colonial period. It is not so much about the colonial period as the contemporary era. After ten years of continental action films, Break the Chain disrupted the established identification processes in 1971. It departed from the traditional expectations of the genre and the dominant ideology of the time, which was the goal of turning people into a nation for developmental statist modernization. Break the Chain was made between the Charter of Education (kukmin kyoyukhunjang) in 1968 and the Yusin Law in 1972 (the so-called Revitalizing Reforms), which were derived from the Japanese Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) and the Japanese Meiji Restoration, respectively. It is commonly recognized that the regime of Park Junghee should be divided into three periods. The first period is the early phase of the May 16 Coup in 1961, the second is the latter part of the 1960s, and the final period is the 1970s.15 In response to the claim that mass dictatorship privileges the consensual masses rather than coercion, Cho Heeyeon points to the emergence of the masses who were conscious of the value of democracy in the 1970s, whereas other masses accepted developmentalism wholeheartedly. In this polemical site of mass dictatorship and an emergent

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consciousness of democracy, Break the Chain presents multiple axes of identification and dis/identification. As has been argued: Identification is a more complex and supple term than identity, which is a matter of social regulation, the allocation of the assimilation of each individual to a social group, a class, a gender, a race, a nation-concept that are themselves in question. The term identification, on the other hand, owing to its psychoanalytic resonance, carries an ontological and an epistemological valence, such that the question Who or What Am I? becomes a question of being and knowing, a question of desire…16

Teresa de Lauretis defines the notion of identification as such and extends it to Fanon’s question of race identity captured the body as the material ground of subject formation. She notes that psychoanalysis, encompassing Freud’s ideas about an individual’s psychic history (ontogenetic development) and species history (phylogenetic inheritance), reaches the place of culture indebted to Fanon’s schema of “sociogeny.” The continental action films Break the Chain and An Eagle in the Wilderness show an especially complicated process of identification and dis/identification at work in the text. First, this is because of the colonial history to which they refer; they are not set in colonial Choson but in Manchuria, a space of transnational phenomena as well as of Manchukuo. Second, the films deal with the race issue with (in) difference; it is mostly through male bonding and its disintegration that the characters in the films come to realize their positions and identities. Third, all this represents either denial or annihilation of national identities. An Eagle in the Wilderness (1969) has an extraordinary narrative. On the frontier of Manchuria (or elsewhere), people await the return of Chang (Chang Dong Hui) to celebrate his third son’s hundred-day anniversary after his birth. However, Japanese soldiers raid the village. The commanding officer, Yoshita (Park Noshik), takes a photo with his soldiers and Chang’s family, rapes Chang’s wife, and then kills her, along with the rest of the family. Moreover, Yoshita composes a poem after committing this heinous crime. Chang comes back and sees that his entire family has been killed. He picks up the photo and uses it to exact revenge. Yoshita, in his perverse mode, adopts Chang’s son, calls him Honto (Kim Hee-la), and raises him as a Japanese soldier. Honto is indoctrinated by Yoshita and believes that the Korean resistance army killed his mother

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and castrated his father, Yoshita. Meanwhile, Honto grows up to become a war machine, a merciless soldier who wants revenge for the death of his mother. Knowing that Chang is after him, Yoshita plans for Honto to kill his own father. Honto, however, comes to abhor the atrocity that his fellow solders committed against his potential Chinese girlfriend, named Yonhwa (Yu Mi): they raped her and falsely accused her of being a spy. Honto sees his dead mother and kills the soldiers involved, one by one. Precisely according to Yoshita’s plan, Honto is led to kill Chang. However, Honto sees a photo that Chang dropped on the ground, discovers the truth, and kills Yoshita instead. Honto is shot in the back as he recognizes his father and comes close to him. At the end of the film, Chang carries Honto’s dead body on his horse and walks off into the wilderness. Yoshita scripts Honto’s identity. There is a displacement of both his race and his family history. In this double-displacement process, he is secretly called “Yoshita’s dog” by an adjutant. His moment of death overlaps with the moment of his real identification of who he is, his realization of how his past has been scripted by Yoshita, and his meeting with his biological father. The film, in general, has many logical and temporal incoherencies, such as why Chang never wonders why his third son is missing from the scene of the crime. In addition, toward the final moment, Honto asks Yoshita, “You said you are sexually impotent. Then how could you be my father?” Yoshita replies, “I became sexually impotent after your birth. How many times do I have to tell you that the Korean resistance army made me like this?” This is an empty question followed by a predictable answer that was already heard in a previous sequence. After this exchange, Honto takes a look at the photo in question and understands the situation immediately. Then he points and fires a gun at Yoshita. The photo of Chang’s family and Yoshita’s soldiers is presented as evidence throughout the film. The insistence and insertion of the photo as an unquestionable piece of hard evidence paradoxically reveals the fact that the film is premised on an unlikely or almost impossible scenario of what might have happened in Manchukuo to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people. This near impossibility involves the adoption of a son of a Korean woman by the man who killed her. Moreover, the child was only 100 days old. The child is successfully raised to become a war machine who starts killing his army comrades when he realizes that they committed a gang rape. In addition, there is a pretension of linguistic commensurability among Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people. The series of displacements and dis/locations in the film turn the traditional continental action film

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genre on its head. Chang is not particularly supportive of the resistance army, and in the end, the war machine, Honto, turns his back on the army. The film provides no sense of verisimilitude regarding what might have actually happened there. Obviously, this is not the aim of the text. The historical pairing suggested by the text is of the colonial period and the contemporary era of the 1960s and 1970s. In general, there exists a distinct group of films that possess this kind of historical pairing. The exemplary films are Daughters of the Kim Pharmacy (1961), Evergreen Tree (1963), and Manchu/continental action films starring Shanghai Park, Bongchon Tiger, and Harbin Kim. It is not difficult to understand why this kind of historical pairing was so popular in the 1960s and 1970s. On the one hand, films such as Daughters of Kim Pharmacy (1963) and Evergreen Tree (1961) show the foundations of colonial modernity, including the gender politics of New Women that were also being taken up by the modernization project of the Park Junghee regime. These films show the complicit connection of the two periods that is historically and politically grounded because of the impacts of the Japanese Meiji Restoration on Park Junghee’s regime. Continental action, focusing on the resistance army, follows the postcolonial narration of a process of modern sovereign nation-building. However, there are exceptions to this, as exemplified by Break the Chain and An Eagle in the Wilderness. In a series of disruptions and displacements in identification processes in An Eagle in the Wilderness following de Lauretis’ articulation, Honto is allocated to a social group, a class, a race, and a nation other than those to which his biological father belonged. This dis/allocation turns him into a dog, a war machine, and a killer. The final moment of “true” identification brings him to death. Hence, he is given no space or time to ask himself, “Who or what am I?” The silence of this question, but the noise of dis/ allocation and the trouble with identification and identity, is doubly resonant in the compulsive historical pairing of colonial time and military regime. Two nation-states (the Japanese Empire and the South Korean military regime), nebulously represented and encrypted in the film, are disavowed. Following Honto, one finds that ontogeny, phylogeny, and sociogeny are displaced. Communities are not operative in either place. The two nations (Japan and Korea) plus another (China) represented in the film constitute most of all states of fantasy in Manchuria. There is a tremendous sense of loss, but strangely without yearning. If there is any yearning, it is for space that is unmarked and open. One could think of an example, in contrast to this. Jacqueline Rose, in her States of Fantasy, observes:

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Going to Israel is to enter a country in yearning, one whose passions flow not only from people to homeland but also and just as powerfully the other way. This is a nation which desires its potential citizens—exiled, diaspora Jewry—to come home with as much fervour as it banishes the former occupants of its land from their own dream of statehood.17

Manchuria before Manchukuo (1932–1935) remains the almost mythical and ancient place of Koguryo with respect to contemporary Korea. The popular understanding sees this as the farthest that Koreans could have reached in terms of geographic expansion. Therefore, when filmmakers such as Im Kwontaek and Lee Manhui revisit Manchuria as their “elsewhere,” the space of the location surprisingly, but rather unconsciously, acquires overdetermined meanings—mythical, ancient, and colonial—which are also at the same time heterotopias of an elsewhere other than a horribly confined and partitioned peninsula whose territorial boundary was imposed by the Cold War. Regarding the notion of place, this is an alleged location of elsewhere that simulates Manchuria. It is an imagined space outside a finite national territory, notwithstanding the fact that the nonterritorial location shooting must take place somewhere in South Korea because of the Cold War, as explained previously. Benedict Anderson’s widely quoted Imagined Communities offers a definition of the nation-state: It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion… The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm… Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.

I would like to add the notion of critical geopolitical fantasy simultaneously circumscribing and traversing and transforming the imagined communities of “finite, if elastic boundaries beyond which lie other nations.”

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This critical geopolitical fantasy is incongruent with the faculty of the cognitive mapping of imagined communities. Whereas imagination in “imagined communities” is protective and proactive mental work for the modern nation-state, critical fantasy concerns one who doubts, disrupts, and transcends the finite boundaries of the nation-state and nationality. The critical geopolitical fantasy is concerned not so much with a protective fiction and fantasy of existing boundaries, geography, and mapping in realpolitik. It is, rather, a vicissitude of topological cuts into imagined communities. As noted, the space of Manchuria and some Manchu/continental action films offer a unique opportunity to discern the importance of Manchuria and Manchukuo as trans-Asian phenomena and conceptualize trans-Asia geopolitical fantasy derived from the overdetermined meaning of location. Critical geopolitical fantasy, through dis/location and the troubling process of identification represented in popular culture, allows us to reflect on an alternative mode of engagement with the political unconscious of the modern nation-state. Moreover, it could provide an unexpected platform for trans-Asia cultural flows, which is in fact evolving, similar to Hollywood versus the rest of American popular culture versus the rest. The former Manchuria and current Northeast China, however, are sites of confrontation, conflict, and friction as well. Currently, it has catalyzed a controversy around the Northeast China project by the Chinese government. It still constitutes the nexus where history’s disquiet meets present political turmoil. In continental action films, people go to Manchuria to shed coercive “identities” and other “protective fictions.” Consequently, death waits in An Eagle in the Wilderness, but the sun breaks a chain of burdensome identity in Break the Chain. Hence, there is no guarantee on this path, but the critical geopolitical fantasy prevails.

Notes 1. For implications of the construction project in the Middle East for gender politics, refer to Choi, Sungae, “Economic Development and the Politics of Gender” in Hankuk Hyundai, Yosongsa (Contemporary History of Korean Women), (Seoul: Hanul Publishing, 2004). 2. In “Fantasies That Matter: The Counter-Histories of Bertha Pappenheim and Ito Noe,” Earl Jackson Jr. mobilizes Teresa de Lauretis’ notion of the public fantasy and the private fantasy. It follows that fantasy as the “private” fantasy is the object of psychoanalysis, an unconscious structuring

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pattern through which a subject’s desire is staged and articulated, and the “public” fantasy consists of texts produced for circulation and consumption, which would include poems, short stories, novels, films, plays, and so forth. He complicates this distinction further by bringing in the fantasy of a political activist as a notable private fantasy and an official or semiofficial version of a history, a life story bordering on rumor and gossip subject to micropolitics. This paper was presented at the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Biannual Conference, KNUA, Seoul, 2005. 3. Yun, Hwytak, and A Study of Japan’s Counterinsurgency in Manchukuo: With Special Reference to the Inner Structure of the Anti-Japanese Armed Resistance in Manchuria (Iljokak: Seoul, 1996). 4. According to Yun Hwytak, there were 2,566,700  in Manchukuo. The resistance movement stopped in 1933 after Manchukuo. 5. For an analysis of the Korean diaspora after the end of World War II, please refer to Bae Juyeon, “The Formation and Dynamics of the Nation-state in the Returnee Genre,” MA thesis, Korea National University of Arts, Cinema Studies, 2005. It deals with how the return of members of the Korean diaspora was dealt with in the series called Returnee (Kwihwan). 6. Owen Lattimore, Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict (New York: Macmillan, 1932, p. 7), requoted from Kim Kyongil et al., East Asian Diaspora and City: DongAsiauiMinjokwakwankwa Dosi, Seoul: Yoksapipyongsa, 2004. 7. Pransenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 8. On the other hand, a film titled Moosookja (Homeless, 1968, the Korean title is adopted from a Spaghetti Western film released in Korea) by Shin Sangok found the most exquisite location that tries to exclude any sense of familiarity. However, it remains an impossible project as the landscape occasionally reveals the recognizable objects. 9. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, 3. 10. Gi-Wook Shin, “Asianism in Korea’s Politics of Identity” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2005, p. 620. 11. Kim Yaerim, Imagining Asia and the Topology of the Anti-Communist Identity of the Cold War (naengjeopnki Asia sangsangkwa bangong jeongchaesdonguo uisanghak, Sangheo Hakbo, 2007, 311–345. 12. Jung Changhwa recollected that he was greatly influenced by Shane (Dir. George Stevens, 1953). As Im, Kwontaek worked for Jung Changhwa, he recounts an anecdote in which he shot Shane from the screen in 35 mm for Jung. They studied a reverse shot and other shots from Shane. From Im Kwontaek Speaks about Im Kwontaek, edited by Jung Sungil (Hyunshil Munhwa Yonku, 2003. pp. 42–43). 13. Still, what is very intriguing in the continental action movies is the absolute blindness to racial and linguistic differences among East Asians. There is not even any pretense of marking differences among Chinese, Japanese,

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and Koreans. In a way, this kind of dislocated spatial configuration gives a sense of freedom. 14. The film stars three men whose goals coincide with finding a Tibetan Buddhist sculpture held by Manchurian bandits. The Tibetan Buddhist sculpture has an encrypted code that reveals a list of resistance army members. The three men turn out to be outlaws. They finally found it and gave it to the resistance army, but chose to continue to live as outlaws. 15. Yang, Myongji, “The politics of class as the dominant strategy of the Park Junghee Regime—The exclusion of the working class and the cooptation of the middle class” in Sahoi Palchon Yongu, 2003, pp. 163–191, re-cited from Yu Sung Young, “The Psychotechnology of the Hyper Nationalizing Project and Cultural Mutation” presented at the seminar under the general topic of the “State and Everyday Life of Park Junghee Era,” Aug. 17, 2006. 16. Teresa de Lauretis, “Difference Embodied: Reflections on Black Skin, White Masks”, Parallax, 2002. vol. 8, no. 2, 54–68. 17. In a similar vein, but with more of a psychoanalytic thrust, Jacqueline Rose argues that a theory of modern statehood can benefit greatly from a dialogue with Freud. She suggests that psychoanalysis can provide a reading of the symptoms of statehood, a threatening excess that is inside of the very process upholding the state as reality.

Works Cited Gi-Wook, Shin, “Asianism in Korea’s Politics of Identity” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2005, p. 620. Harvey, David. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge, 2001. Jacqueline, Rose. 1998. States of Fantasy. Oxford University Press. Jung, Sungil, Im Kwontaek Speaks about Im Kwontaek edited by Hyunshil Munhwa Yonku, 2003, pp. 42–43. Kim, Yaerim, “Imagining Asia and the Topology of the Anti-Communist Identity of the Cold War (naengjeopnki Asia sangsangkwa bangong jeongchaesdonguo uisanghak, Sangheo Hakbo)”, 2007, 311–345. Teresa, de Lauretis, “Difference Embodied: Reflections on Black Skin, White Masks”, Parallax, 2002. vol. 8, no. 2, 54–68. Yang, Myongji, “The politics of class as the dominant strategy of the Park Junghee Regime—the exclusion of the working class and the cooptation of the middle class” in Sahoi Palchon Yongu, 2003, pp. 163–191, cited from Yu Sung Young, “The Psychotechnology of the Hyper Nationalizing Project and Cultural Mutation” presented at the seminar under the general topic of the State and Everyday Life of Park Junghee Era, Aug.17, 2006.

CHAPTER 3

Dan Dan Mian, Hip-Hop, and Baohaus: Transpacific and Interracial World-Making in Eddie Huang’s Fresh Off the Boat Pin-chia Feng

My entire life, the single most interesting thing to me is race in America. How something so stupid as skin or eyes or stinky Chinese lunch has such an impact on a person’s identity, their mental state, and the possibility of their happiness. It was race. It was race. It was race. Apologies to Frank Sinatra, but I’ve been called a “ch!gg@r,” a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a pawn, and a chink; that’s life. I am obsessed with what it means to be Chinese, think the idea of America is cool, but at the end of the day wish the world had no lines. Fresh Off the Boat

The first two decades of the twenty-first century witnessed the emergence of a number of American writers of Taiwanese descent who produced texts in a variety of narrative forms and on diverse themes. These include, for

P.-c. Feng (*) Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu City, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_3

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example, Brenda Lin’s memoir Wealth Ribbon: Taiwan Bound, America Bound (2004); Justina Chen Headley’s comic novel about “hapa” or mixed-race identity Nothing But the Truth (and a Few White Lies) (2006); Tao Lin’s poetry collection you are a little bit happier than i am (2006), novel Taipei (2013), and semimemoir Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change (2018); Pauline W.  Chen’s book of narrative medicine, Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality (2008); Shawna Yang Ryan’s novel about Taiwan’s White Terror era, Green Island (2016); and Charles Yu’s collections of short stories Third Class Superhero (2006) and Sorry Please Thank You: Stories (2012) and his novels How to Live in a Scientific Fictional Universe (2010) and Interior Chinatown (2020). Notably among these, Eddie Huang’s 2013 memoir Fresh Off the Boat chronicles his struggle and search for identity and how he finally carves out a niche for himself, at home and in American society. Huang describes his tumultuous teenage years in these terms: “I was a Chinese-American kid raised by hip-­ hop and basketball with screaming, yelling, abusive parents in the background. If that makes me a rotten banana, well, tell it like it is” (66). This succinct biosketch summarizes the basic trajectory of Eddie’s memoir. His contempt for the denigrating epithet “banana” to refer to children of Asian descent also sets the tone for his life-writing narrative. Later on, Huang continues to hammer out his rebellious, antiauthority stance with a confession of his alienation from both whiteness and Asianness.1 Growing up in the American South, Huang encountered numerous incidents of racism during which he was ridiculed, beaten, and discriminated against because of his visible difference. Huang grows into an angry young man who fights to break through the racial glass ceiling and finds solace in hip-­ hop music, stand-up comedy, and food. For all Huang’s unconventionality, Fresh Off the Boat adopts a conventional narrative form: it is an unruly Bildung recounted chronologically, starting from his relatively carefree childhood among relatives at his maternal grandfather’s furniture store in Washington, D.C., where he received his first training as a businessman. Eddie’s father, Louis Huang, moved to the United States in his twenties and met Jessica Chiao, who had immigrated to the United States when she was seventeen. When Eddie was eight, Louis moved with his wife and three sons to Orlando, Florida, to start his own restaurant business. In Orlando, Eddie and his brother Emery were the only Asian kids in school, and his peers avoided him “like spinach” (28). He also had his first encounter with the word chink and beat up the black boy who used it. Punished by school authorities, Eddie

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was completely transformed by the experience. At thirteen, Eddie hustled in school, selling pirated porno disks and taking bets on sporting events to make money. In fact, Eddie engaged in all kinds of outrageous acts with his “downward assimilating crew” when he was a teenager (111). For instance, he trashed people’s homes when invited to parties because he “hated whiteness” (114). He later went to law school in New York for the sake of self-empowerment and became a stand-up comedian after being laid off by a law firm. The piece of life writing ends with Huang opening his own restaurant, Baohaus, on the Lower East Side (LES) of Manhattan and finally making a career for himself selling Taiwanese hamburgers, or gua bao, soft bread with a braised pork filling. As Huang claims, his “main objective with Baohaus  was  to become a voice for Asian Americans” (264). Replete with profanity, street slang, and references to hip-hop culture, Huang’s memoir indeed creates a different voice for Asian America. In addition to the drama of Eddie’s life story, the memoir impresses readers with its badass, in-your-face attitude and pervasive street language. Upon publication, it received mixed reception. In his New York Times book review of Fresh Off the Boat, for instance, Dwight Garner acknowledges that the writing is “fresh” but thinks Eddie “works too hard to establish his street cred. He’s full of himself in ways that work only in rap lyrics.” For Garner, the memoir is “a book about fitting in by not fitting in at all.” In a Fashion section profile of Eddie Huang in the New York Times, Joshua David Stein calls him “a walking mixtape of postmodern cultural appropriation” and comments that Eddie’s “appeal is not only in what he says, but how he says it—a profane concatenation of Mandarin and African-American vernacular English, spiced with allusions to Jonathan Swift, Charles Barkley and Cam’ron.”2 In other words, it is not the content and theme of Fresh Off the Boat that makes Eddie Huang’s memoir distinctive but the narrative’s extremely colloquial, nonliterary language. In an interview with Huang, Kevin Pang describes Fresh Off the Boat as “a story of an American-born-Taiwanese assimilating into Western culture through the prism of hip-hop, basketball, and Chinese food.” The comment identifies Eddie’s three most important influences; yet Pang is off-target in using the word “assimilating” to describe Eddie’s negotiation with identity, as Eddie repeatedly denounces the ideology of assimilation in his memoir. After he was laid off, for example, Eddie assumed the identity of “Magic Dong Huang” for his stand-up comedy act (234), performing racially charged scenarios inspired by his own experience in

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order “to stomp the life out of the model-minority myth” and to crush Asian American stereotypes (234).3 In his memoir, Huang highlights his efforts to configure his personal becoming through different routes of connectedness, specifically in terms of his ethnic background, cultural identification, and professional choices. Fresh Off the Boat records the trajectory of Eddie’s struggle to construct a distinct form of manhood through a generative process of transpacific and interracial world-making. In what follows, the essay first explores Eddie’s reconnection with his Taiwanese roots through transpacific journeys. The second part examines Eddie’s affective affiliation with African American pop culture and black masculinity. Finally, the third part investigates the way in which Eddie overturns the stereotypical and historically conditioned conceptions of Chinese American cooks and confirms his masculinity by becoming a chef with an activist attitude.

Transpacific Migrations and Diasporic Connections Fresh Off the Boat is unique among ethnic American memoirs for its sociohistorical context since Eddie Huang comes from a Chinese-­Taiwanese community, many of whose members experienced multiple migrations and immigrated to the United States after the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. As Shelley Sang-Hee Lee points out, international politics is a major factor “in shaping Chinese immigration in the second half of the twentieth century” (320). Nearly half of the Chinese immigrants from 1949 to the late 1970s came from Taiwan. After the United States established formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1979, the majority of Chinese immigrants are currently from China (Lee 320). Both sides of Eddie’s family belong to the former category. Moreover, before they made the transpacific move, they had migrated across the Taiwan Strait from the Mainland to Taiwan. Eddie has a specific definition of ChineseTaiwanese, “wai sheng ren” (196), which refers to the Chinese who had moved to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek after the Nationalist government was defeated in China around 1949. His paternal grandfather came from Hunan, Chairman Mao’s home province, worked in Taiwan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, and retired in his mid-­thirties because he opposed Chiang Kai-shek’s policy of land reform. For the rest of his life, Grandfather Huang practiced a kind of passive resistance to the autocratic regime by spending “most of his time translating the Bible after seeing horrific acts during Chiang Kai-shek’s reign” (136), which inspired Eddie to enact his

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own version of political activism later on. In contrast to the Huangs’ genteel poverty, Eddie’s maternal grandparents escaped to Taiwan from Shandong in Northern China and struggled to make a living in Taiwan by selling mantou, or Chinese buns, on the street, establishing the first family connection with the food business. Jessica was their youngest child, the only one born in Taiwan. The Chiaos later grew rich in the textile business and emigrated to the United States in the late 1970s. Although Jessica always answered Eddie’s query about why the Chiaos moved to the United States with reference to pursing the American Dream and getting rich, the Chiaos’ decision to emigrate was very likely prompted by fear and anxiety after the United States ceased diplomatic relations with Taiwan. In the late 1970s, in particular, many Taiwanese were afraid that Taiwan, as a political “orphan,” would soon be taken over by the Chinese government. Many chose to emigrate to avoid communist rule, especially those who had arrived as refugees from China in the first place. Throughout his memoir, Eddie writes about his family’s Chinese ancestry but specifically identifies himself as a person of Taiwanese descent, especially in relation to food. Hence, Eddie places special emphasis on culinary experiences when he writes about the two transpacific trips to Taiwan and their transformative impact on his sense of self. The first “return journey” took place when Eddie was twelve. One day during that trip, Louis took his firstborn to his old neighborhood on Taipei’s Yong Kang Street and visited a noodle stand to eat some Taiwanese dan dan mian, noodles with “steaming soup, and a gremolata-like mixture of crushed peanuts, pickled radish, and chopped scallions” (52). To Eddie, the beauty of the noodle dish is its simplicity: “It’s getting a bowl of food that doesn’t have an agenda. The ingredients are the ingredients because they work and nothing more” (51). To Eddie, the “intense, deep, and mind-numbing” taste of the clear broth offered “a cognitive key” leading to a “mental breakthrough” (52). He has learned to appreciate “the simple things in life” (51). Most importantly, with the simple noodle dish the old peddler taught Eddie an important lesson about culinary art: He took a dish people were making in homes, made it better than anyone else, put it on front street, and established a standard. That’s professional cooking. To take something that already speaks to us, do it at the highest level, and force everyone else to step up, too. Food at its best uplifts the whole community, makes everyone rise to its standard. That’s what Dan-­

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Dan Mian did. If I had the honor of cooking my father’s last meal, I wouldn’t think twice. Dan-Dan Mian with a bullet, no question. (51–52)

In this passage, Eddie moves from admiring the noodle peddler’s professionalism to reflecting on familial bonding. A bowl of noodles with a bullet would serve as his final homage to the father who mercilessly inflicted physical punishment on him. Instead of resenting the abuse and the Chinese-Taiwanese identity he inherited from his father, Eddie came to understand and respect Louis: “he was a neighborhood legend trying to make a man out of me, just like him. For the first time, I saw him and Taiwan as part of me” (53–54). The father-son relationship was built upon acts of physical violence—Louis made Eddie kneel in the driveway and bow to the police to apologize for stealing from neighbors when he was in ninth grade (109), just like the friendship between Louis and the noodle man grew upon the memory of mutual assistance during a life-threatening street fight. Paradoxically, in both cases, love and affection were engendered from violence. For Eddie, his experience at the noodle stand serves as “a rite of passage” (53). He is now part of the gang. In addition to his initiation into culinary professionalism and his father’s legendary past, Eddie’s encounter with the savory noodle dish generated another level of cultural and historical significance. As one of the most famous Sichuan street foods, dan dan mian became popular in Taiwan after Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government moved to Taiwan.4 The noodle dish migrated, as Eddie’s grandparents did, to the other side of the Taiwan Strait. People from mainland China, the first-generation wai sheng ren, brought this signature dish from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan, adjusted the recipe, and made it an integral part of the island’s menu, a process through which different Chinese regional cuisines have been incorporated into Taiwanese cuisine. In a sense, the account of his easy acceptance of the Sichuan noodle into Taiwanese food contrasts with Eddie’s disappointment and disapproval at some flavorless soup dumplings he remembered having eaten as a child in a D.C. restaurant because the restaurant was using off-brand soy sauce instead of a Taiwanese name brand. This experience of one of “the three biggest dishes in Taiwan” (192) losing its original flavor in transnational migration metaphorically embodies Huang’s anxiety about negotiating and constructing his own identity. Read together, the two food episodes prompt us to rethink the issue of diasporic becoming and world-making. Food items travel across different temporal and spatial settings, and it becomes futile to demand

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the original or “authentic” flavor. In the same vein, our conceptualization of selfhood and the world around us is constantly in the process of reconfiguration, especially for the diasporic subject in the state of negotiating with different and contending forces. The young Eddie might not be able to comprehend the significance of this lesson through gastronomic experience at the time, yet eventually it would transform his way of world-making. The first visit to his father’s home country is also meaningful because it triggers Eddie’s interest in Taiwan. As he states, “I wanted to know more about Taiwan and what it meant to be Taiwanese” (54). Although Eddie had few opportunities to reconnect with Taiwan after his first trip, an unexpected second chance arose. As a twenty-year-old, Eddie went on a “study tour” of Taiwan while on probation for criminal charges (186): sending the prodigal sons to the other side of the Pacific for reeducation was most likely a typical practice at the time. His second trip there inspired him to learn about his history, with the help of a fellow Taiwanese American student named Ning. As Eddie confesses: Every part of me was something I sought out and encountered. And that summer in Taipei, I looked around and saw myself everywhere I went. Pieces of me scattered all over the country like I had lived, died, burned, and been spread throughout the country in a past life. Here I was coming home to find myself in street stalls, KTV rooms, and bowls of beef noodle soup. All the things instilled in me from a young age by my family and home, rehydrated and brought to life like instant noodles. They never left, they just needed attention. (198)

No longer feeling visibly different among the Taiwanese, Eddie could sense an almost organic connection with the island. Again, Eddie articulates his affiliative connectedness with Taiwan via food imagery. The image of “rehydrated” instant noodles in particular makes a vivid culinary reference to his reconnection with his Asian cultural background. It is as if all the “ingredients” of his Taiwanese American identity had been preserved in a different format and required his attention in order to be reactivated, although in reality the dehydrated components can never be the same even after rehydration. This might explain why, even after the second trip to Taiwan, he still felt “stuck in the middle” between Taiwan and America and found himself more at home at the airport (199). The transpacific journey nevertheless

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left an unexpected mark on Eddie. At that point, Eddie found a “mission”: “I saw that my interests in hip-hop, basketball, food, comedy, and writing were symptoms of a larger interest: finding a place for myself in the world or making one” (200). He then engaged with this project by studying enthusiastically, which might arguably be viewed as a typical Asian model of self-improvement. Yet Eddie’s immersion in university education was not motivated by a desire to gain capitalist upward mobility but, rather, an urgent need to learn. The list of classes that he took after returning to Florida—“anthropology, sociology, English, Asian studies, film, women’s studies, African-American studies, and even theater” (201)—reveal a self-­ designed route toward consciousness raising and exploring different possibilities. When he graduated, Eddie “went from a punk kid that fought without a true understanding of the who, what, when, where, and why to a contrarian with a cause” and won numerous academic awards (203–4). The young rebel had finally found a cause and acquired the tools he needed to fight for himself. However, Eddie could not fully embrace his Asian heritage without first coming to terms with his racially defined American reality, in which he had been constantly discriminated against because what he called his “face” problem. The next section explores the way in which Eddie defends and defines his masculinity by way of identifying with African American manhood, specifically through the mediation of hip-hop culture.

Interracial Alliance: Yellow Face, Black Mask5 Eddie Huang’s memoir contains three epigraphs, the last one from his father: “Don’t be afraid. Fight for it.” The other two are lyrics from American rappers Cam’ron and Jadakiss. In a way, these three male figures seem to form a trinity behind Huang’s conception and construction of masculine identity. While it makes sense for Eddie to adopt his father as one of his masculine role models, his identification with African American popular culture and its icons needs further probing. “Masculinity,” according to sociologist R. W. Connell, “is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture” (71). Though Connell examines marginalization in the context of masculine discourse, her discussion nevertheless appears limited to white and black masculinities, which corresponds with the racially defined configurations of masculine identity

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in North American society. In other words, in addition to gender, the relational model in American discourse of masculinity is also dominated by racial imagery based on whiteness and blackness. To have “a place” in order to construct a sense of masculinity, American men of other racial descents have very limited choices and sometimes even have to choose between the two prevailing models of masculinity. Eddie chooses an alliance with black masculine discourse. In a way, he assumes a “mask” of African American masculinity to resolve problems that stem from having an Asian “face.” While Eddie’s family sheltered him from racism in D.C., his visible difference inevitably started to haunt him when he moved to the South. He recalls his first encounter with the racist epithet “chink”: Edgar forced me into my William Wallace moment. From that day forward, I promised that I would be the trouble in my life. I wouldn’t wait for people to pick on me or back me into a corner. Whether it was race, height, weight, or my personality that people didn’t like, it was now their fucking problem. If anyone said anything to me, I’d go back at them harder, and if that didn’t work, too bad for them: I’d catch them outside after school. (33)

The reference to William Wallace, the legendary Scottish nationalist hero who led the fight against British rule, popularized in Mel Gibson’s movie Braveheart, signifies Eddie’s sense of ethnic pride and his determination to resist oppression in any form. The same scenario plays out numerous times in his memoir and always ends with Eddie’s vow to strike back. After Eddie’s first encounter with overt racism, Louis gave him a belt for self-defense and what Eddie termed a “License to Ill” (34). In this respect, Louis represented the gangster prototype for Eddie since his father was a “G in Taiwan” (47) and liked to show off “ratchets and knives” when his Taiwanese “homies” visited (50). At the same time Louis instilled a deep sense of racial insecurity in Eddie by telling him point blank that he could never be an anchor for ESPN because of his “face” (44–45). Louis was, of course, only speaking the truth based on his experience with the racial practices of American society, yet this piece of practical wisdom deeply traumatized his son, who describes his affective response to this revelation of a racial glass ceiling: To this day, I wake up at times, look in the mirror, and just stare, obsessed with the idea that the person I am in my head is something entirely different

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than what everyone else sees. That the way I look will prevent me from doing the things I want; that there are really sneetches with stars and I’m not one of them. I touch my face, I feel my skin, I check my color every day, and I swear it all feels right. But then someone says something and that sense of security and identity is gone before I know it. (45)

What Eddie has experienced is a kind of Du Boisian double consciousness and a variation of the Lacanian mirror stage. As David Eng theorizes, “Whiteness—in its refusal to be named and its refusal to be seen— represents itself as the universal and unmarked standard, a ubiquitous norm from which all else and all others are viewed as a regrettable deviation” (138). The personal image Eddie created for himself does not match “the universal and unmarked standard,” and young Eddie’s agony over his visible difference becomes one of the most painful moments in his life narrative. For Eddie, this “face” problem will never go away on its own, and he needs to work out a solution for himself. The nightmarish face problem resurfaces when Eddie graduates from college and has a chance to work as a beat writer for the Orlando Sentinel but fails to pass the interview stage because of his Asian face.6 This traumatic racial encounter marks another watershed for Eddie: “I wanted power, I wanted respect, and I never ever ever wanted anyone to tell me about my face again” (208), so he went to law school for the imagined power and respect he associated with the practice of the law. Importantly, Eddie’s sense of masculinity is seriously threatened by his looks. His short-lived romance with a white girl, Brandy Jenkins, from a summer camp reveals his obsession with, and fear of, white women. Brandy had to take the initiative at every stage of their sexual encounter because Eddie had “the irrational fear” that when he was alone with white women, he would be busted by their parents or arrested by the police “for infecting them with yellow fever” (128). This “irrational fear” (128) reflects an internalized psychological reaction to the (white) violence against miscegenation and interracial relationships that has been practiced for hundreds of years—assaults and lynching in the name of defending white women’s honor. I would argue that, in his tense relations with white women, Eddie unconsciously identified with an imagined African American masculinity, since historically “black male bodies in American culture have been marked as hypervisual sites of hypersexuality and hypermasculinity” (White 40), and they suffer white violence because of this exaggerated sexualized image. The reference of the infectious “yellow fever,”

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furthermore, not only plays on the racist stereotyping against peoples of Asian descent but also refers to SARS, a disease mentioned repeatedly in the memoir and that carries a strong racial connotation. Eddie’s fear was not unfounded: Brandy’s father indeed threatened him with a shotgun after he learned of Eddie’s involvement with his daughter. Interestingly, Eddie supported Obama because he had “a face we could trust” (224). Eddie promptly claims Obama as someone he could relate to: “For the first time in my life, there was a presidential candidate that I related to on a cultural, political, and personal level. Obama was, and will forever be my homeboy” (223–4). Eddie even started a T-shirt company just so that he could promote the Obama campaign. Obama’s 2008 presidential victory made Eddie feel like a real American and marked the starting point for his practice of alternative activism. Eddie’s identification with Obama developed from years of identifying with black culture. Miles White argues that Obama is “the nation’s first hip-hop president,” and his election to the White House exemplifies how the black cultural counterforce that started in the early 1990s evolved into a political force in the twenty-first century (37). As a child, Eddie’s crumbling sense of security and identity was buttressed by hip-hop. In his loneliness, Eddie built an affiliative bond with African American culture through literature and music. Eddie writes, “Without anyone to talk to, I just read books about sports heroes and the racial barrier. There wasn’t a section in the library titled ‘Books for Abused Kids’ but there was black history and somehow, some way, it made sense to me. I listened to 2Pac” (60). Hip-hop, for Eddie and his brother Emery, spoke to their marginality and “because there wasn’t anything else that welcomed us in, made us feel at home,” as Eddie put it (60). In a way, Eddie’s affinity for hip-hop and rap signifies his affective response to an imagined black masculinity. As White observes, hip-hop, as “the culture of the street,” has been consumed “through the global diffusion of electronic media” and widely appropriated so that “youth in virtually any geographical location can construct personal identity and localized meaning around hip-hop music and cultural practices, including the performance of masculinity derived from the mass-­ mediated posturings of black American males” (33). This media-generated affiliation allowed Eddie and Emery to create an image of selfhood and manhood for themselves. This African American presence in Eddie’s life unexpectedly helped him to mend his relationship with his father as well. When Eddie started doing drugs, Louis revealed to his son all his worries for his family; at that

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moment Eddie realized how much his father cared. Louis confessed to Eddie how the death of Len Bias, the All-American black basketball player who died of a cocaine overdose, broke his heart and made him feel vulnerable. Eddie felt much more positive about life after the talk with his father and decided to stop being “self-destructive” since he had “[a] reason to live” (137). Eddie also noticed that this rare moment of father-­ son intimacy was mediated by an African American figure: “[M]y epic talk with my Chinese dad was Len Bias. I look back and it’s funny. You think it’s gonna be Confucius, Lao Tzu, or maybe even something Grandpa passed on since he was such a great man, but no. Even as an immigrant who came over in his twenties, when it came time for the talk, my dad found the inspiration in an African-American basketball player. Like father, like son” (137). Indeed, Gary Y. Okihiro contends that African and Asian Americans “are a kindred people” because of shared history of migration, colonization, and oppression (34). Eddie’s memoir has somehow given a new meaning to this sense of “kindred spirit.” However, Eddie’s affiliation with African American masculinity is not without angst. Louis ridicules Eddie’s reaction against racial politics by calling him “a slant-eyed Malcolm X” (158). Eddie also talks about the ways in which he struggles with a politics of authenticity and the lack of a sense of belonging: All my life people would call me a chink or a chigger. I couldn’t listen to hip-hop and be myself without people questioning my authenticity. Chinese people questioned my yellowness because I was born in America. Then white people questioned my identity as an American because I was yellow…. If I follow the rules and play the model minority, I’m a lapdog under a bamboo ceiling. If I like hip-hop because I see solidarity, I’m aping. (170–1)

All these negative epithets suggest that he feels entrapped in a web of potentially “authentic” racial identities. As well, the sense of “solidarity” can easily be interpreted as a practice of “cultural appropriation,” as manifested in what Joshua David Stein asserted in the New York Times piece cited earlier. While it is painful to be accused of mimicry, there is also a long history of white appropriation of black identity in the tradition of the “minstrel mask.” Following Ralph Ellison’s argument about how the minstrel mask may very well represent “the first commodified racial fetish that was

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uniquely American,” Miles White goes on to draw parallels between “the practices and iconographies of minstrelsy and the slave trade, where one deals quite literally in the trading of black flesh and the other deals in the figurative trade of representations of blackness” (11). Minstrelsy, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop form a continuum of African American presence in the construction of American popular culture and racial imagination, what White terms an “evolutionary process” in which “the popular culture and whiteness have been constructed, negotiated, and represented around the organizing tropes of blackness and black music” (16). In view of the long history of cultural usurpation of black culture, Eddie’s embrace of hip-hop inevitably marks him as guilty of cultural mimicry. Again, White’s interpretation of the “affective gestures” of hip-hop culture is helpful in examining Eddie’s case. White contends that hip-hop has taken center stage in American and global youth culture because of the power of a certain kind of cultural literacy: “The texts that construct the culture constitute a kind of literacy that has been largely internalized by youth worldwide to form a community of practice that identifies with hip-­ hop as a social and/or cultural movement or merely as a means of interpersonal interaction and pleasure” (33). The point is whether you connect with hip-hop as an activist practice or simply as a way of entertainment. Furthermore, even if you seek only pleasure in hip-hop, do you see it as a commodity to be consumed or as a unique cultural expression? For Eddie, among the limited choices that are available to him, hip-hop became a lifeline that allowed him to access the counterculture and a renewed conception of selfhood. The African American cultural sphere associated with hip-hop allows him to establish interracial connections. Eddie’s performative response to marginality is to ally with another racially marginalized group. Moreover, as White points out, rap music is a practice of consciousness raising (35), which fits exactly into Eddie’s self-designed program of education. Instead of hastily condemning Eddie Huang’s identification with African American culture in general and hip-hop in particular as an appropriative act of blackface, we could regard it as a way for Eddie to participate in a textual community, which in turn enables him to negotiate and construct his social, personal, and masculine identity. However, this identification with African American masculinity is only half of the story. To complete his quest for manhood, Eddie needs to make another breakthrough when it comes to his choice of profession. The next section will discuss how Eddie Huang transforms the emasculated image of Chinese American cook into one with activist stamina and vision.

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Activist Chef: Huang Can Cook7 As discussed earlier, Eddie defines his transpacific experience in relation to food, a position central to his worlding project. In a sense, we may regard Fresh Off the Boat as a food memoir that documents his training to be a chef. Eddie has to define his masculinity as he learns to cook, which is traditionally regarded as being among the “feminized” professions, or what David Eng terms “economically driven modes of feminization” (17) for early Asian immigrants. Eddie may have become a restaurateur because of his love of food, yet he is also driven by a desire to challenge and rectify the historically produced stereotyping of the culinary profession associated with Asian America. In the mid-nineteenth century, cheap Chinese eateries sprang up in the American West to feed the massive influx of Chinese laborers.8 The subsequent anti-Chinese sentiments of the late nineteenth century later foreclosed alternative opportunities for employment to most Chinese Americans and drove them into restaurant and grocery businesses to earn a livelihood (McLean, 6). Eddie is very aware of this history of discrimination against early Chinese American immigrants and how they were forced into the culinary business because there were little or no other options. “Ironically enough, the one place that America allows the Chinese to do their thing is the kitchen,” Eddie is quick to point out, “Just like Jewish people became bankers because that was the only thing Christians let them do, a lot of Chinese people ended up in laundries, delis, and kitchens because that’s what was available” (250). However, the fact that Eddie has the luxury to choose his profession indicates a significant difference between the early Asian immigrants and this son from an immigrant family in the post-1965 era.9 Sau-ling C.  Wong’s classic paradigm of necessity versus extravagance is useful to explicate the difference here: If the early Asian immigrants entered the food business out of necessity, the ways in which Eddie begins his career as a chef and his insistence on individual taste and self-expression are obviously extravagant.10 Still, the discriminatory history associated with the culinary profession has left its mark. As David Eng observes, “These low-wage, feminized jobs work to underscore the numerous ways in which gender is mapped as the social axis through which the legibility of a racialized Asian American male identity is constituted, determined, rendered coherent, and stabilized” (17). Chinese American men, in particular, are “effectively emasculated” by “[t]he combination of exclusion laws and discriminatory

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socio-­economic practices that refused jobs to Chinese men” (Chan 5).11 Hence one of Eddie’s challenges in pursuing his cooking career lies in counterbalancing this social and psychological emasculation. Eddie starts to transform the image of the Chinese American cook at a personal level: “When everything else fell apart and I didn’t know who I was, food brought me back and here I was again” (250). Moreover, throughout the memoir he makes it clear that cooking allows him to connect with his family and ethnic roots. Eddie’s apprenticeship for his culinary career begins at home and is closely linked to his transpacific background. In addition to the inspiration from the noodle peddler during his first trip to Taiwan, his discoveries in Taiwanese night markets during his second trip make Eddie realize that “Taiwan got me into food in a way I’d never experienced it before” (192). Eddie also admits inheriting and learning his moves in the kitchen, his culinary skills, from his mother: “I always cook for my own palate but every single thing is derivative of the flavors and techniques she instilled in me” (259). Cooking is thus articulated as a second umbilical cord linking mother and son.12 With training at home and through his Taiwan connection, Eddie learns to love Taiwanese minced pork on rice, make his own version of beef noodle soup based on Mom’s recipe, and even acquire a taste for stinky tofu. He attends a 2009 Food Network show with his Chairman Mao’s red cooked skirt steak, making his first public appearance as a “tiger style” chef with a family recipe.13 This recipe later became a signature item on the Baohaus menu, and this TV appearance also marked Eddie’s first step in taking up cooking professionally. Opening Baohaus was not only wish fulfillment for Eddie but a way for him to carry on the family business and pay homage to his elders, since his maternal grandfather used to sell mantou using the same dough as bao but with a different shape (255).14 Even the boiled peanuts on the menu were one of his grandfather’s favorite snacks. Furthermore, having his own restaurant meant again following in his father’s footsteps. Louis’s Cattle Ranch Steakhouse permitted him to raise his family as well as to succeed in the United States. At the same time it helped him to gain independence from his wife’s family. To Eddie, Baohaus signaled the freedom and creativity that allowed him to “detox” his identity from any imposed mandate (255). Although his family could not understand why Eddie squandered his law degree to sell Taiwanese-Chinese fast food, Eddie had envisioned Baohaus as a familial space that combined paternal memories with maternal heritage.

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Baohaus also embodied Eddie’s activist vision, one that seeks to create a sense of community and become a voice for Asian America. His assertiveness in promoting this political agenda was most instrumental in dismantling the emasculated stereotype of Chinese Americans. For him, food is “a social equalizer” (243), and “the culture of a restaurant” is empowering (259). “I wanted Baohaus to be a place that the neighborhood embraced,” Eddie claims. For him, Baohaus served an unprecedented communal function for young people and the underprivileged: I wanted Baohaus to be a youth culture restaurant that the neighborhood could post up at. Not moms and dads and nine-to-fivers, but the kids across the street, the freelancers, the unemployed, and the people that hung in the neighborhood because they’d scammed their way into rent-controlled apartments. At the core of Baohaus would be this truth: no one would kick you out, call the cops, or serve you shitty 7-Eleven pressed Cubans. (258)

Good food and free space were at the core of Baohaus. Opening a restaurant, like selling T-shirts to support the Obama campaign, served a sociopolitical function. Here Eddie positioned himself firmly within the LES community and practiced his own politics of inclusive world-making, which effectively undermined the xenophobic exclusionist practices suffered by Asian American immigrants then and now. It is also his way of practicing Asian American activism. Mindful of the “representative” status of Baohaus as a Taiwanese-Chinese restaurant, he notes: “My main objective with Baohaus was to become a voice for Asian Americans. Whether you accept it or not, when you’re a visible Asian you have a torch to carry because we simply don’t have any other representation” (264). Still highly conscious of his visible difference, Eddie has taken up the responsibility of speaking for the Asian American community, even though he immediately makes a distinction that he is just “a voice” that speaks for “a few rotten bananas” like himself (264). As a stand-up comedian, Eddie tells subversive jokes to alert people to the potential damage of mainstream stereotyping of ethnic minorities since, as he asserts, “the stereotypes have the power to become self-fulfilling prophecies if we aren’t aware” (235). Refuting the effeminate stereotype by opening Baohaus and developing his restaurant career, Eddie created a space where he could fulfill his political vision and build a solid community to call his own.

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Coda At the end of his memoir, Eddie proudly affirms the immigrant status of his family in his typical flippant rapper rhetoric: My parents were Fresh Off the Boat, I’m a chinkstronaut, and my kids will be on spaceships. I didn’t allow America to sell me in a box with presets and neither should you. Take the things from America that speak to you, that excite you, that inspire you, and be the Americans we all want to know; then cook it up and sell it back to them for $28.99. Cue Funk Flex to drop bombs on this. All my people from the boat, let ‘em know: WEOUTCHEA. (272)

The reference to “chinkstronaut” simultaneously suggests a sense of freedom and rootlessness; he may be referring to an ideal world without borders or boundaries. In an interview with Ruby Cutolo, Eddie explains that his memoir is an Asian American story that needs to be told because “[n]o one is telling it, and there is no one I can relate to.” Eddie confesses that writing the book “was painful, and very personal.”15 His true victory lies in the fact he has overcome the pain of being caught in between cultures and has managed to mobilize the best of both worlds, American English and Taiwanese-Chinese culinary art, to tell his story. When his family first moved to Orlando, Eddie questioned his father’s decision to sell American food instead of the good Chinese food they had at home. Jessica’s response was that “nobody wants to pay for REAL Chinese food” (22).16 By successfully marketing his family’s traditional Taiwanese meat buns, Eddie transcends the culinary prejudice of (white) America. Furthermore, he uses his profession to practice his own version of political activism and showcase his masculinity, thereby challenging the long-­ standing association of cooking with femininity since the beginning of Chinese American history. Though he never shied away from describing the mental and physical abuse his parents inflicted on him during his childhood, he takes pride in his roots and what they have taught him. The memoir concludes with a note of triumph in which his appearance in the World Journal, “the preeminent newspaper for overseas Chinese people” (272), finally led his parents to drink to his success and regard him as a star in the family and community. Whereas this celebratory ending does indicate Eddie’s sense of pride in his own achievement, it does not mean that he has joined the

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model-minority club. Wesley Yang is right when he points out the difference between Eddie and the Asian American model minority: “A model minority is a tractable, one-dimensional simulacrum of a person, stripped of complexity, nuance, danger and sexuality—a person devoid of dramatic interest. Huang is something else: a person at war with all the constraints that would fetter him to anything less than an identity capacious enough to contain all his contradictions and ambivalence.” As a “chinkstronaut” Eddie Huang is always ready to break rules and engage with re/worlding projects, which may not make him an exemplar for the Asian American community. Yet his struggle to construct a masculine selfhood informs us of the risks and difficulties involved in such a task and strongly demands a rethinking of Asian American masculine discourse within the existing disparate power structure of American society.

Notes 1. As Eddie proudly proclaims, “I was a loud-mouthed, brash, broken Asian who had no respect for authority in any form, whether it was a parent, teacher, or country. Not only was I not white, to many people I wasn’t Asian either” (148). 2. Stein neglects to mention that in the memoir the only full quote from a literary work comes from Michael Odaatje’s The English Patient, in which the narrator expresses a hope for “a world without map” (Fresh Off the Boat, 249). 3. Eddie, in fact, constantly voices his refusal to be entrapped by the model-­ minority myth in the memoir. As he puts it, “We play into the definitions and stereotypes others impose on us and accept the model-minority myth, thinking it’s positive, but it’s a trap just like any stereotype. They put a piece of model-minority cheese between the metal jaws of their mousetrap, but we’re lactose intolerant anyway! We can’t even eat the cheese” (156). 4. The British Chinese cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop, in her food memoir Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Four Memoir of Eating in China, explains the origin of the noddle dish: “Dan dan noodles are the archetypal Chengdu street snack. Their name comes from the bamboo shoulderpole that street vendors traditionally use to transport their wares; the verb ‘dan’ means to carry on a shoulderpole. Elderly residents of the city still remember the days when the cries of the noodle sellers—‘Dan dan mian! Dan dan mian!’—ran out in all the old lanes. The vendors would lay down their shoulderpoles wherever they found customers, and unpack their stoves, cooking pots, serving bowls, chopsticks and jars of seasonings” (36).

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5. Here I am referring to Fanon’s idea in Black Skin, White Masks. 6. Eddie wrote about how he lost the job offer after the white editor saw him in person and commented on his (Asian) face (207–8). 7. I am  alluding to  the  famous PBS cooking program Yan Can Cook that premiered in  1982 and  hosted by the  renowned Chinese American chef Martin Yan. Eddie is aware of  his Chinese American predecessor in  the  culinary world and  jokes about Yan’s “Chingrish” in  the  Martin Yan’s China show (Fresh Off the Boat, 254). 8. According to Alice I.  McLean, “Because the vast majority of Chinese arrived in the American West without their families, these early immigrants soon began to establish public eating houses called ‘chows chows,’ which served Cantonese-styled meals to suit the Chinese palate” (3). 9. In his history on Chinese American food, Haiming Liu writes that in the 1970s Chinese American restaurant business took a significant turn with the influx of immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and later China (4). 10. Eddie clearly is taking cooking as a way to express his individuality: “Cooking was something that I loved to do on my own. I didn’t agree with people on their interpretations, their favorites, or  their preferences and didn’t care because my tastes were mine. That’s the thing I really loved about food” (Fresh Off the Boat, 246). 11. However, we should not overlook the fact that the 1882 Exclusion Act actually encouraged the growth of Chinese American food industry. Chinese immigrants in the early twentieth century pooled their resources to open restaurants and were able to gain entrance into the United States with merchant status. See Heather R. Lee’s report on “The Untold Story of Chinese American Restaurants in America.” 12. Eddie’s experiences in Pittsburgh and New  York also contribute to his Bildung in the culinary profession. At an Italian diner in Pittsburgh, among the “universal food truths” he learns that simplicity is the essence of good cooking and that the everyday foods at home will “over time become an indispensable part of your life” (Fresh Off the Boat, 159). In New York, he also  learns about the primary importance of food for immigrant families (242). 13. Eddie entitles Chapter 16, in which he appears on the Ultimate Recipe Showdown show, as “They Don’t Love Me, They Just Love My Tiger Style.” 14. After getting laid off by his law firm, Eddie makes a list of six things that he wanted to do in his life. Every item on the list originates in “some sort of physical or creative expression” within himself; number six is to own a restaurant (233). 15. Its 2015 TV adaptation, ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat, is pitched as a family sitcom and completely fails to capture the hidden pathos embedded in the book.

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16. Jessica’s comment may not be simply a personal observation. Robert Ji-Song Ku comments on what he terms the “stepchild” status of Asian food in American cuisine: “Asian Americans have always been and continue to be emblematic of the unassimilated American, not only in body politic but in gastronomic culture as well. Asian food is America’s culinary stepchild, technically part of the family but never quite entirely” (13). In his monograph on Chinese American food, Yong Chen also points out the lack of appreciation for Chinese cuisine in mainstream American society: “As for America’s Chinese food, its arrival and spread reflected the division of labor in modern global political economy, where China has been largely a provider of cheap labor. America has enjoyed Chinese food as a convenient and affordable service but has yet to fully embrace it as a cuisine” (152).

Works Cited Chan, Jachinson. Chinese American Masculinities: From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee. New York: Routledge, 2001. Chen, Yong. Choy Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Cutolo, Ruby. “Off The Boat, But On The Grid: PW Talks With Eddie Huang.” Authors Profiles. Publishers Weekly. Accessed July 20, 2015. Dunlop, Fuchsia. Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Four Memoir of Eating in China. New York: Norton, 2008. Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Garner, Dwight. “Pork Buns Steamed in Bluster ‘Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir,’ by Eddie Huang. New York Times. January 24, 2013, accessed July 20, 2015. Huang, Eddie. Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013. Ku, Robert Ji-Song. Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. Lee, Heather R. “The Untold Story of Chinese American Restaurants in America.” Journalist’s Resource. June 10, 2015, accessed July 8, 2015. Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee. A New History of Asian America. New  York: Routledge, 2014. Liu, Haiming. From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express: A History of Chinese Food in the United States. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. McLean, Alice I. Asian American Food Culture. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2015.

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Okihiro, Gary. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. Pang, Kevin. “Eddie Huang talks about his memoir, Fresh Off the Boat.” Printers Row Preview. Chicago Tribune. Accessed July 20, 2015. Stein, Joshua David. “Chef Who Refuses to Be Defined by His Wok.” New York Times. January 23, 2013, accessed July 20, 2015. White, Miles. From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Yang, Wesley. “Eddie Huang Against the World.” The New York Times. February 3, 2015, accessed January 31, 2016.

CHAPTER 4

The Place of Worlding: Subaltern Cosmopolitanism in Central Asia and Korea Hye Young Kim

In the World We are in the world. We are thrown into it, and we live in it. But what is the world? What do we understand by the world? Is it space: geological, geographical, cultural, historical, political, linguistic, existential, etc.? Is it time? Does it refer to collective and personal memory? Or does it mean one’s life? One’s belief, philosophy, or ideology? Perhaps it refers to all these imaginable aspects, whether or not we are aware of all these when we say world. It is a complicated concept that is used very commonly and widely in all possible aspects of life. In this sense, “the world” is an open and fluid concept that changes its forms, faces, shades, and colors according to the context, according to the speaker, and according to time and space. In whatever form, color, and shade, however, we are in the world and in worlds.

H. Y. Kim (*) Husserl Archive, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_4

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In this paper, I want to deal with a few different aspects of this notion: historical, cultural, geopolitical, and existential world. In all these aspects, the world is always both personal and interpersonal, meaning that it is always the world of “whom.” The representative “who” of the worlds that this paper talks about is a man named Kim Alex, a second-generation Koryo Saram. First, I will have to tell the story of his historical and cultural world. To understand the unique characteristics of his historical and cultural world, we are bound to talk about the geopolitical world that we are in. The storytelling of his world will lead us to an understanding of his existential world, which is the most personal, yet inevitably interpersonal, because he is in the world. The structure of this personal-interpersonal and existential-geopolitical world cannot be grasped in a rigid form. When the world is tailored to a certain ideology or preshaped in a certain worldview, the world loses the abundance of its stories, the details and the varieties.

The Lost World Some worlds have been long lost in our geopolitical and historical world. The world of the strong is recognized, recorded, and reserved, whereas the world of the weak is ignored, erased, and forgotten. Both on the macro and micro levels, history was believed to evolve around power. This has been considered the norm of the world, the brutal reality or cold principle. The “subject” of the world is the powerful. The weak and the lost are left with no place in the world. They have become invisible in history. This is not only the story of the times of glorified imperialism, broad colonization, and wars; it is the straight face of the globalization of capitalist modernity. Right here, I want to bring up the story of Kim Alex’s world. Kim Alex is the protagonist of the documentary film Kim Alex’s Place: Ansan-­ Tashkent (hereafter: Kim Alex’s Place) (2014) directed by Kim Soyoung (a.k.a. Kim Jeong) (part of this discussion appears in Kim, We as Self ). Kim Alex is from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, but now lives in Ansan, South Korea. He is a Koryo Saram. Koryo Saram (고려사람 Корё сарам) refers to the Koreans in Central Asia. They used to live in Primorsky Kray, the maritime province of Wondong, but were deported to Central Asia under the Soviet Union between 1937 and 1939. Around 1869, these Koreans started moving to Wondong, and during the Japanese colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945, many more crossed the border (Kim, “Subaltern

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Cosmopolitanism”). They integrated into the society of the Soviet Union, but Stalin forced them out in the name of eliminating “Japanese spies” (Kim, “Toward a Technology of the Dead”). Most of these Koryo Saram settled in and made their home in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and could not return to Korea even after Korea regained her independence in 1945. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, a war that continues to the present day, the country was divided into two parts, and this division  has remained frozen in time and in the legacy of the Cold War. In this series of catastrophic events, Korea lost the memory of the Koryo Saram and their history of “the Korean diaspora in Eurasia” (Kim, “Toward a Technology of the Dead”), as did the rest of the world. The name of this place, Central Asia, is utterly ironic. This place is one of the most marginalized areas in the world. Only in the 1990s did the Koryo Saram start to return to Korea as the Soviet Union collapsed, and they were once again forced out of Central Asia. But they had to return to Korea as strangers, not as Koreans in the so-called normative Korean society. Kim Alex’s story stems from and is weaved into this history—a story of one of the most marginalized, forgotten, and deprived groups in the world. In the modern, globalized world, these people’s stories, it was believed, did not deserve to be told. History follows the chronology of power and capital. “The world” does not remember the stories of the subaltern nor find value in their memories. But what happens if we tell these stories? Soyoung Kim invites Kim Alex and his people to tell their stories, and we come to see that this storytelling can become our method for “not losing the world.” As she retells the story of Kim Alex and the Koryo Saram, she tells her own story in a way in which she establishes solidarity and “being with” others, who in fact are all of us, including her own self. She uses this cinematic tactic to “create” the world that does not erase our differences, in which she develops the idea of “subaltern cosmopolitanism” and shows the history, identity, and collective memory of the Koryo Saram as a living example. This example is produced through their storytelling in cinematic form, not as an object of literature.

Kim Alex’s Story Kim Soyoung finds the origin of the memory of the Koryo Saram in Central Asia in their memory of the mass deportation to Kazakhstan in 1937. She describes this time as “stigmatized as the time of state violence of forced migration,” “the origin of their pain,” and “time-coding of

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pain” as “time-coded collective suffering” (Kim, “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism,” 79). However, the core of their collective memory of suffering lies in not the pain itself but in the experience of solidarity and fraternity with the other ethnic groups in Kazakhstan. The narrative of their ordeal tells the story of their cosmopolitan community. When they were deported to Kazakhstan in the middle of a harsh winter, the local Kazakh people helped them survive. They survived, and when the Chechens came to Kazakhstan between 1943 and 1944, they helped the Chechens (Kim, “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism,” 80). Kim Soyoung refers to this community of Kazakhs, Chechens, and Koryo Saram as the community that “emerged after a catastrophe” (“Subaltern Cosmopolitanism,” 80). Their memory of this community after a catastrophe forms the heart of their collective memory. This is the memory of experiencing a “multiplicity of race and culture” (Kim, “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism,” 80) and their transcultural and transracial solidarity. This collective memory turns into the cultural memory of the Koryo Saram, which in turn constitutes the identity of the Koryo Saram. The life of a people does not depend “on the biological survival of an ethnic group, but on the survival of shared cultural memory” (Heller 1032). For cultural memory, concrete and distinct places are crucial, as Agnes Heller explains (1032). The places of the Koryo Saram’s cultural memory are Wondong and Central Asia. In Ansan, South Korea, their memory of the subaltern community and their identity based on this cultural memory survive. The world of Kim Alex is Ansan, and Ansan is the place of the Other. Ansan is a multicultural city of South Korea because it is a city of factories and factory workers. Migrant laborers from the so-called developing countries, the Third World, flow into this city for work. Many of them come from South Asia, China, and Central Asia. Among them, the Koryo Saram and Korean Chinese also found their home in this city. Kim Alex runs a small Uzbek restaurant, Tashkent, in Ansan. This restaurant is a microworld that represents the Koryo Saram’s world, their collective memory, and their identity, and it reflects the world that Kim Alex creates in Ansan as a Koryo Saram. His last name, Kim, reveals his Korean origin, but he is known in Ansan as Alex, a foreigner. This is not only because he doesn’t speak Korean as his mother tongue or because he cooks Uzbek cuisine, but because Korea let him in as a foreigner. Ansan should be the most open place as a home for the Other in South Korea with its overflowing cultural and racial diversity. But paradoxically, this multicultural city is the most closed place. The film Kim Alex’s Place

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ends with a Koryo woman at Incheon airport who leaves South Korea even as she wishes to come back, but with no guarantee that she’ll be able to return, her eyes fill with tears, walking on the border of South Korea, the unseen border in the air. I view this scene as the symbolic moment that shows the actual status of South Korea with borderless borders, where there are no borders, but as the most bordered and isolated place at the same time, and where Ansan is located geographically. This is the place where unseen borders constantly push the others away. But this is also the place where Kim Alex made his home with others, where he has moved together with his memories and history from Central Asia. There are people who turn this isolated and abandoned place into a place of community and solidarity: Kim Alex does in Ansan, as di his parents and grandparents in Central Asia. They do it by sharing and reviving their memories in their own time and space, transforming the closed world into an open world. The story of one’s life is always embedded in the story of some community. Individual derive their identities from these communities with shared memories (Kim, We as Self, 74). One of the crucial facts about history is that a history is shared with others, both from the past as well as the present (Kim, We as Self, 74). Historical temporality is social temporality in the sense that the past that is shared with others is within the experience of an individual and affects the configuration of time of an individual (Kim, We as Self, 74). The identity and cultural memory of the Koryo Saram with the Kazakhs, Chechens, Jews, and Russians in Central Asia, as Soyoung Kim describes it, causes us to “reconsider the articulations of the network of language, race, geography, ethnicity, and nation as well as the apparatuses and arrangements of homogenization and anti-homogenization” (Kim, “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism,” 79). This offers a different form of cosmopolitanism from the one that we are used to. The internationalism and globalization of the modern world has voluntarily and involuntarily erased part of our world. Modern globalization has never lost its fantasy in racial homogeneity, colonization, and imperialism. Central Asia is the place where racial and political minorities were forced to migrate. Global capital and power find little “value” in this land, but the transracial and transcultural solidarity of the subaltern groups in Central Asia transformed their memory of suffering into the making of a history of coexistence and an undesired world into a world of rich cultures and sophisticated internationalism. This is a story of creating a world with diverse identities and memories.

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Cosmopolitanism and the Third World At first glance, Central Asia does not appeal to us as a glamourous place with a multilinguistic and culturally rich cosmopolitan atmosphere. The place is mostly forgotten in the modern picture of the globalized world with the human, linguistic, cultural, and capital networks across the Atlantic. These people and their lives in Central Asia seem to have nothing in common with a cosmopolitan in New  York who eats sushi with her francophone friend who has just returned from a ski vacation in the Alps. A cosmopolitan in Central Asia sounds like a fish in the field. Cosmopolitanism in the modern world is related—and limited—to the experiences of the globally powerful and internationally influential cultural phenomena. The solidarity of the modern globalized world mostly refers to the free movement of goods and services between high-GDP countries or rich countries importing cheap labor and exporting trash to poor countries. A sense of solidarity and community that includes the Third World usually only means the grace from above to those below. An adolescent from Germany could go to Mali with an outreach program to “help” communities that are less endowed with resources. They post their happy pictures with the local children on Instagram, which are shared internationally. In this scene, the position of the giver-receiver and the educator-­ learner is never confused. These days, international interactions between the Have and Have Not countries are mostly virtual. A person from the First World “likes,” on his smartphone, a picture of a child working in often fatal conditions in mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to collect cobalt, some of which finds its way into the smartphone of the person in the First World. Another frequent form of interaction with the Third World is the ethnographic approach. The cultures, languages, and histories of minority groups in Central Asia can serve as a subject of anthropological studies. They can be observed, presented, and analyzed in a framework provided by the First World. The unspoken goal of traditional anthropology was “to produce a self-­ understanding of the West” in which “the centrality of Western civilization” was assumed, as Tejaswini Niranjana rightly describes (108, emphasis added). In this setting, anthropology served as the method and tool to translate “other” cultures into Euro-American language and compare them to Western civilization. This task is based on the idea of a common human nature. Humanism and universalism were presumed under the notion that all the people in the world were ultimately the same despite

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their superficial differences (Niranjana, 109). The standards of universalism are “made from above, as it were” (Niranjana, 109). Many comparative studies compare the cultural products of the Third World to metropolitan standards (Niranjana, 110). In this context, diversity is consumed for a sophisticated justification of the reality of universal humanism. In traditional philosophy, however, whose questions and tasks fundamentally lie in the unchallenged belief in the universality of the human mind and existence, “other” cultures were hardly dealt with seriously. In situations where the Third World appears in the literature only as “footnotes to Western history” (Mukherjee), conforming to the idea of universalism in the Western world, the Third World is deprived of the space for its own stories. Stories from the Third World can acquire dignity and value only within the comparative framework with the “central world.” The underrepresented regions and their cultures have been discursively constructed as objects of knowledge (Niranjana, 111). Central Asia is not placed in the central world; that, the stories from there have no place in the global network and the cosmopolitan culture of the modern world. Nobody told stories of the international community and solidarity among the region’s minority groups. What if their stories are told as their own outside of a comparative framework of the Western literature? When subalterns tell their own stories, the preexisting world with a fixed center turn into a place of happening and becoming: worlding arises. The borders between the First and Third World lose their aggressive meanings, and the world is liberated and expanded with the potential of “embracing” the differences and paradoxes. We catch a glimpse of this world in Soyoung Kim’s documentary series, her Exile Trilogy, with Kim Alex’s Place as the prelude. Kim Alex tells his story, and Soyoung Kim records it, but not as an observer. She is there in his storytelling. The core of her cinematic tactic is her presence. The film shows the process whereby she slowly gets invited into Kim Alex’s world. The scene where Kim Alex opens his heart to Soyoung for the first time and shows her his Korean learning notebook is very significant. This is the point where the storytelling starts “happening” without a rupture between teller and listener. The subject-position in the story becomes flexible and fluid. The filmmaker and the main character simply made “their stories,” and the film itself becomes a story where the Koryo Saram’s history and Soyoung’s history become their story, creating a world together. The happening of worlding itself is fundamentally related to our act of telling stories. Storytelling is always future oriented (Kim, Sorge und

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Geschichte, 158). The future of subaltern stories should lie in “the development of alternative frames of reference, so that Western modernity is no longer seen as the sole point of legitimization or comparison” (Niranjana, 111). When the stories and the common histories of subalterns are silenced, “the possibility of a shared future” is also silenced (Niranjana, 110). New solidarities for alternative frames through critical engagement with Third World spaces are essential for the development of a new type of internationalism.

Subaltern Cosmopolitanism The stories of the minorities in Central Asia have quite a different texture than that of modern internationalism. Through the catastrophic events and experiences of deprivation in Central Asia, they found their own way to survive by being there for each other. When they faced death, they were held up by others who had also been abandoned, and they held up the others in return. They turned the possibility of not-being into the possibility of being-together for real. This initial moment of solidarity formation in the face of crisis (authentic understanding) endured and was transformed into a sustainable bond and communal existence in quotidian life (inauthentic understanding). The international community in Central Asia shared their transracial and transcultural memory of suffering and solidarity. In her cinematic storytelling, Soyoung introduces another storyteller, Lavrenti Son. Lavrenti Son is a Koryo Saram director who recorded the lives of the peoples of Central Asia. As a Koryo Saram himself, Lavrenti Son captures the sorrowful sentiments of these oppressed peoples and the subtle process of transposition of these feelings to gratitude and fraternity, as seen in Music Director, directed by Son as a form of appreciation for the Jewish conductor Ilya Moiseevich (Kim, “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism,” 82). Soyoung Kim records and shows the continuation and extension of this powerful transformation—from catastrophe to gratitude—in her storytelling about Kim Alex and the Koryo Saram. A short documentary by Son, named simply Koryo Saram, is a lively record—a cheerful storytelling—of the cosmopolitan life of the minorities of Central Asia. Koryo Saram consists of a series of short interviews in the Koryo language near Ushtobe. The interviewer is Son himself, and the interviewees are interesting. Despite the title Koryo Saram, Son is the only Koryo Saram in the film. The interviewees are Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Russians, and Kurds. The uniqueness of this situation lies in the fact that

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(1) the Koryo language is not the language of those in power, (2) the interviewees are not ethnically Korean, (3) they are not intellectuals, and (4) they have never experienced “the sovereign territories of South or North Korea” (Kim, “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism,” 79). They learned the Koryo language through their interactions with the Koryo Saram on a collective farm (kolkhoz). It is astonishing to watch the interviewees, how fluently they speak Koryo, and how naturally they show their integration into Koryo culture. These people’s internationalization was not oriented toward power and capital, meaning not vertical or forced, and neither directly nor indirectly, meaning that they didn’t have to learn Koryo in the way that a metropolitan citizen of the modern world “must” learn English to be able to function as a cosmopolitan. These non-Koryo Korean-speaking people in Kazakhstan do not fit into the general picture of “being Korean” (Kim, “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism,” 80). This peculiar case shows a different spectrum of cosmopolitanism than the stereotype of metropolitan cosmopolitanism in today’s globalized world. For example, a Kurdish woman in the film speaks Kurdish, Russian, Koryo (Korean), Kazakh, and Georgian, but this combination of languages does not match the general picture of a metropolitan cosmopolitan. Apart from a few language experts in linguistics, anthropology, or ethnography, nobody in the modern world would find it “worth” the effort or “useful” to learn these minority languages. The value of a certain culture and language is not normally considered grounded in solidarity and mutual understanding of different cultures in the modern world. The “market” and the power structure determine the value. Soyoung Kim calls this cosmopolitan phenomenon in Central Asia “subaltern cosmopolitanism.” The expression “subaltern cosmopolitanism” is, however, paradoxical because the idea of cosmopolitanism is that all humans belong to a single community, so the term “subaltern” as the grouping name of oppressed and marginalized people does not go with “cosmopolitanism.” It is a bit like “discriminated equality.” However, the fact that this expression itself is paradoxical reveals the very paradox of the situation of the ideology of cosmopolitanism, namely, that cosmopolitanism in reality does not include the marginalized peoples of the world and their culture in the “standard” picture of the cosmopolitan world. The shared culture and morality of the cosmopolitan worldview have their sole reference in the mundanely spread and accepted concept of globalization.

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The films by both Kim Soyoung and Lavrenti Son reveal this paradox, subaltern cosmopolitanism, by having marginalized people in marginalized places share their own stories of coliving outside of the standard picture of cosmopolitanism in the globalized world. Subaltern cosmopolitanism as an ideology sounds like a logical fallacy, but the paradox of subaltern cosmopolitanism in reality reveals the inevitable paradox of human existence in a world where nobody is at home but everybody makes oneself at home. Subaltern cosmopolitanism in Central Asia shows us how we can “world” without excluding and being excluded by the Other.

Worlding Worlding is the “art of being global,” according to Rob Sean Wilson, but “without losing cultural-political differences that matter” (7). Worlding, therefore, does not refer to globalization, which reduces the world to a capitalist modernity (Wilson 4). Worlding does not find its meaning in, for example, a girl in London and a girl in Almaty who grow up watching the same Disney movies and buying the same Disney princess dresses made in China, both dreaming to be more like that white princess of the First World. Wilson describes worlding as “a mode of building up a lifeworld palpably disclosing its lived-in modalities, boundaries, tactics, and historical processes of survival and emergence” (Wilson 4). I find that the core of worlding is to be found in its “happening” of a multilayer temporality with diverse centers and axes of various persons and groups. In his explanation of worlding as “to create a world, to world the world,” Wilson also points out that “to world” means “to world the world in an active gerundive sense” (5–6). So far so good, but we still have the question of “how to” specifically. How do we world? How can worlding happen? As briefly mentioned already, I claim that storytelling is a method of worlding both in a phenomenological and a very practical sense. I have analyzed storytelling as a phenomenological method of existential understanding in my interpretation of Being and Time (Kim, Sorge und Geschichte). Although storytelling is a method for understanding human existence that is (and should be) universal to every human being, being able—or being allowed—to tell one’s own stories, in other words, to be the subject of the storytelling, is a very political and highly power-sensitive issue. Storytelling is more than simply telling a story; the act of telling represents the fundamental process of producing an order. The order of a story

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refers to the order of time, and this is the key to understanding. To tell a story is to initiate an epistemological possibility and build a structure of understanding. The etymological root of “to tell” (or erzählen) is “to count” (zählen). Countability is related to creating an order, which means to create (the pattern of) temporality and the coherence of life. Whoever creates this order holds the subject-position. This is the ground upon which I insist that storytelling is a powerful method for the subaltern as much as it is a phenomenological method for understanding existence: a way for them to world the world actively instead of getting eliminated from the world’s story by the “legitimized” storyteller. Worlding is the world that “happens” with others from other traditions, cultures, and regions, with other values, histories, beliefs, and languages. This happening should happen from below, not from above, meaning that we all need to be able to tell our stories. The unspoken—the subaltern—should be able to tell their stories in their language, culture, history, and belief without losing their identity, that is, without losing their own world. Ong sees worlding as practices that are “constitutive, spatializing, and signifying gestures that variously conjure up worlds beyond current conditions of urban living” (13), which Roy calls “worlding from below” (327). In this sense, worlding is multicultural, and worlding’s “multiculturalisms” (Goh viii) can “challenge the capitalist dialectic of state and society” (Wilson 9) without the possibility of “losing ourselves completely in the mediated circulations of global capital” (Goh 8). Ong says that the purpose of worlding is to “enable [people] to dwell and be at home with the complexity of the world” (quoted in Goh 8) by infusing “our arbitrary cultural lives with new things from cultural others in poetic ways” (Goh 8, emphasis added). We can create “patterns” of diverse temporalities in a poetic way by telling stories. This way we can understand ourselves—the world—without losing part of it or being lost in the complexity of the world. Worlding as a happening of the world is the happening of the stories of others, which is in the true sense the understanding of the Other. The time of a new worlding “becomes flexible” (Wilson 7). Cheah explains that time could be an “inexhaustible resource” to open other worlds when it is narrated by postcolonial literature, as others as “new subjects” emerge in the world (330). The experiences of others as “alternative temporalities” can take place and take their place (Cheah 330).

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Process of Becoming: Worlding as Happening Here, I would like to briefly elaborate on the relation between storytelling as the fundamental way of existential understanding for human beings and worlding. The concept of worlding is rooted in the analysis of Dasein as fundamental ontology from Being and Time by Heidegger, which is an analysis of human existence. Dasein refers to the entity for whom “being” is an issue and who understands being (Heidegger 12). Each one of us is Dasein. Dasein is being-in-the-world. For Dasein, the world is more than the space of being; the world is a fundamental constituent of its being. It is because Dasein is thrown in the world and exists in the world in the way that it understands its being as being-in-the-world. I read the being of this human Dasein as a temporal process. This process refers to a processual movement between two temporal moments, the present and the future. This movement is circular as one “throws oneself” to the future and “comes back” to the present. The present where I am there is the moment where I have already been. This existential-temporal circularity represents the process of “becoming” of “being” at each moment of being there (in the world). My interpretation of the existence of Dasein as being-in-the-world essentially relates to “happening.” From the word “happening” it is hard to see its immediate connection to “story”; however, the word geschehen (happening) reveals its relation to Geschichte (story or history) (Kim, Sorge und Geschichte, 145). Each one of us, as an entity who understands the meaning of being, exists as our own-­ most existence. We can do so because we are thrown in the world. This thrownness is crucial for us because we can throw ourselves to the possibilities of the future only based on our thrownness in the world. The happening of the twofold temporal movement between throwing oneself and returning to the thrownness is the process of understanding existence and the very way of human existence itself. This happening refers to the history of each one of us. History is a story, and a story can be understood only when it is told (Kim, Sorge und Geschichte, 146). Storytelling is, therefore, an essential way of understanding existence. Dasein as being-in-the-world is in the world as “having been there.” This “having been” represents our past, our tradition, the world. Each moment of now is the moment of being there as having been there. Each person’s story is a personal history unique to each person. But this personality of each one’s story is always and

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necessarily interpersonal because of our “being there” as “having been there,” standing in the tradition and the stories of the past.

Worlding as Storytelling South Korea is a representative space of the unproud legacy of the Cold War as the place left with invisible borders from imperial ideologies. Korea was colonized by Japan, which strove to possess the subject-position by mirroring the imperialism of the West. After the failure of Japan’s fight for the subject-position, the peninsula was divided and had to submit to the regimes of the great powers. In this history, the story of the Koryo Saram was forgotten. But now, recovering this memory could open a path for a new era of cosmopolitanism, overcoming Eurocentric modernization and metropolitan internationalism caught on the borders of ideologies and the logic of capitalism. In this frame, Ansan is the representative Third World within South Korea, where the history of the Koryo Saram is reviving and happening again. The process of worlding is the process of understanding the histories of the diverse, idiosyncratic, yet “together-belonging” worlds. Kim Alex’s place transcends the spatial borders of geographical places. These two places, Central Asia and Ansan, are his worlds—“plurality of spaces” (Mattens 566; emphasis added)—where his understanding takes place as he tells his story, creating a “variety of spaces” (Mattens 576). Kim Alex tells his story, which leads us to reunite with the others. Kim Alex’s story is his personal story (as an individual person) as well as his interpersonal story with others in Central Asia and Korea. This shows the core of worlding, in which worlds world, creating the world where the marginalized and forgotten lives of subaltern worlds are told and heard. The world that worlds is an open and fluid space in which I and others are organically constituting the world as a communal space with diverse stories and temporalities.

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Works Cited Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Duke University Press, 2015. Goh, Daniel P.  S., ed. Worlding Multiculturalisms: The Politics of Inter-Asian Dwelling. Routledge, 2014. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 2006. Heller, Agnes. “A Tentative Answer to the Question: Has Civil Society Cultural Memory?” Social Research, vol. 68, no. 4, 2001, pp. 1031–1040. Kim, Hye Young. Sorge und Geschichte: Phänomenologische Unterschung im Anschluss an Heidegger. Berlin, Duncker und Humblot, 2015a. Kim, Hye Young. We as Self: Ouri, Intersubjectivity, and Presubjectivity. Lexington Books, 2021. Kim, Soyoung. “하위주체의 세계주의 – 제국을 넘어선 세계와 영화 [Subaltern Cosmopolitanism: World and Cinema beyond Empire].” Hwanghae Review, vol. 89, Dec. 2015b, pp. 67–87. Kim, Soyoung. “Toward a Technology of the Dead: Kim Soyoung on Her ‘Exile’ Documentary Triology.” Senses of Cinema, vol. 78, March 2016, sensesofcinema.com/2016/feature-­articles/kim-­soyoung-­exile-­trilogy/. Accessed 29 Sep. 2020. Mattens, Filip. “From the Origin of Spatiality to a Variety of Spaces.” The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 558–78. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “A phrase in a talk on ‘The Caribbean and Us’.” IACLALS Annual Conference, Mysore, India, Jan. 1995. Niranjana, Tejaswini. “Alternative Frames? Questions for Comparative Research in the Third World.” The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Kuan-­ Hsing Chen and Beng Huat Chua, Routledge, 2007, pp. 103–14. Roy, Anna, and Aihwa Ong, eds. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Wilson, Rob Sean. “Worlding Asia/Oceania: Concepts, Tactics, Warning Signs Inside the Anthropocene.” Worlding Asia: Asian/Pacific/Planetary Convergences, edited by Shiuhhuah Serena Chou, Soyoung Kim, and Rob Sean Wilson, forthcoming.

CHAPTER 5

Filipinese R. Zamora Linmark

Broad daylight. Ono Hai International Airport. The light-deprived terminal is supported by stacks of balikbayan boxes serving as posts, its walls and roof are made from sheets of corrugated tins. Vince’s mother showers U.S. troops deplaning with leis, thanking them for nuking the Japanese on Johnson Atoll. She’s so grateful she can’t control her smiling. “Most people live on a desert island,” she sings. “With Gilligan and Skipper too / Ono Hai/ stay calling.” She pauses to greet more soldiers. “Welcome to Ono Hai.” Her radiant smile is so wide her eyes disappear. “Ono Hai means Ono Island. Means sweet I am. You like smell? Onolicious to you? Listen.” She points a finger at her ear. “You no hear nothing?” “Get your fat ass off this island!” It’s Vince’s father, wearing a grass skirt and a coconut-shell bra. Sailing across his belly is a tattoo of Captain James Cook’s vessel The Endeavour. Vince’s mother gives him the filipinese evil-eye look. “Me filipinese,” she tells him. “Here I live. Here I native. But you only son of Creole here.” A filipinese headhunter in a G-string approaches them. His face is tattooed in red and black stripes, his fat tongue pierced with silver studs. “Brother,” Vince’s mother says, “can you get this loser away from my sight?”

R. Z. Linmark (*) Phillips Academy—Andover, Andover, MA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_5

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A handsome soldier steps off the plane. His features are so striking he could be spotted in a hurricane. “Regardez, Mama!” Vince says, tugging at her floral-print muumuu and pointing to the blue-eyed man’s widow’s peak. “Il est ici! Il est ici!” His mother jumps up and down, clapping her hands. “It really is you, Mr. Smith! We thought the jungle had eaten you alive.” She rushes to give Mr. Smith a bear hug and smothers him with kisses. “Take it easy, Mama Mary,” Mr. Smith laughs. “I no believe is you for real, but is you, is really you, Mr. Smith.” “And who are you?” He glances at Vince. “That my Yat-Bilat,” his mother says. She motions Vince to stand still and smile big. “Pretty in the face, Mr. Smith? You like?” Blue eyes wash up and down Vince’s body. “Does he speak French?” Mr. Smith asks. “Bien sur.” “English?” Vince’s mother nods with pride, then adds: “But no helping verbs, Mr. Smith.” Finally, Vince says, “I believing in the Declaration of Independence. Egalité, Liberté. Fraternité.” Mr. Smith touches Vince’s cheek and smiles. He is much more handsome in real life than in the Komiks, Vince thinks, the hibiscus behind his ear melting as he stares into the bluer-than-blue eyes, then up at the combed-back silver hair that makes the widow’s peak more pronounced. The color around them changes from blue to menstrual red. “As-tu peur de moi, Yat-Bilat?” Mr. Smith asks Vince if he’s afraid of White men. Vince pinches an invisible bug between his thumb and forefinger and says, “Un peu.” “Don’t be,” Mr. Smith says; then asks why life in Ono Hai is so wonderful. “A causé / de toi,” Vince sings. “You have such a lovely face.” Mr. Smith strokes Vince’s cheekbone, brushes his chocolate lips with his middle finger. Vince quivers with fear and excitement. “Tu es très très jolie.” Mr. Smith takes Vince in his strong arms and, French kissing him, drowns him in his saliva. Forty seconds later: a sunrise. The room explodes in bright orange. Vince opens his eyes and the world is in soft focus. On the tatami mat, Mr. Smith’s naked body is spooning his, his right arm over Vince, his gray chest hairs brushing his back. Vince turns to face him. “Bon jour, mon amour,” Mr. Smith says, kissing Vince’s bee-stung lips, his St. Theresa of Avila eyes rolling to the back of his head in filipinese ecstasy. He sighs. “Tu es mon bébé?” Mr. Smith asks.

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“Bien sûr,” Vince answers, then adds: “Papa.” Mr. Smith kisses his forehead. “I am much older than you, too old for you perhaps.” “Pas du tout, Monsieur.” “If we have children,” he brushes Vince’s bangs aside, “will you promise to bring them to America when I die?” Vince begins to cry. “Ne pleure pas, my Yat-Bilat,” Mr. Smith says. “Ne parlez pas comme ca, Papa.” “Pardonne-moi, Yat-Bilat. I’m sorry.” The sound of seven ukuleles strumming in the background cues Mr. Smith to start singing: “Born in different worlds / We are as different as sun and moon / But down the aisle / we march and say.” “I do / love you,” Vince sings. “You want marry Yat-Bilat, Mr. Smith?” His mother hovers over them, her unexpected presence darkening the room to piss yellow. “If you love my Yat-­ Bilat, Mr. Smith,” she says, “you must marry Yat-Bilat now.” “Vous êtes folle?” Mr. Smith says. “You marry Yat-Bilat or I sell Yat-Bilat to British Museum,” Vince’s mother says. “C’est impossible.” “Pourquoi pas, Papa?” Vince cries. As Mr. Smith attempts to get up, Vince throws his arms around his neck. “Me think Mr. Smith want make voodoo witch girl from Siquijor wife number four,” Vince’s mother says. “That’s why he maki-maki in his dreams.” “Non! Not true! Not true!” Vince cries. Mr. Smith breaks free from Vince. “If only the world were a better place, Yat-­ Bilat,” he says. “Jamais!” Vince’s mother exclaims. “And you know why, Mr. Smith? Because you no like have filipinese children. Because you think filipinese not good enough for you and Philadelphia, PA.” “Arretez, Mama, s’il vous plait, arretez,” Vince begs his mother to stop. “Mais c’est vrai, Yat-Bilat,” Mr. Smith says. “It’s true.” “Non, je ne le crois pas. After me give you everything,” Vince says. “Me give you sky meet sea in Ono Hai, onolicious island. Come to me, come to me. Me show you how eat with bare hands. Me talkin’ talkin’ happy talk.” Vince stands up and breaks into a song, pantomiming the lyrics a la hula. “Talk about the you / Swimming in the me / Loving bits and pieces / Of my sea.” “Stop, Yat-Bilat,” Mr. Smith pleads, turning away. But Vince continues. “Talk about the man / saying to the boy…” “I do love you, Yat-bilat,” Mr. Smith says as his legs begin to disappear.

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“Je vous aime aussi, Papa,” Vince says. “Vous êtes ma vie, ma destiné, mon rêve, Papa.” “But I just can’t. Don’t you understand, Yat-Bilat? Je ne peux pas.” “Pourquoi, Papa?” “Because you are going to cause an economic revolution,” Mr. Smith says, his legs, arms, and trunk disappearing. “Forgive me, Yat-Bilat.” And Mr. Smith vanishes completely. “You stupid filipinese kid, you no smile wide enough for Mr. Smith, that’s why. That’s why he not yours. Ever,” Vince’s mother says, raising her voice. “Pas vrai, pas vrai,” Vince says. “Not true. He mine. All mine.” Suddenly, a tremor accompanied by dogs howling. Another quake, this time stronger. More dogs howling as faceless voices scream, cry, ululate so loud, so clear, they’re no longer part of a dream.

CHAPTER 6

My Beast, My Brother, and My Alpha Creation Lucifer Hung

中文篇名:〈魔獸九重天〉 收錄於 1. 《皮繩愉虐邦》(城邦, 2006) 2. 《短篇小說特典集》(Book 11, 2011) My younger bro was not born as a biological male, it seemed. Now he has grown into a terribly resplendent masculine embodiment whom no biological male could match. He was worshiped as the alpha male in many kingdoms, deemed as primordial and diabolic dragon incarnate. So defiantly and evilly handsome he was indeed, a postmodern biker like a more cunning Heathercliff owning this noisy, madly charming early phase of twenty-first-century Taipei Nocturnal Metropolitan, derived from some pages of Wuthering Heights. He rode a classic Harley to wander the gloomy edges of every night, fighting as he pleased in bars and territories. No one could deny him his sovereignty. Leather and old-fashioned tobacco were always attached to

L. Hung (*) Graduate Institute for Gender Studies, Shih Hsin University, Taipei, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_6

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his lean tall form. Gorgeous and foxy femmes adored him as King of their lands. However, my starving younger brother, he was one greedy animal. A death drive and megalomaniacal ambitions drenched his very being. Every night, near dawn, in the tricky moments of twilight, he went home full of spoils of war and smells of sex. Even so, he simply could not leave me alone. “Be drunk with me by drinking yourself as supreme liquor. Let me suck all these hollow and world-weary years inside you, my snow prince. Let me claim you and ravish your melancholy poetics away in this mad banquet, brother of mine, poetry of mine.” Nanquin Heathcliff Shietou, my younger brother, stripped off his clothes, his nakedness exposing a fully excessive masculine body. His chest was sculpted like a bronze Roman statue, tattooed upon his heart a dashing griffin with wings shooting sky high. His mouth twisted into a deadly crooked smile, hungering for me and my indifference. The poignant cheekbones and aquiline nose formed a dark, splendid shade around his face, mocking all the cruelty and bloody light of empires and colonies living a billion years away. His sardonic monologue with those spoils rendered our workshop-cum-apartment within city limits a site of bedeviled multiverse. “Prize of mine and poison for me alone, my older brother with a clit, my beautiful sick poet and one rare creature made in seraphic image…my deeds inspire your obscene songs, and your taunting, dreamy smile is the cruelest gift to the whole universe which longs for you and your empty exquisite words. Yet, no one could taste your inhuman hurt but me.” He bared his teeth, crushing me in his brutal embrace with a finalized penetration like many daggers shining in the rim of a black sun. Those expert hands squeezed my hips with possessive and ruthless force, thrusting his nonorganic phallus as if shooting off a deadly arrow. That thing slipped into my nether being, my deep and narrow tunnel of Thanatos, the backdoor of an outlandish god. Within my soundless twitching and many orgasms, time imploded into a fevered dream. Millions of horses were running into me as vehement shadows. I arched my head, permitting that metahuman, bestial thing to burst into the dark rainbow inside my intestinal labyrinth. My brother caressed my heated lips, long fingers rubbing the crimson erected core between my legs. His harsh and deep whisper just barely let go of some hidden tenderness after this act of Armageddon.

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“I am your one and only Monster Captor, world-building architect of mine. As for you, my daffodil as eternal youthful emperor-god, you are my only one Master Captive.” Upon glimmering galaxy above, there were white heated remains of our consummating fuck. Nightly splendor dug into my neck, my pain pouring into his heart, heart of my beloved monster. Debris of novae plunged uncanny metaphors into my pale porcelain skin. That small death served as one downpour just destroyed one magnificent city and its consort, a prideful pillar in a parallel universe. Wolves screamed gleefully in the distance, our black kittens slumbering happily around us. All the mythical creatures were sweetly feasting upon heavens and infernos. Lying in the arms of my leather-master of a brother, I closed my fiery crystal gaze of a merciless writer of worlds, a wry mage of words. Before Morpheus took me into the arms of big sleep, I listened with joy to the sound of Sodom burning around him. I was coming home with my lover, my brother, my one and only beast. Since timeless beginning, he had been written in biblical chapters, scattering around ancient Asian sites, waiting for me to rewrite him from deathless ashes and stardust, again and again. This ultimate claim is for me, his creator and accomplice, alone.

PART II

Activism, Vision, and Intervention (critical and literary analyses of protests, social movements, and activism as forms of resistance/ deworlding/alter-worlding; new forms and levels of crossing, contacts, and convergences across disciplines and sites as modes of worlding and reworlding) (worlding as a tactic for resistance and building alternative values and communities toward “other Asias”)

CHAPTER 7

Violence, Magic, Certainty: Journalistic Worlding and Middle East War Isaac Blacksin

“The very idea of wanting to explain a practice—for example, killing the priest-king—seems wrong to me.” This gesture to the limits of explanation begins Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, the philosopher’s commentary on James Frazer’s influential 19th century study of magic. As an example of explanation’s failure, killing is suggestive. For Wittgenstein, explaining the unknown—and here, an unknown dimension to an act of violence—only obscures the potency of unknowability itself. “I think now,” Wittgenstein continues, that the right thing would be to begin my book with remarks about metaphysics as a kind of magic. But in doing this I must neither speak in defense of magic nor ridicule it. What it is that is deep about magic would be kept. In this context, in fact, keeping magic out has the character of magic.1

I. Blacksin (*) Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_7

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This essay is about journalism in wartime and begins with remarks about journalism as a kind of magic. But I will take care to note how my explanations of magic, like journalism’s explanations of violence, can obscure the phenomenon in question, even as such an explanation performs the same magical acts—naming the unnamable, disciplining the unknown—as the magic that explanation explains. Journalism’s magic is the power of signification—a world-making power, truly—but this power always fails to contain the unsignified: that deworlding excess of violence, resistant to facticity, realism, accuracy, categorization, and related journalistic conventions. The whiplash of magic, as of journalism, is that an occulted remainder is both articulated and, in this very articulation, pushed farther out of grasp. To explain is to increase the potency of the unexplained; to keep the inexplicable out is to invite the specter of inexplicability. I am huddled in the lobby of the Classy Hotel Erbil, a half-block from the sealed-off US consulate and the old Barista Café, where smoke-stained concrete recalls a 2015 car bombing that failed to penetrate the consulate blast walls. The milieu of security contractors, aid workers, and diplomatic corps suggests, despite the soft jazz and imported liquors, the edge of an international warzone. A journalist and I are discussing journalistic laborpower, the pressures of Internet virality, relationships with editors, the nightmares that occur on assignment. We’re strangers here: an American ethnographer, observing journalists around the Middle East; a British foreign correspondent, reporting daily on airstrikes and refugees and death in Iraq. Conversation rolls along, and then a lull. “That’s a striking watch,” I remark, partly to fill the gap and partly because it was. She shifts her wrist, considering the timepiece. “It is, isn’t it? Came from the body of a dead Islamic State fighter.” My next question is about proximity.

Magical Explanation For the many foreign correspondents I’ve interviewed and observed in areas of conflict, proximity to war and violence is a matter of market value, journalistic authority, and prestige.2 The aim of these journalists is to establish, for their faraway audiences, direct and transparent access to war’s reality. This access is premised on facticity, neutrality, certainty, and related journalistic conventions, while this reality is presented as categorically explicable and systematically demonstrable. Journalistic proximity thus

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grounds journalistic realism: war can be known through contact, and this knowledge can be narratively conveyed. Proximity becomes archetypal of the craft-cum-profession of foreign correspondence, while journalism’s realist insistence—its promise to transmit, across borders of many kinds, the way it really is—is paradigmatic of journalistic expression. In this manner, journalism makes the world of war anew; its world-making magic orders violence to suit particular expectations for what violence is. How to plumb these twinned operations, then: contact and replication, proximity and mimesis? Can journalism transform the deworlding potential of violence, or only repress it? Amidst  wars across the greater Middle East, I spoke with journalists about the “strategic ritual” of objectivity and watched them establish, through practices of reportage and narration, the coherence of events in the world.3 But while journalism gives expression to audience desires for the “really real” of war, journalists themselves are often hesitant to confirm the reality they report. Journalists make worlds for their audience through generic  tropes, styles, and themes, but another power—a deworlding violence—pushes back. For encounters with violence reveal what James Clifford calls “discrepant senses of the real”:4 a violence that challenges journalism's discursive control. In these intervals to the indexical vigor of news-making, the certitude bracing journalistic professionalism begins to warp; some weight—an ambiguity encountered, an experience undefined— bears down. In such moments, as for Wittgenstein, explanation “seems wrong.” A practice designed to order the world confronts what cannot be so ordered, and the realist intentions of journalism push against journalists’ lived experience of the irreal. Outside a press conference in Erbil, a journalist told me, “Death is unfathomable. It doesn’t make sense. Death and violence disrupt all norms, and understanding that we can’t understand it is an important part of the job.” In a newsroom in Beirut, a correspondent remarked, “In coverage of war, what is is chaos. I’ve felt pressure to add meaning when there hasn’t been meaning.” As an explanatory enterprise, journalism suits Clifford Geertz’s description of a “quest for lucidity,” wherein the ambiguities of violence are disciplined by the rationalism of news-making.5 Yet this discipline is also a displacement, revealing the margins of journalistic revelation. What journalists cannot represent continues to haunt their representational enterprise: an absent presence, a ghost in the news machine.

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Edward Tylor coined the term “pseudo-science” to describe how magic, like science, explains and exploits causal relations.6 Six decades later, G.E.R. Lloyd argued that magic’s “general aim is similar to that of applied science, to control events.”7 Like science and like magic, journalism operates as an articulation of, and control over, the meaning of events in the world. The facticity and empiricism of journalism rhymes with scientific inquiry, yet the exposure to violence introduces to journalism an ineffability, a resistance to the rational account.  Here the operation of magic pertains. Anthropologies of magic, from Ernesto de Martino’s Magic: A Theory from the South and Jeanne Favret-Saada’s Deadly Words to James Siegel’s Naming the Witch, show how the Western philosophical tradition is concerned with a knowledge bounded by the limits of reason. Existing beyond the bounds of what reason can countenance, magical forces— witchcraft, sorcery—become a way of assimilating the unknowable, of confronting that which exceeds and thereby challenges reason’s domain. As Siegel notes, belief in magic appears to “make the uncanny explicable and thus no longer uncanny.” Yet the uncanny has not, in its magical explication, been undone or resolved. The ambivalence of magic is such that it can succeed as an operation of explanation even as what it explains remains “the inexplicable and potent” itself.8 What Siegel calls “naming the witch” both admits and preserves the witch’s power. World-making practices can signify, but not quite master, a world untethered. “There’s a structural desire on the part of journalists to find explanations when things don’t make sense.” This is what a journalist explained to me over the rattle of an aging 4x4 bounding through Lebanon’s Bekka Valley. “Journalism,” she continued, “must create sense for the insensible.” How does journalism both contain and compel the nonsensical world of warfare? In The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, James  Frazer presents a bifurcation of what he calls “sympathetic magic.” The first type of such magic, Frazer reports, is a homeopathic or imitation magic, governed by the laws of similarity and dealing in the use of effigies, fetishes, and totems. Such magic promises that the replication of a thing affects the thing replicated, and in this manner offers  a mimetic power that can influence faraway persons or objects. Frazer’s second type of magic is that of contagion, governed by the law of contact and premised upon a correspondence between things in the world that, once contiguous, remain in contact. Here is the magic of love potions, and of the treatment

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of wounds through manipulation of the weapon used in the wounding. Such magic entails an initial proximity in order to engage the power of control at a remove. These twinned typologies are grouped under the sign of the sympathetic because both types presume connection across distance, a “secret sympathy,” writes Frazer, “the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether.”9 Borne upon newsprint or radio waves, in cables running beneath oceans and bundled through apartment walls, the stories foreign correspondents tell are this connection, across distance, between journalists and the object (war, violence, suffering) upon which the magic of foreign correspondence acts. Journalism cultivates an invisible ether. The foreign correspondent makes contact with the Other—with victim, with battlefield, with death— in order to witness the atrocious and heroic, the immediate and spectacular, the consequences of foreign policy, weapons development, international aid, military intervention. The journalist’s stories then work to replicate events on the ground, promising authentic accounts of an intelligible real. Establishing proximity with the dangerous and obscure, reproducing that phenomenon through narrative portrayal, and thereby creating knowledge of the otherwise unknown: here is the work of magic. This work is activist insofar as magic coheres a collective worldview; the unknown is signified and thereby brought within the bounds of the social. The unsignifiable of violence, however, tempts social dissolution with its deworlding potential. War’s insensibility, agitating at the borders of journalistic worlds, threatens to undo the sense constituting sociality as such. At a restaurant in a shopping mall in Baghdad, waiting to interview a journalist, I glanced at a small television bolted to the ceiling. Exotic locales blinked across the screen while a narrator announced: “What connects us, what binds us, what helps us to understand”—a pause for effect—“are our stories.” The commercial promoted the sympathetic magic of the BBC, wherein news stories are a magical ether instantiating the power of social knowledge. When the journalist arrived, she ordered tea and referenced newly broadcast  drone footage from the ongoing siege of Mosul. “Have you seen it?” she asked. I had; the footage, then circulating through social media, depicted black-clad bodies hurrying down an alleyway in Mosul’s labyrinthine old city. “In Syria, that was me,” she said. “We were the ones looking up at the drones. We were the other side.” I ordered more tea while the journalist disparaged colleagues who report from their hotel

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confines, what older journalists still call Mahogany Ridge. “Here in Iraq, we’re only getting one side of the story. They have refugees on their side too, you know. And now we’re the drone’s eye view…” She searched for something at the bottom of her teacup. “Do I know, like I did in Syria, what it’s like to be underneath the bombs? How can we know this war without knowing that?” Explanations reveal an elision; an unknown is sharpened even as it becomes familiar. For the making of worlds is always a choice—bounded by generic conventions—of which worlds to make and which to silence. Journalism’s attempt to control reality is a generative endeavor, a worlding tactic that confronts other ways the Middle East has been made and unmade.

Corresponding the Foreign I want to map Frazer’s schematic onto foreign correspondence and in this way track the sympathetic magic of journalism. Like the magical binary of imitation and contagion, those I interviewed and observed identify themselves with a revealing dyad: “foreign correspondent.”10 Foreign correspondents travel from the familiar to the foreign, where they make contact, create representation, and in this way establish connection to otherwise obscure events. In seeking connection with the foreign, foreign correspondents participate in a rite of passage: moving through national borders, language communities, bureaucratic red tape, sniper alleys, military checkpoints, and hotel lobbies, foreign correspondents traverse social, political, and conceptual frameworks to access what is unfamiliar and, thus, in need of exposure. Corresponding with what is beyond a community’s purview, the foreign correspondent, representative of that community, encounters the foreign and creates meaning therefrom. Correspondence is also a Frazerian magical property, initiated by contact and constituting control across distance. The control inherent in correspondence exemplifies the power of magical sympathy. And like Frazer’s magical correspondence, journalistic correspondence illustrates the centrality of proximity for disciplining the unknown. A wire reporter at a shawarma stall in Baghdad remarked, “There’s no substitute for going to the morgue and counting bodies.” A journalist at a  Kabul bar was blunter: “My job is to see the blood on the mattress.” Foreign correspondents explained proximity as both technique and value, both practical necessity and journalistic ideal. A magazine journalist, in the

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lobby of his hotel in Erbil, told me, “When you see things with your own eyes, it’s easier to tell a story, and it makes it more human.” A freelancer at his apartment in Beirut remarked, “If you go there, it’s different. Physical proximity gives you detail that can’t be questioned. Witnessing is authoritative.” Sensory experience, first-hand knowledge, the sound and the fury: professional authority is established through the encounter, and proximity in this way underwrites the ability of journalists to tell—and to sell—their stories. The journalistic promise of direct access to the real is codified through having been there, having seen the bodies, smelled the cordite, spoken to the displaced.11 In its magical iteration, the foreign—the second element in the “foreign correspondent” dyad—is that which exists at the boundary of the knowable. Magic is used to contact and control this foreignness and to bring it within the domain of social knowledge. Roy Wagner explains how “controlling a context amounts to objectifying it…  transforming it by articulating it through the objective associations of controlling context.”12 Wagner’s example of this process concerns the ghosts of the dead, whose “relation to the living is controlled… by collective acts of mourning and ritual.”13 The foreign must be translated as contextually meaningful, and this meaning is constructed and harnessed by the magician based on community needs and expectations. Meaning transacts control of foreignness. Stuart Hall puts this process thusly: If newsmen did not have available—in however routine a way—such cultural ‘maps’ of the social world, they could not ‘make sense’ for their audiences of the unusual, unexpected and unpredicted events which form the basic content of what is ‘newsworthy’…. This bringing of events within the realm of meanings means, in essence, referring unusual and unexpected events to the ‘maps of meaning’ which already formed the basis of our cultural knowledge, into which the social world is already ‘mapped’.14

Making the nonmeaningful mean again is the purpose of both journalism and magic. For the journalists I interviewed and observed, violence and the devastation it levies is the foreign that must be made legible to faraway news consumers. “War, for my audience, is foreign,” a reporter told me at a café in Beirut. “It’s what the people I report for don’t really know and have trouble understanding.” At a Baghdad restaurant, a journalist maintained, “The foreign is the ‘bang-bang,’ the violence, and it’s what everyone

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wants.” The violence of foreign wars is foreign not only in its geographic remove, then, but in its presumed unfamiliarity—affective, political, epistemic—to distant news consumers. Like Walter Benjamin’s translator, the journalist must communicate the foreignness that his reportage inherently denies in its claim to rational coherence; the obscure is rendered intelligible while the allure of the aberrant is maintained. Here the journalist assumes a central aspect of the magician: the ability to cross epistemic as well as topological borders. But can journalists translate violence in a way that captures the foreign and familiar both, the strange but intelligible, the particular and universal, and thereby produce both spectacle and understanding? Can the particular activism of journalistic world-making allow for the deworlding that is war and violence? Can the potency of the insensible be sterilized as sense? Can journalism make meaning from devastation? I had lunch with a wire reporter in a fancy pedestrian mall near her newsroom in Beirut. “We’re explicit about explaining things,” she told me. “We say what things mean. We play things straight: what this means, period. You need to create a narrative, one that people can understand. You have to make clear.” She recalled her experience reporting from war in Syria, before foreign correspondents became targets for kidnapping and execution. The scale of the violence was hard to capture, she told me, while its complexity—economic, theological, historical, social—resisted neat definition. A somber waiter delivered coffee. “As a foreign correspondent, you make the foreign legible,” she said. The violence in Syria presented a frontier at which journalistic explanation foundered. As storyteller of the foreign event, the journalist applies definitional certainty to the violence she contacts, recoding this violence as a coherent phenomenon in the world. Yet this operation gestures to its own failure. By delimiting and thus controlling what violence is, journalism suggests the outside to its explanatory dynamic, the unassimilable remainder rustling around the boundaries of journalistic worlding.

Explanatory Magic The connection between magic and explanation is longstanding. Herodotus depicts magic as a technology of interpretation, wherein inexplicable events like dreams and eclipses require an explanatory operation that magic is called on to perform.15 In the linguistic theory of Claude Levi-Strauss, magic’s power entails an overcoming of inscrutability

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through verbal expression; magic makes sayable and thus knowable what otherwise escapes explanation. Ethnographic studies posit violence, broadly construed, as a phenomenon that challenges explication and to which magic has been applied as means for understanding. A violence that disrupts normal life—a violence that deworlds—is named and thereby brought within the realm of social knowledge. The uncanny is controlled through its utterance. Ghosts, zombies, phantasms, animated objects—phenomena disruptive to ordinary understandings of life and death—become typologies that restore intelligibility. Thus Levi-Strauss can assert that it is not merely explanation at stake in the use of magic, but the possibility of articulating what is suspected but resistant to conventional signification. This articulation is eminently activist, pulling the unknown into the realm of the social. The suicide bomber, a prominent figure in contemporary war reportage, fits this mold. American newsreaders have long been interested in news about militarized suicide, from the elite Japanese kamikaze pilots to the Tamil Black Tiger corps to Islamic State shock troops. Talal Asad notes that suicide bombing is something of an obsession in American newsrooms. In their propulsion into lives beyond deaths and in their weaponization of the human, suicide bombers disrupt particular understandings about the intelligibility, meaning, and separation of life and death.16 The journalistic essentialization of the bomber as exotic and pathological subject, whose acceptance of death is explained as indoctrination or alienation and whose suicidal act is defined through the weapon used and the casualties inflicted, seems to fall short. An act saturated with symbolic and theological resonance, suicide bombing can challenge the definitional constraints of journalism and trouble the application of rational verification. For the border between knowable and unknowable, real and imagined, victim and perpetrator, is transgressed by suicide bombing, and the line between life and death—for the bomber, for those killed and wounded, for the journalist—blurred. Can journalists maintain factual, certain meanings for this violence? Can journalism adequately disclose what a suicide bombing is? A violence that engages fantasy and defies categorical constraint can sunder shared understandings of reality, cleaving a hole in the presumed knowability of death, victimhood, and violence. The activist impulse of journalism falters at this threshold. Journalism attempts to manage the conditions of possibility for the reality of war, but the application of this process to topics like suicide bombing reveals a discursive periphery. The name given to what is known

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by journalists—“tragedy,” “extremism,” “suffering,” “societal breakdown,” “sectarianism,” “Iraq at a crossroads,” “Syria on the edge”— is, like “witchcraft,” an attempt to name the unnamable. While a suicide bombing can be made intelligible through descriptions of gore, casualty statistics, and classifications of victim and perpetrator, there exists a conspicuous surplus—what Georges Bataille might call an “accursed share”17—to the significance journalism assigns. How then to signify that which tests signification? How to world the deworlded? Recourse to foreign words, depictions of suffering, and descriptions of terror and trauma are some of the tools journalists use to gain control over phenomena that challenge their normative modes of knowing. Narrative employment of foreign words—“martyr,” “jihad,” “mujahedeen,” shouts of “Allahu akbar”—become another means to signify, in the Englishlanguage press, a foreign violence that threatens signification as such.18 Here the news assumes a magical dynamic, what Branislaw Malinowski calls a “coefficient of weirdness”: magic words maintain an Otherness even as the Other is brought into expression—and thus into intelligibility— through their use.19 For Marcel Mauss, language is conditional to magic, and hence “spells are composed in special languages.”20 In A General Theory of Magic, Mauss argues that foreign words are essential to magic insofar as they connect their users to the alien source of magical power. Words like “jihad” make something true in their journalistic utterance, restoring the ability to represent the indiscernible and suggesting those places from which unknown and dangerous violence emanates. The activism of journalism, like the activism of magic, is this capacity to form signs for the otherwise unsignified. Saussurean and Jakobsonian linguistics posit this process—the expression of the hitherto inexpressible—as the true power of signification. Where no signification occurs, as when violence challenges explicability as such, a symbol can still be found, and it is this symbol that allows for the explanation of what formerly lacked constituted meanings. As Wagner notes, “The sound of a word is thought to have some intrinsic relation to the things it conventionally stands for, so that by uttering a verbal spell one exercises a kind of control over the thing referred to in the spell.”21 The news is just such a magical spell: an indexical and expressive means of reference and control where shared understandings falter.22 “Terrorism,” like “witch,” is an indication of a failure to signal otherwise, a name established by journalistic convention but that remains conventional “only as a signifier” and not “in terms of its application to an object.”23 The unknown is familiarized even as its foreignness is

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perpetuated. Journalism allows the social body to articulate the unknown that threatens it, yet that threat is only extenuated as its unsayable aspect is repressed. War more generally—as limit condition, as phenomenon that challenges expression—registers journalistically through similar stretches of signification. The turn to the language of trauma and victimhood can also be read as a means to articulate the otherwise incomprehensible and, thus, to make tellable those events that inspire unformed feelings of dismay. “Trauma” answers an unanswerable question; it explicates the inexplicability of war. What is traumatic about war—and in an earlier, World War I signsystem, what “shell shocked” its participants—is the otherwise unnamable. The “thousand-yard stare,” a phrase emerging from World War II reportage and employed through the Vietnam War period, captured the psychic distress of war precisely because the object of the soldier’s stare is obscure. As a language utilized throughout war reportage, trauma allows news consumers to recognize what cannot be otherwise grasped of the event and experience of conflict. “We must ask to what extent the words used contribute to forming (and transforming or even deforming) the objects that constitute the world.”24 So writes Didier Fassin, who posits trauma as just such a worldconstituting word. Building from an Austinian linguistics, Fassin considers the performative dimension of trauma as a language that attempts—and often fails—to capture the inexpressible: “We need to grasp the movement whereby language imposes a reality and at the same time the real resists language.”25 As a “new vocabulary of war,”26 trauma brings a particular meaning for violence into being by naming it, and here journalism can be seen as both constative and performative: journalism establishes the meaning of violence through the practice of proximity while bringing that meaning into existence in an act of textual imitation. As a language journalists use to capture the insensibility of war, trauma maintains an activist, worlding function. Trauma allows the otherwise unassimilable to be pulled into a shared realm of significance; opacity is pierced and explanation achieved. But what is traumatic about war remains unsignified. The unnamable can be named as symbols are found and deployed, but the potency of unassimilability bears down. “Jihad,” “terrorism,” “trauma”: like “witch,” these words register a shared suspicion that then establishes, per Siegel, “the ‘reality’ of the existence of that which is truly foreign.”27 A magazine journalist, in an Ottoman flat in Beirut, explained: “Making ‘jihadists’ scary: politicians,

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experts, and journalists work together to exaggerate a situation.” By exaggerating the threateningly oblique, journalists establish the reality of the Other. It is the logic of journalism as witch-naming. Such exaggeration can be compared to what Levi-Strauss calls the “signifier-surfeit”: a signifier that outdoes the signified, indicating the power of articulation. Levi-Strauss writes: There is always a non-equivalence or ‘inadequation’ between the two [signifier and signified]… this generates a signifier-surfeit relative to the signified to which it can be fitted. So, in man’s effort to understand the world, he always disposes of a surplus signification…That distribution of a supplementary ration…  is absolutely necessary to ensure that, in total, the available signifier and the mapped-out signified may remain in the relationship of complementarity which is the very condition of the exercise of symbolic thinking.28

This “signifier-surfeit” is inherent in journalism’s magical language: “extremism” and “victim,” casualty counts and weapons specifications, operation names like “Shock and Awe” and the ongoing “Inherent Resolve,” chronotopes such as the battlefield and the refugee camp: all express more or other than the signified requires, creating worlds through their deployment. These signifiers occlude their surplus in order to achieve subject-object correspondence; the realism of journalism demands it. Correspondence with the foreign allows signifiers to be found for the otherwise indeterminate and for a shared world between journalists and their audience to be shaped and maintained. But what is left out? What deworlding powers of war and violence are occluded by this worldfashioning pursuit?

Writing Violence A half-dozen journalists were  gathered around a plastic table in a tiled kitchen in Erbil, Iraq, in a cinderblock house a short walk from the Classy Hotel. The residents  in the house tend to rotate—a newspaper photographer leaves for Raqqa; a wire reporter moves in—but a staff photographer and two freelancers are steady tenants. The photographer keeps  close attention to a small lawn; it remains lush in defiance of Iraqi summer.

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The journalists were discussing the logistics of access to the frontline, a frequent and critical topic of conversation. Some were planning a trip to West Mosul in the morning, a week before the military offensive there will officially end. That day a Kurdish fixer was killed in Mosul’s old city, and two French journalists injured, when they set off an IED while dodging Islamic State sniper fire. The French journalists will later die from their wounds. The journalists around the table reason these casualties a mistake: a scramble down an alleyway that hadn’t been properly checked for explosives. One of the journalists insisted that it’s not frontline proximity that is to blame here, but inattention to surroundings amidst the confusion of combat. The other journalists nodded without commitment. A pause descended, and the conversation had nowhere to go; it seemed crass to press the issue, or just bad luck. For these journalists, violence is real and present, but its reality can be difficult to express for these professionals of expression.  A freelancer broke the silence: “So should we rent a car to Mosul or get a ride with an Iraqi division?” One of the journalists in the room will not join the trip. Later, the kitchen empty, she explained her decision. “Most of the work that’s produced from the frontline—mine too—is the same. It’s exciting but rarely thoughtful, mostly just fast and disposable news. Proximity is not what is needed. The literal approach of ‘being there and seeing it’ can be an ideological folly.” Through the kitchen window I saw a flak jacket slumped in the grass. She continued:  “What you get, when you go on reporting trips to Mosul, is confusion. Where is this convoy going? Where is the frontline? Can we trust these guys we’re talking to or traveling with? What was that bang? What we don’t know is everywhere, and getting a story out of that is a miracle every time.” In its translation as news, violence adheres to causation and coherence, to a plottable process operating within a determinist, means/ends logic. Nameable and thus knowable (as suicide attack, as carpet bombing), describable and thus narratable (blackhawks “downed,” insurgents “precisely” struck), violence is assessed by norms of legitimacy, justification, and rationality, which allocate legibility through typology and definition. Allen Feldman shows how the typologies foundational to “regimes of facticity” produce exclusions effaced by the structure of typification itself.29 The symptomology journalism assigns to violence demonstrates the intelligibility of a newsworthy event and must thereby omit those aspects of violence that challenge signification as such. So even while journalism indexes the expected functions and purposes of violence—communicative,

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performative, political—journalists attest to what their texts are designed to occlude: a violence that is other than the analytic categories of instrumentalism (the means to ends) and to explicit expressive purpose (the instantiation of meaning). What Antoine Bousquet calls the “a-significance” of violence is a dynamic encountered by journalists but displaced by journalism in the making of meaningful worlds.30 Since journalists must produce journalism, their particular world-making tactics often entail a confrontation with this lacuna. The indulgence of atrocity, the sovereign spectacle of execution, the muteness of ruination: such matters stalk the assurance of journalistic depiction. As for Siegel’s examination of witchcraft, journalism both depends upon a degree of suspicion—of the power of violence and of its disruptions to perceived normalcy—and also keeps suspicion alive by deploying a particular terminology—extremism, suffering, victimhood—that remains incapable of doing more than signaling what is not fully understood and about which we cannot be fully certain. What is identified of violence, as for Siegel, “remains not only unknown, but also continues to have unpredictable consequences.”31 War crimes are exposed and military operations outlined; victims and perpetrators are parsed and identified; casualties are counted and suffering described—but what is named, defined, and classified sustains the inexplicability of violence in the world. Here journalism “names the witch.” Anthropology’s so-called reflexive turn allows us to see journalism not as the description of violent realities but as a transformation thereof, a reordering or reworlding that legitimizes particular categories of experience in a way that appears transparent while remaining situated, partial, and  contestable.32 Terroristic or humanitarian, rational or extreme, psychopathic or traumatic, tribal or lawful, gratuitous or justified, sacrificial or preemptive: violence reported in faraway places receives a particular representational valence, an intelligibility that foreign correspondence is designed to provide. Journalists I interviewed confirmed both the limits of this explanatory addition and the residue of indeterminacy that violence secretes. “You can quantify certain things as true or untrue, but how to write is a version, a selection,” a journalist  told me on a park bench in Beirut. “You have to simplify, make clear something that often provides no clarity at all.” Another journalist echoed this sentiment at a checkpoint near Mosul. “Not everything is explainable, but I keep it simple. It’s hard to convey the scale of violence so I just tell stories.” The inexplicability of violence is at issue for many journalists with whom I spoke; ambiguity

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lurks, and an incoherence threatens to leach through the borders of verification. Narrative simplicity can fashion and control the foreign but cannot quite contain it. Thus the reworlding of journalism meets but never quite constrains the deworlding of violence. For the conventions of journalistic realism always mystify war’s irreality. The fragmentation, incoherence, and inexplicability of the world of journalists—a world where categories blur, certainties collapse, margins fray—cannot be made by journalism but only remade as the legible and complete. The ethnographic record suggests that the object of sorcery is the inexplicable itself, that phenomenon which cannot be otherwise integrated into shared understandings of the world. Magic’s semiotic function delivers needed clarity. In what is perhaps the most well-known example of magic’s explanatory power, E.E. Evans-Pritchard considers the collapse of a granary in which many Azande are killed. The Azande attribute the collapse to magic even as they are aware that termites have eaten into the granary’s load-bearing supports. Rational causation cannot satisfy suspicion about why these particular individuals were under the granary at the pivotal moment of collapse. There remains a doubt—some trace of an excess to ordinary explanation—and the turn to magic becomes a means of accounting for this challenge to regular ways of knowing. “The concept of witchcraft,” writes Evans-Pritchard, “provides [Azande] with a natural philosophy by which the relations between men and unfortunate events are explained.”33 That which challenges reason is contained by resort to a distinct explanatory technology, a system that controls the meaning of inexplicable occurrence when other systems fail. In rites of death and hunting rituals, in healing ceremonies and interpretations of weather events, magic gives meaning to what lacks it, offering intelligibility to those people, objects, and processes that test ordinary explication. The nonmeaningful is in this way assimilated into knowledge. Foreign correspondence, when tasked to report foreign war, works in a similar fashion. Violence deemed foreign (including violence, such as U.S. airstrikes, dispensed by powers “familiar” to particular news audiences) relies upon a distinct meaning-making operation. Like science, journalism makes the strange familiar; like magic, it preserves the strange in its evocation of violent events. Journalism’s translational tension is such that violence, a phenomenon that taunts ordinary modes of knowing, retains its potency as the foreign itself.

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I met a young journalist in a bar in a dark basement in Kabul. “Writing about fears, you exacerbate and sharpen them. People want to see what scares them,” he told me. “The news gives us something to fear, and news particularizes it.” This particularization of fear—this “giving” of the object to fear—is precisely the naming of the witch, an act that supplies intelligibility to the danger suspected but otherwise unnamed. And this operation, journalistic and magical, always suggests an aporia: a failure to stem the tentative, the nonsensical, the fantastic prowling the certain. A deworlding violence pushes back.

Articulating Power “Harum-scarum with fragmentary, definitional swerves.” This is how James Boon describes Mauss’s A General Theory of Magic.34 Like Wittgenstein, Mauss wants to perform rather than explain the magic he investigates, a magic he sees as heterodox and subversive, operating around ambiguities, juxtapositions, and contingencies. “Imagine for a moment— if you possibly can…” So Mauss entreats his readers, offering the spectacle of magic.35 How might journalism thus imagine? Can journalism perform such a definitional swerve in its depictions of violence? Can it suggest the contingencies and subversions of war? I spoke with a journalist in Iraq after her visit to a frontline. “A girl lifting her brother from the body bag—it’s senseless. My experience is that war is strange, reality doesn’t make sense anymore. It’s nonsensical. I try to find stories that gesture toward the nonsense, to that absurdity disrupting normalcy. Sanity changes; what’s good and bad shift. Getting it past the editor is the game, but they’re removed.” Journalists encounter the ambiguities and excesses of war, the weight of its foreignness, and apply the authority of proximity to the translational practice of representation. Given journalists’ awareness of their own discursive limit, the question becomes whether a journalist can smuggle into journalism some suggestion of indeterminacy, some sense of nonsense. “I’d forgotten,” the journalist continued, “that legs have bones in them.” Imagine for a moment, if you possibility can, a journalism for which the bones in legs are not fact but gesture, a swerve to what certainty cannot master. Other worlds—incomplete, uncontrolled—may yet be made. A comparison with magic suggests the semiotic and activist power of journalism. Foreign correspondence assimilates violence into social truth,

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constituting communal knowledge and articulating otherwise unformed feelings of collective dread. In so doing, journalism coheres popular judgment about what violence is and does. But this disciplining process has its limits. Possibility agitates on the margins of the known; the witch can be named, but the ambiguity of what is called witchcraft remains. As journalism makes worlds, cohering social expectations for what violence is, the deworlding potency of violence—constitutive of the world in which journalists live—continues to stir. The activist potential of journalism is always challenged by the conventions of sense that violence never ceases to threaten.

Notes 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (Retford, UK: Brynmill Press, 1993), v. 2. The journalists interviewed and observed for this article—in and around Baghdad and Erbil, Iraq; Kabul, Afghanistan; and Beirut, Lebanon—are largely foreign to the countries from which they report, though some have familial and ethnic ties to the region. All were reporting for Englishlanguage media (newspapers, magazines, radio, wire services, television, and “digital native” publications) based in North America and the United Kingdom. Research was conducted over eighteen months, from June 2013 to October 2017. Interview locations and content have been scrambled to protect anonymity. Support for this research was generously provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and The Humanities Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 3. Gaye Tuchman, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual,” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 4 (1972). 4. James Clifford, “Feeling Historical,” in Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology, ed. Orin Starn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 31. 5. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 101. 6. Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1903), 119. 7. G.E.R.  Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 179. 8. James Siegel, Naming the Witch (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 25. 9. James Frazer, The Golden Bough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 27.

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10. Many journalists disavow the label “war correspondent.” That one’s professional identity would be linked to war and conflict is anathema to many journalists, who tend to view their topical charge as human suffering rather than “war.” This titular preference reflects a topical shift: where war reportage once focused on battlefield progress and the glories of combat, today’s news is more concerned with trauma, suffering, and the social effects of conflict. 11. The “dateline”—the locational designation at the beginning of most foreign news stories in daily newspapers—marks the reporter’s proximity to an event. I’ve been told of journalists traveling to remote or dangerous locations simply to achieve a particular dateline, even when presence at that location did not bear on the narrative produced. True or not, the rumor indicates the professional value of proximity as guarantee of authenticity and, thereby, of authority. 12. Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 43. 13. Wagner, The Invention of Culture, 93. 14. Stuart Hall et  al., Policing the Crisis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), 57. 15. Owen Davies, Magic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3. 16. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 17. George Bataille, The Accursed Share (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 18. To translate these terms from the Arabic would unsettle the meanings journalists deploy through their use. As foreign correspondence is “our” magic (that is, as English-language news “belongs” to the reality shared by English-language journalists and their audiences), so do these words become “ours,” making meanings distinct from those made in the language communities of their origin. 19. Branislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic (London: Unwin Brothers, 1935), 218. 20. Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London: Routledge, 2001), 71. 21. Wagner, The Invention of Culture, 106. 22. Roman Jakobson, in Fundamentals of Language (Paris: Mouton, 1956), suggests a link between the Frazerian bipartition of imitation/contagion and the literary bipartition of metaphor/metonym. If contagious magic corresponds to metonymy, we might see how “terrorism” and “suicide bomber,” or even “Iraq” and “Middle East,” assume a metonymic power in the news—signifying lawless violence, a place of lawlessness, an irrational actor or culture or religion—and as such do the magical work of expressing and thereby controlling the foreign through contact and correspondence. 23. Siegel, Naming the Witch, 229.

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24. Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 55. 25. Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, 55. 26. Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, 220. 27. Siegel, Naming the Witch, 229. 28. Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (Oxford: Routledge, 1987), 62–63. 29. Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 6. 30. Antoine Bousquet, “The Obscure Object That Is Violence,” The Disorder of Things, September 7, 2011, https://thedisorderofthings. com/2011/09/07/the-obscure-object-that-is-violence/#more-4133. 31. Siegel, Naming the Witch, 25. 32. See, for example, George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 33. E.E.  Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 18. 34. James Boon, Verging on Extra-Vagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 160. 35. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, 151.

Works Cited Asad, Talal. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Bataille, George. The Accursed Share: Volume 1. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Boon, James. Verging on Extra-Vagance: Anthropology, History, Religion, Literature, Arts… Showbiz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Bousquet, Antoine. “The Obscure Object That Is Violence.” The Disorder of Things, Sept 7, 2011. Accessed August 1, 2014. https://thedisorderofthings. com/2011/09/07/the-obscure-object-that-is-violence/#more-4133. Clifford, James. “Feeling Historical.” In Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology, edited by Orin Starn, 25–34. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Davies, Owen. Magic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. De Martino, Ernesto. Magic: A Theory from the South. Translated and annotated by Dorothy Zinn. Chicago: HAU Books, 2015. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Fassin, Didier. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.

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Favret-Saada. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Feldman, Allen. Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Frazer, James. The Golden Bough. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978. Jakobson, Roman. Fundamentals of Language. Paris: Mouton, 1956. Levi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Oxford: Routledge, 1987. Lloyd, Geoffrey E.R. Polarity and Analogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Malinowski, Branislaw. Coral Gardens and Their Magic. London: Unwin Brothers, 1935. Marcus, George, and Michael Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Mauss, Marcel. A General Theory of Magic. London: Routledge, 2001. Siegel, James. Naming the Witch. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Tuchman, Gaye. “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual.” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 4 (1972): 660–79. Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. London: John Murray, 1903. Wagner, Roy. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Edited by Rush Rhees. Retford, UK: Brynmill Press, 1993.

CHAPTER 8

Refugee Migration Through the Division System: On the Ethics of Copresence in Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean Chih-ming Wang

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. —Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13.2 (1948)

Just as the world was watching with amazement the series of summit meetings between Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, and Moon Jae-in regarding the dramatic changes on the Korean Peninsula after almost seventy years of division, The Guardian reported the struggle of Kim Ryon-hui, a North Korean defector currently living in Seoul, to return to the North.

This essay is an abridged version of the article previously published under a separate title in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 20.2 (2019).

C.-m. Wang (*) Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_8

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She had come to the South through China in 2011 as a defector and was given South Korean citizenship, after signing a statement that disavowed her allegiance to the North. But she soon realized that defectors are treated as “second class citizens” in the South and that she was unable to go home without the South Korean government’s approval. She has since protested, gone on speaking tours, and petitioned the United Nations for help, but it was not until the summit meetings that began in May 2018 that she saw a glimmer of hope (Haas 2018). Kim’s experience and aspiration is shared by more than 30,000 North Korean defectors that currently live in South Korea—a figure that has more than tripled since 2005.1 The story of North Korean defectors is usually shaded by the narrative of miraculous escape and pasted over by the rhetoric of freedom and prosperity. Seen from the standpoint of the narrative of escape, Kim’s wish to return to the North is an anachronistic paradox. Having risked her life to reach here, why would she wish to return to the country from which she fled? If, as Hirsch and Miller (2011, 18) argue, every return is also an attempt to exercise a right to acknowledge, what do Kim and defectors like her wish to acknowledge, especially against the backdrop of the U.S.-inter-Korean summits? If defection is a passage to freedom and salvation, how do we begin to explain Kim’s demand? How do we make sense of Kim’s complex subjectivization from a defector and refugee to an activist for the right to return? Moreover, how may the world of North Korean refugees—one that involves traumatic experience of escape and tethered patriotism across borderlands—reengage the world we live in through and beyond the division system? That is, how would the poesis of struggles help to “‘world the world’ beyond death and market banality into a renewed presence and active becoming” (Wilson 2007, 215) by making present, bringing near, and attending to the suffering and survival of those crushed by states and empires? Understanding Kim’s demand as a trace of the complex problematic of the inter-Korean division where questions of imperialism, anticommunism, and humanitarianism are fatefully entangled with diaspora and minority formations in the protracted aftermath of the Korean War, I take the dyadic subject of North Korean defector/refugee as an entry point for unpacking the rhetoric of freedom and salvation that has been essential to the American imagination of the refugee, yet problematic to the Korean diaspora. Often resting upon a transpacific passage from Asia to North America and embedded in the inter-Asian history of the Cold War, North Korean defectors/refugees constitute an invisible borderland between

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communism and capitalism and are taken as objects of anticommunist campaigns, now framed in the human rights discourse. The comingling of transpacific and inter-Asian factors provides us with a comparative lens through which to view the transnational minority formation of Asian American in relation to such borderland subjects as North Korean defector/refugee and the Joseonjok (Korean Chinese). At a time when human rights are subsumed into a form of Western imperial power (Douzinas 2007), it is important that we examine how the issue of North Korean refugee is presented to us and how the desire for return—as Kim Ryon-hui’s story suggests—may complicate the story of refugee migration. Specifically, I intend to take issue with the humanitarian imagination that is central to the “escape and rescue” narrative in the Asian American formation as a means to reconsider the critical question that Franklin Odo (1971, x) posed 50 years ago at the inception of Asian American studies: “How closely, if at all, and in what ways should Asian Americans relate to Asia?” I find this question still pertinent today because the inception of the Asian American movement was articulated with the wish to cut the two “chains of Babylon”2—U.S. racism and imperialism—and bring an end to national divisions in Asia. If the quest for identity and equality in U.S. racial politics was also a means to end imperial wars in Asia to make national unification possible, Asian Americans have a greater role to play than merely being an open-ended, inclusive identity that collapses Asians and Asian Americans into groups of either victims to be rescued or sources of information to help fight an unending war against communism or whatever has come as a threat to the U.S. since the 1950s. Indeed, the Asian/ American is often forced to assume an intermediary role as active participant in rather than passive recipient of the schemes of the U.S. liberal empire.3 Lisa Yoneyama’s (2016, 173) critique of the “excess” of Asian/American war memories is especially apt because such excess risks the “Asian/ Americanization of justice” that contributed to “the obfuscation of past and present America’s military and colonial violence” and “subsequently suppressed and silenced the people and nations to whom [the U.S.] claims to have brought freedom and democracy.” Such “excessive” memories often overlook the geopolitical interest and civilizational bias that Asian Americans assumed as they took on the intermediary role in the guise of U.S. liberalism. In another context, Christine Hong (2012) shows that the Korean American Coalition, riding on the endorsement of Sandra Oh, played a crucial role in the campaign to push for the North Korean Refugee Adoption Act of 2011, when the target of the adoptions are in fact “not

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North Korean, not refugees, and not orphans,” but rather “China-born, mixed-ethnic offspring of Chinese fathers and North Korean mothers.” This “excessive” humanitarian act creates an adoptable object out of the blue and, by doing so, ironically makes adoption a violation of human rights and Chinese sovereignty. As Hong (2013, 516) contends elsewhere, “human rights critiques of North Korea have served hegemonic interests […] justifying war, occupation, sanctions, and the withholding of humanitarian and developmental aid,” allowing “U.S. soft-power institutions, thinly renovated cold war defense organizations, hawks of both neoconservative and liberal varieties, conservative evangelicals, anticommunist Koreans in South Korea and the diaspora” (Hong 2013, 511) to join forces in the fight to topple the North Korean regime. What matters, then, is not “how closely” Asian Americans relate to Asia but, rather, in what ways and to what ends. Taking a cultural studies approach that regards literature as a terrain of political engagement for reconsidering narratives of freedom in relation to the hierarchy of nationhood embedded in the protracted Cold War in Asia, I examine Krys Lee’s novel How I Became a North Korean (2016), an Asian American text that weaves together the story of an Asian American returnee with those of North Korean refugees and Joseonjok in the North Korean–China borderland. Conflating refugee and returnee, Lee’s novel occasions an exploration of the ethics of copresence—the copresence of coethnic brethren in conditions not of their own choosing that make their relationship to one another a matter of ethical concerns and epistemic challenge—that undergirds Asian American studies when the Asian/ American becomes a slippery identity hinging on migrant trajectories and citizenship protection, which in bestowing rights to “Americans” reduces “Asians” to victims. The attention on copresence enables us to consider both the predicaments of North Korean refugees as produced by Cold War geopolitics and epistemology and the linkage between Asian America and Asia therein. With an emphasis on the meaningful overlap of refugee, Joseonjok, and Asian American returnee in Lee’s novel, I hope to show why a consideration of the Asian American’s copresence with the Asian is necessary for our discussion of Asian American literature in an era of transpacific linkage and continuing division on the Korean Peninsula, shaped to a certain extent by the anxieties about the Cold War and globalization. Taking literature as a form of activism, this article furthermore reflects on the promise of activism as it pertains to how the demands for return may challenge the orthodox of humanitarian

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imagination, render a moment for relational thinking beyond representation, and constitute the hope to end Cold War division.

The Refugee Connection How I Became North Korean is an uncanny novel in the sense that it is built upon the loss of home and the impossibility for refugees to feel at home. Though recently published in 2016 and purportedly about the universal plight of the refugee as one contemporary humanitarian crisis, the novel, albeit unwittingly, touches on the theme of division as the precondition of such a crisis in which the global spread of the Korean diaspora has become complexly entangled with the homeland. Through the lens of the refugee, it specifically reorients discussions of diaspora and minority formation to transnational comparison and geopolitical complexity where the escape from “home”—for political or economic purposes—becomes an epistemic point of departure for understanding North Korea. Moreover, the novel presents a complex understanding of Koreanness and migration by creating a scenario where North Korean, Joseonjok, and Asian American are problematically collapsible yet symptomatically different. The copresence of Yongju (son of a North Korean elite), Jiangmi (a lower-class woman), and Daniel (a Joseonjok turned Asian American), the three protagonists in the novel, represents varied shades of Koreanness and testifies to the division system that still haunts Koreans and demarcates the history of the Korean Peninsula. It also helps to extend our notion of Koreanness to underrepresented borderlands. Renowned South Korean scholar Paik Nak-Chung (2005, 21, 24) describes the division system as a “self-productive process” that is “persistent and multi-faceted,” one that involves interdependence and opposition between North and South Korea, with foreign powers constantly exerting influence as well. He argues that the division of the Korean Peninsula has been maintained by both internal and external forces, not for the sake of the Korean people, but for the “bloc confrontation” that sustains the opposing ideologies of socialism and capitalism (2005, 25). However, the division system is more than an ideological product of the global Cold War; it is also a systemic blockade to the ongoing struggle over national unification. In effect, the division system not only divided the Korean Peninsula into two countries hostile to each other but also created, through legal, social, and geopolitical

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institutions, a plethora of internal differences and separation that framed North Korean refugees as a geopolitical and humanitarian crisis. The North Korean refugee crisis can trace its origin to the great famine of the mid-1990s when millions of people were reported to have died of starvation or hunger related illness. While poverty and hunger were no news to North Korea, thanks to the international sanctions led by the United States since the 1950s, the withdrawal of Russian and Chinese aid at the cusp of their socioeconomic transformations in the early 1990s made the already impoverished conditions of North Korea unbearable, driving North Koreans to cross the border for subsistence and help. By the late 1990s, as the number of border crossers began to rise, and their maltreatment by the Chinese authorities became noticeable, South Korean and Western—especially Christian—nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) intervened by setting up underground networks to spirit them away. Since 2002, with the aid of activists, North Korean migrants have successfully staged several high-profile occupations of foreign embassies in Chinese cities and elsewhere to demand political asylum (Lankov 2004; Neaderland 2004). Such action attracted the attention of Western media and led the Chinese government to enhance its police action and deportation policy and South Korea to change its laws to deter North Koreans from defecting to the South. Because such measures designed to stem the emigration flow have been applied, more North Koreans have fled their own country and sought entry into South Korea and other places in the world.4 As Sung-Kyung Kim (2014, 555) argues, the human rights approach “produces a unified notion of exploitation and punishment by the authoritarian North Korean regime” and thereby subjects the refugees to the U.S.–inter-Korean stalemate. Thanks to the division system, leaving home becomes a political choice and a matter of life and death. China became a fated destination for North Koreans not only because it borders North Korea by two rivers—Yalu to the west and Tumen to the north (known in Korean as Amnok and Duman)—but, much more importantly, because the Chinese side of the rivers is the home of the Joseonjok, ethnic Koreans in China. The Joseonjok speak the same language as North Koreans, more or less, and many of them actually have family connections in North Korea. According to the more nationalist interpretation, Manchuria, which is now part of China’s Northeast territory, is Korea’s ancestral homeland, and over the course of centuries there have been waves of migration between Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula. The latest wave of Korean migration to China was created by

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Japanese colonialism, which, according to Dong-hoon Seol and John Skrentny (2004, 2–3), was intended to make Manchuria a supply base for invading China. Japanese colonialism “forced entire villages to move as part of this program of farming work camps, and the Korean population grew from 600,000 in 1931 to approximately 2.2 million at the end of World War II,” all of whom settled north of the Yalu and Tumen Rivers and constitute what is now called in China the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. This area was also the site where Korean freedom fighters congregated to resist Japanese rule. The advent of the Cold War eased the return of the Joseonjok to the North but prevented them from departing for the South. In 1957, China conferred citizenship on them, making the Joseonjok officially Chinese but ethnically and culturally Korean. The Joseonjok–North Korean connection that is subterranean to the rules of sovereignty became both crucial and dangerous for refugees escaping the North. Jiangmi’s story in the novel spins on these tense and tender ties between North Korean refugees and the Joseonjok, where “marriage” is a transborder transaction for food and shelter and a promise of agency and social mobility, bordered by the underworld of sexual violence and exploitation. Therefore, before and during the initial phase of the great famine, there had already been border-crossing activities and transactions between North Koreans and the Joseonjok (Kim 2014, 556). For them, the so-called “border” is not a line but a living sphere shared and shaped by the communities on both sides. Sung-Kyung Kim (2016, 117) indicates that “North Korean mobility becomes possible as a result of not only the migrants’ rational calculation of cost-benefit, but also, and perhaps more importantly, their shared feelings and sensibilities constructed within history and culture.” She argues that “rather than understanding the borderland as two states adjacent to each other and centered on the border, it may be better understood as a common social space where people have established their dwelling” (S.-K.  Kim 2016, 118). Such a space penetrates different national systems and identities, because the borderland is “a common place” for “a common people” that had been there before the modern state institutionalized borders as an obstacle to movement or as the formal blockade for division. Kim’s argument counters our modernized intuition about the state and the border and suggests a more grounded way to understand border-crossing activities as everyday practices intensified and interrupted by the state in times of exception. Importantly, these border crossers are not merely victims of violence and

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treachery; they are people with agency who make decisions, albeit with limited choices, to survive (Choo 2006, 580).5 This critical understanding of the North Korea–China borderland brings to light the conundrum in naming North Koreans in China as defectors, refugees, or immigrants because these terms are state-oriented categories created to identify the unwanted and to shirk the responsibility of humane governance. In legal and political parlance, a defector is a person who gives up allegiance to one state in exchange for that to another, implying that that person may be in jeopardy if not transitioned into another place and protected by another state. In contrast, the term refugee has more of a humanitarian connotation and is governed by the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which defines the refugee as a person with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinions” and is “unable or unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country” or “outside the country of his former habitual residence and unable or unwilling to return to it.” In a nutshell, whereas a defector is someone who abandons home, a refugee is someone who cannot return home. However, that is only part of the picture, because many North Koreans have left North Korea not—at least not primarily—for political reasons but rather for food and subsistence, at a time when border control was more flexible. They are perhaps better characterized as so-called economic migrants or border crossers. However, the category of the migrant isn’t entirely applicable in the legal and political senses, either, because North Korean migrants do not enjoy the protection of the North Korean government. What makes things more complicated for them is that in 1961, China signed a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with North Korea, which commits China to returning defectors.6 China is rightfully worried that accepting North Koreans as refugees on the grounds of humanitarianism, as activists for North Korean refugees have pressed China to do, will compromise China’s relationship with North Korea, possibly bring about a greater exodus of refugees into China, and lead to the collapse of the North Korean regime. Both scenarios are likely to bring chaos to East Asia and unwelcomed by China and South Korea, although favored by the U.S. secret service and NGOs that wish to topple the North Korean regime (Hong 2014). At the same time, it is also difficult, if not impossible, for China to regard them as “immigrants” because most North Korean refugees expect to be transported to South

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Korea or a third country. China is but a way station on their escape to “freedom,” although some refugees have since settled there and mingled with the Joseonjok to become invisible. What is lost in these categories is more than the accuracy of describing what is happening on the ground; in fact, real people suffer from their inability to obtain status as defector, refugee, or immigrant and must live with the stigma of being North Korean. Undocumented and illegal, they are the impossible subjects that no one is supposed to see or know, except as well-established stereotypes that project the fear of communism. The Joseonjok on the China–North Korea borderland furthermore adds to the conundrum of naming North Koreans because the Joseonjok is as much a Chinese minority as a Korean diaspora.7 The Joseonjok/refugee’s connections to China, North Korea, and South Korea across Cold War division disrupt the boundaries of ethnicity and political allegiance. The Chinese term minzu, roughly translated as ethnicity in the Western context, connotes not only alterity to mainstream Chinese culture and ethnicity but also subalternity to South Korean citizenship as articulated by the regimes of loyalty and labor regulation. As Melody Lu and Shin Hyunjoon (2013, 163–164) point out, although the South Korean vision of globalization in the 1980s opened a window for the Joseonjok to return to South Korea to work and live, in the Cold War era they were seen as aligning with China and North Korea and, therefore, deemed to be traitors by the South Korean nation. The Joseonjok were particularly hurt when the term return was used to “justify the repatriation of some of them who overstayed their visas”; once regarded as compatriots welcomed to visit Korea as their homeland, they were now seen as “migrant laborers to be returned to their homeland China” (Lu and Shin 2013, 172). Moreover, the Joseonjok are deemed unwelcomed returnees by South Korea’s Overseas Korean Act of 1999 and so are unable to obtain the “status of sojourn” (F-visa) and only granted the visiting employment visa (H-2) to offer “simple labor” that is “dirty, dangerous, and demeaning”—“needed but unwanted” (Lu and Shin 2013, 172).8 In this way, the Joseonjok are wedded into what Dong-hoon Seol and John Skrentny (2009) call “hierarchical nationhood” of South Korea. Seol and Skrentny (2004, 7) also noted that, despite changes in South Korean policies since the late 1980s to facilitate their entry and employment, the Joseonjok are clearly defined “as foreigners” and deemed to be lower than Korean Americans, who fit better within a South Korean vision of globalization.

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This inter-Asian condition where Cold War and neoliberal logics persist creates a specter of comparison where the Joseonjok are juxtaposed with Korean Americans and North Korea defectors/refugees. Whereas the defectors/refugees are regarded as proof that communism is bad and passé, the Joseonjok is viewed as a national subaltern that South Korea is reluctant to accept even as it opens its arms to its Korean  brethren  in North America. In contradistinction to the model minority image of Korean Americans in the global family of Korea, the Joseonjok is a related yet differentiated diaspora, poor and politically suspicious. It conjures up conflicting specters of (Japanese and American) colonialism, (Korean and Chinese) nationalism, and wartime collaborations (between Japanese and Koreans to rule Korea and between Chinese and Koreans to fight Japanese and American imperialisms),9 all tossed into the treacherous settings of human trafficking, political defection, and sexual exploitation across the border. As traces of North Korea, defectors/refugees and the Joseonjok assemble to form a borderland around an isolated North Korea and serve as a window into its darkness. This refugee connection therefore reorients the discussion of Korean ethnicity and minority formation to the geopolitical history of the division system that thrives on the hysteria of national security and globalization. The possibility of collapsing North Koreans, the Joseonjok, South Koreans, and Korean Americans into one indistinguishable yet differentiated subject in the telos of immigration thus suggests a geopolitics of relation informed by histories that have separated coethnic brethren into a disarray of diasporic communities. They may look alike but are discernibly different in their linguistic and historical  formations. The possibility of the collapse entails a critique of North American multiculturalism and Korean nationalism as exclusive regimes of forced conversion where identity, equality, and citizenship are bestowed as “violent gifts” of freedom haunted by a history of dislocation, dispossession, and self-denial. It unveils the painful and traumatic passage of refugees’ becoming. As Mimi Nguyen (2012, 18) theorizes regarding the Southeast Asian refugee passage into the U.S.: Under liberalism’s purview, the transmutation from possession to personhood (at least to “full” personhood) is impossible, because there is no gift without debt—which is to say, no gift without claim on the other’s existence. For the anachronistic human targeted for transmutation, freedom is not generated from his or her own interiority but is manufactured, in the

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sense that this freedom bears the provenance of another’s hand. […] To be given freedom is a process of becoming without being.

For Nguyen, freedom is neither innate nor free but a claim of transformation that is open-ended and forever indebted. As a gift, freedom is not what one deserves as a (human) being but what one earns at a cost for a chance of becoming. This spectral modality of becoming without being is a powerful form of social death where the past is replaced by the present and where the remainder of its absence is as stubborn as memory.

The Loneliness of Freedom Exploring the complex scenarios of becoming without being in the refugee’s passage at the China–North Korea borderland, How I Became a North Korean is unveiled by three distinct yet interrelated voices to deconstruct what it means to be a North Korean and to explore how this traumatized and stigmatized subject can be related to, or even become, us, if they succeed in making the transpacific journey, as implied by the seemingly plain title. The interweaving narrative structure suggests a geopolitics of relation that is embedded, yet often lost, in the slippage of refugees, defectors, immigrants, and returnees where any of these labels shapes the lives of the protagonists but never fully explains them. Once made refugees, they must doggedly strive to become something else. The novel begins with Yongju’s story. He is the son of a North Korean official who is killed by the Dear Leader at a party in Pyongyang. Yongju’s story is the story of a political defector; since his father was killed, he no longer has a future in North Korea. He escapes with his mother and sister—from whom he is soon separated upon arrival in China. In contrast, Jangmi’s story is one of hunger and sexual exploitation; she was born into a “lowly seongbun” family—with connections to South Korea and a poor peasant background—which means that in North Korea she would be barred from any opportunity for upward mobility. With an illicit baby in her stomach, Jangmi must leave if she is to give her baby a chance for a future. The third—and arguably the most important character—is Daniel Daehan Lee. Born and raised in the Yanbian Autonomous Korean Prefecture until he was nine years old, when his family emigrated to the U.S., he is both a Joseonjok and an Asian American who can easily slide between Chinese, Korean, and Asian American identities. In fact, his grandfather crossed into North Korea during China’s Cultural Revolution

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and gave birth to his mother there. Thus, if Daniel’s mother and her family had not recrossed while they were still able, he could have been born a North Korean. Though he was taken to the U.S. without his consent, Daniel still is a young immigrant who retains memories of the past and is only a flight away from them. He represents what refugees could become and everything that they are not: a native son of China and a privileged subject that retains everything from the past and holds the right to return. Daniel returns to China because he is bullied in the school and needs a trip home to “rest and recover” (Lee 2016, 59). He is a returnee, “a body returning to the past to escape the past” (Lee 2016, 64). However, homecoming does not bring him the expected rest and recovery but instead casts him further into struggle. Shamed and upset to find out about his mother’s affair with a church deacon, Daniel runs away into the North Korea–China borderland. There he is stripped bare by local gangsters and descends into the life of an undocumented outcast with little to help him survive: My passport, ID card, tools, everything is lost, except the money tucked under my underwear. Daniel Daehan Lee, citizen of the [People’s] Republic of China and permanent resident of the United States of America, has now become an undocumented migrant, as if I have never existed. (Lee 2016, 107)

Likewise, Yongju also realizes that after crossing the border into China, he is “no longer a privileged Pyongyang man but a North Korean” others can “abuse without punishment;” he learns that “a North Korean man in China was less than a man” (Lee 2016, 115). More chillingly, Jangmi admits that “We who entered China, and all the children created from these marriages [with Chinese men who bought wives from North Korea], did not officially exist” (Lee 2016, 28). Such renditions of loss not only suggest a parting with the past but also the stigmas attached to North Korean refugees as downtrodden, unwanted, illegitimate, and, worst of all, nonexistent. As illegal aliens without documentation, they become people “who cannot be and problem[s] that cannot be solved” (Ngai 2004, 5). As Yongju realizes after being rescued by an underground missionary network, “We, we, we—that was what I had become” (Lee 2016, 142), this is the price he must pay for temporary safety. The novel’s depiction of the spectral modality of bare existence is meant to critique Christian evangelism, but it also reproduces the myth of

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victimhood without agency. As the novel unfolds, the missionary network that is supposed to be the savior of refugees turns out to be equally devious, if not more so, than the snakeheads who have smuggled Jangmi, Yongju, and others across the border. Missionary Kwon, a self-proclaimed humanitarian who preys on Jangmi and runs shelters like prisons, “saves” the refugees so that he can receive financial support from charitable individuals and organizations. Kwon is depicted as the archetype of evil in the novel—an imposter of the worst kind. He claims to be pious and a loyal servant of the Lord and to have risked his own life to save the refugees, but the institutional logic of the church outruns his morality as he forces Christian doctrine on them and makes the acceptance of the Christian faith a prerequisite of freedom. On top of that, though he rescues Jangmi, who has been forced to perform online sexual services, Kwon rapes her. Regardless of his intentions, Kwon becomes part of the machine that oppresses the refugees and makes humanitarian efforts complicit with state mechanisms that created and destroyed them in the first place. (Indeed, Kwon often threatens to send the refugees back or report them to the police in order to get what he wants out of them.) For the refugees, the road to freedom through the church becomes another form of imprisonment and adds another layer to their trauma as Christianity promises a becoming without being. Unlike Yongju and Jangmi, who wish to leave their North Koreanness at the border, Daniel maintains a fine balance between being a North Korean and a Joseonjok while keeping his American identity strictly invisible. His Joseonjok upbringing in the borderland gives him an unusual advantage to bond with the refugees by observing and experiencing what it is to be one of them. Empowered by his knowledge about China and the world at large, he is able to be their savior by finding food, scouting, making contact with the church, and, ultimately, reaching out to his mother’s missionary network to rescue himself and his friends. For Daniel, becoming a North Korean is an accident or, perhaps, a test of God’s will, and this unexpected twist gives him the opportunity to be an activist and act on what is right. In the end, he loses his faith in God, but he gains a new understanding of humanity and a chance to return home as an Asian American and earn a Harvard degree. As missionary Kwon argues, unlike the refugees, Daniel has a choice. Even though he experienced the escape with them, Daniel will not be marked as a North Korean whose “history [is] wiped out in a new country” and regarded with suspicion as a spy or an oddity (Lee 2016, 182). Indeed, his escape experience may have shaped North Koreans

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into a coethnic collectivity that Daniel can easily fit into, but their ultimate destinations separate Jangmi, Yongju, and Daniel, for Daniel is a returnee, not a refugee. As an Asian American, he is already free. Becoming North Korean is a misrecognition that brings up close a history to which he is related but does not belong. In How I Became a North Korean and other Asian American works like it, return is a narrative apparatus to draw connections between Asian America and Asia and to explore the responsibilities that Asian American literature may bear toward Asia. Crystal Parikh (2013, 122) argues that to move from the legal-bureaucratic setting of human rights and toward an ethical rearticulation of humanitarianism, “minor literatures can offer a crucial staging of the form and meaning of responsibility and protection within a transnational frame of vulnerability, violence, and justice” to generate empathy as well as “ethical obligation” toward others who lie beyond our sight. In this sense, it might be helpful to regard return less as a privilege—while not denying that it is a privilege, either—than as a narrative prompt to respond to Odo’s question. That is, by making Daniel an “accidental activist”10 for North Korean refugees, How I Became a North Korean encourages us to ponder an ethics of copresence, where Asian Americans and Asians may share a common identity and even history but are directed to different destinies, where salvation—in religious and nonreligious terms—plays a powerful role in the making of U.S.–Asia relations and where a transpacific continuum of minorities is created along with the hierarchy of nations that places North Korea at the bottom. The transnational entanglement of copresence does not necessarily guarantee a new community, but it powerfully manifests the differences that are “always present within racialized publics and diaspora” that Asian Canadian critic Christine Kim (2016, 120) hopes, through a nuanced reading of what is forgotten in the Korean diaspora, may “construct new forms of intimacy.” As Daniel admits years after their rescue, “I was there. I was a witness,” but the refugees were “survivors” (Lee 2016, 233–234). The recognition of difference in sameness signals that a geopolitics of relation— informed by the Cold War hysteria and the hierarchy of nationhood— works to scrutinize, classify, and separate others from us, all the while painting a new geography of desire through precarious intimacy and migrant passage. Conflating returnee and refugee in the post-Cold War borderlands of East Asia, How I Became a North Korean returns us to the real origins of the Korean War (the anti-Japanese resistance since the 1930s and the civil

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war that started immediately after August 15, 1945) that was extended by the U.S. into the larger division system in East Asia. It also compels us to consider the ends of Asian American literature in the transpacific terrain. Min Hyoung Song (2013, 8) contends that with the arrival of the “children of 1965”—the generation of Asian American writers who were born or arrived in the U.S. after immigration reform, Asian American writing and literary studies have since evolved out of their sociological “ethnic” contexts into a litmus test for American futurity: “One does not read and study Asian American literature to understand only Asian Americans. One also does so to understand American literature in its expansive plasticity and its potential for constant renewal.” Defining Asian American as an open-ended identity, Song (2013, 51–52) contends that Asian American writers “show how race and literature together open up the potential for a becoming that is neither a regression nor an evolution but an involution.” His view squarely locates Asian American literature in the U.S., in which the not-yet is to be fulfilled by whoever crosses the border to occupy and claim Asian America with aesthetic finesse and demographic significance. By ushering in the North Korean and the Joseonjok into postracial Asian America, How I Became a North Korean can easily secure its place in Asian American literature as a borderland, transpacific text that symbolically fulfills the promise of the not-yet by widening the “horizons of expectations about what the future holds for America” (Song 2013, 58). However, How I Became a North Korean also stretches the limits of Asian American literature in a different direction. More than concerning itself with the potential that North Korean and the Joseonjok may bring to envision an American literary futurity, it asks how Asian American writing may relate to others outside North America. Such relatability is not merely ethnic and cultural but political and ethical as well. It implies an entangled relationship that has the capacity to wrest Asian American away from the comfort of U.S. domesticity to bear witness to the refugee’s struggle. Making Asian American copresent with North Korean refugees forces us to look critically at the intermediary role that the Asian American has played in the making of Western liberalism and humanitarianism that requires Asians to occupy the position of the victim. But, as Daniel realizes, they are survivors not victims, and their stories are not always about successful immigration. How I Became a North Korean thus issues a critical challenge to Asian American studies: in what ways can Asian American literature produce an awareness of the geopolitics of relation that Asian Americans are, even if not complicit, at least copresent in the displacement

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of North Korean refugees? For Asian Americans, what does it mean to bear witness to their survival?

Literature as Activism For our present discussion, the literal copresence of refugee, migrant, and returnee has both ethical and theoretical implications: it raises questions about the politics of representation (who can represent the refugee?) as well as the ethics of relation in terms of how closely an Asian American text can stand with the subjects it portrays while admitting to its intermediating role (what entitles Asian Americans to represent them?). Put simply, copresence alerts us to the intersected activism of Daniel, Krys Lee, the missionaries, the refugees themselves, and the media in coproducing knowledge about North Korea and gestures to the discrepant relations between North Korea, the Joseonjok, South Korea, and Asian Americans undergirded by Cold War and globalization logics. It also forces into view a geopolitics of relation that China, the two Koreas, Asian America, and the U.S. are uneasily aligned in the post-Cold War milieu where human rights are upheld as a universal value and the meaning of the refugee is oversimplified. An ethic of copresence therefore demands that we think not so much about whose side Asian Americans are on but rather how they have become part of the system and how they may change the system by redefining Asian American literature otherwise to reorient our views of and relations to the world. In this sense, literature is also form of activism—a vehicle for activating and acting on critical works that matter “beyond the nation,” to multiply “imaginary anchoring point[s]” and “alternative horizon[s]…through which to engage the world histories that are sedimented in our daily lives and take seriously the materiality of Asia rather than reducing it to an adjective” (Lee and Kim 2015, 13). Yen Le Espiritu (2017) also advocates a “relational comparative approach” beyond the nation-state to realign our critical project toward the active remnants of imperial wars that continue to shape and form unruly and unexpected relations between such spaces as Okinawa and the Philippines. Such propositions relocate our critical focus on theorizing relations and bring our critical imaginations to bear on realpolitik without reducing Asian American activism to a telos of immigration and salvation.

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In an interview with The Guardian, Krys Lee revealed that the starting point for writing this novel was “when North Koreans became part of [her] world,” for which she received threats: The threats came from an unlikely source—a Christian missionary, someone ostensibly involved in a good cause, setting up hideouts for defectors. [Krys] Lee and the missionary were working together to help a refugee, but when, on a rare occasion, the man “was left alone with me, he got on his knees and begged me to get him out of the country,” Lee recalls. “He said: ‘You’re different from the others.’” It turned out that the missionary wanted to keep him locked up in China, and—claiming a conversion—to use him to solicit donations. (Laity 2016)

The missionary referred to in the interview is the archetype of the missionary Kwon; thus, by writing this novel, Lee herself, like Daniel, also becomes an “accidental activist” who endeavors to save the lives of others by offering insights into their worlds. There is no doubt that such an activist orientation in literature is important, especially in light of the increasing globalization of the refugee crisis today and the revival of “world literature” as an ethical response to the other’s arrival. Scholars have argued that literature should play “an active role in the world’s ongoing creation” (Cheah 2016, 186) and to “deliver us out of our ‘comfort zone’” (Palumbo-Liu 2012, 10) so as to generate a relational thinking of ethics. While it is necessary to focus on the humanist/humanitarian aspiration of literature, the emphasis on representation, without sufficient contextualization, also risks mistaking the roots of the problem. What made North Koreans leave in the first place and what structural forces are in place to maintain their plight are arguably the more critical questions to consider. And it is these questions that may steer literature’s humanist/humanitarian concern toward questions of geopolitics. In other words, it is not enough to focus merely on the refugee as a figure of human rights and humanitarian activism, and one should not take the inter-Korean division for granted. Instead, a humanist perspective should encourage us not to take refugees and human rights as “soft weapons” for achieving regime change in North Korea and compel readers of literature to also consider how a peaceful transformation of the Korean Peninsula may bring an end to this crisis, or at least how the experience of the refugee may reshape our vision of the world.

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How I Became a North Korean ends with a bleak vision of freedom, which, in Yongju’s words, is filled with loneliness, loss, and money (Lee 2016, 235). While he is free to do what he pleases in South Korea, he is also iron cast as a model North Korean refugee, “testifying in front of churches, to the National Assembly, to anyone who will listen” (Lee 2016, 238), for South Korea will not let him forget his dilapidated home in the North and his dispersed family nowhere known, for which he is often bitter and always nostalgic. Jiangmi also wasted no time transforming herself in the South, but she too is bogged down by the past as her injured leg could not fully heal and “drags a beat behind the rest of me” (Lee 2016, 243). Lee’s careful depictions open a window into the psychic and affective states of North Korean refugees who, despite having “freedom,” are emotionally further bound to the North as a space of being that is now denied to them. While these characters do not express a desire to return, their sense of loneliness and loss and “leg dragging a beat behind” are potent symbols of the painful division for which their obtainment of freedom becomes a self-defeating allegory, since division lives on the systematic production of enemies, defectors, and comrades. The freedom of loneliness and loss is a paradox that can be resolved only by the end of the division because it envisions a world where the refugee may cease to be a category of victimhood and otherness, where home is no longer forbidden to them. Raymond Williams (1977, 54) reminds us that literature is never simply ideology but “means of production, developed in direct if complex relations with profoundly changing and extending social and cultural relationships: changes elsewhere recognizable as deep political and economic transformations.” If this idea still rings true today, it might be helpful to ask how Asian American literature and critique may contribute to the transformation of North Korea through the peaceful resolution of the Korean War. How can it enlighten its readers to an understanding of Asian Americans’ embeddedness—through the discourses of freedom, salvation, and security—in the keeping of U.S. Empire in Asia? How will Asian American literature reshape U.S. national/imperial imaginations to reveal and critique what U.S. domestic and foreign policies have done to Asia? In short, can literature imagine and activate a turn to/in geopolitics to undo the hierarchy of nations and reset the world order? In particular, how may we rethink the story of refugee from one that seeks freedom elsewhere to that which hopes to go home? Can literature help us to

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imagine a world where division along geopolitical and ideological lines may cease to be the logic of the day? A text like How I Became a North Korean is a timely and welcome addition to Asian American literature, but we need more than that. We need literature to activate campaigns that can contribute to empathetic understandings across ideological faultlines and, as Rob Sean Wilson (2007, 211) argues, to “[create] different modes of thinking and writing, studying, and teaching the world against and inside” capitalist-imperialist formations and globalization. If the North Korean refugee is indeed a new figure for Asian American activism, then its future does not lie in the “involution” of Asian America, whether by deferral or deconstruction, but in bringing down the racial and imperial logics that set up North Korea firmly as a racial, political, and civilizational alterity in the first place. And herein lies the significance of Daniel’s ambivalent identity and belonging: North Koreans are made—not born—by U.S. imperial humanitarianism and inter-Korean division based on anticommunism. Such are the imperial legacies Asian American critique must confront and engage.

Notes 1. Hae Yeon Choo (2006, 582) reported that according to the Ministry of Unification in South Korea, the total number of North Korean settlers in South Korea in 2005 was 6870. Benjamin Haas (2018) noted that about 30,000 North Korean defectors are currently living in the South. 2. See Maeda (2009). An updated version of this view can be also gleaned in Schlund-Vials (2018). 3. Yen Le Espiritu et al. (2018, 186) have argued that “Whether expressed through Asian immigrant exclusion or inclusion, the U.S. state has produced itself as a global power through the formation of the “Asian American” as a means to resolve the contradictions of the U.S. racial capitalism and its imperial military project. Yet we wish to emphasize that for this reason, now, as before, the ‘Asian American’ is a critical mediating figure for diagnosing racial power and geopolitical ordering.” 4. Lankov (2006) notes that the number of North Korean defectors/refugees reaching South Korea has dwindled since 2005 because the South Korean government changed its policy from one that encourages defection to that which discourages defection by reducing the aid package. This does not mean the North Korean refugee issue has been resolved, but rather that their crossings have been made more difficult and costly.  Miriam Jordan (2018) reports that since 2004, at least 220 North Korean defec-

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tors and refugees arrived in the United States when Congress passed the North Korean Human Rights Act and opened the door to political refugees. But only six have been admitted since November 2016 when Trump was elected president. 5. Sung-Kyung Kim’s research (2014, 557) for instance shows that “North Korean women choose to cross the border in order to perform the role of ‘good mother’ and ‘filial daughter’” to suggest that their migration was propelled not only by economic forces but also by other social concerns. 6. For a more detailed discussion of how China is caught in the conundrum of multi-lateral treaty obligations in dealing with the North Korean refugees, see Neaderland (2004), Lankov (2004). 7. The Chinese term is minzu, meaning nationality, and China boasts itself being a country consisting of 56 minzu although the Han nationality occupies about 90% of the population. 8. The depiction of  the Joseonjok as downtrodden outcast living in South Korea is often seen in South Korean popular culture. Na Hong-jin’s action thriller film Hwanghae (The Yellow Sea, 2010) is an obvious example. 9. On the complexities of such inter-colonial and inter-national entanglements during the periods of Japanese colonialism, U.S. occupation, and the Korean War, see Cumings (2010). 10. The term is borrowed from the title of Bae’s interview (2016) with Krys Lee.

Works Cited Bae, Hannah. 2016. “‘Accidental Activist’ Krys Lee On Writing in Korea and How I Became a North Korean.” NBC News, 30 August. https://www.nbcnews. com/news/asian-america/accidental-activist-krys-lee-writing-korea-howi-became-north-n640076. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. Choo, Hae Yeon. 2006. “Gendered Modernity and Ethnicized Citizenship: North Korean Settlers in Contemporary South Korea.” Gender & Society 20 (5): 576–604. Cumings, Bruce. 2010. The Korean War: A History. New York: Modern Library. Douzinas, Costa. 2007. Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. New York: Routledge-Cavendish. Espiritu, Yen Le. 2017. “Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies: A Transpacific Critique.” American Quarterly 69 (3): 483–490. Espiritu, Yen Le, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama. 2018. “Transpacific Entanglements.” In Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, edited by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, 175–189. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Haas, Benjamin. 2018. “‘Forever strangers’: The North Korean Defectors who Want to Go back.” The Guardian, 26 April. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2018/apr/26/forever-strangers-the-north-korean-defectors-whowant-to-go-back. Hirsch, Marianne, and Nancy K. Miller. 2011. “Introduction.” In Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, edited by Miarianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller, 1–20. New York: Columbia University Press. Hong, Christine. 2012. “The Fiction of the North Korean Refugee Orphan.” 38 North, 19 September. https://www.38north.org/2012/09/chong091912/. Hong, Christine. 2013. “Reframing North Korean Human Rights: Introduction.” Critical Asian Studies 24 (4): 511–532. Hong, Christine. 2014. “Stranger than Fiction: The Interview and U.S. Regime-Change Policy Toward North Korea.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 52 (4): 1–11. Jordan, Miriam. 2018. “U.S. Admission of North Korean Defectors Has Slowed to a Trickle.” The New  York Times, 25 October. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/10/25/us/north-­korea-­refugees-­defectors-­usa-­utah.html?rref=co llection%2Ftimestopic%2FNorth%20Korea&action=click&contentCollection= world®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacem ent=4&pgtype=collection. Kim, Christine. 2016. The Minor Intimacies of Race: Asian Publics in North America. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Kim, Sung-Kyung. 2014. “‘I Am Well-Cooked Food’: Survival Strategies of North Korean Female Border-Crossers and Possibilities for Empowerment.” Inter-­ Asia Cultural Studies 15 (4): 553–571. Kim, Sung-Kyung. 2016. “Mobile North Korean Women and Their Places in the Sino-North Korean Borderlands.” Asian Anthropology 15 (2): 116–131. Laity, Paul. 2016. “Krys Lee Interview: ‘North Korea Became Part of My World, and then I Got Threats.’” The Guardian, 8 August. https://www.theguardian. com/culture/2016/aug/12/krys-lee-interview-north-koreans-became-part-ofmy-world-and-then-i-got-threats-­. Lankov, Andrei. 2004. “North Korean Refugees in Northeast China.” Asian Survey 44 (6): 856–973. Lankov, Andrei. 2006. “Bitter Taste of Paradise: North Korean Refugees in South Korea.” Journal of East Asian Studies 6: 105–137. Lee, Christopher, and Christine Kim. 2015. “Editorial: Asian Canadian Critique beyond the Nation.” Canadian Literature 227: 6–14. Lee, Krys. 2016. How I Became a North Korean. New York: Viking. Lu, Melody Chia-Wen, and Hyunjoon Shin. 2013. “Ethnicizing, Capitalizing, and Nationalizing: South Korea and the Returning Korean Chinese.” In Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia, edited by Xiang Baio, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, and Mika Toyota, 162–177. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Maeda, Daryl. 2009. Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Neaderland, Benjamin. 2004. Quandary on the Yalu: International Law, Politics, and China’s North Korean Refugee Crisis. Stanford Journal of International Law 40 (1): 143–177. Ngai, Mae. 2004. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2012. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham: Duke University Press. Odo, Franklin. 1971. “Preface.” In Roots: An Asian American Reader, edited by Amy Tachiki, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo, and Buck Wong, vii–xi. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Paik, Nak-chung. 2005. The Shaking Division System. Seoul: Changbi. Palumbo-Liu, David. 2012. The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age. Durham: Duke University Press. Parikh, Crystal A. 2013. “‘Come Almost Home’: Human Rights and the Return of Minor Subjects.” Journal of Human Rights 12 (1): 121–137. Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. 2018. “Introduction: Crisis, Conundrum, and Critique.” In Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, edited by Cathy J.  Schlund-Vials, 1–18. Nork York: Fordham University Press. Seol, Dong-hoon, and John Skrentny. 2004. “Joseonjok Migrant Workers’ Identity and National Identity in Korea.” Paper presented at the International Conferences on Korean Identity: Past and Present, held by the Institute of Korean Studies at Yonsei University and the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, Seoul, Korea, 29 October. Seol, Dong-hoon, and John Skrentny. 2009. “Ethnic Return Migration and Hierarchical Nationhood: Korean Chinese Foreign Workers in South Korea.” Ethnicities 9 (2): 147–174. Song, Min Hyoung. 2013. The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing as an Asian American. Durham: Duke University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Rob Sean. 2007. “Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic.” In The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. Edited by Rob Sean Wilson and Chris Connery, 209–223. Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press. Yoneyama, Lisa. 2016. Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes. Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 9

The Crusades and a Marginal History of Islam: Tariq Ali’s Activism and Alternative World in The Book of Saladin Pei-chen Liao

The English rock band the Rolling Stones’ explicitly political song “Street Fighting Man” is about Tariq Ali1—a British Pakistani novelist, producer, and longstanding activist who has been campaigning against authoritarian regimes, globalized capitalism, and inequality. Born to Marxist parents in pre-Partition Lahore, Pakistan, in 1943, Ali began organizing street protests from a young age and became hostile to the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan. Because of his political activism, Ali’s life was endangered, forcing him to move to Britain in 1963, where he studied at Oxford. Ali’s activism, however, did not diminish with his migration. He became president of the Oxford Union, engaged in student politics, agitated for workers’ rights and instigated labor uprisings, and led the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, in praise of which “Street Fighting Man” was written. Even

P.-c. Liao (*) Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_9

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though Ali’s public profile as a Leftist celebrity began in the 1960s, his mission as an activist did not reach full maturity until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when he began producing films and writing novels. As Ali claimed in an interview with James Campbell, he shifted his priorities, “which were completely political until the early 1980s, by forming Bandung Films.”2 Ali made this shift because it was “time to move off the streets and be on the other side, in terms of looking at people and not being one of them.”3 To some extent, Ali and other protesters had to become involved en masse in local and global campaigns when they took to the streets, so as to demonstrate power in unity and to push protest to policies. After moving off the streets, Ali started to draw inspiration and strength from art, which allowed him to look more closely and deeply at people’s singularity along with collectivity and to reworld the world more creatively and affectively. In terms of writing novels, Ali, despite his atheism since childhood, spent two decades composing a series of historical novels as his response to the conflicts between Christianity and Islam.4 The Gulf War in 1990, in particular, aroused Ali’s interest in Islam, when he was angered by “a wave of crude anti-Arab propaganda.”5 He then started “writing the series of historical novels known as the ‘Islam Quintet,’”6 including The Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), The Book of Saladin (1998), The Stone Woman (1999), A Sultan in Palermo (2005), and Night of the Golden Butterfly (2010).7 Even if writing novels was an alternative to his activism in the streets, it is surprising that Ali turned to the historical novel rather than some other genre. What is there in the form of the historical novel in general, or the postcolonial historical novel in particular, that enables him to achieve what he could not as a historian, a political commentator, or a street fighter? To explore these questions in depth, this chapter will center on the second volume, The Book of Saladin, which has been cited as the “best,”8 “particularly rewarding,”9 and the “most historic”10 of the quintet. Culminating in the Kurdish Sultan’s uniting the politically divided Arabs against the Crusaders and regaining al-Kuds (Arab name for Jerusalem) in 1187, The Book of Saladin depicts a cosmopolitan world where Jews and Muslims lived harmoniously and did not identify with the European Crusaders, who were commonly perceived as cross-eyed barbarians. The novel has eerie implications for the post-9/11 world that is divided into “us” (namely the U.S.) and “them,” wherein Muslims, like the Crusaders in medieval times, are often stereotyped as “bearded terrorists.”11

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This chapter will, first of all, contextualize The Book of Saladin against the literary return of Anglophone and postcolonial fiction to historical forms. Pheng Cheah’s normative theory of postcolonial literature as world literature and Hamish Dalley’s notion of the dialectic between typification and singularity in the postcolonial historical novel will be significant for my textual analysis of the novel. As a postcolonial historical novel, The Book of Saladin undermines the EuroAmerica-centered world system and imperialism in the existing world by returning to the contested histories of the Crusades in the twelfth century by representing typical/normative characters of Muslims and Christians. Blurring the line between history and fiction, it furthermore embeds, within the story of Salah-ud-din ibn Ayyub (known in the West as Saladin), a variety of imagined nonrepresentative or singular characters, including Salah al-Din’s Jewish scribe and his wives, whose voices were rarely heard in medieval histories. By looking critically inward into Salah al-Din’s court, this chapter argues, Ali’s novel not only narrates a marginal history of Islam but imagines an alternative world that is built on reflexivity and empathy rather than imperial expansion.

(Un-)Worlding: (Post-)Colonial Histories and Typical Representation The ongoing debate about Islam and the West since the First Gulf War and the advent of the War on Terror is concerned not only with the clash of civilizations but with the perception of culture and identity in the age of globalization. After the end of the Cold War, Samuel Huntington posited that global politics would enter a new phase, in which “the peoples and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.”12 According to Huntington’s argument, in a world that is becoming smaller, the increasing interaction between Western and Islamic civilizations will inevitably lead to conflicts because differences between these civilizations are “real” and “basic,” and among the fundamental differences, “religion” in particular is the “most important.”13 The Gulf War, 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to support Huntington’s hypothesis for civilizational conflicts. Voicing dissent, however, Edward Said criticizes Huntington’s controversial conception of civilizational identity based on homogeneity and Orientalism,

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and especially his ignorance of “the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization” and of the fact that “the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture.”14 Adopting a poststructuralist approach, Jean Baudrillard deconstructs and reconstructs the clash of civilizations or religions as “triumphant globalization battling against itself.”15 In Baudrillard’s perspective, “what is at stake is globalization itself,” rather than Islam or the West per se, “for it is the world, the globe itself, which resists globalization.”16 That is, any nation, civilization, or religion would have incurred the wrath and revenge of “all the singularities (species, individuals and cultures)” had it become a single power to dominate the world and to allow “no alternative form of thinking.”17 As Said and Baudrillard have maintained, the issue of the clash of civilizations should be readdressed through a postcolonial lens, taking into serious consideration the singularity and heterogeneity of individuals and cultures, as well as the hegemonic power of imperialism and globalization. If, on 9/11, terrorism is rendered an act that “restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a system of generalized exchange,”18 art attempts to achieve the same goal without the extreme violence of terrorism. Baudrillard, for example, contrasts violent singularities, as exemplified by terrorism, with “subtle ones, such as those of language, art, the body or culture,” to create another world order that thwarts the global system.19 According to Said, the artistic form that could be an effective tactic of reworlding is the postcolonial historical novel. As Ali recalls, after he published The Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, Said encouraged him to “tell the whole bloody story” and not to “stop midway.”20 In addition to Ali’s Islam Quintet, examples of the postcolonial historical novel, which, as Ahmed Gamal defines, is “grounded in the political and historical formation of the Third World,”21 can also be found in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999), and Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002). It seems that, since the 1980s, the historical novel has become a popular genre in postcolonial literature whose aims, as Cheah illuminates, are “to track the processes of globalization that make the world” and “to contest this world by pointing to the temporality of another world.”22 The two aims call attention to the two senses of the “normative force” of “worlding,” whose distinction, according to Cheah, is crucial.23 The first refers to the globalizing process of imperial expansion and reductive view of the Other, the consequence of which is homogeneity and “unworlding” to some extent. The second, in

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contradistinction, pertains to the aesthetic process and the worldly force of postcolonial literature to remake the world informed by non-Western traditions and temporalities.24 Postcolonial literature is thus world literature, too. Despite the worth of postcolonial literature as world literature, the postcolonial historical novel has not received as much critical attention as it has deserved. As Dalley points out, “To date, the postcolonial scholarship that has engaged with literary realism” has largely “dismissed” the postcolonial historical novel as “theoretically naïve at best and as an expression of imperialistic attitudes at worst.”25 There is also “the charge of escapism frequently leveled at the genre, which offers a convenient way out from having to confront the difficulties of the present or even attempting to actively intervene in it.”26 Ali has also come under fire. Even if he is “a non-fiction and creative writer of great worth,” as Claire Chambers acknowledges, “his novels to date have generated relatively little sustained criticism.”27 Not only are the values of Ali’s novels downplayed, but they are even criticized as having been written “primarily to put ideological messages across.”28 Philips and Jones assert that there may be “an uncritical element” to much of Muslim-identified authors’ and activists’ return to the glorious past of Islamic civilization.29 In their opinion, in promoting anti-Western anti-imperialism, Ali’s novels “may well celebrate one imperial civilization—albeit one lost in time—and condemn another, without seeing the parallels between them.”30 In the words of Olivier Roy, the danger of Ali’s postcolonial historical novels is that, “by systematically referring to history and Islamic civilization, one misses what is going on now among the vanguard of Islamic militants.”31 To put it simply, critics of the postcolonial historical novel in general or of Ali’s novels in particular cast doubt on anti-Eurocentric resistance that, while criticizing imperialism, seems to appropriate or repeat imperialist oppressive structure by arguing about a superior non-Western ideal. According to Western conception of modernity, namely, “a consciousness obsessed with the time of the ‘now,’”32 they also question how progressive “nonmodern” time-­ consciousness could be as the postcolonial historical novel returns to the premodern past and world. Nevertheless, engaged with the contested histories of the Crusades in the twelfth century, Ali’s The Book of Saladin is a postcolonial historical novel that is not merely anti-Eurocentric; more importantly, it attends to the normative forces of both Western and Islamic civilizations. It exemplifies how the problem of narrating contested histories is connected to the

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question of the politics of truth and the epistemic norms inherent in different types of historical knowledge that chroniclers provide. On the one hand, Ali’s novel aims at faithful representation of history even if, in the style of postmodern historiographic metafiction, history is argued to be a constructed narrative and any presumed truth rendered spurious.33 In the novel’s explanatory note, for example, Ali makes clear that his endeavor is “to remain loyal to historical facts and events.”34 On the other hand, Ali is aware that, in the case of the Crusades, “Christian and Muslim chroniclers often provided different interpretations of what actually happened.”35 Different interpretations suggest different epistemic norms imposed on knowledge claims, including truth, justification, unity, and coherence. Based on historical actuality, it is true that the Crusades occurred. However, historians are in disagreement about the justification of the Crusades. Some believe that the Crusades were “Europe’s first colonial wars, a kind of proto-imperialism visited on the Muslim people,” while others argue that the First Crusade was conceived as “a war of expulsion,” to expel Arab and Turkish Muslim invaders and to help regain lost Byzantine territory.36 In other words, whether the Crusades were colonial or postcolonial in nature remains debatable. However, if historians often give different interpretations of the Crusades, both Christian and Muslim sides of stories should be heard. The problem is that, even if “the conquest and reconquest of Jerusalem has been the subject of many epics,” it has “seldom [been] seen through Islamic eyes.”37 Ali’s The Book of Saladin fills that gap by providing a memoir of Salah al-Din; nonetheless, in narrating the process of Salah al-Din’s reconquest of Jerusalem, it also brings out the globalizing force of Muslim expansionists. In The Book of Saladin, Ali illustrates the imperialist discursive cartography by mapping and remapping the Byzantine Empire and the region under the nominal sovereignty of the Caliph of Baghdad. Before the narrative unfolds, the novel presents a map of “the Near East in the late twelfth century,” a region encompassing southwestern Asia and northeastern Africa. According to Cydney Grannan, “the term Near East was coined in the 19th century when Westerners divided the ‘Orient’ into three parts: the Near East, the Middle East, and the Far East.”38 During World War II, the British military referred to the first two parts simply as the Middle East. No matter which regions the Near East or Middle East denotes, both terms are, as Grannan alerts us, “completely Eurocentric, meaning that the Western English-speaking historians named the region on the basis of its position relative to Europe.” The map that Ali’s novel provides

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specifically marks Damascus and Jerusalem as the Frankish territory after the First Crusade. Naming the first three sections after three cities, “Cairo,” “Damascus,” and “Jerusalem,” Ali reveals that the memoir of Salah al-Din, much like the map, employs a similar cartographical approach to the world. Despite its non-Western view of the Crusades, the overarching story of Salah al-Din exhibits how the Sultan, like the Franj, also sees the world as “a spatial category, determined solely in terms of extension.”39 Just as Salah al-Din, in Cairo, tells his scribe Ibn Yakub, “Our people will soon return to al-Kuds. The cities of Tyre and Acre, of Antioch and Tripoli, will once again belong to us.”40 For Salah al-Din, the center of the Islamic world is al-Kuds, and the other cities are conquered to expand that world. Having taken years to complete, the long journey of Salah al-Din and his armies from Cairo to Damascus and finally to the holy land of Jerusalem is undertaken as a backlash against the globalizing force of the Franj, but it is also referred to again and again throughout the novel as “jihad,”41 launched by “the most united army of Believers ever raised to defeat the infidel.”42 Returning to Europe’s and Islam’s colonial-imperial past through medieval crusades and jihad, Ali’s novel shows that globalization, neither a modern nor a purely economic phenomenon, has had a paradoxical relationship with “religious actors” who “are both agents of globalization and principals in its backlash”43 from medieval times to the present post-9/11 period. To realistically represent the history of European and Islamic imperialism, The Book of Saladin conforms to the conventions of the classical historical novel by creating, in addition to characters based on historical personages like Salah al-Din himself, fictional exemplary characters who embody typical qualities and mass experience of the medieval society. George Lukács’s The Historical Novel was one of the earliest attempts to theorize the practice of the historical novel “arising at the beginning of the nineteenth century at the time of Napoleon’s collapse,”44 which “for the first time made history a mass experience.”45 Even if most novels set in the past were liable to be considered historical, Lukács heralded Sir Water Scott as the first author whose novels can properly be called historical. It is because “the so-called historical novel before Scott” treated history “as merely costumery”46 and lacked individuals who are “historical-social types,” namely exemplary characters “from the historical peculiarity of their age.”47 In Ali’s The Book of Saladin, examples of invented typical characters include Shadhi, “an old Kurdish warrior in his nineties,” who has been “a retainer with the Sultan’s father”48 and taught young Salah

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al-Din how to ride and use a sword. Over the years, Shadhi has accompanied Salah al-Din on all campaigns, but he does not live to see Salah al-Din recapturing Jerusalem. As Shadhi tells Ibn Yakub from his deathbed, “It was not granted to me to see my boy’s victory, but I am sure it will come…. His name will live forever. Who will remember Shadhi?”49 Despite his being one of the few characters whose stories are narrated from the firstperson perspective of “I,” Shadhi’s final words indicate that in the novel, as well as in the medieval Muslim community that he is part of, his significance is determined by his role as a representative of a collective entity of loyal servants who devote themselves to the Sultan and submit to Islam. Another group of typical Muslim characters are Salah al-Din’s soldiers whose “solidarity was created by the knowledge that if they succeeded in driving the Franj out of al-Kuds, this army of which they were a part would be remembered throughout history.”50 Those soldiers’ wish to be remembered reveals their desires to be honored as individuals of heroic deeds, but, even worse than Shadhi, they remain anonymous throughout the novel and the history it represents. Losing the individuality that they crave, typical characters like Shadhi and the soldiers embody a normative medieval Muslim community that is governed by the trend of self-sacrifice and by the noble cause to serve the Sultan and to spread Islam by converting the Unbelievers. In addition to inventing exemplary characters of Muslims, Ali’s novel also portrays their rivals, the Franj, to exemplify another mode of normative force and colonial occupation. Salah al-Din recalls that, as a child, he heard his father and uncle “talk of how the barbarians had first arrived, and of how they ate human flesh and did not bathe.”51 In the eyes of Shadhi, the Franj are “arse-fucking icon-worshippers” who “broke treaties whenever it suited them,” whereas his Sultan is “too honorable.”52 Ibn Yakub also heard of rumors “travelled to every city” about the Franj “who, over a hundred years ago, during a siege, had roasted their prisoners on an open fire and eaten them to assuage their hunger.”53 In the novel, stories circulated in the family circle, personal experiences, and widespread rumors seem to fix a typical image of the Franj as uncivilized savages, an image that is normally applied to non-Westerners in European colonial discourse and literature, as seen, for example, in Joseph Conrad’s famous novella Heart of Darkness and in Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden.” Ali’s representation of the medieval Crusaders also presents an eerie parody of the “crusade,” the war on terrorism that American President George W.  Bush declared against “evil-doers” and

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“barbarism”54 in the aftermath of the September 11 events. The parody, or uncanny doubling, reminds the reader how, “in the clash between a religous [sic] fundamentalism … and an imperial fundamentalism determined to ‘discipline the world,’ it is necessary to oppose both.”55 However, in the classical historical novel adapted from national tales, as Dalley enunciates, opposite sets of exemplary characters represent “social forces in conflict,” and “the violence of the conflict between different modes of social organization is legitimated as the inevitable side effect of progress.”56 With its emphasis on societal change and national progress as the end result, the classical historical novel suggests “a mode of historical understanding that is teleological, and treats the present as the outcome of ineluctable processes.”57 In contrast, Ali’s postcolonial historical novel utilizes and modifies the practice of typification as a tactic to challenge “linear temporality” and “Romantic concepts of nationalism” inherent in the classical historical novel58 as it brings to light the medieval and present society’s similar normative conceptions of the Other, leading tragically to a vicious circle of violence rather than progress.

An Alternative World: The Singular Needless to say, Ali is a politicized writer and an anti-imperial activist, but he is not “uncritical,” as Philips and Jones assert. Neither does he celebrate the Islamic past while condemning contemporary imperialism by providing “something convenient and simplistic about a world view that characterizes one set of peoples and histories as ‘good,’ others as ‘bad.’”59 Rather, minding the literary practice of typification and its implied cultural political ideology, The Book of Saladin criticizes the normative and globalizing force of both the Western and Islamic civilizations. Alternatively, it imagines a world that is grounded on reflexivity and empathy, rather than imperial expansion or religious fundamentalism, through an alternative mode of representation—the singular. The singular, as Dalley explains, paradoxically emerges “out of typification, and in opposition to its epistemic violence.”60 Unlike “the post-colonial strategy of ‘writing back’” that, in critiquing imperialism, simply turns the peripheral and marginal into the central,61 the realism of the singular recognizes the almost irresistible power of normativity, examines such influences on one’s thinking and behavior, and seeks resistance “not from outside [the typical], but from within.”62 Such a dialectical fashion of representation that fluctuates between typification and singularity can effectively evoke the reader’s

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affective engagement, which is a major goal of the genre. As Lukács argues, “What matters … in the historical novel is not the re-telling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events.”63 Specifically, the reader’s affective engagement boosts the capability for empathetic understanding because, when we enter the world the novelist creates, “we should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality.”64 Since the key element of the historical novel is “to communicate through character a sense of empathy and thence of historical process,” as Jerome de Groot further elaborates on Lukács’s theory, “the novel is best when it concentrates on the minor details and the marginalized characters in order to communicate the ‘social and human motives’ of behavior.”65 In Ali’s novel, examples of the singular characters include Salah al-Din’s Jewish scribe and his wives and concubines, whose voices of dissent from the margins of gender, race, and class create an opening for an alternative world to emerge and disrupt the Islamic world from within. Although, as the title suggests, The Book of Saladin is framed as a memoir of the Kurdish ruler Salah al-Din, it is actually a multiperspective tale narrated by a variety of imagined minor voices, including Salah al-Din’s Jewish scribe, Ibn Yakub. More precisely, the medieval history of Islamic civilization and the Crusades that The Book of Saladin provides is seen through Jewish rather than Islamic eyes. The history, therefore, is necessarily marginal and unorthodox. Ibn Yakub is Ali’s invented character, a Jewish scribe to whom Salah al-Din dictates his memoirs because he does not trust his own official secretary. Ibn Yakub may be an invented character, but he is, in some aspects, similar to what Lukács terms a “middling” or “mediocre” “hero.”66 That is, as “a minor character,” he is paradoxically “the great historical figure” who “is able to live himself out to the full as a human being, to display freely all his splendid and petty human qualities,” whereas, in the historical novel, the most important figure, like Salah al-Din, “is necessarily only a minor character.”67 As a Jew and a middle-­ class scribe, Ibn Yakub “surprises us by his omnipresence” in Ali’s The Book of Saladin and “reveals himself only in the most interesting attitudes”68 toward the Sultan and the Crusaders. On the one hand, as a scribe, Ibn Yakub is surprisingly critical when he observes the Sultan’s hatred for a Franj knight named Reynald. Seeing the Sultan swear to Allah in open council that, “if the opportunity ever arose, he would decapitate Reynald with his own sword,” Ibn Yakub is frightened by “the fact that ever since the Franj had first arrived and stunned our world with their barbaric

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customs and habits, our side too had become infected, imbibing some of the worst of the traditional practices of the Franj.”69 On the other hand, toward the end of the novel, when the Sultan’s armies are conquering Jerusalem, Ibn Yakub wishes for the Crusaders’ quick death because, as he confesses, seeing “the sand darkened by the blood of the Franj,” he “recalled the accounts of what they had done to my people in Jerusalem and other towns.”70 Even if by temperament he is “not a vengeful person,” he then prays silently, “pleading with the Almighty to hasten the victory of our Sultan.”71 In Ali’s novel, Ibn Yakub is portrayed as a human being with virtues and weaknesses that are historically imposing, but he is not entirely like the middling hero who, in the classical historical novel, “drifts, almost involuntarily, to the winning side.”72 Rather, as shown through his reflexivity and conflicted desires, Ibn Yakub is at once a sociohistorical type of character who discloses the real-life problems and conditions that led to the historical crisis of the Crusades and a self-conscious individual of singularity who is critical of the growing violence of his society. Taking into account both the increasing tension between the West and Muslim worlds since the Gulf War and the present Israeli-Arab conflicts, having a critical Jew as the narrator of the book of Salah al-Din “raised a few eyebrows when it was published in the Arab world.”73 And yet, the mediated voice of Ibn Yakub helps make the distant history of twelfth-­ century Islamic civilization familiar and sympathetic to the reader, especially when the novel, having a global reach and market, reached Western and non-Muslim audiences.74 In the novel, other minor yet historically significant characters are Salah al-Din’s women, who represent the forgotten or unrecorded history of Islam from the margins of gender. Whereas “the principal male characters of this story are based on historical personages,” as Ali explains in the novel’s explanatory note, he had to imagine the female characters because “women are a subject of which medieval history is usually silent.”75 It is known in history, for example, that Salah al-Din had sixteen sons, but “nothing has been written about their sisters or mothers.”76 In fact, the historical novel, whether British, Anglophone, or postcolonial, is usually gendered. In Scott’s historical novels, for example, where women are represented, “with very few exceptions,” the heroines “represent the same type of pristinely correct, normal English woman.”77 Despite the criticism about Scott’s providing “no room in these novels for the interesting and complex tragedies and comedies of love and marriage,” Lukács argues that Scott’s greatness lies precisely in “his capacity to give living human

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embodiment to historical-social types.”78 According to Lukács’s argument, Scott is true to the spirit of nineteenth-century society when he portrays his heroines as “the same type of pristinely correct, normal English woman.” It is because, as Diana Wallace observes, the “‘typical’ woman is one who … rarely, if ever, comes into contact with world-­ historical figures.”79 Quite the opposite has been argued, however, about the heroines in Ali’s Book of Saladin. Even if medieval history is usually silent on the subject of women, Ali’s heroines are “portrayed as capable of developing their intellectual and creative skills across class differences.”80 Salah al-Din’s favored wife Jamila, for example, is seen in the novel as a fairly bold woman of unusual intellect. As the daughter of an “enlightened Sultan,” Sultana Jamila is well educated because her father “refused to tolerate any attempt to restrict her learning” and “insisted that she be educated, just like her brothers.”81 Jamila grows to share some beliefs of the rationalists like Ibn Rushd, who “once remarked that if women were permitted to think and write and work, the lands of the Believers would be the strongest and richest in the world.”82 Jamila teaches the women in Salah al-Din’s harem what she has learned and, according to Halima, “keeps our minds alive.”83 Gamal, therefore, argues that we should see Jamila as “one of the rationalist mouthpieces of the author.”84 Sajid Ali, Nafees Pervez, and Waseem Malik likewise claim that, “through Jamila’s character, Ali gives a voice to his own ideology.”85 Robyn Creswell shares with these critics the view of freethinkers like Jamila as “remarkably ‘modern’ individuals, seemingly unconstrained by social conventions.”86 When critics see Ali’s heroines as “modern” characters or as Ali’s “mouthpieces,” they are questioning, to some extent, the authenticity of these critically intelligent and active Muslim women characters and the medieval Islamic world that these women represent. Lacking empathy, contemporary Western critics fail to share medieval Muslim women’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in their situation. The historical “truth” they appear to believe is of a medieval society where Muslim women were exclusively victims and constrained entirely by social and religious forces. It is the racist myth of Muslim women as passive victims, this chapter argues, that Ali’s postcolonial historical novel breaks by creating an alternative world where there exists an obvious tension between sociohistorical types and singular individuals. Readers who are empathetically engaged in the world that Ali’s novel creates should feel medieval Muslim women’s struggle to balance social expectation and self-determination. On the one

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hand, the novel is faithful to the gendered structure of medieval society by portraying Salah al-Din’s women, including Jamila, as secondary citizens whose movements are limited to the domestic sphere of the harem and who have very few rights to interfere in the public affairs that men are involved in. On the other hand, as discussed previously, through Jamila’s unusual intellect and bold criticism of the dominant patriarchal structure, Ali presents a history of the marginalized aspects of medieval Islamic society, where there “existed many extremely powerful queens and princesses,” as existed historically “in both the Abbasassides caliphate in Baghdad, and the Moghul Empire in India.”87 Instead of dividing realism into typical abstraction and singular individuality, Ali’s postcolonial historical novel treats the singular, such as Jamila’s deviation from gendered norms, “as a dialectical result of typification, one that emerges through abstraction to trouble its borders.”88 The novel’s affective engagement of women who refuse to be types breaks the racist myth dominant in the West and, in creating dissonance from within, simultaneously generates an alternative world that troubles the medieval history of Islam projected by the traditional mode of realism, in which women are often silenced or reduced to abstract types without singularity. Moving off the street, Ali the activist has become a novelist who fights in real and imagined worlds, in the past and the present, for the rights of the marginalized and for a nonviolent future. His Book of Saladin is a historical novel in which Salah al-Din is paradoxically necessarily a minor character and Salah al-Din’s Jewish scribe and women are the true heroes who, under the constraints of the historical period, have tried to live full, rich lives as human beings. Through the strategies of mapping and typification, the novel challenges the normative and globalizing force of both the Western and Islamic civilizations before and now. Through the dialectic between the typical and the singular, it further narrates an unorthodox history of Islam by including the voices of Jews and women and imagines an alternative world that is at once anti-imperial and self-reflexive. Ali’s intention of writing The Book of Saladin and the other volumes of the Quintet, as he himself declares, is “to encourage further discussion and debate within and without the House of Islam.”89 Writing postcolonial historical novels to open up an ethicopolitical vista for the existing world, Ali demonstrates that art—an aesthetic form of subtle singularity in Baudrillard’s words—can exert a normative force in the world.

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Notes 1.

On March 17, 1968, when the band’s lead vocalist Mick Jagger attended an antiwar rally protesting the Vietnam War outside London’s U.S. embassy, Ali’s activism inspired him to write the lyrics, “Hey! Said my name is called disturbance / I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, / I’ll rail at all his servants.” According to Leo Burley in “Jagger vs Lennon,” the lyrics had appeared in The Black Dwarf, a nineteenth-­century radical newspaper, which Ali helped relaunch in 1968. 2. Tariq Ali, interview by James Campbell, “A Life in Writing: Tariq Ali,” The Guardian, May 8, 2010. 3. Ali, interview by Campbell. 4. As explained in The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Ali, a well-known atheist, grew up in a nonbelievers’ household, where religion “played a tiny part” (15). Claiming not to believe in God, “not even for a week, not even between the ages of six and ten,” Ali only began to read the Koran and learn Islamic history at the age of twelve because his father wanted him to know his people’s history and, most importantly, “to know what it is that one is rejecting” (15-16). Even though a tutor and a local mullah were hired to teach him Koranic verses, Ali’s knowledge of Islamic history remained slender. 5. Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms (New York: Verso, 2002), 23. 6. Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, 23. 7. Night of the Golden Butterfly, the final volume of the Quintet, is set in twentieth-century Pakistan and post-9/11 London and France. Among the five volumes, it is the only exception that does not dwell in the past but instead comments directly on the present situation in South Asia and the world. 8. Robyn Creswell, “The Heretic and the Holy,” review of Islam Quintet, by Tariq Ali, The National, May 7, 2010. 9. Muneeza Shamsie, “Restoring the Narration,” in Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora, ed. Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert (New York: Routledge, 2015), 65. 10. Hugh S. Galford, “Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree/The Book of Saladin/The Stone Woman (Book Review),” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 19, no. 8 (2000): 102. 11. Ali, interview by Talat Ahmed, Socialist Review, November, 2006. 12. Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 23. 13. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” 25.

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14. Edward Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” The Nation, October 4, 2001. 15. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (New York: Verso, 2003), 11, emphasis original. 16. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 11, 12, emphasis original. 17. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 9. 18. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 9. 19. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 96. 20. Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, xi. 21. Ahmed Gamal, “Rewriting Strategies in Tariq Ali’s Postcolonial Metafiction,” Postcolonial Text 6, no. 4 (2011): 3. 22. Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 210. 23. Cheah, What Is a World?, 8. 24. Cheah, What Is a World?, 8–12. 25. Hamish Dalley, “Postcolonialism and the Historical Novel,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2014): 52. 26. Mariadele Boccardi, The Contemporary British Historical Novel (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 22–23. 27. Claire Chambers, British Muslim Fictions (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 37. 28. Richard Philips, “Remembering Islamic Empires,” New Formations 70 (2010): 101. 29. Richard Phillips and Rhys Jones, “Imperial and Anti-Imperial Constructions of Civilisation,” Geopolitics 13, no. 4 (2008): 734. 30. Phillips and Jones, “Imperial and Anti-­Imperial Constructions of Civilisation,” 734. 31. Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam (London: C.  Hurst Publishers, 2004), 110. 32. Cheah, What Is a World?, 200. 33. For more detailed discussions on the postmodern turn in historiographical writing, see Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), and Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988). 34. Ali, The Book of Saladin (London; New York: Verso, 1998), xiii. 35. Ali, The Book of Saladin, xiii. 36. Thomas F.  Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 119, 4–7, emphasis in original. 37. Bruce King, review of The Book of Saladin, by Tariq Ali, World Literature Today 74, no. 1 (2000): 245.

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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

Cydney Grannan, “Are the Middle East and the Near East the Same Thing?,” Encyclopedia Britannica. Cheah, What Is a World?, 5. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 33. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 129, 200, 244, 263, 266. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 250. Luke M.  Herrington, “Globalization and Religion in Historical Perspective,” Religions 4 (2013): 145. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 19. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 23, emphasis original. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 19. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 19. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 10. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 204. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 244. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 33. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 139. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 199. George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President upon Arrival,” White House, September 16, 2001. Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, ix. Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 22, 23. Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel, 23. Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel, 24. Philips, “Remembering Islamic Empires,” 104. Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel, 28, emphasis original. Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel, 27–28. Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel, 37, emphasis original. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 42. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 42. Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (New York: Routledge, 2010), 28. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 33, 35. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 45. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 45. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 199. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 272. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 272. Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel, 23. Ali, Interview by Ahmed.

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74.

It is worth noting that, as pointed out in the interview with Ahmed, “The Book of Saladin is the only novel by Tariq that has been translated into Hebrew and published in Israel.” 75. Ali, The Book of Saladin, xiii–xiv. 76. Ali, The Book of Saladin, xiv. 77. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 34. 78. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 35. 79. Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 12. 80. Gamal, “Rewriting Strategies in Tariq Ali’s Postcolonial Metafiction,” 13. 81. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 95. 82. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 126. 83. Ali, The Book of Saladin, 95. 84. Gamal, “Rewriting Strategies in Tariq Ali’s Postcolonial Metafiction,” 13. 85. Sajid Ali, Nafees Pervez, and Waseem Hassan Malik, “The Secular Side of Islam,” Journal of Culture, Society and Development 3 (2014): 66. 86. Creswell, “The Heretic and the Holy.” 87. Ali, Interview by Ahmed. 88. Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel, 31, emphasis original. 89. Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, 4.

Works Cited Ali, Tariq. The Book of Saladin. London; New York: Verso, 1998. ———. The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. New York: Verso, 2002. ———. Interview by James Campbell. “A Life in Writing: Tariq Ali.” The Guardian, May 8, 2010. Accessed April 9, 2018. http://www.guardian.co. uk/books/2010/may/08/tariq-­ali-­life-­in-­writing/print. ———. “Interview: Tariq Ali.” By Talat Ahmed. Socialist Review, November, 2006. Accessed March 1, 2016. http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article. php?articlenumber=9871. Ali, Sajid, Nafees Pervez, and Waseem Hassan Malik. “The Secular Side of Islam: A Case Study of Tariq Ali’s Islam Quintet.” Journal of Culture, Society and Development 3 (2014): 61–68. Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism. Trans. Chris Turner. New  York: Verso, 2003. Boccardi, Mariadele. The Contemporary British Historical Novel. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Burley, Leo. “Jagger vs Lennon: London’s Riots of 1968 Provided the Backdrop to a Rock’n’roll Battle Royale.” Independent, October 23, 2011. Accessed April 9, 2018. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­entertainment/music/ features/jagger-­vs-­lennon-­londons-­riots-­of-­1968-­provided-­the-­backdrop-­to-­ a-­rocknroll-­battle-­royale-­792450.html. Bush, George W. “Remarks by the President upon Arrival.” White House, September 16, 2001. Chambers, Claire. British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Creswell, Robyn. “The Heretic and the Holy: Tariq Ali’s Histories of Islam.” Review of Islam Quintet, by Tariq Ali. The National, May 7, 2010. Accessed April 9, 2018. http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/ the-­heretic-­and-­the-­holy-­tariq-­alis-­histories-­of-­islam. Dalley, Hamish. The Postcolonial Historical Novel. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014a. ———. “Postcolonialism and the Historical Novel: Epistemologies of Contemporary Realism.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2014b): 51–67. De Groot, Jerome. The Historical Novel. New York: Routledge, 2010. Galford, Hugh S. “Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree/The Book of Saladin/The Stone Woman (Book Review).” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 19, no. 8 (2000): 102. Gamal, Ahmed. “Rewriting Strategies in Tariq Ali’s Postcolonial Metafiction.” Postcolonial Text 6, no. 4 (2011): 1–19. Grannan, Cydney. “Are the Middle East and the Near East the Same Thing?.” Encyclopedia Britannica. (2016). Accessed July 24, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/story/who-­invented-­the-­internet Herrington, Luke M. “Globalization and Religion in Historical Perspective.” Religions 4 (2013): 145–65. Huntington, Samuel. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. King, Bruce. Review of The Book of Saladin, by Tariq Ali. World Literature Today 74, no. 1 (2000): 245. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Madden, Thomas F. A Concise History of the Crusades. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

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Philips, Richard. “Remembering Islamic Empires: Speaking of Imperialism and Islamophobia.” New Formations 70 (2010): 94–112. Phillips, Richard, and Rhys Jones. “Imperial and Anti-Imperial Constructions of Civilisation: Engagements with Pre-Modern Pasts.” Geopolitics 13, no. 4 (2008): 730–35. Roy, Olivier. Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. London: C. Hurst Publishers, 2004. Said, Edward. “The Clash of Ignorance.” The Nation, October 4, 2001. Accessed July 7, 2019. https://www.thenation.com/article/clash-­ignorance/. Shamsie, Muneeza. “Restoring the Narration: South Asian Anglophone Literature and Al-Andalus.” In Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations, edited by Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert, 59–69. New York: Routledge, 2015. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

CHAPTER 10

Zeugmatic Formations: Balikbayan Boxes and the Filipino Diaspora Fritzie A. de Mata

This chapter examines the practice of sending boxes to balikbayan in the Filipino diaspora. The term balikbayan refers to Filipinos worldwide who occasionally return to visit the motherland. Aside from monetary remittances, Filipinos all over the world either ship or carry with them on their flights standardized balikbayan boxes or minicontainers filled with imported goods back to the Philippines. In the United States alone, according to Forex Cargo, one of the leading balikbayan box services, they deliver at least 300,000 balikbayan boxes each year to the Philippines. Today, the Philippine government offers incentives for Filipinos around the world to send these minicontainers to their families and friends left behind because it highly benefits from the industry. In 1989, the balikbayan box business contributed 4.2 billion pesos (or $190 million) to the Philippine economy.1 Of these 4.2 billion pesos, 3.3 billion went directly to Filipino families in the form of basic commodities, 155 million went to the Philippine government through custom duties and taxes on the

F. A. de Mata (*) University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_10

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shipped minicontainers, and the remainder went to the businesses involved in shipping. These numbers most likely have increased today because of the continuous outmigration of Filipinos and the recent decrease in the luggage weight limit, or stricter baggage allowances, in international flights.2 This study relates several distinct histories to present a complex understanding of balikbayan boxes. My first approach situates these mini containers in relation to the Marcos regime and the history of Filipino labor migration. Though not completely unrelated to these histories, I then interrogate the connection between the homogeneous nature of these mini containers and globalization through the standardization of the shipping industry. I also contextualize balikbayan boxes through a phenomenological analysis of the terms pasalubong (which means Filipino gift exchange) and balikbayan to reveal the other types of linkages created from below through balikbayan boxes. I have two goals in mind. First, I want to show how a phenomenological approach can undo the determinations of globalized capital, Philippine nation-state, and identity to reveal what they mask—that balikbayan boxes are about social relations and Filipinos carving out a space for themselves, not necessarily for their individual selves, but to maintain their connections with others. The practice of sending balikbayan boxes pertains to the materialization of social relationships. Secondly, to further continue undoing these bigger structures that appear to overdetermine people’s lives, I will look at the figurations of balikbayan boxes within Filipino American literature. A figural reading of balikbayan boxes through rhetorical tropes reveals the other histories, the lived experiences of individuals, the choices they make, and the motivations behind their actions. Thus, I take literary texts not as types of mediation or imitations of reality but as accounts of lived experience. Most scholarship on balikbayan boxes analyzes them through the framework of identity and the nation-state. Vicente Rafael sees balikbayan boxes as representations of immigrant success and the promise of immigration.3 He understands balikbayan boxes as being tied to Filipino American immigrant identity because they are indicative of the subjection or domination of Filipinos both within the borders of the Philippines and the American Empire. In a similar vein, Jade Alburo locates the significance of balikbayan boxes in relation to first-generation Filipino American identities. According to her, balikbayan boxes reveal Filipino Americans’ experience of dislocation or their entrapment between two different places, the Philippines and the United States.4 Similar to Rafael, Alburo

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perceives the box as a type of or index of restriction, oppression, and unfreedom. Although Clement Camposano examines balikbayan boxes outside the United States and beyond U.S. and Philippine relations, he also relates the act of sending balikbayan boxes to identity, specifically to the production of Filipino women’s gendered identities.5 For Camposano, balikbayan boxes tie these women to their roles as domestic workers abroad and back home because these mini containers become the means by which their gendered identities as mothers and domestic helpers get maintained.6 In other words, it is through balikbayan boxes that Filipino migrant women’s gendered subjectification happens. Even though these scholars discuss balikbayan boxes as part of a gift-giving exchange, their works focus more on the construction of identity that happens in relation to balikbayan boxes, or how these boxes constitute gendered, national, and postcolonial identities. They all understand balikbayan boxes as representations of Filipino or Filipino American identities. They also pay more attention to individual identities instead of the social relationships that occur through the act of sending balikbayan boxes.

Histories Marcos and the Balikbayan Program In 1973, a year after the declaration of martial law in the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, dictator and president, launched the Balikbayan Program to encourage Filipinos primarily in the United States to come back to the Philippines as tourists to generate foreign exchange and income for the country. The program offered various incentives, such as cheaper plane tickets, tax breaks, and discounts in stores. At its inception, the program was meant to clean up the image of martial law and show that the Philippines was not in a state of complete disorder.7 Balikbayans were provided with identification cards that eased the process of identifying them and distributing their benefits. The government implemented the Balikbayan Program with certain rules and regulations, such as legal definitions of what counts as a balikbayan. These restrictions have been adjusted throughout the years, and balikbayan benefits have expanded today. It is important to note that it was also during this time that Marcos institutionalized the Philippines as a laborexporting state in order to alleviate the growing national debt. The Balikbayan Program was part of Marcos’s strategy to respond to the country’s growing debt to the IMF and World Bank.

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Filipino Labor Migration The Philippines’ historically specific colonial and neocolonial relationship with the United States partly explains its transformation as a contemporary source of migrant labor. In the 1920s to 1930s, Filipino migration to the United States, largely male migrant workers to the West Coast, marked a foundational historical moment of Filipino outmigration.8 Migration during this period was predicated upon the American Empire’s economic demand for cheap and racialized labor. The Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 restricted Asian migration to the United States, and to supply its labor needs, the United States started importing Filipino workers. At this time, Filipinos were considered U.S. nationals and not citizens. This categorical loophole allowed the United States to source its labor needs from the Philippines because Filipinos could legally cross American borders. This represented one of the largest waves of Filipino outmigration.9 Scholars such as Robyn Rodriguez claim that the Philippines’ long history as a source of migrant labor for the United States has played a formative role in the current diaspora of Filipinos as global workers and the transformation of the Philippines as a labor-brokering state: “The neo-colonial socio-­ economic conditions and institutional rationality of the colonial labor system made make [sic] labor export necessary and practicable as an economic intervention in the Philippines by 1974.”10 The formation of Filipinos as global seafarers and nurses also has its roots in the American Empire.11 After World War II and the end of American formal colonization of the Philippines in 1945, U.S. neocolonial relations with the Philippines began, and unfair economic relations were established only benefitting the United States. Several agreements, such as the Parity Amendment, opened up the Philippines’ natural resources and public utilities to the American government, businesses, and citizens. The United States maintained major economic privileges in the Philippines, but the Philippines no longer had the benefit of access to American markets. In the 1970s, this neocolonial relationship drove the Philippines further into debt to the IMF and World Bank while the country was under the United States-backed Marcos dictatorship.12 The IMF and World Bank restructured the Philippine economy by changing its policies from import substitution to export production and devaluing the Philippine peso. This restructuring destroyed the Philippine economy and only served to force the Philippine government to borrow more money. It also compelled many Filipinos to move abroad

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because of the rising unemployment. Filipino migration increased during this period and expanded beyond the United States.13 Through the passage of a presidential decree, the 1974 Philippine Labor Code, Marcos institutionalized labor export and mandated workers’ remittances to bolster the economy to address the growing national debt and deficit.14 Marcos eventually required workers to send their remittances through the Philippine banking system, and workers’ failure to do so resulted in punishment.15 However, the transformation of the Philippine state as an exporter of human labor can also be attributed to globalization and the creation of flexible labor.16 For instance, the oil boom in the Middle East in the 1970s and the rapid transformation of East Asian countries (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea) into export-oriented production sites resulted in the heavy reliance on imported cheap and contractual workers from the Philippines.17 In addition, due to the feminization of labor in these export-processing zones, the economic development of these newly industrialized countries (NICs) also depended on the labor of Filipina OCWs working primarily as domestic workers. Filipino labor export is profitable for the Philippine state because migrant workers remit millions of dollars home every year, and these remittances bolster peso-dollar exchange rates.18 Today, 10 percent of the Philippine population is located in 104 different countries. One out of two Filipinos has a family member working abroad.19 The Philippines ranks second to Mexico as the leading labor exporter.20 The Middle East, Asia (particularly East Asia), and Europe are the top three regional destinations for overseas contract workers21 (OCWs).22 A large majority of Filipinos outside the Philippines also reside in the United States. Balikbayan Box Although the Balikbayan Program was a Marcos state-sponsored policy, the beginnings of the balikbayan box was an expedition from below by Filipino migrants in the United States and was tied to the tradition of pasalubong, or Filipino gift giving. The creation of the balikbayan box was meant to take advantage and push the limitations of airline regulations, specifically on how much checked baggage Filipinos could take with them on the plane. In the 1970s, Filipino immigrants in the United States utilized discarded boxes of electronics, computer equipment, Pampers, and canned goods in order to bring pasalubong or gifts to their families

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and friends when returning to the Philippines.23 Balikbayan boxes maximize on the allowed weight and size limits of checked baggage on planes. They are cheaper, lighter, and more spacious than suitcases, enabling Filipinos to pack and bring larger quantities of pasalubong back home. Balikbayan boxes also have their roots in the Filipino tradition of pasalubong. Filipinos bring back items from their travel destinations to give as gifts to those who were not physically with them while they were away. A pasalubong can be either food or a nonperishable item that is meant to communicate a part of their experience while traveling. For instance, many bring back a local delicacy from their travels to share with family or friends. Through this practice, travelers bring back a piece of their destination, a materiality of their experience. The experience of their travels is embedded in these objects because they are associated with one’s travel destination and journey. Several connections are made through the act of pasalubong: the geographical link between the home location and travel destination, the social ties between the one who left and the ones left behind, and the imaginary relation between those who did not get to travel and the place visited by the traveler. The act of giving brings together two different places spatially apart from each other, social relations between people, and place with people. There is also a notion of time from being away from one’s dwelling or the duration of travel; hence, a pasalubong is supposed to fill in or atone for the person’s absence while traveling, a way of also saying that the traveler thought of the one left behind while away. Since most studies on balikbayan boxes primarily focus on their aspect as a gift,24 I would also like to contextualize these mini containers in relation to the containerization of the shipping industry to highlight its dimension as a commodity and its connections to the globalization of capital, since a balikbayan box functions both as a gift and a commodity. The standardization of balikbayan boxes and the global shipping industry results from the economization of space to increase the efficiency of capital’s mobility. The standardization of balikbayan boxes started from airline baggage regulations.25 By the 1980s, Filipino entrepreneurs in the United States manufactured standardized cardboard boxes with the name “balikbayan box” printed on the sides. They were first made for air transport and then later adapted for sea transport. The homogeneous nature of balikbayan boxes allows them to easily pile up and fit perfectly in standardized shipping containers without wasting space. They function as miniature shipping containers, only in the form of cardboard instead of metal. Cargo companies make it almost effortless and inexpensive to ship

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these mini containers door to door. The cargo company picks up the mini container from the sender and delivers it to the recipient within 21 days to a month. Sending these mini containers costs about $70 to $80 each depending on the delivery location in the Philippines and on its area of origin. In contrast to transporting balikbayan boxes through air, shipping allows one to pack any amount of goods without weight restrictions as long as they fit in the space provided within the container. Shipping balikbayan boxes is a cost-effective way of using space and sending imported goods to the Philippines. Similar to the trend of balikbayan boxes, containerization also concerns moving goods efficiently at minimum cost. The standardization of the shipping industry through containerization grew out of the need to reduce the total cost of moving freight by decreasing the transportation time of commodities. To minimize transportation time, containers needed to be homogeneous and interchangeable so that freights could be quickly transferred between any ships, trains, ports, and trucks all over the world.26 For instance, any truck, train, or port in Japan is able to smoothly move a container from the United States. Containerization also reduces the time spent on loading and unloading goods because there is no longer a need to manually carry and transfer goods from each mode of transportation to the next. Most of the work done at container ports is highly mechanical, automated, and computerized. A crane moves thirty to forty containers an hour from ship to dock and simultaneously empties and fills a ship at once.27 As a result, the volume of goods and containers being circulated increases and transportation costs decrease. Transport time can now be easily calculated because of the routinization in the movement of goods. Also, the homogenization of containers and balikbayan boxes obscures the heterogeneity of the goods inside them. Standardization creates a frictionless movement for capital; capital homogenizes both time and space in the drive for efficiency and maximization: “Containerization links peripheries to centers in novel fashion, making it possible for industries formerly rooted to the center to become restless and nomadic in their search for cheaper labor. Factories become mobile, ship-like, as ships become increasingly indistinguishable from trucks, trains, and seaways lose their difference with highways.”28 In this instance, the ocean becomes a mere extension of the highway, a transportation surface for terrestrial production. It has become homogenized without a role distinct from that of a highway.29

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Balikbayan boxes move with the frictionless movement of capital through the shipping industry, and labor and death become hidden beneath this seemingly effortless flow of capital. Similar to shipping containers, balikbayan boxes are also “the very coffin of remote labor-power, bearing the hidden evidence of exploitation.”30 Two kinds of boxes arrive in the Philippines from the Filipino diaspora: balikbayan boxes filled with imported commodities and coffins of Filipino OCWs. Every day about five or six corpses of Filipino OCWs return in coffins to the Philippines without much attention from the government or the media.31 The balikbayan box is a microcosm of the containerization of the shipping industry, and containerization enabled the business of balikbayan boxes to flourish. The trend of balikbayan boxes and containerization are part of the globalization process. Globalization exacerbates the trend of sending balikbayan boxes because of the intensification of global economic inequality that results in the continuous outmigration of Filipinos all over the world. Many Filipinos today send balikbayan boxes to connect with family and friends instead of going back home in person since it is cheaper for commodities to circulate than actual bodies even though Filipino bodies have also been hypercommodified in the process of globalization. The nature of contractual work also limits the opportunities of Filipino OCWs to come back to the Philippines. Balikbayan boxes operate as material connections that sustain the Filipino labor diaspora. These mini containers have become a generic manner of shrinking the distance between the Philippines and the Filipino migrant’s location abroad. Balikbayan Balik in Tagalog means to return, to come back to the space or location one came from. The term has an aspect of both space and movement. While bayan refers to town, country, and the nation-state, it also pertains to one’s relations with others, or social ties. It also points to the center of governance, where economic and social activities mainly take place, the location of a market, plaza, or municipal building. For the Marcos regime and the Philippine state, bayan related to the Philippine nation-state in order to interpellate Filipinos back to the state. This is a territorial definition that carries with it notions of Filipino “race” and state-imposed official nationalism.32 However, bayan, and thus balikbayan, has many more meanings beyond its dominant articulation by the Philippine state. It is important to examine the longer history of the word bayan in order

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to understand its nuance and to disassociate it from the state’s usage and loosen up the state’s control of its subjects. A balikbayan is a person who goes back to where he came from and to the social relationships he left behind.33 I would further argue that the term balikbayan pertains to the process or act of coming back to a place and social relations since the term can also be used as a verb in Tagalog. It is common for Filipinos when meeting other Filipinos for the first time to ask where they come from and whether they know so-and-so. In this respect, Damon Woods considers the long history of the word bayan.34 In examining Tagalog documents and by understanding Tagalog society in relation to Southeast Asia, Woods finds that individuals identify themselves in two ways: by location and through relationships: “In terms of relationships, horizontal and existential are what are expressed—based on contemporary realities and not ancestry. Three types of relationships tend to be used to express relationships: familial, age, and shared experience.”35 Bayan refers to both a location and social connections or ties with others who come from the same place and therefore have similar experiences from living in the same area. According to Woods, the most common way to identify oneself is to use the prefix ca, such as cababayan, to indicate shared experience.36 The prefix itself is relational and not individual since it links one to another based on shared experience and imparts meanings of companionship and likeness. Wood’s findings suggest that the term bayan during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries does not necessarily pertain to race, nation, or origin, especially since these are concepts that would not be introduced to the Philippines until much later. It was not until the nineteenth century that bayan was used to express Western or Spanish political concepts of nación and patria.37 At the outset of Spanish colonization, Woods argues that, in order for Spaniards to understand their new colony, they imposed their Western notion of social organization in referring to the unit of Tagalog society as barangay: “The desire to imagine Tagalog society in a form recognizable and familiar to Western minds has perpetuated the myth of barangay in political terms and by extension, in terms of identity.”38 The term barangay, similar to bayan, is a geographical (and identity) marker that is imposed by the government, starting from the Spanish Empire to the present. Woods further argues that bayan actually bears more influence than barangay in the organization of Tagalog society. It is important to understand the concept of bayan as an experience grounded on social ties that do not necessarily pertain to the nation, because to do so is to remain tethered to the

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Philippine nation-state’s interpellation and to the Western imposition of the concepts of race and patria, which did not materialize until later on. Although Vicente Rafael rightly points out the significant difference between a balikbayan and an OCW—that balikbayan refers to permanent Filipino immigrants in North America, while OCW pertains to Filipinos who work abroad contractually—this also creates an unnecessary binary between the two categories. Filipinos in the United States were once migrant workers as well, and hundreds of thousands of undocumented Filipinos in the United States do not fit into these categories. In addition, since I am focusing my analysis on the act of sending boxes that are called balikbayan boxes and these boxes are primarily used in the Filipino diaspora regardless of whether or not one resides in the United States, my claims remain valid. I also want to anchor the trend of balikbayan boxes not in the category of balikbayan per se but in the shared experiences and social relations of the term balikbayan. I want to focus less on the identities of Filipinos as either balikbayan or OCW and more on the act of sending balikbayan boxes and the shared experiences that underlie this practice. To an extent, this distinction, though important, also plays into classist perceptions of the difference between a Filipino U.S. immigrant and an OCW. This distinction also starts to lose its validity since many Filipinos outside the diaspora in the United States have started to settle down and have families in other countries.

Histories Too: Figurations of Balikbayan Boxes Rather than analyzing a narrative or story, this section focuses on the figuration of balikbayan boxes in Filipino American literature instead of their literal representation. Figuration is the central process of figural thinking and reading. It was first theorized by the philologist Erich Auerbach and then taken up, almost simultaneously, by Edward Said and Hayden White. There are some differences in their conceptions, but they are not so significant that they need to be referenced here. Figuration is first and foremost a way of thinking about history that preserves the idea of human agency too often sacrificed in deterministic or structural studies of historical causation. Its principal advantage is that it addresses the question of historical causation from the immanence of the process rather than the transcendence of the analyst. Of course, this makes it more contingent than other conceptions of history, but this contingency is consistent with the underlying belief that everything, including accounts of historical

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causation, is historical. Another way of putting this is that figural readers are not detached observers inhabiting the world of knowledge and regulated by it; they are, instead, in the midst of things, struggling with the demands of what they are reading. A figure, in this view, is a complex composite of the material and the imaginary; it is permeated with desire and other affects. Most of all, it nourishes the experience of those whom it touches, which is why I have invoked it. It is a mode of reading that allows one to see meanings that otherwise one would not see in the text. It focuses on the construction of meaning between X and Y that are both real and historical but separate in time.39 It allows me to grasp the significance of balikbayan boxes and their traffic. I am well aware that one could, and indeed should, study them from other perspectives, say, an economic or a geopolitical one, but this goes beyond the purview of the present chatper. Here, I examine the act of sending and receiving balikbayan boxes and the construction of meaning behind this process. Why do people send balikbayan boxes? What kinds of meaning do they endow the boxes with? How are relations maintained through the exchange of balikbayan boxes? What does reading literary texts through figuration offer that other approaches to analyzing balikbayan boxes cannot provide us? In other words, what can reading through figuration add to our current understandings of balikbayan boxes? A In Mia Alvar’s short story “A Contract Overseas,” Andoy, one of the main characters, is a figuration of a balikbayan box because it is through his performance that connections among family members are maintained. Each time he comes back to the Philippines from Saudi Arabia and visits his friends’ families, he brings with him a tampipi or a native Filipino suitcase to distribute cassette tapes, photographs, and cards from his friends abroad to their families back home. Interestingly, it is not the container itself that he uses that functions as a figuration, but Andoy himself: “‘Your carabao,’ he called himself: our water buffalo, our beast of burden. His skin was not quite carabao-dark, but close. And rather than a plow of produce cart, he’d brought a woven straw box full of envelopes from men he knew in Saudi.”40 In this instance, Andoy becomes disassociated from a carabao, a suffering heroic animal and a necessary instrument in plowing rice to produce food. Unlike the carabao, Andoy is not characterized as a

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mere worker needed to put food on the table but as a connector of relations that links separated families together. The creation of meaning (or the significance behind the practice of sending objects) happens through Andoy’s performance as he visits his friends’ families. His actions as a son, brother, husband, and father to those left behind by his friends working in Saudi Arabia become more significant than the material items he delivers to them: Andoy wanted to make his deliveries first thing in the morning. By the time I woke up, he’d already come back from the bank, dressed in his denim and white shoes. He beckoned me to help. At the kitchen table, he went down a list of names and riyal contributions, converting them on a calculator into pesos, which I doled into envelopes. We matched cassette tapes, photographs, and cards to the amounts and put them in a straw tampipi box. Then we took the jeepney: from Antipolo to Santa Rosa; from Marikina to Laguna; from tin shantytowns to houses with clay roofs and living room pianos in neighborhoods so tony I could hardly believe the people there relied, as we did, on a son or brother overseas. Aging mothers squinted hard at Andoy, as if they could blur their own sons into being. Wives and girlfriends perked up in his presence. Children gaped at the stranger they were told to kiss because “he knows your father,” and I even recognized myself, in teens who surfaced from their textbooks long enough to crack a joke and count the money. Like all the carabao I’d met, my brother said and ate more than he wanted, fed them Saudi trivia they’d likely heard before. I saw what an essential trade was taking place. My brother’s health and cheerfulness told them their own boys were well. And he would bring their rosy performances of family life back to friends in Jeddah. Walking through each barangay with him, into the swarm of children shouting Carabao!; seeing people through each screen door rise, when he appeared, in hope and recognition; I finally understood the purpose of the Saudi suit. I’d always though it heavy for Manila, not to mention a billboard for thieves. But men so silent and invisible overseas must have loved this guarantee of being seen at home.41

Andoy is not a replacement for these men; rather, he symbolizes them. In ancient Greece, there were seafarers who left home to set up colonies, and it took them a long time to come back, so fraud was a frequent problem.42 The people left behind were not sure of the fishermen’s identity when they finally returned. To address this issue, they baked a vase, broke it in half, kept one part, and gave the other to the departing fisherman. If the fisherman came back and his piece of the vase fit the one left behind, then the vase was called a symbolon. Thus, a symbol is about bringing two things

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that were once one together but separated. Symbols are conventional because they are a contract between a community of interpreters, and a community of interpreters is essential for symbols to work. There is actually no resemblance between the symbol and what is being represented; it depends on convention. Andoy, by performing in such a way as to look and act like the other workers when he comes back home to the Philippines, becomes a symbol of them. It is through his performance that he brings separated families back together, albeit temporarily. However, more than performing likeness, Andoy as a symbol depends on how family members interpret his actions. In other words, Andoy as a symbol only works if his friends’ families buy into his performance as their son, brother, and husband. Since Andoy’s friends act the same way when they come back home and return the favor by visiting Andoy’s family, all the workers function as a symbol of each other. Consequently, Andoy also works as a synecdoche, part of the whole, because he belongs to a network of workers. The practice of sending objects creates a network of symbols. Andoy needs to act as a perfect symbol by wearing a Saudi suit to connect his friends in Saudi Arabia with their families back home. In contrast to a literal reading of the passage’s ending, the Saudi suit is not a means for representation against Andoy and his friends’ marginalization abroad. The suit is a necessary accessory of Andoy’s performance that allows him to fit into his role as the brother, son, or husband who left to work abroad. This is the means by which he is able to match family members’ memories of their loved ones and fulfill his duties as their makeshift family member. Since they are not blood relations and do not actually bear any resemblance at all to him, he needs to look similar to his friends to be recognizable to their family members. Andoy is not their real family. But it is his performance with the suit, of acting to look and be like other workers, that connects them all. Andoy performs an identity by wearing the Saudi suit. However, to be precise, this constitutes an instance of identification instead of identity. He is not building up a wall around himself, and this identity is not imposed on him by the state. He identifies himself with his friends in order to share a part of himself with them and their families. He chooses to wear the suit and even risks being robbed because his relations with others are more important to him than the money he carries with him. He does not see himself as a mere source of money and, consequently, not as a mere worker, a producer of labor and capital. More than a marker of identity as a worker in the Middle East, the act of wearing the Saudi suit is a means to help others.

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Andoy wears the suit as a response to the need of separated family members to connect with each other. He gives comfort to his friends’ families by taking on his friends’ appearance. Their likeness is not about interchangeability or commodification, or even ease of exchange; instead, their similarities respond to the need of family members’ desire to see them. They need to be visible and to stand out for their families in order to fill the void of missing a loved one. In addition to Andoy’s performance through the Saudi suit, his other actions bring families together. The phrase “[m]y brother sat and ate more than he wanted” suggests that Andoy displays his healthy appetite to show his respect to the families.43 He tries to act like their son, brother, or father by sharing a meal with them. He also goes against his individual desires; he eats more than he wants in order to address a need beyond his own sustenance. He is fulfilling what he sees as his responsibility to his friends and his friends’ responsibility to their family members in front of him. Andoy’s friends also visit his family when they come home from abroad. As a result, it is not only his friends’ obligations to their families that he fulfills but also his responsibility to his own family. This process becomes a concatenation of responsibility, but a shared one, and everyone becomes a family member without being a blood relation. The basis of family membership is redefined beyond blood and legal relations because familial belonging becomes based on responding to a need to connect with others. The maintenance of “familial” relations here depends on reading. Family members and even neighbors interpret Andoy’s actions. In the same way, Andoy also reads the reactions of family members to relay information back to his friends. The line “I saw an essential trade was going on” suggests that what is being traded are performances more than personal narratives.44 The content of stories becomes inconsequential, and it is how the story is told that matters. Hence, Andoy feeds them Saudi trivia that they already know and that has no plot. They exchange information on how each family member is doing through their performances, their movements. They do not say words directly to express how they are doing but they are instead putting a show on how they should be doing. Family members act like they are doing well in front of Andoy. In return, Andoy also acts as cheerful as he can. But how does it work on the other side? To the workers abroad Andoy does not need to dress up because his friends know what he looks like. But he still performs in front of the others as he attempts to mimic their families’ behaviors: “He would bring their rosy performances of family life back to his friends in Jeddah.” Andoy also

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carries something back abroad with him, news of his friends’ family members, but he acts out what he sees from his meetings with the families. Similarly, it is his manner of storytelling that matters more than the story he tells his friends of their families’ well-being. Family life is being performed through Andoy. In this instance, visible signification based on live performance becomes more important to make up for the absence of a family member. Words or images that merely express their predicament through cards, cassette tapes, and photographs do not quite suffice. There needs to be a live person in flesh to comfort them and to alleviate their sorrow for the loss of their brothers, sons, or fathers. However, Andoy’s performance only temporarily brings separated families together—and through a façade. The exchange of performance between Andoy, his friends, and their families is not for truth but for the assurance of the well-being of family members. They read each other’s performances, not in search of a particular truth, but in terms of how they should appear and what they should convey through their actions. They make decisions based on the necessity of the situation. Though they know it is all an act, they still perform to save each other from worrying. Symbol, in this instance, is not about truth or used to avoid fraudulence; it actually depends on performing a “truth.” They create fictions of themselves through their movements. But this does not necessarily mean it is not real, because their actions are very much part of their lived experience. Most importantly, meaning is created not through representation but through performance. They do not tell stories but act to convey information. Social ties are maintained because of performativity instead of representation. They interpret performances and not representations. Andoy is not a representation of their son, brother, or husband but a figuration of them, a symbol. What is the value of not reading in representation in this case? Why do they not read in representation? If they read Andoy as a representation, Andoy dressed in a Saudi suit signifies that he is a mere worker. If they are concerned with representation, then they cannot buy into Andoy as a symbol of their son, father, or brother, since they do not look alike. If they do not read through figuration, they will not be comforted by Andoy’s presence, the comfort that a live person brings. Andoy is not a direct reflection of their family member; he is not their actual family member. Representation here means truth and direct reflection. Andoy as trope suggests that meanings are not quite fixed, so the family members can believe that their son, brother, or husband is doing well, instead of learning the truth that he might be suffering abroad. In addition, children

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in the passage are asked to kiss him not because he is their father, or a representation of the real father, but because Andoy “knows his father.”45 He is associated with their father; he is a trope, a metonymic device in this instance. It is only through his association with the other workers, as evidenced by the wearing of the suit, that their memory works. Otherwise, they would not feel comforted by Andoy’s actions and so would not feel connected to their family member. It is only by reading through figuration that relations are maintained and how distance gets traversed. They must understand the world through figurations and not through representations in order to deal with the separation of their family members. This is how the person who leaves to work abroad and those left behind survive. So far, I have shown that Andoy functions as symbol, synecdoche, and metonymy. However, these rhetorical tropes prove inadequate because they fail to explain everything at hand. An analysis based on symbolic economy still deals with representation because the other part of the vase that gets left behind becomes a representation of someone who is not there. Although interpreting Andoy as a synecdoche or symbol provides us more insight into Andoy’s social relationships, as part of a whole he still becomes the representation of other workers because they all wear the same suit. On the other hand, interpreting him metonymically helps us little in understanding his actions. Andoy is a bridge; he carries different types of connections together. He has material presence in all three different places and carries out many physical actions that link different locations, people, and even economies. He works as a zeugma, an ancient rhetorical trope that yokes heterogeneous entities together. This trope is named after zeugma, a famous bridge on the Euphrates that linked the Greek world to the Persian Empire, or, as they had it, Europe to Asia. It is only through reading Andoy as a zeugma that the materiality of his presence and actions is revealed. The rhetorical trope that actually covers everything previously discussed, offers more insights, and best counters representation is the zeugma. The living conditions of contract workers abroad can be best described through a zeugma. Andoy is present in several geographical locations all at once: in Saudi Arabia with his friends, in the Philippines with his friends’ families, and in his journey through different locations as he delivers money and other items. He connects his friends abroad to their families back home and in doing so connects the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. He even links together all the places that he covers in his travels to deliver money from Saudi Arabia to Manila and from Manila (city) to the different

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provinces such as Laguna (country). He brings together people across different ages and genders, from children and wives to mothers. He even establishes an affinity between his little sister and his friends’ younger siblings: “I even recognized myself, in teens who surfaced from their textbooks long enough to crack a joke and count the money.”46 Two distinct temporalities become connected, Andoy’s sister’s past and other children’s present, based on their similar experience of having a sibling who works abroad. Andoy even brings together people from different classes, from those living in shanty houses to those dwelling in tiled-roof homes with pianos. Moreover, Andoy yokes the economy of Saudi Arabia and the Philippines through his conversion of riyals to pesos. He actually exchanges, calculates, counts, and distributes money. Instead of handing off money in riyals to his friends’ families and having them exchange it on their own, he does the work for them and converts one monetary value into the other. In this way, he becomes a center of conversion, but a moving one that holds different linkages together. He not only produces capital through his labor but also enables the flow of currencies across nations and people. He ferries money both at the nation and individual levels and embodies both social and economic relations. Yet Andoy is involved in a much more complex transaction than just as a courier of money and other objects. Interestingly, the money is not sent from one person to another already individually allocated. Instead, the money comes from an individual abroad and goes into a pot of money, and the one who brings it home then divides it accordingly: “At the kitchen table, he went down a list of names and riyal contributions, converting them on a calculator into pesos, which I doled into envelopes.”47 Each of Andoy’s friends can easily send a sealed envelope with money inside to their respective families. But what explains this peculiar setup? There are several possibilities here. Each worker gives a certain amount of money in a pot and that exact quantity is what his family receives. However, the word “contribute” suggests the likelihood that the workers all give money in whatever amount they can and they then equally divide it among their families back home. This arrangement indicates that the workers appear to have their own collective system that considers the different economic capacities of these workers and the financial needs of their families back home. It does not matter how much one contributes; what remains important is that each family receives money. Andoy’s friends also reveal to him how much money each one of them sends. The act of sending money to their families is an act of

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community based on need and trust. Converting money is also an unpaid labor that falls outside their work obligations, and while they help the state economy through the money they exchange at banks and bring back into the country, at this moment they are the ones in charge of their own money. The practice of sending money moves it from an individual-to-­ individual relationship and from private ownership to a collective one. Whoever goes back home takes on the responsibility of distribution, but everyone plays a part and no one person is in charge of the entire process. This is not an alienated relationship in a Marxian sense, but this manner of sending actually takes money out of the process of exchange, and in this particular instant, albeit temporarily, money only has use value, especially since there is no process of exchange. The senders are not paid to do this work, and they give the money to their families. Most importantly, in this process, Andoy not only yokes two different national economies to each other but also connects both national economies with the economy of the household, or oikos. Andoy performs the monetary transactions on kitchen tables and ends up sharing meals with his friends’ families at their dining tables when he delivers the money. He brings these bigger economies together with the household economy, but through their own collective banking system he also displaces the national economies and brings them to the level of the household. There is a management of various economic systems that happens through Andoy as a zeugma. But it is actually Andoy, deftly navigating across these different linkages, who is in control. B In Carlos Bulosan’s short story “Be American,” boxes, crates, and barrels filled with food and even envelopes containing pornographic materials are figurations of balikbayan boxes. These containers work as zeugmas because they link together workers, who are friends and even strangers to each other, in different places and situations. Most importantly, these bridges allow them to create a community larger than their individual selves: I did not think much of his disappearance because we are a wandering people due to the nature of our lowly occupations, which takes us place to place, following the seasons. When I received a box of asparagus, I knew he was working in Stockton. But when it was a crate of lettuce, he was working in Santa Maria or Salinas, depending on the freight mark again. And in the summertime when I received a large barrel of salmon, I knew he was work-

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ing the salmon canneries in Alaska. There were no letters, no post cards— nothing. But these surprising boxes, crates and barrels that arrived periodically were the best letters in the world. What they contained were lovingly distributed among my city friends. Similarly, when I was in one of my own wanderings, which were done in cities and large towns, I sent my friend or friends unsealed envelopes bursting with the colored pictures of actresses and other beautiful women. I addressed these gifts to poolrooms and restaurants in towns where my friends had lived or worked for a season, because they were bound to go to any of these havens of the homeless wanderer. However, when another curious wanderer opened the envelopes and pilfered the pictures, it was not a crime. The enjoyment which was originally intended for my friends was his and his friends. That is the law of the nomad: finders keepers.48

The crates of produce and other food items connect the speaker of the story with his cousin and friends. The speaker and his cousin are each other’s subjects of knowledge because they are the subjects of each other’s thoughts. They worry and wonder about each other. In this context, they are subjects and not objects of knowledge because they can never fully know each other’s situation. They have no mastery over one another. They can only estimate their probable location and occupation and know that they are okay but cannot gather any more information. These crates, barrels, and envelopes, these figurations of balikbayan boxes, are quasi-persons.49 The word person comes from persona, the masks worn in Ancient Greek theater. These masks are conventional, and one can easily read how they are supposed to affect the audience’s affect. For example, if the mask has a happy face, one is supposed to have a happy reaction. These mini containers are quasi-persons because, like masks, they produce effects that affect us.50 In other words, they have an effect on one’s affect. This is precisely why they have cultural agency. They are not passive objects that merely bring content to somebody. Their very arrival is an event because the recipient responds with affects like joy and love. Workers convey each other through containers. Barrels and crates connect one subject to another; they mediate the relationship between two subjects of knowledge. They commune with each other through the practice of sending each other containers and create a community among them, one based on the logic of love instead of kinship or blood relations. Not only are these packages common or free to everyone in their community, but people also freely send each other these items without being obligated to do so.

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In the story, the “boxes, crates and barrels” of food function as a type of labor and knowledge. The food in these “boxes, crates and barrels” are part of the migrant workers, not as representations of their occupation, but as part of their labor, specifically their alienated labor. The goods within these containers are part of the workers themselves through their work, but they become separated from them once their labor and the products of their labor become commodities. Yet the story does not reveal the manner of procurement of these items, whether they are stolen or not purchased. If they are, then the goods no longer count as commodities. The lack of letters and postcards implies that migrant workers, similar to Consorcio, may be illiterate. The “boxes, crates and barrels” operate as the “best letters in the world.” Since “letters” pertains to learning, the circulation of these boxes among migrant workers refers to a movement of a different kind of knowledge. With these boxes, workers learn that their friends are doing okay and have jobs somewhere without giving the specifics about their location. Because most of the workers are illiterate, communication needs to be performed through these “boxes, crates and barrels.” The workers connect to others with part of who they are, their “occupations.” The phrase “our lowly occupations” suggests a sense of ownership on the part of migrant workers in relation to their own work. But the word “our” shows collective ownership of their work and not an individual’s possession. The migrant workers have a collective relationship and not an individual one with their work. They also “lovingly” distribute or share the items in the containers. Love, in this instance, pertains to the act of sharing among friends. Sending “boxes, crates and barrels” to their friends only to be shared by their friends with their other friends creates a collective network among people who might not directly know each other. The items in the containers are shared by the migrant workers working in the rural areas to those in the city without work. Sending “boxes, crates and barrels” to their friends and, indirectly, to persons unknown to them operates as a response to the needs of their friends and others they do not know. Most importantly, the migrant workers’ “lowly occupations” belong not just to them but to their friends and to strangers as well, meaning they belong to everyone in their community. The migrant workers understand their “occupations” in relation to other people’s needs outside their own and even beyond their acquaintances and, thus, beyond friendship. This act then refers to a type of love predicated on an immediate need rather than on recognition of friendship, individual identity, or kinship. They

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send gifts of food items primarily because of others’ need for sustenance, not because the recipients are their cousins or friends. The workers thus create their own communal practices on the margins of the capitalist economic system and the state. Contrary to existing state laws, the “law of the nomad” establishes a loosely defined community with its own logic. Rules of ownership do not exist in this act of sending gifts. They send “unsealed envelopes” because they are not concerned with privacy or property. Despite the fact that they barely own anything, they do not see their possessions as only belonging to them. Pilfering through someone else’s envelope or property is not treated as a crime. They do not criminalize what otherwise would be considered stealing. The only thing at work here is a notion of sharing. This practice of gift sending among migrant workers opens up a space based on the act of collective sharing instead of individual ownership. The practice of sending boxes, crates, barrels, and envelopes does not pertain to an economy of exchange based on values. Since there is no specific sender or addressee, this act of gift sending does not pertain to an equal exchange since there is no guarantee of return for the sender because of the absence of a specific sender or addressee. Consequently, there is no subject and object relationship in this practice because there is no mode of address in the process of exchange. The gift can be for anyone, so giving back can be for anyone, too. This act of giving is not about reciprocity or debt; nor is it about equal exchange between the original sender and the addressee. Since the packages arrive “periodically,” these are gifts that keep on giving. The migrant workers continually give to each other without strings attached. This practice also contests a notion of original, origins, beginnings, or source. The concept of origin in this passage relates to ownership with the phrase “originally intended for my friends.” The word “originally” also has ties to property, intention, and, thus, authorship. In addition, there is a logic of ordering at work in the term “originally” because it implies position and sequence. It denotes what comes before or after the original. Most importantly, giving here is predicated not on value but on needs, such as other people’s need for food, enjoyment, and communicating with others. This practice of gift giving implies a notion of literature as experience based on the act of sharing not predicated on ownership, exclusion, or aesthetic quality. The movement of these boxes creates a space without origins, ownership, authorship, and hierarchy. It refers to the knowledge of friends not based on their physical features but on their needs and

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location. Because “letters” also signify literature, the migrant workers in the story create a world of “letters” or world literature, an organization of knowledge, not based on writing or formal education. Instead, these boxes respond to the need of others to eat and enjoy life and, thus, to be able to live and communicate their experience to others. Since this act of giving is not about exchange values and the quality of their writing, this transfer of knowledge is not based on aesthetics. The sentence “But these surprising boxes, crates and barrels that arrived periodically were the best letters of the world” indicates that boxes, crates, and barrels are also types of letters, knowledge, and literacy. The migrant workers assert their literacy through the practice of responding to others’ needs and bringing together a community of varied experiences. This is a concept of literacy that is about responding to the needs of others instead of a qualitative or quantitative measurement of one’s intellect, which has only been used to exclude and discriminate against them.

Figurations and Zeugmatic Formations: Balikbayan Boxes and the Filipino Diaspora I have attempted to provide a zeugmatic account of the history of the Filipino diaspora through balikbayan boxes. How did the balikbayan box as a zeugma come to function through heterogeneous histories, from Marcos’s establishment of the Balikbayan Program, the Filipino labor migration, the tradition of Filipino gift giving, and the containerization of the shipping industry to the linguistic history of the words bayan and balikbayan? These are all different kinds of histories that cannot necessarily be synthesized together, but they are sustained and even coexist together. Most importantly, the balikbayan box as zeugma arose from the need of the Philippine government to manage its citizens in order to extract income from them, but it also grew out of a necessity for Filipinos to create a community among themselves and to maintain social relations back home, a need to share their experiences with those left behind. The practice of sending balikbayan boxes has become the process of people linking themselves to others and the various facets of their lives, especially since Filipinos are present in many different places all at once. Balikbayan boxes have become the means for navigating the diaspora, Filipinos living across different spaces. Filipinos are moving centers; they are in between but not necessarily isolated, trapped, or without agency. Balikbayan boxes are

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material linkages that sustain the Filipino diaspora; they are zeugmas that yoke together different types of relations, social, economic, linguistic, and material. A figurative reading of balikbayan boxes through zeugma allows us to access a literary text not as a representation but as the materiality of an individual’s lived experience. The balikbayan box as a zeugma, as the absolute trope of the Filipino diaspora, is one of the best ways to relate to us the lived experiences of Filipinos in the diaspora. Through zeugma, we are able to connect at least two disparate spaces and link individuals together with their distinct experiences, without flattening out their specificities. Through figuration, we are able to put together different temporalities. In this way, we can read against the dominant meanings of balikbayan boxes to create new ones in order to open up other possibilities in the present and, thus, the future. Figuration and zeugma afford us access to the complex temporal and spatial coordinates of Filipino experience in a globalized economy. They are the instruments of their worlding. Reading through zeugma and figuration, as a methodological approach, gives us access to the world-making of Filipinos from below. This mode of reading opens up other possibilities; it creates spaces for individuals to exercise their agency instead of merely analyzing for their domination, or reading how they are oppressed through the frameworks of capitalism, nation-state, and identity. The practice of sending balikbayan boxes allows Filipinos in the diaspora to create a world against and amidst the determinations of globalized capital, the Philippine nation-­ state, and identity. Acknowledgments  I am thankful to Wlad Godzich, Jim Clifford, and Chris Connery for their generous feedback throughout the different stages of this project and to Gladys Nubla for reading an earlier draft.

Notes 1. 2.

Basch et al., Nations Unbound, 257–58. Today, one is allowed to check in two pieces of luggage with a weight of no more than fifty pounds each, which was not always the case. Filipinos now buy smaller balikbayan boxes to adapt to these changes. Philippine Airlines is notorious for their strictness; they often weigh passengers’ carry-on luggage right at the gate right before they board the planes. However, this luggage restriction only applies to economy class as more expensive ones often have more generous baggage allowances.

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3. Rafael, White Love, 260. 4. Alburo, “Boxed In or Out?,” 139. 5. Camposano, “Balikbayan Boxes and the Performance of Intimacy,” 83. 6. Deidre McKay emphasizes the same point in her study on balikbayan boxes in Singapore; see McKay, “Everyday Places,” 2–29. 7. Blanc, “A Filipino Extension of the National Imaginary,” 181. 8. For a historical account of Filipino Migration on the West Coast, see Fujita-Rony, American Workers, Colonial Power. 9. There is a longer history of Filipino diaspora, and there was a moment of Filipino migration in the diaspora that was not propelled by the economic compulsions of the current globalization. In “The Revolution and the Diaspora in Austral-Asia,” Reynaldo Ileto points out that the Philippines already had a diaspora even before this concept became a buzzword of globalization. According to him, hundreds of Filipinos had already settled and worked as pearl divers and seamen in the northern parts of Australia after 1872. For more, see Ileto, Filipinos and Their Revolution, 119, 126. 10. Rodriguez, “The Labor Brokering State,” 10. 11. For an extensive discussion regarding these issues, see Choy, Empire of Care, and McKay’s forthcoming book on Filipino seafarers. 12. For more on this topic, see Schirmer and Rosskamm Shalom, eds., The Philippines Reader, 263–67. 13. Blanc, “A Filipino Extension,” 187. 14. Rodriguez, “Labor Brokering State,” 10. 15. Rodriguez, “Labor Brokering State,” 8. 16. Many more factors contribute to this trend, and each geographical location of Filipino migration has its own historical specificity; however, my purpose here is to provide a broad historical overview that explains Filipino outmigration. 17. Rodriguez, “Labor Brokering State,” 6. 18. Rodriguez, “Labor Brokering State,” 2. 19. McKay, “Born to Sail?” 20. Hau, On the Subject of the Nation, 227. 21. Roland Tolentino made an important point in distinguishing overseas contract workers (OCWs) from overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). Like Tolentino, I prefer to use OCWs because this term emphasizes the nature of overseas work as contractual in response to capital’s need for flexible labor. The move to change contract to Filipino was also a nationalizing move by the Philippine state. For more, see Tolentino, “Diaspora as Historical/Political Trope,” 1. 22. Rodriguez, “Labor Brokering State,” 6.

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For more on the history of how balikbayan boxes came about, see Rafael, White Love, 260. 24. See Alburo, “Box Populi,” and McKay, “Everyday Places.” 25. Alburo, “Box Populi,” 103. 26. See Levinson, The Box, 149. 27. Levinson, The Box, 5. 28. Sekula, Fish Story, 49. 29. For more on how capitalism annihilates the unique identity of the ocean for value production, see Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, 188. 30. Sekula, Fish Story, 137. 31. San Juan Jr., “Trajectories,” 233. 32. In fact, the Philippine state interpellates Filipino overseas contract workers (OCWs) by calling them “mga bagong bayani,” or the new heroes of the nation, because of their sacrifices and significant economic contribution through remittances that keep the national economy afloat. Former Philippine president Corazon Aquino, Marcos’s successor, started this discourse on Filipino OCWs through a speech she delivered in Hong Kong before Filipino OCWs in 1988. This heroicizing discourse continues to this day. 33. Vicente Rafael makes a similar claim that a balikbayan is not about loyalty to the nation-state, but he still focuses on the individual experience as opposed to a shared one: “As a balikbayan, one’s relationship to the Philippines is construed in terms of one’s sentimental attachment to one’s hometown and extended family rather than one’s loyalty to the nation-state.” See Rafael, White Love, 206. 34. Many thanks to Joi Barrios and Lily Ann Villaraza for pointing me to Damon Wood’s work. 35. Woods, “From Wilderness to Nation,” 11. 36. Woods, “From Wilderness to Nation,” 11. 37. Woods, “From Wilderness to Nation,” 18. Vicente Rafael makes the same claim that bayan did not come to mean nation until at least the nineteenth century; see Rafael, White Love, 206. 38. Woods, “From Wilderness to Nation,” 5. 39. For more on Auerbach’s conceptualization of figuration, see, Auerbach, “Figura,” 65–113. 40. Alvar, In the Country, 238. 41. Alvar, In the Country, 254–55. 42. I thank Wlad Godzich for the information on rhetoric, tropes, and figuration. 43. Alvar, In the Country, 255. 44. Alvar, In the Country, 255.

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45. Alvar, In the Country, 255. 46. Alvar, In the Country, 255. 47. Alvar, In the Country, 255. 48. Bulosan, “Be American,” in On Becoming Filipino, ed. San Juan, Jr., 69. 49. I am grateful to Wlad Godzich for his discussion of works of art as quasi-persons. 50. But at the same time, they are much harder to read than masks. Similar to works of art such as literary texts and sculptures, they are legible but not transparently so. That is why we have to learn how to read them. It is harder to determine their effect on one’s affect.

Works Cited Alburo, Jade. “Boxed In or Out? Balikbayan Boxes as Metaphors for Filipino American (Dis)Location.” Ethnologies 27, no. 2 (2005): 137–57. Alburo, Jade. “Box Populi: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Filipino American Balikbayan Box.” Master’s thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2002. Alvar, Mia. In the Country. New York: Vintage Books, 2015. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Christina Szanton Blanc, eds. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. New York: Routledge, 1994. Blanc, Cristina Szanton. “A Filipino Extension of the National Imaginary and of State Boundaries.” Philippine Sociological Review 44, no.1/4 (1996): 178–93. Bulosan, Carlos. “Be American.” In On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan, edited by E.  San Juan Jr., 66–72. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Camposano, Clement C. “Balikbayan Boxes and the Performance of Intimacy by Filipino Migrant Women in Hong Kong.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 21, no. 1 (2012): 83–103. Ceniza Choy, Catherine. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Fujita-Rony, Dorothy. American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919–1941. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Hau, Caroline. On the Subject of the Nation: Filipino Writings from the Margins 1981 to 2004. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press, 2004. Ileto, Reynaldo. Filipinos and Their Revolution: Event, Discourse, and Historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press, 1999. Levinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006.

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McKay, Deidre. “Everyday Places—Philippine Place-making and the Translocal Quotidian.” Paper presented at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual Conference, Murdoch University, December 2004. McKay, Steve. “Born to Sail? Filipino Seafarers and Racial Formation in a Global Labor Niche.” Paper presented at UC Santa Cruz, March 1, 2010. Porter, James I., ed. Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach. Translated by Jane O. Newman. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014. Rafael, Vicente. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Rodriguez, Robyn. “The Labor Brokering State: The Philippine State and the Globalization of Philippine Citizen-Workers.” PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2005. Sekula, Allan. Fish Story. Rotterdam: Richter Verlag, 1995. Schirmer, Daniel B., and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds., The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance. Boston: South End Press, 1987. Steinberg, Philip. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. San Juan Jr., E. “Trajectories of the Filipino Diaspora.” Ethnic Studies Report 18, no. 2 (2000): 229–38. Tolentino, Roland. “Diaspora as Historical/Political Trope in Philippine Literature.” Lecture presented at the UC Berkeley Center for Southeast Asian Studies, February 16, 2006. Woods, Damon L. “From Wilderness to Nation: the Evolution of Bayan.” Lecture presented at the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, February 3, 2005.

CHAPTER 11

Call Me Ishimaru Karen Tei Yamashita

Several years ago, literary critic Min Hyoung Song asked me in an interview if I considered myself to be an Asian American writer or, posing his question apologetically since in previous author interviews he had received rather hostile replies, “an American writer who happened to be Asian American.” I believe I answered that I was “an Asian American writer who happened to be American.” Min Song’s surprised response was “Can I quote you on that?” I may have shrugged a “sure,” but for the hyphenated writer who happens to be American, the more complicated question might be what I thought about Herman Melville. Early last year, I met another literary critic, Tatsumi Takayuki, who, over an unagi donburi, tried to convince me to visit Tokyo to deliver a talk to the International Herman Melville Conference. Yes, Herman Melville, maybe the greatest American writer. I demurred, an indirect route to saying “no” because, after all, I’m an “Asian American writer.” But Takayuki reminded me of a character in my first book, published in 1990, Though

K. T. Yamashita (*) Department of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_11

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the Arc of the Rain Forest, Kazumasa Ishimaru, and stated plainly that Ishimaru, as he understood it, is Ishmael (Yamashita 1990). In these encounters of lit critic and author, writers who are known to be dead think deep down that critics exist mostly to amuse us about things we never thought about. However, I confess that, regarding this book, Through the Arc, no critic has ever made this particular suggestion about Ishmael and, thus, found me out. Perhaps you had to know my meaning of Ishimaru: round stone or perhaps rolling stone, the gesture toward the nomadic and the castaway Ishmael as the son of Abraham and Hagar, exiled to the great desert to sire another tribe, an opposing people under the same God. As an aside, I suppose readers might be aware that Moby-Dick has been translated into an emoji, and emojis I take to be a pictorial language resonant of Chinese characters or kanji (Melville and Benenson 2010). Like emojis, my Ishimaru derives from Asia, born on the Japan seaside, the exilic island of Sado floating in the distance, and it is this same Sea of Japan into which Ahab and the crew of the Pequod chased the great white whale. As a boy, Ishimaru, playing on that seaside, is struck by heavenly debris, pieces of a meteoroid from outer space, and awakes to discover a small personal satellite whirling on its axis a few inches from his forehead. What you need to know is that the story is told by this whirling personal satellite, known as “the ball” or the “Ishi-maru.” Well, the story continues from there, but eventually, Kazumasa Ishimaru and his ball, his ishi-maru, find their way to Brazil and become a part of a pilgrimage of characters who gather at a fictional place in the Amazon rainforest called the Matacão. I’m not going to dwell on this story except to say that there is indeed an acquisitive American CEO named J. B. Tweep who could be a kind of nerdy modern-day Ahab. However, while Ahab lost a leg, Tweep has, instead, the additional convenience and, he believes, efficiency of a third arm. And the object of desire and plunder is the Matacão. The Matacão emerges as a solid block beneath the Amazon rainforest as the forest is exploited, chopped down, cleared, and eroded away. What the Matacão turns out to be is “an enormous impenetrable field of some unknown solid substance stretching for millions of acres in all directions” (Yamashita 1990, 16), and what that unknown solid substance turns out to be is: plastic. I imagine the Matacão as an immense and endless ice-rink (though warm and tropical), perhaps colorless, or a slick asphalt gray slab, but, colorless or grey, it could be the slippery back of an immense, albeit plastic, whale.

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An immense plastic slab beneath the great Amazon rainforest might not be so implausible considering what is known to be the Great Pacific Garbage patch or “trash vortex,” floating with the currents of the North Pacific Gyre (“Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” National Geographic: Encyclopedic Entry. http://education.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/great-­pacific-­garbage-­patch/.) This trash vortex of pelagic plastic is thought to be the size of the state of Texas. The recurring narrative of Moby-Dick is nothing new. It is the Promethean tirade of Lear and Macbeth—man against God, man against nature, man against himself in literary times when we were all “men.” Moby-Dick is also the story of the endlessly acquisitive and arrogant plunder of Earth’s resources. I would speculate that the great white whale exists also as symbolic space—often exotic, terrifying, and impenetrable, perhaps like the Congo for Joseph Conrad, the Amazon for Lope de Aguirre, the Sahara for T. E. Lawrence, Japan for Herman Melville, and the Matacão for the three-armed J. B. Tweep. Perhaps we can similarly speak of two charismatic and controversial American Ahabs and generals, George S. Patton, Jr. and, significantly for Japan, Douglas MacArthur. The myth and symbol of Moby Dick has moved forward in time. With the advent of the Cold War, born here in Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to become our nuclear MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, we see Moby Dick become Godzilla. For the Trekkies in contemporary popular culture, we might see the Pequod reinvented as the Star Trek Enterprise— its crew: Kirk as Ahab (kinder gentler), Spock as Fedallah or the Parsee (still an Oriental, but with pointed ears), and Doc as Starbuck (the good Quaker). Variations of the great white whale may be seen as antagonists, such as the great Khan or the Borg or simply SPACE, the final frontier, “where no man has gone before.” Thus, we repeat our continuing manifest destiny. I believe, however, that Godzilla remains our most terrible and revitalized vision of the white whale risen again in the seas of Japan. However, very recently, renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking proposed that our earthly future is speculative. In a BBC interview, he said, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race … Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded” (Cellan-Jones, Rory. 2014. “Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind.” BBC News, December 2. http://www.bbc.com/ news/technology-­30290540). In thinking about this and considering that Japan is likely at the forefront of this technology of artificial

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intelligence, or AI, I would propose that our contemporary Moby Dick in fact has a very different and even benign or cute look. The great Leviathan has become this: Hello Kitty. * * * Turning from my penchant for making connections with the popular and contemporary, what fascinated me in rereading Moby-Dick were the characters who Melville put on the Pequod, that oddly multicultural brotherhood of the Pequod. Who is on the ship? Or perhaps more appropriately, who is not on the ship? Well, women are not on the ship, but in any case, on the Pequod float men from every continent and race on earth, and in particular those men who represent original peoples, aboriginal and indigenous, and cast as royal and dignified representatives. Thus, from the South Pacific we get Queequeg, from Africa is Daggoo, and Tashtego hails from the Americas. Very importantly, the blood of these original peoples must temper the American steel of Ahab’s harpoon. Finally, there is the Parsee Fedallah and his crew of Filipinos who, I believe, represent the Oriental imagination of the nineteenth century, very much as Edward Said described it. Fedallah is Muslim and Chinese, inscrutable, but also the defining other of Captain Ahab. Though I realize that the Parsee should be Zoroastrian, there is nothing really Parsi or Zoroastrian about Fedallah, whose name, containing as it does Allah, marks him as Muslim. If each of the harpooners—Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo—are the paired others of the mates Starbuck, Stubbs, and Flask, then Fedallah is the paired harpooner and other of Ahab. Moreover, Fedallah and Ahab are joined as the Muslim to the Judeo-Christian, to the monotheism of a shared Old Testament God through the patriarch Abraham, paired to the restless anger and arrogance of men fighting God’s destiny. So here is the Pequod’s motley crew of humanity, finally completed by Ishmael, nomadic exiled outcast and orphan, destined or condemned (as writers are) to tell the story. I am drawn to the last scene, in which the three harpooners are held aloft on the three masts of the Pequod as it sinks to its watery grave. Significantly, the masts of the Pequod are masts hewn from Japanese pine, replaced during the Pequod’s previous voyage to Japan. The three harpooners, aboriginals of three continents, are raised as if on three crosses at sea. The religiosity and biblical symbolism are strange and yet, I think, obvious, with Tashtego, the American Indian, on the middle mast, a post

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reserved for Jesus. Tashtego dies heroically nailing the Pequod’s flag into the body of a sky hawk, which is, I also imagine, a hybrid sign of the American bald eagle and ancient Noah’s dove and sign of land, the last vestige, the last hurrah, of the ship before it finally disappears into the sea. What does this mean? If it is about the tragedy of manifest destiny played out in the Pacific and, significantly, in the Sea of Japan, it is a narrative that will continue to haunt these seas. For me, tracing these figurative connections through time, my own work, and through popular media forces me to think about the legacy of the nineteenth century, the completion of colonial encounters by the West, and American maritime and naval power—its “discovery” of the Pacific, its shipping and whaling industry, territorial plunder to build empire and to capture resources, and, finally, the opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry. In the next part of this essay and my ruminations on Melville’s Moby-­ Dick, I want to invoke Tashtego, the American Indian, the last dying sailor of the Pequod, as well as Ishmael, the sole survivor fated to tell the tale, to focus more particularly on my personal family history as a narrative thread that reaches back to the nineteenth century. * * * Nineteenth-century American history becomes uncannily personal to me, beginning with the opening of Japan. The fiction and the symbolic meaning of Melville’s adventure seem intertwined as narratives that also define the immigrant lives of my family. My paternal grandfather, Yamashita Kishiro, was born in 1873, twenty-two years after the publication of Moby-­ Dick (1851), twenty years after Commodore Perry’s arrival in Edo (1853), and five years after the fall of the Shogunate and the Meiji Restoration (1868). At the end of the nineteenth century, Yamashita Kishiro was another “Ishimaru” sent off to pay off debts, and thus to save the honke or home branch, of his family. As time passed, Kishiro would ultimately be sent off forever and forever made invisible in this sacrifice. Yet, in fact, like the original Ishmael, Kishiro would father a new tribe of Yamashitas in the Americas. If Herman Melville, via an international conference in his name, could be brought to Japan, returning Moby Dick to the Sea of Japan, perhaps, too, we might remember the legacy of Melville’s nineteenth century played out for twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japanese and Japanese

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emigrants and their descendants in the Americas. Let me tell another story, this time about Japanese American wartime incarceration, in which the great expanse of ocean becomes a great expanse of desert, and Moby Dick is that desert of incarceration. In this story, our Nantucket is Oakland, California. What follows is a small portion of my book Letters to Memory. My dad was an avid cook, and he created extraordinary meals, but sitting down for a meal and eating in silence would not do; his culinary creations had to be graced with what he called “scintillating conversation.” Thus, the original working title for this book was Scintillations. I have long been fascinated with the idea of the museum, which is, I figure, a nineteenth-century colonial thing about collecting the stuff of great and ruined civilizations like pharaonic Egypt, or of “savage discovered” people, or of natural things that are curious and extinct like dinosaurs. The museum seems to be about the nineteenth century’s discovery of the evolution of everything and everyone from the original to the extinct. Thus, the Pequod, a fragile museum of humanity, voyages over the greater museum that is the Earth’s sea. Lately, my cousins and I have been collecting artifacts—letters and memorabilia of our parents—and wondering what to do with this stuff. What is our responsibility to these memories and what are we supposed to learn from them? What I’ve discovered is that the nineteenth-century idea of the museum haunts what we’ve come to call the Yamashita Archive. We are haunted by ideas and cultural thinking that seem to automatically come with our bodies and memories, unconsciously or innocently imposed upon us, perhaps, and forcing us to organize the way we think about this history we save and collect. Ruth Benedict was an anthropologist who wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, published in 1946, a work based on her reading of translations of everything she could get her hands on that was about Japan, plus interactions and interviews with Japanese Americans, in particular a kibei named Robert Hashima. (To clarify, kibei means that Hashima was born in the United States but raised and educated in Japan before returning to the United States; therefore, Hashima was bilingual in Japanese and English.) Benedict’s anthropological work has been cited as an important document that guided American policies on the postwar occupation of Japan. Dorothy Swaine Thomas directed the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study, or JERS, project to study Japanese Americans during

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World War II under the sponsorship of the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the Rockefeller, Columbia, and Giannini Foundations, and supported by the War Department, Western Defense Command, and Fourth Army. Swaine Thomas was assisted in the research, investigation, and writing of these books by Richard Nishimoto, Charles Kikuchi, James Sakoda, and others, all Japanese Americans and bilingual kibei. This project, now contained in boxes and boxes of research materials, is stored in the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library and constitutes another part of our extended archive of that period and those events of wartime incarceration. The books resulting from this project were The Spoilage (Thomas and Nishimoto 1946) and The Salvage (Thomas et al. 1952), which represent perhaps only the surface of this massive research endeavor. The archive itself totals 254 linear feet of material. (“Japanese-American evacuation and resettlement records, 1930–1974” OskiCat UCB Library Catalog, http://oskicat.berkeley. edu/record=b10828661~S1). Decidedly, these books are important artifacts that preserve our history and inform our past, and they were written in a particular time and period of war and intense hatred and racial stereotyping. However, as a writer, I note the reductive narratives—the opposition and contradictions of chrysanthemum and sword, beauty and violence, which are powerful metaphors that help us understand but also reduce an entire people to cultural stereotypes so that they might also be occupied and controlled. The image of Japan as the embodiment of a beautiful violence reminds me here of the image of that great white whale, Moby Dick. Swaine Thomas and Nishimoto define three types of Japanese American evacuation models, with “salvage” referring to those Japanese Americans who were able to leave camp before the end of the war to assimilate into American society and continue their lives; “spoilage” referring to those Japanese Americans who rejected American society and chose repatriation and imprisonment at Tule Lake prison camp; and, finally, “residue” (the title of a book that was never written) defining those Japanese Americans who were left in camp until the war’s end, people tossed out of the camp finally to fend for themselves. While these definitions of the types of Japanese Americans affected by this episode might have been useful as organizing principles, think about the words: spoilage, salvage, residue. Notably, it’s about trash and garbage, in other words, people who are dispensable, possibly recyclable, but certainly thrown away, discarded.

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Richard Nishimoto’s life and story have been fleshed out and his writing edited in a book by Lane Hirabayashi (Nishimoto and Hirabayashi 1995). Charles Kikuchi’s diaries have been published and edited by John Modell (Kikuchi and Modell 1993). James Sakoda went on to publish books about origami, which heralded and introduced the complex creative mathematical and architectural world of paper (Sakoda 1969). As noted, the JERS archive at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library is immense. But again my questions arise: What have we saved and what is our responsibility to this stuff? My grandparents emigrated from Japan to the San Francisco Bay area at the turn of the century, in 1900. My grandparents settled in San Francisco and Oakland, establishing businesses and new livelihoods. They formed large families—the Yamashitas, a family with seven children, and the Sakais, a family with nine children. In 1942, both the Yamashita and Sakai families were incarcerated in the Topaz camp near Delta, Utah. In the case of the Yamashita family, they were, for the most part, among “the salvage” (although we say could that Grandma Tomi and her first son, a kibei, Susumu and his family were part of the “residue”). From Topaz concentration camp the Yamashitas were dispersed to farms and cities in the Midwest and East Coast, to Idaho, Nebraska, Michigan, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Saint Louis. And after the war, back to Oakland. All the Yamashita siblings are now deceased, and my cousins and I have now gathered several hundred letters and documents, the core of which date from 1938 to 1948, during those years of the war and postwar. That collection is significant to our family history, revealing a story suppressed by personal trauma and shame of the camps and by erasure from the grander national narrative of American victory in World War II. During the war, my father, John, was able to leave Topaz concentration camp to attend seminary at Garrett Biblical Institute, in Evanston, Illinois. Perusing his papers, I came to the conclusion that these years were the darkest and most depressing years of his life; he was separated from his family sent to a camp and across the country. However, in 1945, as the war ended, John wrote these recommendations to his sister Kay as his train approached California: Dear Kay, … feel independent and seek the situation which makes for the most peaceful now and in regards to the future … be ready to take off where your

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heart calls and interests lie. Don’t let circumstances shape your affairs too much … In the change [we] learned much and saw more. I maintain [that] in America we have a women’s world—they have the initiative to make up men’s minds for them … I say all is adventure and more adventure and if you don’t want it—then don’t venture forth in faith, but be content with things as they are … Here’s to you for new worlds to be. (Yamashita Archives)

John would be one of the first Japanese Americans to return to Oakland, and one of the first to face the open hostility of racism and war hatred in his old hometown. As a young pastor, he was charged with opening the Oakland West Tenth Japanese American Church and to receive Japanese Americans returning from wartime exile. The church’s multipurpose gym and reception hall had been boarded up and packed with the left-behind belongings of Japanese as they left for camp. My father had the help of volunteers, and these folks worked for two years without compensation to turn the church into a hostel for returning Japanese and to return stored belongings. So my father was buoyed home by his own optimism and a sense of the work ahead, which was to resettle and reclaim lost time and lives. But I also think he, like Ishmael, was also buoyed home by the coffin of war. When he arrived in Oakland, among his many pastoral duties, one of the first funerals he conducted was to bury his best friend, who had enlisted in the 442nd Battalion and was killed on the Italian front. I thought, in trying to fulfill my dad’s wish for scintillating conversation, it would be necessary to bring storytellers to the table. Thus, one of the storytellers I’ve convened is Ishi, the historical Ishi being the last Yahi Indian of California, who came out of the forest near Mount Lassen, in the same years that my grandparents immigrated to San Francisco, and lived his last days in the anthropology museum of UC Berkeley, supervised at the time by Professor Alfred Kroeber. In part, this is my tribute to Tashtego, the American Indian harpooner and the last drowning member of the Pequod to descend into the Sea of Japan. Combined with the historical Ishi, in a sense reincarnated here, is my contemporary version of Ishi, perhaps, a historian and anthropologist. One detail: When the original Ishi died in 1916, Kroeber was not in Berkeley to prevent the autopsy of Ishi’s body and the removal of his brain, which was stored in the Smithsonian until being repatriated to California Indians in the 1990s (Starn 2004).

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I excerpt here passages from a section titled “Letters to Modernity” from my book Letters to Memory (Yamashita 2017). As “letters to memory” suggests, its form is epistolary. Presumably, the narrator is writing to an imaginary muse named Ishi. Dear Ishi: Nobody wants my brain. Even if my driver’s license were to indicate my willingness to have my body parts distributed, decidedly, nobody wants my brain. There are days, when it hurts, that even I do not want my brain. It may be, however, that the FBI might want my computer. The UC Santa Cruz Library Special Collections seems to want my books and all their related detritus. And connected to that, we’ll foist this family archive of letters and photographs and wartime materials. I asked our historian friend Homer why he thought my family saved this stuff, and he had the historian’s view that they knew what was happening to them was significant and wrong, that justice might not happen in their lifetimes. What they saved shows that this is true, but we children also thought that they were nostalgic packrats. Now we are old and nostalgic ourselves and comb through this business like we invented it. We pass pdfs and htmls over emails, google this and that— amateur historians, trying to compensate for the fact that we as kids were too distracted with the idea of this past to be actually immersed in it. Shame on us, and now they are all dead, and we didn’t save their brains either. But let’s be fair. To live like Walter Benjamin’s angel swept into the future while staring into the past like Paul Klee’s rendition is pretty horrific. I salute you and Homer who are willing to do so. But what to net in this storm of wreckage and debris? There is what has been salvaged, and there is what attracts our attention. You remind me that the museum gets organized and reorganized. Each of us owns a glass case of curiosities arranged particularly. When we are dead, what meaning will it have? When I’m dead, I suspect everything in my glass case can be burned and replaced virtually by a USB flash drive. Who cares about my brain? But Homer’s work demonstrates the tedious precision of tracing the forensics of history, to uncover a question stone by stone. To have access to those stones at all, his eyes glow with wonder. You interpret Ishi to be the Yahi word for man, but I also translate from the Japanese word meaning stone. Stone by stone. Stone age by stone age. Forgive me; it is taboo to speak of the dead. But they are my dead, and I fear the reasons for which they saved these letters and how I must necessarily fail here to complete my task so ordained. And yet, I ask for your indulgence, to attempt to overturn at least one stone.

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Ishi, I have wondered about your idea that ethnography could be a surrealist project enacted on a science of cultural jeopardy. I don’t imagine that my enactment here of juxtapositions, not really surreal, is necessarily what you had in mind, but you did recommend that I should stray and play far afield from our original conversations, our factual selves. It is true that this shuffling of realities has begun to unmake my old world. It has anyway been my creative method to contort or at least humor the mind toward revelation. I do not entirely understand your meaning—cultural jeopardy, a kind of anthropological game of risk-taking, though I sense that I am about to lose something. If that something is my culture, it seems to always have been a dynamic thing constantly in its death throes, nearing extinction. Years ago, I imagined a fictional character named Manzanar Murakami as the first sansei born in captivity, that is, born in camp. Now I must imagine the last sansei. The vulnerability of the ethnographer, you may say, is her strength. But to return to the ethnographic project …

* * * I check out a library copy of Benedict’s book, microdust rising off the yellowing pages turning to acid. I cough, comforted by the thought that I’m similarly allergic to my family’s archive of letters. It’s all dust from the same relative period. These days I tuck Benedict into my bag and snatch paragraphs while sitting with my mother Asako at the hospital. Asako is 96 years old and the last Yamashita, by marriage, of her generation. She’s fractured her hip, and they’ve drilled screws into her thighbone. The surgery is a great success, but the morphine, the IV drip, the catheter, and the stress on her heart knock her out for days. She’s pared down to about eighty-five pounds, a small mound in bed, and my sister and I sit on either side, waiting, listening to the rhythmic spit of the oxygen machine, the beeps and dings of the monitors, the melancholy of some TV soap opera, and a lady named Eleanor two doors down who tries to escape, yelling, Call security! The doctor is a fake! I wander into the corridor to check out Eleanor in yellow skid-free socks, her hospital gown with her backside indecently exposed, and corralled by nursing personnel because why not; I’m bored. When the nurses apparently strap Eleanor to the bed, she shouts out repeatedly, I am bound! I am bound! Asako can’t hear any of this anyway, but we figure the last time Asako was locked up with folks going loony was back in 1942. I pick up the Benedict and read sections of it out loud to my sister. Check this out! Japanese are a bundle of contradictions: polite but insolent, rigid but adaptable, submissive but uncontrollable, brave but timid, robotic but insubor-

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dinate, Western-leaning but conservative, loyal but treacherous, kiku but katana! I reenact ritual suicide over the book. This is it! Can you believe it? Benedict defined who we are. Of course she never went to Japan … I wave my wrists around like I could have been a bona fide anthropologist too. Preface says here she acknowledges her colleague Robert Hashima. Says it all: Hashima was a kibei like Uncle Sus. Benedict could have gone to Topaz! She’s not describing Japanese, she’s … I gesture toward Asako and burst into laughter. My sister narrows her eyes in disgust. That’s not funny. I point to page 116’s schematic outline of obligations and sputter, Giri, on, haji, gaman, shikataganai, and double over in hilarity. The cultural mythology of our people was made manifest by the internment! If it weren’t for the camps, who would we be? Benedict was a genius! That’s not funny, my sister repeats. I’m consumed by absurdity and gasp for hospital air. I’ve got to get this under control, or I’ll pee on Asako’s bed. Okay. Okay, I pant, So Benedict says, Japanese differentiate between obligation and duty. Which is it that we are doing here? I fall prostrate across Asako’s body, convulsing somewhere between mirth and grief. We stare at the two creases that line Asako’s forehead above her nose and between her brows; on a scale of pain, 1 to 10, it’s a 7. Oh geez. Weeks later when Asako emerges from her stupor, I test her long-term memory. Did you ever read Ruth Benedict’s the Chrysanthemum and the Sword? Oh yeah. So what did you think? She never went to Japan. Ridiculous. And then they occupied Japan based on that. I think about this. Japanese internment/Japanese occupation. The WRA camps were like prequels? Mini crucibles? Yikes. If the Japanese Americans could maintain their dignity under conditions of great shame and humiliation, why not an entire mother nation? Oh, I take a breath. In the day, did others think like you? I don’t know. Asako shakes her head. I press my lips together and attempt a pious look of conjecture. Well, if Benedict studied the Japanese in camps, maybe she was describing … us? Asako is offended. We are not Japanese. Maybe we are Benedictines.

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What I get from Benedict is that the reason Japan went to war was for respect. And to be cognizant of the fact that if you humiliate or shame a Japanese, his revenge will be virtuous. I understand this; it is rather like being a fiction writer. And then I relearn from Benedict that the Japanese cultivate the habitual, the pleasurable, and the painful in elaborately artful rituals, everything from drinking tea, sleeping, fornicating, bathing, shooting arrows, playing the violin, wrestling, planting miniature trees, killing, eating, committing suicide. Anyone can learn the habit, which means that it can be predicted and that unlearning it can also happen. This is the anthropological lesson: social behaviors are patterns. * * * Of all the things I could say about your namesake, I can’t resist quoting this passage by Theodora Kroeber (Ishi in Two Worlds, 1961): Ishi was orderly by nature probably, and by old habit certainly … This easy competence and pleasure in well-ordered arrangements of the tools and possessions of living suggests the Japanese flair for raising mere orderliness to an aesthetic of orderliness. There is a temperamental, and possibly a kineaesthetic something in this trait not to be explained by poverty in the variety of things owned, or difficulty of replacement and consequent need to take good care of them … The aesthetic of order and arrangement would seem to be rather something in-born, deep-seated in the individual psyche. Some cultures turn this preference and capacity into an approved value: thus the Yana and the Japanese. Though doubtful, if, like Asako, I live to 96, I could maybe be the last sansei. I’ll make no bones about it right now. House me in any international museum that’s a swooping architectural extravaganza, preferably with water and glass and spectacular views and height, and surround me with sycophant handlers who invent exotic cocktails and precious gourmet fusion tapas; wash my body and hair in lavender oils; perform the nostalgic and the rude in arts and music. Just make sure I die in sweet sleep, and you can have my brain too.

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As the Pequod slips down into its burial in the Sea of Japan, here are the last words of Moby-Dick: “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf: a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” (Melville 1851) From those depths, the great white whale, that Leviathan, calls us again, and once again. Ishmael. Ishimaru. Ishi maru. This essay was first presented as a talk at the Tenth International Melville Conference for the Melville Society of Japan at Keio University in Tokyo in June 2015. I am grateful to scholarly contributions and early reading comments by Howard Boltz, Charles Kerns, Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, and Rob Sean Wilson. I am also grateful to Rie Makino, whose research funds made possible my visit to Keio University. The original talk, along with an introduction by Takayuki Tatsumi and participant responses from Keijiro Suga, Rie Makino, and Ryuta Imafuku, was published in the journal Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2016, 62–91, Johns Hopkins University Press and Hofstra University.

Works Cited Benedict, Ruth. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Kikuchi, Charles and John Modell. 1993. The Kikuchi Diary. Chicago: University of Illinois Press Kroeber, Theodora. 1961. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America. Berkeley: University of California Press Melville, Herman. 1851. Moby-Dick. Melville, Herman and Fred Benenson. 2010. Emoji Dick. Lulu Books Nishimoto, Richard S. and Lane Hirabayashi. 1995. Inside an American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, Arizona. Tucson: University of Arizona Press Sakoda, James Minoru. 1969. Origami Flowers. Dover Publications Starn, Orin. 2004. Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian. New York: Norton Thomas, Dorothy Swaine and Richard Nishimoto. 1946. The Spoilage. Berkeley: University of California Press Thomas, Dorothy Swaine, Charles Kikuchi, and James Sakoda. 1952. The Salvage: Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement. Berkeley: University of California Press Yamashita, Karen. 1990. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press ———. 2017. Letters to Memory. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.

PART III

Planetary Creation: Critique and Cosmos (reworlding at the Anthropocene/planetary/ environmental level)

CHAPTER 12

Flow or Friction? Ecological Transnationalism in Japanese TV Anime John Parham

Personified as cartoon characters, 17 nations at an international conference discuss initiatives to tackle global warming. Initially drawn as blank faceless figures, as they take on colour, facial features, clothing, and national characteristics, the discussion degenerates into aggression, gamesmanship, and a chaos of nations talking across and at odds with each other (Figs. 12.1 and 12.2). Hetalia: Axis Powers, the Japanese original net animation (ONA), implies that any attempt to wipe the slate clean and tackle climate change will be doomed in the face of rival national interests, deep, historically rooted antagonisms, and absurd levels of cross-national incomprehension. Hetalia is not really about ecology, however. After its two opening minutes, the subsequent six series retell a modern and principally military history via the personification of nations. That disinterest in environmentalism coupled with Hetalia’s one-dimensional characterisation, arguably crude plotlines, and crass national stereotyping might imply that the visual

J. Parham (*) University of Worcester, Worcester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_12

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Fig. 12.1  Hetalia: 17 ‘faceless’ axis powers gather to discuss global warming

Fig. 12.2  Hetalia: China watches on as France and the UK’s climate negotiations descend into traditional antagonism

cultural milieu of Japanese anime, manga, or computer games is ill-­ equipped to address the complexity of global environmental issues. Yet as Sharon Kinsella points out, in 1994 the Japanese government, no less, published a 50-page Environment White Paper in manga form.1 This example of how Japanese popular culture began to enter social, educational, and political institutions implies something different—the potential of manga and associated cultural forms (e.g. anime) to nurture environmental thinking right up to the level of national policy. Images and meanings about ecology abound in Japanese anime—from empathy and posthuman relations with other animals to scenarios of

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apocalypse and climate change to detailed prescriptions for environmental lifestyles, sustainable cities, or international policy. For such reasons it has regularly been argued that certain examples of anime—notably the films of Studio Ghibli—can help nurture environmental consciousness in receiver markets abroad. Those markets are extensive, encompassing East and South-East Asia, Australasia, Europe, and North and Latin America.2 Yet the vast world of Japanese anime can also be, to its global audience, enigmatic, culturally contentious, or disturbing—in its sentient plants, animals, ghosts, and monsters, its dystopian scenarios, its unsettling undercurrents of xenophobia, or its sexualised cartoon girls. Correspondingly, uneven or interrupted flows in transnational media prevent much of this material ever reaching non-Japanese, and particularly ‘Western’, audiences. In this essay, which addresses how popular culture might nurture a more global environmental consciousness, I will look not at those examples (e.g. Ghibli) that flow relatively smoothly out of Japan but instead at Japanese TV anime. The essay focuses, that is, on anime which is not generally being watched abroad. This exploratory chapter will attempt to reach some preliminary conclusions concerning the possible extent and causes of flow or friction in the transnational communication of ideas between East Asia and the rest of the World (Europe, North America, and Australasia in particular). I will consider why non-Japanese audiences might feel distanced from these shows but also reflect on what could be gained, in environmental terms, by watching them.

Transnational Media Flows and East Asian Popular Culture Transnationalism has been defined by Steven Vertovec as ‘ongoing exchanges’ and collective practices operating across national boundaries.3 In terms of media, this amounts to flows of theme, genre, finance, production, distribution, markets, and audience appeal. Flow can be seen in terms of both political economy—i.e. flows of capital across global media—and transculturally, as a sharing of taste, ideas, and values across individuals, communities, and fan cultures, for example. Typically, models of transnational media flow have described how cultural and economic imperialism rubs up against processes of resistance and ‘counter-flow’.4 However, ever increasing markets for the export of localised television cultures has created, in the words of Kevin Robins, a ‘new

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global media map’ and ‘new cultural spaces’.5 In this regard, East Asia has been a central focus in work on transnational media flow. Moving beyond the widespread importing of content from America or Britain, the increasing integration of East Asian economies into global markets has generated opportunities in film and television production, distribution, and screening abroad. Those opportunities have been enhanced markedly by cable or digital TV and especially by online media. For two particular reasons, the extended, transnational reach of East Asian popular culture offers a space in which shared and global environmental values may be nurtured. On the one hand, the internet in particular allows more niche content to flourish. Subscription websites, streaming services, or platforms for uploading content (e.g. YouTube) are generally less dependent on sales. This could, potentially, foster global fan cultures, more culturally knowledgeable audiences,6 and even more globally aligned forms of social and political consciousness. Secondly, as critics examining the far-reaching appeal of Japanese popular culture have argued, this tends to wield less coercive cultural influence than (to take the obvious example) American culture.7 Indeed, Koichi Iwabuchi suggests that an ‘awkwardness’ in ‘Japanization’ marks a means to reconsider transnational cultural flows as more fluid and more ‘disjunctive, non-isomorphic, and complex than what the center-periphery paradigm allows us to understand’.8 Transnational media culture stresses difference as much as it does similarity,9 implying that Japanese or East Asian popular culture will appeal in dialogue with other cultures, rather than being imposed upon them. A theory pertinent to an ecological reading of Japan’s transnational media is Ursula Heise’s ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’. In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet Heise argues that ‘the increasing connectedness of societies around the globe entails the emergence of new forms of culture … no longer anchored in a place’. Such forms would have the capacity to cultivate an ‘understanding [of] and affective attachment to the global’ (i.e. ‘a sense of planet’) or even a global feeling of belonging and ‘world environmental citizenship’.10 Her book attempts ‘to find effective aesthetic templates’ for cultivating such an attachment. These encompass ‘highly mediated kinds of knowledge and experience’ which—precisely because of their interconnected, global nature—can ‘lend equal or greater support to a grasp of biospheric connectedness’.11 Heise’s emphasis is on the connectedness afforded by tools such as Google Earth as well as on ‘experimental’ or ‘innovative’ forms—e.g. literary novels, avant-garde music, installation art12—seen as able to embody complex connection. As I have

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argued elsewhere, however, eco-cosmopolitanism can also be applied to popular media.13 Before considering this, two elements, it seems to me, might check this smooth flow from national into global culture. First, Heise makes it clear that cultural texts embodying a distinctly place-based sense of human ‘ties to territories and systems’ will remain significant in feeding sensibilities that might ‘encompass the planet as a whole’.14 Indeed, several of her examples do derive from a particular place, nation, or culture: for instance, the exploration of how Chernobyl impacted upon local communities in two German novels. Nonetheless, as I point out in the following discussion, the movement of local specific cultures into the global sphere—even when these are tracing global ecologies—will invariably be curbed by shortfalls of mistranslation or cultural distance. Secondly, it is strongly implied that the development of a mature eco-cosmopolitanism is likely to remain partial and imperfect, more aspiration than achievable goal. A key example—Google Earth—remains deeply entangled with dominant global forces; a novelist of the stature of Kim Stanley Robinson fails to transcend, Heise argues, a narrow, national perspective in setting his climate change trilogy in Washington, D.C.15 Such examples indicate the sheer difficulty of developing cultural forms, popular or otherwise, ‘commensurate with the complexities and heterogeneities of cultures joined in global crisis’.16 On the surface, these difficulties in establishing a viable eco-­ cosmopolitanism are exacerbated by the ‘disjunctive’ nature of the transnational exchanges that structure global media flow. Recent commentaries, as Heise is aware, have foregrounded that the expectations of cosmopolitanism are often both unrealistic and suspect. In particular, a ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ has attacked cosmopolitanism’s association with privilege and the consumer lifestyles of Westerners able to travel and experience other cultures. It has likewise criticised tendencies, in cosmopolitanism, towards universalising human culture in ways which elide more negative experiences of migration, exile, and displacement or which downplay the importance of national identity or indeed any localised sense of place or home.17 In a similar vein, critical cosmopolitanism has also taken issue with an emphasis on ‘openness’ to other cultures which, sometimes for ideological purposes, can obscure or negate the very real sense of difference, estrangement, or conflict which can be experienced, not least by individuals, when they encounter, or consume the culture of, different nations or ethnicities.18 Critical cosmopolitanism also encompasses attempts to formulate progressive notions of global citizenship and planetary awareness,

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of which eco-cosmopolitanism would be one type.19 Yet this still emphasises that any aspiration towards a universalising global form of belonging will have to confront and work with difference. A good model here is Jackie Stacey’s ‘uneasy’ cosmopolitanism. For Stacey the encounter with difference encouraged by a cosmopolitan outlook will be disconcerting and sometimes antagonistic. Nonetheless, if we truly aspire to be cosmopolitan, not least in pursuit of a more ecologically viable world, then we have to be honest and confront, as Stacey suggests, the ‘discomfort’, ‘aversion’, or ‘friction’ these encounters can contain.20 The paradigm of uncritical cosmopolitanism is similarly questioned by a transnationalism that entails a particular emphasis on the process and attendant difficulties of crossing borders and boundaries.21 On this basis, transnational media and culture are well placed to carry us towards a sense of world culture that would encapsulate the complexities of cosmopolitanism, global connectedness, and ecological interrelationship but that would also highlight the difficulty, and uneasiness, of any attempt to forge an eco-cosmopolitan culture. This can be seen if we consider various alternative metaphors by which media and communication theorists have qualified the notion of flow, not least in connection to East Asian popular culture. Critics have suggested, for example, that in the United States (and other Western nations) Japanese popular culture is often modified, absorbed, dissolved,22 or domesticated.23 Iwabuchi goes a step further, nearly refuting the directional impetus of flow, when he suggests, with reference to Japanese anime, that ‘transnationally circulated images and commodities … tend to become culturally odorless’.24 Conversely, Hoskins and Mirus apply an economic model relating to lost revenue. They describe a cultural discount in transcultural processes whereby a particular [television] programme rooted in one culture, and thus attractive in that environment, will have a diminished appeal elsewhere as viewers find it difficult to identify with the style, values, beliefs, institutions and behavioural patterns of the material in question.25

That discount increases each time viewers in other countries fail to pick up a nuance or are put off by cultural unfamiliarity and is exacerbated, they argue, by subtitling or dubbing.26 The discount is smaller, though, in the case of media in the United States, the country with the highest export trade.27 Taking this a stage further, Sandra Annett refers passingly to

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blockage with regard to the global circulation of East Asian visual media, i.e. an inability to understand or find appeal in another country’s culture.28 Yet perhaps the most useful metaphor for describing transnational Japanese anime is the one Annett actually deploys in Anime Fan Communities. For central to her book is an argument for friction as well as flow in popular culture, a metaphor developed out of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005). Tsing argues that an aspiration for ‘global connection’ is central to all major contemporary systems of thought—capitalism, science, politics, environmentalism. Nevertheless, she continues, from postcolonialism we know that all meta-discourses encounter a ‘friction’ between their own universalising tendencies and local cultures and conditions. Friction is the distinguishing trait of ‘global connection’. Such connections are routinely marked, Tsing writes, by the collision between, for example, ‘predatory business practices’ and ‘local empowerment struggles’,29 struggles shaped by local customs and traditions. The crucial point Tsing makes is that ‘global forces’ don’t indiscriminately dominate. Because ‘cultural diversity brings a creative friction to global connections’, those connections end up, in fact, as ‘congeries of local/global interaction’30 wherein global and globalising practices are constrained, altered, and sometimes revitalised or sustained in such encounters.31 While friction gives global connectedness ‘grip’,32 it also allows us to see that behind ‘each apparent hegemony there may be (or may not be) fragility’ and, therefore, there may be ‘sources of hope’ even if such encounters might also bring ‘new nightmares’.33 While Tsing largely describes an ethnography of friction generated by the collision of modern-day economic modes of imperialism with local resistance, friction might also characterise progressive universalising modes of global connection such as cosmopolitanism. Indeed, friction is, I believe, the metaphor by which we can best understand how eco-­ cosmopolitanism works. Tsing draws a direct parallel to global environmentalism, noting a friction in which environmental conservation, ‘eager to promote global knowledge and agreement’, has been ‘impeded by the rise of other forms of globally circulating knowledge’34 such as neoliberal capitalism or right-wing, nationalist populism. Yet Tsing’s sense that friction is also positive indicates that the frictional nature of transnational media might just nurture an eco-cosmopolitanism. This can be illustrated via Annett’s conception of transnational anime as ‘productive friction’. For Annett, friction illustrates how, on the one hand, there are blockages in the communication of meaning from one nation, culture, or

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community to another, but also that, in certain cases, this can be a ‘productive friction’ between, in the case of anime, political economy—i.e. global and corporate media production—and the ‘interpersonal’ transcultural fan activity which takes place around texts. It’s in the latter where new meanings, not least with regard to the environmental themes prevalent in anime, can be created as global audiences consume and re-interpret local culture.35 Annett’s conception of a transnational anime characterised by friction is underlined by more specific critical models. Y.H. Fung has identified four ways in which Asian Popular Culture migrates across borders: • as texts that are genuinely global in terms of both financial production and cultural outlook; • ‘indigenous forms that consciously distinguish themselves from the West’; • hybrid forms that combine Eastern culture and aesthetics with global reference points; • and ‘some elaborate cultural forms and products that can be converted to something global for certain situations’.36 Each of Fung’s categories applies if we examine the transnational dissemination of environmental or ecological themes in Japanese anime. For this research, I looked at seven shows tagged online as having ‘environmental’ themes: Arjuna (2001), Bamboo Bears (1997–8), Coppellion (2013), Jyu-­ oh-­sei (2006), Rewrite (2016), Shangri-La (2009), and This Ugly Yet Beautiful World (2004). My analysis balances the fact that while some texts, or some elements in texts, may simply be too Japanese to nurture global forms of culture, nonetheless a productive friction does emerge. It emerges from what Mizuko Ito, in Fandom Unbound, describes as the dual ‘fear and fascination’ engendered by anime’s ‘curious mix of exotic tradition and advanced technocapitalist modernity’.37 That mix is the basis on which a distinctly Japanese form of eco-cosmopolitan culture blends the alien with the ecologically instructive. I will now examine those two counterbalancing aspects in turn.

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Anime Discounted Four main factors might limit the extent to which Japanese TV anime can nurture eco-cosmopolitan sentiment in a global audience. The first, arguably, is the pervasive influence of Shintō, the ancient national religion of Japan, and in particular one of the philosophies associated with it, animism. The notion of ascribing character and agency to other animals, plants, inanimate forms of nature (e.g. rocks), weather patterns, and environments—and sometimes of giving these sentience or supernatural power—recurs throughout these shows: imaginary animals, ghosts, witches, and fairies populate Rewrite, for example; Arjuna features monstrous serpents and, contrastingly, interspecies communication by luminous forests and insects; arguably, one might even cite the Bamboo Bears performing acts of environmental activism. Patrick Curry has argued for animism as one of the pre-existing cultural traditions that could help ‘re-­ enchant’ a sense of being in the world.38 Though the ‘plasticity’ (flexibility) of animation is ideally equipped to realise animism on the screen, for Western audiences more familiar with anthropomorphised animals and nature, carefully framed to reflect back human attitudes and values,39 the blurred lines between human and non-human, the leap of faith required to invest in ghosts, spirits, and monsters, or speaking animals and sentient plant life may prove baffling, disturbing, even ludicrous. Furthermore, uneasy feelings might be compounded, in the context of the shows’ ecological themes, by the dark visions that living without enchantment might provoke, the menacing, moving grass and vengeful, carnivorous plants of Jyu-oh-sei, for example. A second factor that could distance global audiences is Japanese TV anime’s origins in the culture, or subculture, of otaku. Otaku is generally defined as obsessive, individual fandom focused around an immersion in the fictional worlds of—most prominently—anime, manga, and video games.40 Specific aspects include predominantly male fans; a perception of geekiness, withdrawal, or being socially inept; sexual feelings and obsessive love expressed through the consumption and creation of fictional characters; pessimism, cynicism, and, consequently, parody; and, in some readings, identification with militarism, empire, nation, or a ‘neonationalist ideology’.41 While otaku has been somewhat rehabilitated in recent years, its origins in a subculture stigmatised for supposedly sociopathic tendencies can carry through into cultural aspects that are challenging even for Japanese

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audiences.42 These include the solipsistic self-referencing that can characterise ‘nerd’ or subcultures, for example the in-joking about otaku boys that peppers This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. Neonationalism is probably less likely to be at the forefront in environmentally themed texts, but certain shows do flirt with militarism even in narratives about social or ecological restoration. An example would be the militias created to tackle social-environmental justice and nuclear fallout in Shangri-La and Coppellion. The latter in particular offers an odd—though, in the context of otaku, perhaps logical—alliance of Stormtroopers and schoolgirls. Perhaps the most obvious alienating feature of otaku culture, however, is the routine sexualisation of young female characters, several of whom are lead characters. Brett Hack writes: The driving forces of otaku culture are the sexually charged bishōjo (‘beautiful young girl’) characters and the idealized love called moe (lit. ‘budding’) that fans feel for them … This eroticized devotion to the fictional world has put otaku culture at odds with mainstream sentiments.43

Environmentally themed shows are not exempt. Conspicuous in several were short skirts, voyeuristic glimpses of underwear, partly or fully exposed breasts, and sometimes full nudity. These images were prominent too in packaging and marketing material (Fig.  12.3). Ubiquitous, notably, in Rewrite and This Ugly Yet Beautiful World, specific narrative examples include the pivotal moment in Arjuna when Juna is saved from death by undertaking to save the Earth, a moment enacted when she leaves her hospital bed revealingly semi-dressed; and when Takeru and Ryou in This Ugly Yet Beautiful World discover a spirit, Hikari, naked in the forest, clothe her, and then struggle as she keeps unzipping her top in a way presumably intended to titillate. The otaku fixation with what Saitō Tamaki calls the Beautiful Fighting Girl is far more complex than I could do justice to here. Yet for those less accustomed to otaku culture, and the scholarly debates around it, this apparent manifestation of lolicon—a boys’ appropriation of girls’ manga and anime characterised by sexual fixation—makes for a queasy viewing experience. Whether or not it is, in Japan, ‘at odds with mainstream sentiments’, certainly these types of anime have been subject to censorship in the West and are liable to unsettle anime’s cosmopolitan audience, as some previous studies indicate.44 Citing Iwabuchi’s description of Japanese anime as ‘odorless’, McKevitt points out that ‘cultural odor’ is relative:

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Fig. 12.3  The DVD for This Ugly Yet Beautiful World epitomises how environmentally themed anime routinely sexualises female characters

‘what seemed denationalized to a prominent anime director could smell a lot like Japan to a young person in California’.45 Interviewing Australian fans, Iida and Armour find just such examples of unease in these encounters with another culture: I am a little bit concerned about what I see now. When I go to Japan, the popularity of the moe thing is just—I find it quite disturbing and I don’t really like it … this proliferation of, you know, under-age pornographic—I mean, there’s so many of these cartoons that are aimed at teenagers are so

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sexualized—I mean, there’s always been a little bit of an element of that, but I think they’re going a little too far, in my opinion.46

A third reason why international audiences might be distanced from these shows is the friction between anime as, undoubtedly, a form of mass culture in Japan and its status as subculture, or even high culture, for Western consumers. Complex ecological arguments and, indeed, dark posthuman themes jar against blatantly mass cultural tropes such as the cheesy pop songs and videos that end and begin most of the programmes. Along similar lines, one of Iida and Armour’s interviewees, uneasy about the mass cultural connotations of the fandom associated with (and celebrated in) anime, admits that she conceals her enthusiasm from university friends for fear of being regarded ‘nerdy’ or ‘geeky’.47 The context shaping this disjuncture is the customary argument that, since the 1960s, Japanese anime has existed in a commodified ‘media mix’ in which TV shows—themselves often adapted from manga—engender spin-offs such as video games, toys, stickers, magazines, and posters. Subsequent aspects, arising from the commodified form, could further undermine expectations of cultural value. Integral to TV anime, for example, is the creation of numerous and often one-dimensional or stereotypical characters that translate across platforms into commodities.48 Marc Steinberg likewise posits the ‘media mix’ as the reason behind the form, ‘limited animation’—broadly, an interplay of minimal motion and still imagery—that characterises TV anime. Though ‘[s]tilling the movement of animation allows the image to connect with other media forms’,49 limited animation also gives, as Hayashi Jōji has suggested, a ‘jerky’ appearance to most Japanese TV anime. This may disaffect international audiences accustomed to the tradition of realism in (for example) Disney’s ‘illusion of life’ production values.50 Correspondingly, some international viewers discern that anime’s political economy might impact upon narrative. Another of Iida and Armour’s interviewees detects a ‘downgrading of quality’ in the later episodes of series that he attributes to ‘the tight production schedule and lack of budget’ (11).51 Consequently, if the cosmopolitan viewer looks to Japanese anime as a source of exoticism, education, or alternative social values, these mass cultural aspects might disappoint. A last constraint on the flow of environmental anime is something that Hoskins and Mirus indicate: simply, that lack of ‘supply’ can limit the appeal of imported television.52 Regarding transnational flow, Iwabuchi has argued that Japanese anime’s most significant shortcoming was the

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‘lack of international distribution channels’.53 Even now, in the age of internet television, this can be a problem. Subscription websites such as Crunchy Roll and Funimation exist, but of the seven shows discussed here, only Rewrite was available (on Crunchy Roll). DVDs could be bought (notably on Amazon), but sometimes only in formats used in particular countries. Moreover, this is a dying media with fewer and fewer devices now carrying DVD players. YouTube was the best source, but in almost all cases, certain episodes were unavailable or broken up into three sections. Some shows were not translated online (e.g. Coppellion) or were available only in specific languages (episodes of Shangri-La or This Ugly Yet Beautiful World could only be watched in Spanish) or were dubbed in English rather than subtitled, creating a somewhat Westernised feel. Lack of access unquestionably impedes this particular flow of Japanese TV, reinforcing my central point in this section: that media culture’s ability to nurture eco-cosmopolitanism is always likely to be partial and imperfect. Nonetheless, it’s worth clarifying that the majority of episodes could be obtained. Moreover, some of the blockages or sources of friction identified earlier will be minimised where viewers are willing, on occasion at least, to be bewildered, discomforted, or shocked in ways consistent with an ‘uneasy’ cosmopolitanism. In that case, I will now argue, such shows are indeed rich in ecological affect, information, and entertainment.

Rewrite: Towards Global Environmental Citizenship? An initial way in which ecological meaning can emerge out of the friction between Japanese anime and its transnational audience lies in the fact that, in certain senses, anime does flow smoothly across national boundaries. Elements of these programmes exemplify Fung’s ‘hybrid’ form in which Eastern culture and aesthetics combines with those of a global media. For example, there were many cross-cultural references: images of military helicopters hovering above a devastated Tokyo in Coppellion appear to consciously reference Apocalypse Now; the commander overseeing the Bamboo Bears closely resembles The Lorax. In Jyu-oh-sei, the stronger of the two brothers, fighting to protect them both, is called Thor; the notion of Shangri-La derives originally from the British novel Lost Horizon, written by James Hilton, while the series’ division between Atlas, a wealthy and technologically advanced city, and the ‘lower’ more impoverished city of Duomo closely resembles that of the societies of the Eloi and Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

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More substantially still, these shows draw from globally recognisable genres and narrative types. The majority were science fiction, which directly supports an interpretation of them as eco-cosmopolitan. For as Patricia Malone, from the U.S. national anime fan club, has suggested, ‘one of anime’s most common genre vehicles, science fiction, [has] frequently portrayed one-world globalized futures in which national identities mattered less than planetary origins’.54 Correspondingly, Japanese TV anime shares certain of the characteristics by which, it has been argued, global film or TV drama can support ecological content. Romantic narratives, for example, enact and symbolise ecological responsibility and a love for the planet, as seen when a budding romance with Hikari transports Takeru to maturity and ecological awareness in This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. Similarly, in narratives such as Arjuna and Shangri-La, individual heroes drive the plot towards ecologically rewarding conclusions. This particular device has, admittedly, been seen as problematic in eco-­ media studies. Framing environmental issues as conflicts between heroes and villains can increase our sense of reliance on exceptional, usually male, heroes, which in turn can discourage audiences from examining their lives and minimise the complexity, compromises, or tricky resolutions demanded by ecological issues.55 Yet it’s worth remembering here that most of the heroes in Japanese TV anime are female. Analysing how ‘anime heroines’ impact on U.S. audiences, Ramasubramanian and Kornfield argue that shōjo heroines are normal girls with heightened pro-social traits. This enables them to function as relatable role models, since they are similar to the audience members and yet exhibit consistent and thorough pro-social behaviors. Functioning as role models, these heroines generate strong wishful identifications and parasocial interactions….56

In a context where cultural translation is often imperfect, the shorthand of globally recognised conventions may sometimes be productive. At the same time, Iida and Armour find that fans connect to a ‘deep storyline’.57 This suggests something else: that, as Steinberg argues, anime also ‘has a strong tendency towards the development of complex human relationships, stories, and worlds’.58 Such depth suits the complexity of both transnational culture and eco-cosmopolitanism. In anime it emerges directly out of the productive friction between global eco-media and a distinctively Japanese popular culture. And out of that conjunction emerge

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two particular eco-cosmopolitan perspectives: an encounter of animism and ecological posthumanism, which reframes humans’ relationship with nature, and an imagination of future human societies which draws upon Japan’s unique historical legacy as a focal point of technological, ‘technocapitalist’ modernity. The flipside of the unsettling weirdness of animism described earlier is that confronting such images might also enhance our awareness that ‘dark’ nature is a consequence of our mistreatment of it and, conversely, that altering our actions to live in a more ecologically responsible way might re-enchant the Earth and enrich human lives. In these shows, conversant with Japanese tradition, it is apparent that vengeful nature and hostile animals or spirits result from human behaviour, for instance in the dense oxygen levels and poisonous swamps depicted in Shangri-La or in the devastated but perilous Tokyo of Coppellion. This critical outlook is perhaps most apparent in Jyu-oh-sei. The twin brothers Thor and Rai begin the series exiled on the terraformed colony of Juno to which humans have been forced to migrate due to rising population and carbon levels. Worse, though, falling foul of the authorities, they are then further exiled on a prison planet, Chimera. The implication, that we become exposed to a vengeful nature when humans mistreat their environment (and each other), is dramatized in Chimera’s insanely polarised weather cycle—half a year of intense heat and half a year of below-freezing temperatures—and in the carnivorous plant life amidst which the brothers must struggle to survive. Yet also foregrounded is the alternative. Prominent in current ecological discourse is an argument that to avoid disaster we need to acknowledge that we live, to apply another term of Anna Tsing’s, in ‘multispecies assemblages’. We are materially and emotionally linked to non-human life. As such, critics like Tsing and Donna Haraway suggest that our survival, indeed our flourishing, depends on cultivating an awareness of kinship with the non-human. To do that, they argue, we need stories. These anime, guided by animism, offer precisely this—in rediscovering that humans exist in multispecies assemblages, the world can become re-­ enchanted. This is signified, memorably, in the swarm of red returning butterflies that features in the closing scenes of This Ugly Yet Beautiful World and in a spectacle of illumination in Arjuna. Juna is told that she will ‘gain the power of the Earth, by sympathizing with the planet’. That sympathy is induced, however, by a reciprocal, communicative act of nature. What appears initially as a vaguely menacing, nocturnal glow which

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encompasses locusts, owls, ants, and fireflies becomes, as Juna awakens, an ‘earth sympathy wave’. In a visually dramatic scene, the ‘wave’ spreads, enveloping the forest, all its animals, the surrounding mountains, and both the Earth and Juna herself. This visual manifestation of our existence in an assemblage of species and nature is what ultimately motivates Juna to try to save the world. Ultimately, too, it engenders her social intervention, the other dimension to how these shows might inform an eco-cosmopolitanism. Noting that the social isolation and cynicism of otaku culture can give rise to, for example, nationalist ideology, Brett Hack concludes by suggesting, in an analysis of Akira Nakata’s manga Babel (2011), that parody can also be applied both to critique ideologies such as nationalism and to offer more ‘hopeful’ visions of the future. Depicting a Japan adapting to economic stress by embracing multi-ethnicity, Hack reads Babel as offering ‘a future where Japan is forced to change, but in changing, continues’.59 Much the same motivation drives eco-cosmopolitan narratives which are evidently derived both from Japan’s historical proximity to nuclear attack and nuclear disaster and its position as a hub of ‘advanced technocapitalist modernity’. Coppellion’s storyline is triggered, for instance, by a catastrophic accident in a nuclear power plant; in Arjuna the world is imperilled by pollution as well as by potential nuclear disaster; in Shangri-La, a reversion of society to nature is precipitated by earthquakes and global warming; in Jyu-oh-sei, as we have seen, humans colonise space because of overpopulation and rising carbon levels; while This Ugly Yet Beautiful World addresses a planet (and humans) likely to be impoverished by a sixth mass extinction. Only Rewrite breaks the repeated pattern of risk. It depicts a future sustainable city, Kazamatsuri, premised on ‘experimental afforestation’ and comprehensive recycling. Nonetheless, while the pre- and post-apocalyptic narratives inevitably weigh up options for how to save or rebuild the world, the looming chaos and underlying occult mysteries that haunt Rewrite and the theme of social injustice in Shangri-La both demonstrate that fully realised ecological futures will need to be constantly maintained. Whatever the scenario, each of these series creates narratives about a potential ecological future, and so, collectively, TV anime offers key social perspectives that could guide a future eco-cosmopolitanism. Three stand out: a genuinely planetary perspective, a sense of the relationship of the global present to both Earth’s deep history and distant future (as well as that of humanity), and an ethics of global ecological citizenship.

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In the first place, as Malone argues, there is little doubt that the impetus of these shows is planetary rather than nationalistic. The now archetypal image of Earth from space—which Heise argues contributed to a new planetary consciousness60—is quite literally ubiquitous (Fig.  12.4). Versions appear in Arjuna, Shangri-La, Hetalia, Jyu-oh-sei, Rewrite, and This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. More generally, there’s a clear sense that the battle for Japan to sustain its future is happening within a further, transnational assemblage, the planetary community signalled but then derided in Hetalia. This theme gets applied both in a critique of the present and in visions of eco-­ cosmopolitan futures. In Shangri-La, Japanese computer hackers, infiltrating a global carbon credit system, increase Saudi Arabia’s ‘carbon factor’ and, in so doing, instantly raise sea levels by 7 mm. Conversely, in Rewrite, the headquarters of Martel, a fictional worldwide environmental group, is based in Kazamatsuri, though, of course, the Bamboo Bears fly around the world attempting to tackle comparable conservation issues in countries and continents as far flung and varied as Africa and the Philippines, Antarctica and Russia. Unmistakably Japanese, these anime strive towards a sense of place and a sense of planet, implying strongly, sometimes poignantly, that the Earth is also our home. In Jyu-oh-sei, before being

Fig. 12.4  Images of Earth from space are ubiquitous in Japanese TV anime

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imprisoned on Chimera, the brothers see an image of the Earth—all swirling blues, whites, greens, and browns (Fig. 12.5)—juxtaposed with the alternately lurid or monochrome, terraformed planets of the new (‘Balkan’) system to which humans have migrated. As a consequence, they long to return to a planet of ‘real oceans and real fields’ which, for them, for now, is only accessible to a ‘super elite’ or via a satellite screen. Offering a planetary perspective, most of these shows also project—in a correspondence of time and space—from the present to the future, or from the future to now. In the Bamboo Bears, the bears regret, in Episode 5, that they were unable to stop the spread of sugar plantations on Cuba but hope that ‘maybe someday, someone will’; conversely, though This Ugly Yet Beautiful World strives to reverse mass extinction (aided by monsters!), its final episode suggests that any subsequent conservationist action will be contingent on humans who will have their ‘own go in the future’. This cross-historical perspective applies particularly, however, to the excellent Arjuna (the first episode of which is entitled ‘A Drop of Time’). In Episode 2, Juna, assuming her role as ‘avatar of time’, comes to understand the urgency of her mission by seeing across scales of past, present, and future. This is brilliantly (and movingly) realised in cutbacks between colour and black and white (both animation and photography). Flashbacks to monochrome photographs allow Juna to remember her home city while reminding her of the contemporary human world she’s been designated to protect. Conversely, a juxtaposition between a romanticised

Fig. 12.5  Jyu-oh-sei. Images of Earth from space come to represent ‘home’ for future humans

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black-and-white animation of a steam train and lurid, colour-splashed images of a near-disaster at a nuclear power plant brings to the reality of the present a critical discourse on how we apply technology. Nuclear power, the narrative explains, is risky, is not cost-effective (given the price of construction and waste disposal), and, ultimately, merely serves the excesses of modernity such as neon lighting, ubiquitous IT, and air conditioning. Similarly, a juxtaposition of images of ocean waste and nuclear power plants with fossilised animal bones puts modernity and its bleak future into dialogue with deep historical time. This enables Juna to contextualise her actions within the deeper history of the Earth. Underscored by yet another image of Planet Earth, she is told ‘You must feel the present’ but realises that this also means a need to ‘Look far, far beyond the limitless’, i.e. to keep in mind the distant future. From a culture more familiar with impending annihilation than most, the message rings clear: we must take the opportunity now, while we can, to rewrite our future and that of the planet. Key to all these narratives, the majority of which focus around central characters, is the importance of assuming individual responsibility. Rewrite begins with Tennoji reflecting critically on his idle life. Juxtaposed to this, and placing this in a humbling perspective, are animated depictions of the evolution of Earth. When, in a somewhat convoluted plotline, he is given a questionnaire to complete by a witch, Tennoji finds, amongst many ‘pointless’ questions, the following: Q25) You have the power, and are discontent with this world. Tell me, do you wish to change this world? Or do you wish to change yourself?

The answer, in Rewrite and in more or less all these shows, is both. In other examples, This Ugly Yet Beautiful World addresses—in the gradual coming to age of Takeru—a ‘pessimism’ in otaku culture that (he is told) is ‘no excuse to slack off’; the central narrative of Arjuna concerns having the confidence, inner strength, and skill to take up the challenge of securing the future. Out of this conjunction between the ecological crisis of modernity and the anxieties of otaku culture emerges a narrative that shares some central perspectives of eco-cosmopolitanism: firstly, of the need to recuperate cosmopolitanism’s ‘moral orientation’ and, secondly, of moral, critical cosmopolitanism as a prerequisite to a sense of global ecological citizenship that will be realised in individual globally minded acts of responsibility. For while this stress on personal responsibility could exemplify a weakness in green politics—displacing onto individuals

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responsibilities that should be addressed at government and corporate levels—nevertheless, as Luis Cabrera has argued, an individual ethos of global citizenship is probably necessary, for now, in the absence of effective global institutions (Cabrera 2008).61

Conclusion: Friction and Flow Whether in the elegy of Jyu-oh-sei—conveying loss before we have reached a tipping point of ecological catastrophe—or in counselling that we need to act now to rewrite the future, Japanese TV anime migrates across borders and seeks to shape a planetary ecological awareness. Friction does remain. Each of these shows contains elements likely to be alien to non-­ Japanese viewers, and at least some episodes are inaccessible to global audiences. Developing her model of ‘productive friction’ Annett rightly warns against polarised interpretations of anime: between political economic readings which stress the ‘soft’ economic power of the commodity and those of fan studies that (over)emphasise ‘the liberating potential of cultural exchange’.62 Framing the transcultural anime community as a Fandom Unbound, Mizuko perhaps stumbles closer to the truth in describing that community as a meganiche.63 Anime, especially TV anime, remains confined to a passionate, sizeable, but still limited international audience, which does limit its potential influence on any emergent eco-­ cosmopolitanism. Moreover, what anime offers is not the expedient cosmopolitanism of Western liberalism but an ‘uneasy’ cosmopolitanism engendered by both the disconcerting nature of encounters with ‘difference’ and, in these examples, by dark ecological visions and the fundamental questions these ask about the technocratic capitalist societies in which many of us live. And yet, despite these nodal points of friction, Japanese TV anime does flow through transnational media culture. It is now more readily available through the internet while its ecological themes are often conveyed via globally familiar narrative modes, genres, or visual forms of representation. And just like the more ‘innovative’ or ‘experimental’ examples Heise offers, anime can meet the challenge of describing complex global ecologies. A protracted scene in the first episode of Shangri-La explains the principle and ramifications of an international system of carbon tax. Introduced to curb global emissions, credits or debit would accrue, we are told, according to the CO2 emitted or absorbed. Yet this seemingly desirable

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idea exacerbates inequality. Countries would continue to industrialise, most likely offsetting the carbon cost by cheap labour; alternatively, the credit system is liable either to increase the power of rich, more technologically advanced First World nations over Third World nations or—in its abstract big data and complex, computerised systems—could offer yet greater leverage to the invisible (shady) powers that operate in a capitalist global economy. In Shangri-La this particular storyline—with a complexity you’re unlikely to find in a Disney film—is underscored by the fact that the system is being manipulated by hackers, but it’s underscored in a way totally unique to anime. As the hackers wield power anonymously, their online identities are the names and voices of little girls and the face of a teddy bear, while the computer analysis is carried out by an enslaved, terrified serpent! This bizarre, complex collision of global politics, ecological modernism, animism, and the power of girls typifies Japanese anime and underpins, up to a point, the impossibility of reaching a seamless eco-cosmopolitanism. Yet difference, as Stacey suggests, is what gives ‘grip’ to all forms of cosmopolitanism. In the productive friction between complex flows of transnational media production and correspondingly complex cultural, philosophical, religious, or political perspectives, the environmentalist critique and ecological vision of Japanese TV anime can translate in ways meaningful to the lives of an international audience, just so long as those audiences tune in!

Notes 1. Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000), 95–6; and see Frederik L. Schodt, Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1996), 297. 2. Andrew C.  McKevitt, Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 181. 3. Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London: Routledge, 2009), 3. 4. Vertovec, Transnationalism, 2–3. 5. Cited in Vertovec, Transnationalism, 8. 6. Michael Keane, Anthony Fung, and Albert Moran, New Television, Globalisation, and the East Asian Cultural Imagination (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 53.

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7. McKevitt, Consuming Japan, 181–3; Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 34. 8. Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 36. 9. Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 43–4. 10. Ursula K.  Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 59. 11. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 62. 12. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 10–11. 13. John Parham, Green Media and Popular Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 24. 14. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 10. 15. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 207. 16. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 208. 17. Gerard Delanty and David Inglis, “Introduction: An overview of the field of cosmopolitan studies,” in Cosmopolitanism: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences (vol. 1), eds Delanty and Inglis (London and New  York: Routledge, 2011), 9; Nina Glick Schiller and Andrew Irving (eds), Whose Cosmopolitanism?: Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontents (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 5. 18. Jackie Stacey, “The Uneasy Cosmopolitans of Code Unknown,” in Whose Cosmopolitanism?, eds Glick Schiller and Irving, 160–1. 19. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 10; Delanty and Inglis, “Introduction,” 9. 20. Stacey, “The Uneasy Cosmopolitans,” 160–3, 170. 21. Victor Roudometof 2005. “Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Glocalization,” Current Sociology 53, no. 1 (2005): 114–15. 22. Keane, Fung and Moran, New Television, 49–50. 23. Y.H.  Fung, Asian Popular Culture. The Global Dis(continuity) (Oxford: Routledge, 2013), 5. 24. Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 46. 25. Colin Hoskins and Rolf Mirus, “Reasons for the US Dominance of the International Trade in Television Programmes,” Media, Culture and Society 10 (1988): 500. 26. Hoskins and Mirus, “Reasons for the US Dominance,” 500. 27. Hoskins and Mirus, “Reasons for the US Dominance,” 501. 28. Sandra Annett, Anime Fan Communities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 5. 29. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2005), ix. 30. Tsing, Friction, 3. 31. Tsing, Friction, ix–x. 32. Tsing, Friction, 5.

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33. Tsing, Friction, 77. 34. Tsing, Friction, 12. 35. Annett, Anime Fan Communities, 5. 36. Fung, Asian Popular Culture, 1–2. 37. Mizuko Ito, “Introduction,” in Fandom Unbound, eds. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izuma Tsuji (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), xiii. 38. Patrick Curry, Ecological Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 142–6. 39. Nicole Starosielski, “‘Movements that are Drawn’: A History of Environmental Animation from The Lorax to Avatar,” The International Communication Gazette 73, no. 1–2 (2011): 154–6. 40. Brett Hack, “Subculture as Social Knowledge: A Hopeful Reading of Otaku Culture,” Contemporary Japan 28, no. 1 (2016): 41. 41. See Thiam Huat Kam, “The Common Sense that Makes the ‘Otaku’: Rules for Consuming Popular Culture in Contemporary Japan,” Japan Forum 25, no. 2 (2013): 153–4; Hack, “Subculture as Social Knowledge,” 33; Ō tsuka Eiji and Thomas Lamarre, “An Unholy Alliance of Eisenstein and Disney: The Fascist Origins of Otaku Culture,” Mechademia 8 (2013): 252. 42. Kam, “The Common Sense,” 152. 43. Hack, “Subculture as Social Knowledge,” 41. 44. Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl, trans. J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lucas (Minneapolis and London: Minneapolis University Press, 2011), 53–61. 45. McKevitt, Consuming Japan, 182–3. 46. Sumiko Iida and William S. Armour, “The Voices of Adult Anime/‘Manga’ Fans in Australia: Motivations, Consumption Patterns and Intentions to Learn the Japanese Language,” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 5, no. 1 (2019): 11. 47. Iida and Armour, “Voices of Adult Anime/‘Manga’ Fans,” 12. 48. Marc Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 6. 49. Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix, 6. 50. Cited Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix, 5. 51. Iida and Armour, “Voices of Adult Anime/‘Manga’ Fans,” 11. 52. Hoskins and Mirus, “Reasons for the US Dominance,” 509. 53. Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 38. 54. Cited McKevitt, Consuming Japan, 182. 55. Parham, Green Media, 43–4. 56. Srividya Ramasubramanian and Sarah Kornfield, “Japanese Anime Heroines as Role Models for U.S. Youth: Wishful Identification, Parasocial

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Interaction, and Intercultural Entertainment Effects,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 5, no. 3 (2012): 204. 57. Iida and Armour, “Voices of Adult Anime/‘Manga’ Fans,” 10. 58. Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix, 8. 59. Hack, “Subculture as Social Knowledge,” 55. 60. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 22. 61. See Luis Cabrera, “Global Citizenship as the Completion of Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of International Political Theory 4, no. 1 (2008). 62. Annett, Anime Fan Communities, 4–5. 63. Mizuko Ito, “Introduction,” xii.

Works Cited Television Shows Arjuna. 2001. Satelight. Bamboo Bears. 1997–8. Mitsui Company Ltd. Coppellion. 2013. GoHands. Hetalia: Axis Powers. Studio Deen. Jyu-oh-sei. 2006. Bones. Rewrite. 2016. 8-Bit. Shangri-La. 2009. Gonzo. This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. 2004. Gainax, Shaft.

Published Sources Annett, Sandra. 2014. Anime Fan Communities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cabrera, Luis. 2008. “Global Citizenship as the Completion of Cosmopolitanism.” Journal of International Political Theory 4(1): 84–104. Curry, Patrick. 2011. Ecological Ethics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Delanty, Gerard, and David Inglis. 2011. “Introduction: An overview of the field of cosmopolitan studies.” In Cosmopolitanism: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences (vol. 1), edited by Delanty and Inglis, 1–27. London and New York: Routledge. Fung, Y.H. 2013. Asian Popular Culture. The Global Dis(continuity). Oxford: Routledge. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Andrew Irving (eds). 2014. Whose Cosmopolitanism?: Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontents. New York: Berghahn Books. Hack, Brett. 2016. “Subculture as Social Knowledge: A Hopeful Reading of Otaku Culture,” Contemporary Japan 28(1): 33–57.

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Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoskins, Colin, and Rolf Mirus. 1988. “Reasons for the US Dominance of the International Trade in Television Programmes.” Media, Culture and Society 10: 499–515. Iida, Sumiko, and William S. Armour. 2019. “The Voices of Adult Anime/‘Manga’ Fans in Australia: Motivations, Consumption Patterns and Intentions to Learn the Japanese Language.” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 5(1): 7–23. Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2002. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kam, Thiam Huat. 2013. “The Common Sense that makes the ‘Otaku’: Rules for Consuming Popular Culture in Contemporary Japan.” Japan Forum 25(2): 151–73. Keane, Michael, Anthony Fung, and Albert Moran. 2007. New Television, Globalisation, and the East Asian Cultural Imagination. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Kinsella, Sharon. 2000. Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Richmond: Curzon Press. McKevitt, Andrew C. 2017. Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Mizuko Ito. 2012. “Introduction.” In Fandom Unbound, edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izuma Tsuji, xi–xxxi. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ō tsuka Eiji, Lamarre, Thomas. 2013. “An Unholy Alliance of Eisenstein and Disney: The Fascist Origins of Otaku Culture.” Mechademia 8: 251–277. Parham, John. 2015. Green Media and Popular Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ramasubramanian, Srividya, and Sarah Kornfield. 2012. “Japanese Anime Heroines as Role Models for U.S.  Youth: Wishful Identification, Parasocial Interaction, and Intercultural Entertainment Effects.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 5(3): 189–207. Roudometof, Victor. 2005. “Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Glocalization.” Current Sociology 53 (1): 113–35. Saitō Tamaki. 2011. Beautiful Fighting Girl [trans. J.  Keith Vincent and Dawn Lucas]. Minneapolis and London: Minneapolis University Press. Schodt, Frederik L. 1996. Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Stacey, Jackie. 2014. “The Uneasy Cosmopolitans of Code Unknown.” In Whose Cosmopolitanism?, edited by Glick Schiller and Irving, 160–74. Starosielski, Nicole. 2011. “‘Movements that are Drawn’: A History of Environmental Animation from The Lorax to Avatar.” The International Communication Gazette 73(1–2): 145–63.

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Steinberg, Marc. 2012. Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP. Vertovec, Steven. 2009. Transnationalism. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 13

Hurricanes and Kaiju: Climate Change and Toxicity Across the Pacific in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim Danielle Crawford

Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) is set in the 2020s, during a time when alien life, or kaiju, emerge from a breach between tectonic plates on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.1 San Francisco and Manila are some of the first cities to get attacked by kaiju, and to fight these monsters from the oceanic depths, the Jaeger Program is created.2 Jaegers are giant robots that are operated by two pilots who participate in a neural handshake, known as the “drift,” melding their minds with the machine and with each other in an effort to save humanity from destruction. This American monster film, with its depictions of human-powered robots and hurricane-like kaiju, confronts the deworlding forces of climate change but presents a nuclear solution to the kaiju invasion that ultimately exacerbates environmental toxicity across the Pacific.

D. Crawford (*) University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_13

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Pacific Rim has explicit ties to the kaiju genre, a genre that, dating back to Ishirō Honda’s Gojira (1954), is intertwined with the legacy of nuclear trauma in Japan. In his extensive study of kaiju films, Jason Barr writes that in “Japan, and among devout kaiju fans, the genre is often called kaiju eiga, a term that loosely translates to ‘monster movie’ but more often colloquially denotes a purely Japanese film or television production featuring oversized creatures.” However, despite these strong ties to Japan, Barr asserts that kaiju are a global phenomenon that “have dotted the world’s screens,” making kaiju its own genre “that “incorporates kaiju eiga, but also embraces and examines the role giant monsters play throughout the world of cinematic storytelling.”3 At the heart of this genre is a critical reflection of social anxieties, spanning from nuclear proliferation to environmental pollution, and it is these anxieties that set the genre apart from all films featuring a big creature or monster.4 Barr asserts that films within the kaiju genre not only highlight “worldwide anxieties but also the underlying realism that allows those anxieties to fester,” as “the problems addressed about the environment, the international political atmosphere, terrorism, or violence are [often] never ‘solved’” in the films’ endings.5 Although Pacific Rim belongs to this larger kaiju genre, it refashions the Cold War nuclear anxieties of its filmic predecessors. In an illuminating article titled “Beasts from the Deep,” Erin Suzuki writes that “while Cold War-era monster movies spoke to historically specific anxieties around nuclearization, imperialism, and containment,” films such as Pacific Rim “revisit these monster-movie tropes not only to reconsider such issues in a twenty-first century context but to overcome them with future promises of transpacific partnership between the United States and Asian nations.”6 Thus, instead of using kaiju to symbolize the devastating destruction of nuclear bombs, Suzuki asserts that Pacific Rim uses jaegers and the different nationalities of their pilots to symbolize the neoliberal collaborations of a transpacific future, one where the United States and Japan must come together to fight the monsters emerging from the waters of their borders.7 Suzuki’s interpretation of the film speaks to its title and the different meanings embedded within it. As an economic concept, the Pacific Rim has been predominately associated with flows of capital and the so-called “rising” economies of countries in and around the Pacific Ocean. However, Chris Connery notes that the “origin of the term is [actually] geological, referring to the rim of volcanic and tectonic activity around the Pacific Ocean.”8 This geological understanding of the Pacific Rim is emphasized in the opening lines of del Toro’s film, when the main character, Raleigh

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Becket, describes the breach as “a fissure between two tectonic plates” at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, or “a portal between dimensions.”9 Here the camera lens focuses on the ocean floor, where a breach, filled with electric blue light, opens beneath a school of fish—a breach where fault lines and oceanic ecologies are mapped onto alternate dimensions and worlds. The opening scene thus presents the Pacific Rim as a geological, oceanic concept that is tied to the act of “worlding,” defined by Rob Sean Wilson “as a diverse historical process of world-formation and life-world building-­up.”10 However, in this film, the opening of the breach creates a deworlded Pacific, where lifeworlds in Asia and the Pacific are dismantled due to the escalating kaiju disaster. This paper builds from this deworlding framework and Suzuki’s interpretation of kaiju as allegory, as she argues that the film’s oceanic beasts both “allegorize the militarization and economic liberalization of the ‘Pacific Rim’ nations whose economies have come to dominate the region” and highlight “the inextricable entanglement of these neoliberal projects from the chaotic and unpredictable crises that they purport to solve or prevent.”11 In this essay, I read del Toro’s kaiju as an allegory for the threat of climate change in Asia and the Pacific. Analyzing the nuances of this climate change allegory exposes a deworlded landscape of ruin, as different countries of the region are undone by the effects of planetary warming and the transpacific flows of toxic, kaiju-­ infested waters. Just as fictional monsters emerge from the Pacific Ocean, monster storms emerge over a warming Pacific with ever-rising sea levels. However, I argue that this allegorical engagement with climate change, an engagement that reflects anxiety about the frequency of human-induced disasters in and around contaminated waters, is ultimately undercut by the film’s use of multiple nuclear explosions to close the kaiju breach. This use of nuclear technology to “save the day” notably deviates from the nuclear anxieties of the kaiju genre and problematically rewrites the history of U.S. nuclear testing in the Pacific, and more specifically the Marshall Islands, by positing toxicity as both the cause and solution to disaster.

Kaiju and Climate Change After Pacific Rim hit box offices, film critics and reviewers began debating the underlying symbolism of del Toro’s rendition of kaiju, with many turning to climate change as a theme that resonated with contemporary audiences. In a review for National Public Radio (NPR), Ian Buckwalter

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wrote that Pacific Rim “trade[s] in nuclear anxieties for more top-of-mind worries about climate change,” while Annalee Newitz wrote in a review for Gizmodo that the film is “clearly intended as an allegory for the kinds of problems that humanity is dealing with in the twenty-first century, specifically climate change and natural disasters that transcend national boundaries.”12 In his analysis of the kaiju genre, Barr even notes that “the set design in Pacific Rim appears to take climate change into account, creating a darker world with vastly different weather patterns from those that exist today.”13 However, despite Pacific Rim’s apparent ties to climate change, the film diverges from the representational tactics of the climate fiction genre. Climate fiction, often abbreviated as cli-fi, is a literary genre that examines the disastrous impact of climate change within a fictional setting. Although it is speculative, it departs from traditional science fiction in that “its stories seldom focus on imaginary technologies or faraway planets.”14 While cli-fi is steeped in the reality of climate change, projecting us into a believable world devastated by the effects of global warming, Pacific Rim uses the imaginary technology of jaegers and the science fiction scenario of an alien kaiju invasion to create a different representation of climate change. The film never addresses climate change directly, and instead of creating a realistic world of environmental ruin, like other works of cli-fi, Pacific Rim encourages audiences to understand kaiju as an allegory that can be mapped onto contemporary environmental issues. In doing so, the film elides the representational challenges of cli-fi. Works of cli-fi are presented with the daunting task of representing the complexity of climate change, a hyperobject that Timothy Morton defines as a “nonlocal” entity that is “massively distributed in time and space.”15 Morton asserts that because global warming is “distributed across the biosphere and beyond, it’s very hard to see as a unique entity.” He writes, “Like the image in a Magic Eye picture, global warming is real, but it involves a massive, counterintuitive perspective shift to see it.”16 By not attempting to directly represent climate change, del Toro’s film evades the challenge of representing a hyperobject and instead uses the kaiju–jaeger dynamic to localize the forces of planetary warming. This is accomplished toward the beginning of the film when Raleigh Becket and his jaeger copilot and brother Yancy fight a kaiju codenamed Knifehead off the coastline of Alaska. Raleigh states, “There are things you can’t fight, acts of God. You see a hurricane coming, you have to get out of the way. But when you’re in a jaeger, suddenly, you can fight the

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hurricane. You can win.”17 Here, kaiju are effectively hurricanes, while jaegers are humans who no longer have to run from forces of nature. By presenting kaiju as symbolic representations of hurricanes, the film contains the vast scale of extreme weather events within the localized body of the kaiju, while the giant, robot bodies of the jaegers, which are merged with their human pilots, quite literally give humans, in the words of Morton, the “massive, counterintuitive perspective” needed to not only see climate change but to confront, fight, and defeat it.18 This parallel between kaiju and hurricanes is further cemented in the action of the scene when Knifehead approaches a fishing vessel that appears to be caught in the throes of an extreme storm. The boat is tossed back and forth on a tumultuous sea amid the thrashing of rain and wind, causing the fishermen to believe that they are caught in the storm’s eye. The camera lens moves inside the boat to reveal its radar machine, as the fishermen track what appears to be the closest land mass—a moving “island” that is actually the body of a kaiju. As the camera pans out, we begin to the see the movements of this kaiju, although it is dark and distinguishing the creature from the choppy water poses a challenge. Then the camera pans out even further, revealing what appears to be a giant wave crashing beside the fishing vessel. This wave is in fact the curved back of the kaiju emerging from the ocean, encased in the foam and spray of the murky waters. This image of a fishing vessel overcome by a wave-turned-kaiju is reminiscent of the opening scene in the original Gojira, when a Japanese boat is attacked by Gojira and sunken by a bright flash of light that rises out of the ocean. While the initial attack in Gojira directly harkens back to the Lucky Dragon incident in 1954, when, as Yu-Fang Cho notes, “a Japanese tuna fishing trawler by the name of Lucky Dragon No. 5 … was showered with radioactive fallout from the Castle Bravo nuclear test carried out by the United States on Bikini Atoll,” the kaiju attack in Pacific Rim is linked to extreme weather, as Knifehead’s body quite literally creates the material conditions of a storm on the water.19 Del Toro thus reframes the iconic opening scene of Gojira, shifting from an analogy and critique of nuclear violence in the Pacific to an extended analogy of climate change in the Pacific. This analogy is developed over the course of the film through key details that resonate with popular understandings of climate change. For instance, kaiju are rated by a category system of one through five, with one being the weakest and five being the strongest. Likewise, hurricanes are ranked on a category system of one through five via the Saffir Simpson

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Hurricane Wind Scale, with each category corresponding to escalating wind speeds.20 Owing to this clear parallel in categorization, Barr writes that “when a level five category kaiju appears at the end of the film, most audiences will automatically understand the severity of the situation, and they will know this not because of the film’s internal logic but because of their preexisting familiarity with hurricane terminology.”21 While the categorization of kaiju connects them to storm systems, the intensity of these kaiju categories increases over the course of the Kaiju War, with, as Barr notes, a Category 5 kaiju emerging in the final battle scene. This increase in kaiju categories is reflective of climate change forecasts, which predict that extreme weather events, such as heat waves and heavy rain, will increase in intensity as global temperatures rise. In a 2015 scientific study on weather extremes and climate change, Erich M. Fischer and Reto Knutti state that “today 75% of the moderate hot extremes and about 18% of the moderate precipitation extremes occurring worldwide are attributable to warming, of which the dominant part is extremely likely to be anthropogenic.”22 Should temperatures increase to the 2-degree-­ Celsius threshold, often considered a tipping point, the authors note that “the fraction of precipitation extremes attributable to human influence rises to about 40%.”23 Indeed, the Asia and Pacific region is already witnessing a devastating increase in storm intensity, as evidenced by Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), a super typhoon that hit the Philippines and caused a death toll of approximately 10,000 people. This typhoon, which was one of the strongest tropical cyclones in known history, occurred on November 8, 2013—just months after the release of del Toro’s film. Though the intensity of kaiju increases over time, the frequency of their appearances escalates over the duration of the film. When Raleigh Becket arrives in Hong Kong and enters the Shatterdome, the last remaining base of the dwindling Jaeger Program, Stacker Pentecost, the commanding officer of said program, shows Becket the war clock. Pentecost states, “The war clock. We reset it after every kaiju attack. It keeps everyone focused. The frequency of attacks is accelerating.”24 This rising frequency of attacks is connected to the increasing frequency of extreme weather events under climate change. Fischer and Knutti predict that if the 2-degree-Celsius threshold is reached, an extreme weather “event expected once every 10,000 days (about 30 years), in pre-industrial conditions,” would be “expected every 10 to 20 years,” with “extreme precipitation” increasing due to the “increased water-holding capacity of warmer air.”25 Such forecasts pose a direct threat to the many nations in Asia and the

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Pacific that are located in typhoon and hurricane belts. The film thus highlights the deworlding impact of frequent, extreme weather events in Asia and the Pacific through the analogy of extreme and frequent kaiju attacks that dismantle coastal cities. This analogy is deepened through the characters’ responses to kaiju attacks, responses that parallel the threat of rising sea levels. Near the beginning of the film, Pentecost attends a virtual meeting with world leaders who inform him that the Jaeger Program is no longer effective as kaiju have adapted to and ultimately deflected jaeger fighting techniques. Much to Pentecost’s disappointment, the leaders inform him of their plans to defund the Jaeger Program and instead focus their resources on promoting the Coastal Wall Program. However, this wall proves to be ineffective when a news broadcast from Sydney shows a Category 4 kaiju that is able to break “through the coastal wall in less than an hour.”26 Becket watches this news broadcast while working on the “Wall of Life” in Sitka, Alaska, five years after his fight with Knifehead. As Becket watches this news clip, wherein the coastal wall crumbles around a kaiju marching toward the Sydney Opera House, his fellow laborer on the wall states that “that thing went through the wall like it was nothing.”27 Indeed, the wall is a band-aid solution to kaiju attacks that is unable to protect coastal cities. The failed “Wall of Life,” designed to block out kaiju, can be compared to coastal walls that are used to block out the rising sea levels of climate change. Like the “Wall of Life,” coastal walls are a band aid solution that fails to address the underlying cause of rising sea levels.28 Nonetheless, these walls are viewed as a potential adaptation strategy for climate change. In response to a study on coastal flood damage, Evan Lehmann writes that “every country worldwide will be building walls to defend itself from rising seas within 90 years because the cost of flooding will be more expensive than the price of protective projects.”29 However, for countries like the Marshall Islands, rising sea levels and sea walls are already a grim reality: a change in global trade winds has “raised sea levels in the South Pacific about a foot over the past 30 years.”30 Makeshift sea walls are used on islands such as Ebeye, but these walls are often unable to keep out the rising tides. Coral Davenport from The New York Times writes that if you “add to this problem a future sea-level rise wrought by climate change,” Marshallese “who today experience deluges of tidal flooding once every month or two could see their homes unfit for human habitation within the coming decades.”31 Despite this vulnerability, Pacific Rim curiously omits how the Coastal Wall Program

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would protect Pacific Island nations, like the Marshall Islands, from the threat of kaiju—as the proposed wall simply stretches across the continental borders of the Pacific, such as the wall from Alaska to California that Becket helps construct. Pacific Rim’s allusions to climate change are bolstered by a preoccupation with environmental toxicity, which is revealed when the scientist Newton Geiszler drifts with the remains of a kaiju brain. Geiszler learns that kaiju visited Earth during the prehistoric era; however, he states that “the atmosphere wasn’t conducive” during the first visit, “so they waited it out.”32 Human production of waste created an ideal environment for kaiju, as Geizler states that “with ozone depletion, and carbon-monoxide-­ polluted waters, well we’ve practically terraformed it for them.”33 Barr notes that Geizler’s monologue creates an equation of “pollution leading to climate change leading to kaiju, which then directly leads to a fundamental and destructive altering of the entire world.”34 Just as greenhouse gas emissions create the conditions for a warming planet, these same emissions create the conditions for kaiju to successfully live on Earth. While kaiju may thrive in polluted waters, their acidic blood leaks into the ocean, generating even more pollution and toxicity. In the film, a newscaster announces that the “acid factor of the kaiju blood creates a toxic phenomenon named kaiju blue.”35 Here, the camera shows a crew of people in hazmat suits cleaning up a contaminated area of kaiju blood after an attack in Manila. This kaiju blue is reminiscent of the feedback loops of climate change, which operate on a self-perpetuating logic, accelerating the process of rising temperatures. Melting sea ice is a key example of a positive feedback loop. Ice “is light-coloured and reflective, [and] a large proportion of the sunlight that hits it is bounced back to space, which limits the amount of warming it causes.”36 However, with planetary warming, this same “ice melts, revealing the darker-coloured land or water below. The result is that more of the sun’s energy is absorbed, leading to more warming, which in turns leads to more ice melting—and so on.”37 In a similar vein, kaiju blood creates a cyclical loop wherein kaiju emerge from a toxic ocean and then contaminate the water with more toxins via their blood, which in turn makes the oceanic atmosphere more conducive to kaiju and so forth. While we can connect kaiju blue to climate change feedback loops, the film’s image of a toxic leak in the Pacific Ocean, one that workers in hazmat suits are desperately trying to contain, is eerily reminiscent of the 2011 nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station

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in Japan. In the film, kaiju blood seeps into the Pacific from the coastline of Manila, turning the water a toxic blue, after the rupture of a seismic breach. Meanwhile, in our current moment, toxic radiation still leeches into the Pacific Ocean from the coastline of Japan eight years after the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant—a meltdown that resulted “in the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history.”38 Del Toro’s film was released just two years after this nuclear disaster, during a time when an estimated three hundred tons of contaminated water were being leaked per day into the Pacific.39 As such, the kaiju of Pacific Rim seem to be a figurative warning of the dangers associated with both climate change and oceanic toxicity.

Rewriting U.S. Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands However, while the film presents kaiju as a type of deworlding, environmental disaster, exhibiting, on one level, an anxiety about a polluted and warming planet, this anxiety is ultimately undercut by its use of nuclear energy to “save the day.” In the final mission of Pacific Rim, two nuclear explosions are detonated under water to defeat the kaiju and seal the breach. The final remaining jaegers, Gypsy Danger (piloted by Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori, the adopted daughter of Pentecost) and Striker Eureka (piloted by Pentecost and Chuck Hansen), walk on the floor of the ocean and journey to the opening of the breach. Striker Eureka is carrying a 2400-pound thermonuclear bomb, or a hydrogen bomb, and while the initial plan was for Striker to drop this bomb into the breach, the jaeger gets severely damaged by a Category 5 kaiju. Instead, Gypsy Danger, which is powered by a nuclear reactor, must venture into the breach and use its reactor to create a nuclear explosion. In an act of self-sacrifice, Pentecost and Hansen decide to detonate the bomb on Striker to clear a path for Gypsy Danger and kill the kaiju surrounding the breach. The bomb’s explosion creates a massive, underwater mushroom cloud that destroys not only the kaiju but all marine life in its wake, as seen by the dead fish flopping around on the ocean floor. The camera then pans out to show the sheer immensity of the bomb, as it obliterates everything in its path, consuming marine ecosystems in a fiery haze. All that remains is Gypsy Danger, magically unscathed by the blast, allowing Mori and Raleigh Becket to take the jaeger into the breach, after

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which Becket initiates a meltdown of the machine’s nuclear core, creating a second explosion that closes the breach—one that Becket and Mori are able to survive via the jaeger’s escape pods. The war clock is subsequently deactivated, and everyone at the Shatterdome base cheers in celebration. In her analysis of Pacific Rim, Suzuki writes that the “oceanic origins” of kaiju “speak to the absent presence of indigenous Pacific histories and epistemologies within the construction of contemporary transpacific networks.” She asserts that the kaiju of the film, which are “tied most closely to the geography and ecology of the Pacific Ocean,” are “also implicitly tied to the history of nuclear tests on the Pacific Islands.”40 In taking this reading a step further, I contend that the underwater nuclear explosions of the film’s ending eerily parallel the underwater nuclear detonation off Bikini Atoll during Operation Crossroads in 1946. Bikini Atoll “was the site in the Marshall Islands for the testing of twenty-five nuclear bombs between 1946 and 1958.”41 The first test, dubbed Operation Crossroads, “was meant to determine the relevance of a naval fleet when atomic weapons could simply be dropped by air.”42 Barbara Rose Johnston describes the details of this operation, which entailed both above-water and underwater explosions: On July 1 and July 25, 1946, two atomic bombs, code-named Able and Baker, were detonated over and in Bikini Lagoon, where ninety-five target vessels were anchored. … The underwater detonation of Baker produced a huge cloud of radioactive mist that did not disperse and that blanketed the lagoon and atoll with a heavy deposition of radiotoxins, briefly enshrouding the naval fleet, which had briefly reentered the lagoon shortly after the test. Radioactivity was dangerously high even a week after the blast when the fleet returned. Decontamination was next to impossible…43

Indeed, the blasts from both Able and Baker—along with subsequent tests, such as Operation Castle—produced a long-lasting legacy of radioactive contamination on Bikini Atoll, which is uninhabitable to this day.44 These nuclear explosions have created intergenerational suffering for Bikini Islanders, who have been permanently displaced from their home and exposed to the perils of radioactive fallout. The oceanic blast of the Baker test, with its submerged mushroom cloud and production of radioactive mist, thus parallels the underwater detonations at the end of Pacific Rim. However, unlike the devastation wrought by U.S. nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll, a devastation that Teresia

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Teaiwa argues is “render[ed] invisible” in the popular imaginary through the “excessive visibility” of the bikini bathing suit, Pacific Rim uses nuclear explosions to “save” humanity from kaiju.45 In this problematic rewriting of nuclear weaponry in the Pacific, toxicity is ironically posited as both the cause and solution to disaster.46 While polluted waters create an environment that allows kaiju to thrive on Earth, their home portal is destroyed by the very weapons that produce this long-lasting radioactive toxicity. By presenting nuclear technology as a desired solution, Pacific Rim deviates from the nuclear anxieties of the kaiju genre. In the original Gojira, the Oxygen Destroyer, “a device that can outstrip the atomic bomb’s destructive power,” is used to kill Gojira.47 Although the film also uses a weapon of mass destruction to stop kaiju attacks, this weapon, which closely parallels the development of the hydrogen bomb, is presented as a grave threat to society.48 Dr. Serizawa, creator of the Oxygen Destroyer, uses it very reluctantly and even decides to die with it to ensure that his knowledge will not be used to duplicate the weapon and to prevent the possibility “that politicians will adopt the device and immediately use it as a weapon on other countries.”49 However, in Pacific Rim, a hydrogen bomb and nuclear reactor are used without hesitation. There is no reluctance on the part of the characters, nor is there any discussion about the dangers of using this technology. Instead, both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy are upheld as uncomplicated solutions to the kaiju disaster, rather than devices of mass destruction with serious ramifications. By using a nuclear reactor to seal the breach, the film highlights an intimate connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry in the Pacific, a connection that was forged in the aftermath of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Matthew Penney asserts that during the American occupation of Japan, nuclear energy was promoted as a “‘peaceful use of atomic energy’” and “a way of putting the war behind” Japan. He notes that conservative politicians in Japan “were concerned that anti-nuclear sentiment could jeopardize the security alliance with America. At the same time, American officials also lobbied on behalf of US nuclear tech exporters like GE … tying security and energy partnership together as a comprehensive diplomatic push.”50 The nuclear-powered Gypsy Danger, piloted by a Japanese woman and an American man, seems to embody the geopolitics of this energy alliance, as Mako and Becket join forces to maneuver it, using its nuclear energy to bring “peace” to a kaiju-­ ridden Pacific.

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Pacific Rim’s final battle scene ultimately destabilizes the film’s metaphoric connections to climate change and its implicit environmental anxieties, as it aligns itself with environmentally destructive technologies and the U.S. military-industrial complex itself—a military whose extensive greenhouse gas emissions directly contribute to climate change.51 Most importantly, the film’s celebration of nuclear technology negates the long-­ lasting suffering endured by Pacific Islanders at the expense of U.S. nuclear weaponry. While Pacific Island nations, such as the Marshall Islands, are notably excluded from the geography of the film, their histories are likewise neutralized through an ahistorical rewriting of U.S. nuclear testing. More specifically, it is Becket, a white American man with the title of “Ranger,” who detonates the core of Gypsy Danger and saves the known world. When he and Mori enter the depths of the breach, Becket says, “It’s ok now Mako. We did it. I can finish this alone,” after which he unceremoniously ejects her in an escape pod.52 This ending is contingent on a white male savior narrative that figuratively reverses the culpability of the U.S. military. The U.S. military-industrial complex is directly responsible for the nuclear destruction of Bikini Atoll, a destruction that Pacific Islanders have collectively resisted through antinuclear activism, such as the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement.53 However, in the film, the militarized Jaeger Program is fashioned as the “resistance,” and it is a white male U.S. ranger who creates peace in the Pacific, a peace that is fostered through ultimate annihilation.54

Monsters in a Militarized Pacific In an interview with del Toro shortly after the release of his film, he stated that Pacific Rim was decidedly antiwar: “I carefully avoided the car commercial aesthetics or the army recruitment video aesthetics. I avoided making a movie about an army with ranks. I avoided making any kind of message that says war is good. We have enough firepower in the world.” Identifying himself as a pacifist, del Toro asserted that the ranks and titles of the Jaeger Program were specifically designed to avoid militarized parallels. He stated, “I used very deliberate language that is a reference to westerns. I don’t have captains, majors, generals. I have a marshal, rangers … it has the language of an adventure movie.”55 Nonetheless, despite the director’s intentions, the film is rife with militarized symbols and imagery, ranging from

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nuclear explosions and the use of military time markers to the operations at the Shatterdome base and the image of the closing scene, when Raleigh Becket and Mori embrace on top of Gypsy Danger’s floating escape pod. In this scene, the characters are flanked by a double V formation of fifteen flying helicopters, which are presumably coming to transport Mori and Becket back to the Shatterdome. These excessive helicopters can be understood as a militarized show of force. They fly through a blue sky strewn with fluffy, white clouds—a sky notably free from any rain or inclement weather. Storms, and their figurative counterparts, kaiju, have been cleared from the Pacific, and we are left with sunny skies and calm waters. However, while the monsters of the Pacific have been defeated, the monstrous force of the military remains, enveloping and haunting the Asia and Pacific region. It is this monster that is celebrated in the lingering image of the film’s closing scene. This adherence to militarism is bolstered in the film’s sequel, Pacific Rim Uprising (2018), which was directed by Steven S.  DeKnight and produced by del Toro. The film picks up ten years after the collapse of the breach, during a time when some coastal cities are still recovering from the war. The Pan-Pacific Defense Corps (PPDC), which branched out from the Jaeger Program, enlists and trains young cadets to pilot jaegers in case the breach reopens and the kaiju return. Unlike the dwindling forces of the Jaeger Program, the PPDC is a robust and thriving organization replete with its own pilot academy, numerous jaegers, and simulation technology for fighting kaiju. In a deal with a Chinese corporation, the PPDC council even authorizes the production of drone jaegers that can be piloted remotely—a plan that goes awry, leading to the reopening of the breach. The overtly militarized PPDC, with its control over the Pacific, brings to mind the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, formerly known as the Pacific Command. Headquartered in Hawai’i, the Pacific Command “has responsibility for the entire Pacific Ocean—and for Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, China, and India as well (half the earth’s surface).”56 Like the Pacific Command, the PPDC of Pacific Rim Uprising is responsible for defending countries in and around the Pacific Ocean from the so-called threat of kaiju, even after the closure of the breach, and it uses militarized training and technology to do so (i.e. pilot academies and drones). In closing, the kaiju of the first Pacific Rim lend themselves to being interpreted in connection with climate change as it pertains to the Asia and Pacific region and the forces of environmental deworlding that now

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confront it. By likening these alien creatures to hurricanes, del Toro’s film creates a series of metaphorical parallels that highlight the dangers of a warming planet, while showcasing a dismantling of lifeworlds across the Pacific as a result of these dangers. However, the film’s environmental consciousness, which seems to warn of the perils of a toxic Pacific, is ultimately negated by its celebratory use of nuclear weaponry—a move that problematically rewrites the brutal history of U.S. nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. Any environmental anxiety exhibited by the first Pacific Rim is completely erased in the movie’s sequel, as Pacific Rim Uprising presents a Pacific that is controlled and surveilled by the PPDC.  Long after the kaiju have disappeared, militarized monsters, or jaegers, remain— monsters that, like the U.S. military, are in a constant state of war, ready to contain an ever-present security threat in the disparate sites and worlds of the Pacific.

Notes 1. Although the present narrative of the film begins in 2020, during the seventh year of the Kaiju War, the first kaiju attack actually takes place in 2013—the same year as the film’s release. 2. The film defines kaiju as the Japanese term for “giant beast” and jaegers as the German term for “hunter.” 3. Barr, The Kaiju Film, 7. 4. Barr, The Kaiju Film, 13. Barr notes that “all films with kaiju may not be a part of the kaiju genre; the appearance of an oversized beast is just one pinion of the foundation. A particular example would be a film such as Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus (2010). Although the film does feature two kaiju, it is ultimately hollow, based on spectacle rather than any attempt to explore worldwide anxieties.” 5. Barr, The Kaiju Film, 12. 6. Suzuki, “Beasts from the Deep,” 11. 7. Suzuki, “Beasts from the Deep,” 20. Suzuki discusses the geopolitical significance of the jaeger pilots’ nationalities, noting that “first, Chinese and Russian jaeger teams are sent out and destroyed; then, a jaeger team composed of Australian and British copilots heroically sacrifice themselves so that the final jaeger, steered by an American man and Japanese woman, can unleash the nuclear payload that destroys the last of the kaiju.” This “sequence of events—the fall of the Cold War communist bloc as represented by China and Russia, followed by the emergence of a powerful U.S.-Japanese union leading the way with the support and assistance of the

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Commonwealth nations—is not dissimilar to contemporary narratives of renewal and trade partnership that have shaped contemporary ‘Pacific Rim’ economic policies.” 8. Connery, “Pacific Rim Discourse,” 32. 9. Pacific Rim, dir. del Toro, 0:00:58. 10. Wilson, “Afterword,” 211. 11. Suzuki, “Beasts from the Deep,” 12–13. 12. Buckwalter, “‘Pacific’ Overture;” Newitz, “Pacific Rim is the Greatest Fairy Tale of the Twenty-First Century.” 13. Barr, The Kaiju Film, 51. 14. Ullrich, “Climate Fiction.” 15. Morton, Hyperobjects, 48. 16. Morton, Hyperobjects, 49. 17. Pacific Rim, dir. del Toro, 0:08:54. 18. Morton, Hyperobjects, 49. 19. Cho, “Remembering Lucky Dragon, Re-membering Bikini,” 127. 20. “Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.” 21. Barr, The Kaiju Film, 51. 22. Fischer and Knutti, “Anthropogenic Contribution to Global Occurrence of Heavy-Precipitation and High-Temperature Extremes,” 564. 23. Fischer and Knutti, “Anthropogenic Contribution to Global Occurrence of Heavy-Precipitation and High-Temperature Extremes,” 560. 24. Pacific Rim, dir. del Toro, 0:26:24. 25. Fischer and Knutti, “Anthropogenic Contribution to Global Occurrence of Heavy-Precipitation and High-Temperature Extremes,” 560. 26. Pacific Rim, dir. del Toro, 0:20:10. 27. Pacific Rim, dir. del Toro, 0:20:27. 28. Hale, Newkirk, and Beck, “Helping Coastal Communities Adapt to Climate Change,” 84. 29. Lehmann, “Sea Walls May Be Cheaper than Rising Waters.” 30. Davenport, “The Marshall Islands are Disappearing.” 31. Davenport, “The Marshall Islands are Disappearing.” 32. Pacific Rim, dir. del Toro, 0:49:00. 33. Pacific Rim, dir. del Toro, 0:49:16. 34. Barr, The Kaiju Film, 67. 35. Pacific Rim, dir. del Toro, 0:2:12. 36. “What are climate change feedback loops?” 37. “What are climate change feedback loops?” 38. “Fukushima Radiation.” 39. “Hundreds of Tons of Radioactive Water Pouring from Fukushima Nuclear Plant.” 40. Suzuki, “Beasts from the Deep,” 13.

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41. Teaiwa, “Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans,” 87. 42. Johnston, “‘More Like Us than Mice,’” 29. 43. Johnston, “‘More Like Us than Mice,’” 30. 44. After the detonation of the Castle Bravo bomb during 1954 Operation Castle, Marshallese living on the atolls of Rongelap, Ailinginae, and Rongerik were knowingly exposed to downwind radioactive fallout. In “More Like Us than Mice,” 39, Johnston asserts that Rongelapese were not evacuated from the atoll until three days after the explosion and were subsequently “enrolled in medical studies documenting the long-term effects of radiation on a human population.” 45. Teaiwa, “Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans,” 87. 46. The 2014 remake of Godzilla, directed by Gareth Edwards, also problematically rewrites the history of U.S. nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. In “Beasts from the Deep,” 13, Suzuki writes that “the opening sequence of Edwards’s film implies that the tests at Bikini Atoll were intended not to promote a policy of Cold War containment but to put an end to Godzilla.” 47. Barr, The Kaiju Film, 41. 48. Merchant, “A Brief History of Godzilla, Our Walking Nuclear Nightmare.” 49. Barr, The Kaiju Film, 41–42. 50. Penney, “Nuclear Nationalism and Fukushima,” 4. 51. Hynes, “The ‘Invisible Casualty of War’,” 4. In this article, Hynes writes that the “U.S. military enterprise is far and away the largest single climate polluter and contributor to global warming.” 52. Pacific Rim, dir. del Toro, 1:56:27. 53. In “Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans” 99–100, Teaiwa provides a history of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement, writing that “protest[s] against nuclear testing in the Pacific began in 1970 when the committee Against Tests on Moruroa (ATOM) was formed in Suva, Fiji,” a committee that went on to create “the first Nuclear Free Pacific conference in Suva in 1975.” From here, the “movement for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) gained momentum.” Teaiwa writes that the “NFIP has adopted a radical platform that advocates independence and sovereignty movements in the Pacific.” 54. When Pentecost first tours Becket through the Jaeger Program’s base at the Shatterdome, he states, “Things have changed. We’re not an army anymore, Mr. Becket. We’re the resistance.” Pacific Rim, dir. Del Toro, 0:25:54. 55. Howell, “Pacific Rim’s Guillermo del Toro is a Monster-loving Pacifist.” 56. Cummings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, 420.

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Works Cited Avila, Bobit S. “How Many Casualties from Typhoon ‘Yolanda’?” Philstar, August 23, 2014. Accessed August 22, 2019. https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2014/08/23/1360818/how-­many-­casualties-­typhoon-­yolanda. Barr, Jason. The Kaiju Film: A Critical Study of Cinema’s Biggest Monsters. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016. Buckwalter, Ian. “‘Pacific’ Overture: The Apocalypse, off to a Bang-Up Start.” NPR, July 12, 2013. Accessed October 1, 2019. https:// w w w. n p r. o r g / 2 0 1 3 / 0 7 / 1 2 / 1 9 9 1 0 9 6 0 1 / p a c i f i c -­o v e r t u r e -­t h e -­ apocalypse-­off-­to-­a-­bang-­up-­start. Cho, Yu-Fang. “Remembering Lucky Dragon, Re-membering Bikini: Worlding the Anthropocene through Transpacific Nuclear Modernity.” Cultural Studies 33 (2019): 122–146. Accessed August 30, 2019. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09502386.2018.1428643. Connery, Chris. “Pacific Rim Discourse: The U.S. Global Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years.” boundary 2 21 (1994): 30–56. Accessed August 10, 2019. http://www.jstor.org/stable/303396. Cummings, Bruce. Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Davenport, Coral. “The Marshall Islands are Disappearing.” New York Times, December 2, 2015. Accessed January 5, 2020. https://www. nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/02/world/The-­Marshall-­Islands-­Are-­ Disappearing.html. del Toro, Guillermo, dir. Pacific Rim. 2013; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. Digital Copy. DeKnight, Steven S, dir. Pacific Rim Uprising. 2018; Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2018. Digital Copy. Edwards, Gareth, dir. Godzilla. 2014; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2014. DVD. Fischer, Erich M. and Reto Knutti. “Anthropogenic Contribution to Global Occurrence of Heavy-Precipitation and High-Temperature Extremes.” Nature Climate Change 5 (2015): 560–65. Accessed December 10, 2019. https:// doi.org/10.1038/NCLIMATE2617. “Fukushima Radiation.” Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Accessed July 30, 2018. http://www.whoi.edu/main/topic/fukushima-­radiation. Hale, Lynne Zeitlin, Sarah Newkirk, and Michael Beck. “Helping Coastal Communities Adapt to Climate Change.” Solutions 2 (2011): 84–85. Accessed November 10, 2019. http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/869. Honda, Ishirō, dir. Gojira. 1954; Tokyo, Japan: Toho, 1998. DVD.

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Howell, Peter. “Pacific Rim’s Guillermo del Toro is a Monster-loving Pacifist.” The Star, July 5, 2013. Accessed January 18, 2020. https://www.thestar.com/ entertainment/movies/2013/07/05/pacific_rims_guillermo_del_toro_is_a_ monsterloving_pacifist.html. “Hundreds of tons of radioactive water pouring from Fukushima nuclear plant.” The Telegraph, August 7, 2013. Accessed August 10, 2019. https://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/japan-earthquake-and-tsunami-in/10228382/Hundreds-of-tons-of-radioactive-water-pouring-fromFukushima-nuclear-plant.html. Hynes, Patricia H. “The ‘Invisible Casualty of War’: The Environmental Destruction of U.S. Militarism.” Pop Dev 84 (2014): 1–4. Accessed August 10, 2019. https://compass.fivecolleges.edu/object/hampshire:231. Johnston, Barbara Rose. “‘More Like Us than Mice’: Radiation Experiments with Indigenous Peoples.” In Half-Lives and Half-Truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War, edited by Barbara Rose Johnston, 25–54. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research, 2007. Lagmay, Alfredo Mahar Francisco, et  al. “Devasting storm surges of Typhoon Haiyan.” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 11 (2015): 1–12. Accessed January 20, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2014.10.006. Lehmann, Evan. “Sea Walls May Be Cheaper than Rising Waters.” Scientific American. February 4, 2014. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://www. scientificamerican.com/article/sea-­walls-­may-­be-­cheaper-­than-­rising-­waters/. Merchant, Brian. “A Brief History of Godzilla, Our Walking Nuclear Nightmare.” Vice, August 23, 2013. Accessed November 15, 2019. https://www.vice. com/en_us/article/9aaxze/ godzilla-­is-­our-­never-­ending-­nuclear-­nightmare. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Newitz, Annalee. “Pacific Rim is the Greatest Fairy Tale of the Twenty-First Century.” Gizmodo, July 12, 2013. Accessed August 10, 2019. https://io9.gizmodo.com/pacific-­rim-­is-­the-­greatest-­fairy-­tale-­of-­the-­twenty-­fi-­752579393. Penney, Matthew. “Nuclear Nationalism and Fukushima.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 10 (2012): 1–23. Accessed January 20, 2020. https://apjjf.org/2012/10/11/ Matthew-­Penney/3712/article.html. “Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.” National Hurricane Center. Accessed July 18, 2018. https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutsshws.php. Suzuki, Erin. “Beasts from the Deep.” Journal of Asian American Studies 20 (2017): 11–28. Accessed December 10, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1353/ jaas.2017.0002. Teaiwa, Teresia K. “Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans.” The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1994): 87–109. Accessed August 10, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/23701591.

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Ullrich, J.K. “Climate Fiction: Can Books Save the Planet?” The Atlantic. August 14, 2015. Accessed August 10, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/ 2015/08/climate-­fiction-­margaret-­atwood-­literature/400112/. “What are climate change feedback loops?” The Guardian, January 5, 2011. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jan/05/climate-­change-­feedback-­loops. Wilson, Rob Sean. “Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic.” In The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, edited by Rob Sean Wilson and Chris Connery, 209–223. Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2007.

CHAPTER 14

Albatross Unbound: Worlding the Plastic Sea Ranjan Ghosh

…the sea has grown ever more bitter with the salt of the continents. —Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

Albatross Bound How does the sea open onto us? Alien, imperialist, overpoweritng, geopolitical, ecogenetic, nautical, and cultural. Perhaps more, perhaps as plastic sea. The ocean has never been a dark and neutral space; rather, it has always been an exploitative space—subject to imperialization and deep sea territorialization—and yet unknown,1 compelling, and autonomous. It evokes fear, wonder and will (as Rachel Carson writes in The Sea Around Us), reflection, romance, anxiety, a different level of sensoriality.2 Unlike Carson, Jacques Cousteau sees an intense interface between the sea and humans, a surprising indifference to certain marine life forms, for the misconception about the inexhaustibility and renewability of the sea prevailed. However, Cousteau sees our negotiations with the sea happening at a different level of struggle and survival. Elizabeth S. Bell argues that both

R. Ghosh (*) Department of English, University of North Bengal, Siliguri, West Bengal, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_14

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Carson and Cousteau recognize the mystery of the sea and bond with it for their own reasons. Carson’s sea is part of us, from the chemical makeup of human body fluids that matches almost exactly those proportions in sea water, to that “miniature ocean,” the womb.3 The sea is part of our collective psyche, our imagination, our subconscious. From it we learn of the eternal verities. Cousteau’s ocean is more alien, but within it resides our future, literally and metaphorically. Just as he sees the ocean providing potential for living space and food supplies for an increasingly overcrowded world, so Cousteau sees that “the greatest resource of the ocean is not material but the boundless spring of inspiration and well-being we gain from her. Yet we risk poisoning the sea forever just when we are learning her science, art, and philosophy and how to live in her embrace.4

The sea now has come to futurize its existence with plastic poisoning. Subject to misunderstanding and underestimation, this site is predominantly seen as manipulative by so-called landers—drilling, fishing, dumping. Often and mostly ignored in the wake of presumptuous self-aggrandizing instincts, the sea is better placed with its moving ecologies, accommodativeness, and ecological and material returns and productions. Those on land scarcely see how contamination and lifescape are mutual, how transformation does not respect the divide of the seashore— how essentially “blue” the continents are. If the sea is a no man’s land, humans scarcely realize how dominated they are by it, how the sea can imperialize and hegemonize landers: the consequences of violating a “blue contract.” The sea, then, is an imaginary, with its own nonanthropocentric ontologies, relational epistemologies, and separate affect, thinking, and visibilities.5 It is, as Carson argues, “an encircling sea.”6 Here the transcorporeality thesis begs an entry into the world of the Hypersea: the “imaginative new hypothesis” of Mark and Dianna McMenamin. The notion and the dynamics of the Hypersea bring the land and the sea into a unified whole, not forgetting the differences that go into its making. Carl Zimmer explains: Hypersea is in many ways different from an ocean: for starters, it has no surface on which you can gaze, and it does not seek to be level. If you could look at life on land through a machine that registered only fluid, you would see great columns of nutrient-laced water rising—the columns would be where trees stand. You would see water flowing horizontally underground among plant roots and fungi, pouring into animals as they fed, moving as the creatures moved. According to the McMenamins, this liquid matrix has

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become Earth’s newest aquatic habitat, one that marine organisms have aggressively colonized. And in critical ways it behaves exactly like an ocean: the movement of fluid through Hypersea provides life with the same sustenance that ocean currents do.7

So if one were to believe the McMenamins, then Hypersea is not a metaphor but a reality that argues for a “ripple” through all flora and fauna that crawl or walk upon the land—a sea coursing through land. This speaks of a “mysterious emergence of life.”8 I think the dream of the ocean and dreaming the ocean have changed dramatically and have been changing fast and furious. With plastic making it way out to sea, our engagement with the ocean has shifted, building a suprasubjectivity whose conditions and achievements are difficult to measure and comprehend. The plastic sea has come to hit the binaries of land-­ sea hard and in queer and startling ways has connected and entangled the two through its micron-particle presence: landfill with sea dumps. The perverse process of oceanization conducts fraught discourse in that land and sea life, the soil and the water, “lander and oceaner,” are caught in a plastic symbiosis where it is difficult to identify the power that throws our perspectives on death. It is a hugely complicated task that struggles to identify the site of danger and death. The ecology of the ocean mind asks: what is plasticene? What scalar, granular, and molar changes—sea-cene— have occurred in the last hundred years? Why isn’t the sounding, the texture, the composition, the whale, the water, the sea shore no longer what they used to be? Anthropsea and anthrobscene (in the words of Jussi Parikka9) are connected on a common virulence and “shape-shifting.” Ocean throws back what you throw in: for me, it is plastic. Elspeth Probyn argues that “the reality of the Anthropocean is that the ocean is us even as it is so differently ‘us.’”10 Here “eating the ocean” comes with its affective plastic habitus where the bounded entities between land and sea are revindicated as myths: plastic sea breaks up the “singularity of Ocean-­ Earth”11 and multiplicities thrive on a “plastic connect.” It is the “ocean multiple” with the dominant plastic strain: “microplastics, enslavement and indentured servitude on fish boats … Ocean acidification, the calcium-­134 pouring out of the Fukushima reactor, the islands going underwater as the planet warms, the floating plastic gyre in the Pacific, the oil bubbling up from breached undersea drilling platforms, the fence that goes into the ocean between the United States and Mexico, the desperate migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, the ocean blockade of Palestine,

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Australia’s offshore migrant holding facilities, and so on.”12 In fact, the plastic sea is a space “that facilitates movement—the space across which things move—but because it is a space that is constituted by and constitutive of movement.”13 Man has returned to the sea always: in forms that are as diverse as anthropologized hegemony, land-waste colonization, imaginatively, reflectively, and, now, dreadfully and ferally through plastic. From the Eulerian perspective, the fluid dynamics of the plastic sea is difficult to explain. The Eulerian model records the “forces that act on stable buoys” where the “terrestrial spatial ontology” is mimicked. Within points that are fixed in space and time we thus get to identify “general patterns”14; this contrasts with Lagrangian fluid dynamics where movement becomes geography as “objects come into being as they move (or unfold) through space and time.” The plastic sea within a Lagrangian mold has changed the perspective on the fluidity and boundedness of the sea. Plastic has rendered enormous complexity to its movement and liquidity and spatial and scalar transformations: a “wet ontology,” as Kimberley Peters and Phillip Steinberg argues, that does not merely “endorse the perspective of a world of flows, connections, liquidities, and becomings, but also to propose a means by which the sea’s material and phenomenological distinctiveness can facilitate the reimagining and reenlivening of a world ever on the move.”15 The plastic sea is intensely on the move, trafficked, othered, and malevolently self-transcendent. It is increasingly losing itself to multiple seas that the land has to endure and suffer exceedingly from. In his Alien Ocean, Stefan Helmreich describes his “athwart theory” as an “empirical itinerary of associations and relations, a travelogue which, to draw on the nautical meaning of athwart, moves sidewise, tracing contingent, drifting and bobbing, real-time, and often unexpected connections of which social action is constituted, which mixes up things and their descriptions.”16 The plastic sea is athwart. With plastic, the sea has become far more striated than Deleuze would admit or Foucault could fathom. The more than human assemblages have taken the land-sea stories beyond the mere fish, ships, waves, commerce, and voyages. We are getting wet in a different way and the “wet ontology” of sea-liquidity is far more from being static. Plastic, thus, is our new “hydro-materiality.”17 There is an inextricability that attaches to plastic where beyond a point the environment and the plastic are inseparable, become one. However, does the plastic sea leave us with a sense of self-exclusionary consciousness of discard, filth, and garbage? How does discardism build its own intricate

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ways of attachment? Plastics have come with a new idiom of resurfacing, a return “from the molar category of garbage to the order of the particular and molecular” producing “material and affective entanglements.”18 This makes our detachment an illusion, the consciousness of “harm zone” unsustainable. Plastic as litany, as garbage, builds a molecularity of bashed borders of hyper-relationality where the consciousness of plastic is no less hauntological. Nature’s metabolism and levels of assimilation are under serious pressure—the tragedy of the commons19—and most conventional assumptions and inferences about plastic dissemination and travel are proving alarmingly wrong. It is indeed true that thinking about nature begins when our living amidst nature is in crisis. Within the framework of what Patricia Yaeger calls “Ecocriticism$,” the “ocean as oikos or home rolls under, beneath, and inside the edicts of state and free market capitalism. We’ve left the possibility of wilderness or pastoral for the roller coaster of capital.” The plastic sea is the “fleshy entanglement of sea creatures, sea trash, and machines.”20 It demonstrates rapacious profit-making capitalization underpinned by an ethics of irresponsibility, where the “sea is just another site where human relations take shape and connect through low-­ cost hardware and the freedom of an unregulated environment.”21 It is more “techno than ocean.” Thinking the plastic sea is “thinking without the circle”: no matter how and to what length we stretch and extend the circle of existence, thinking that stretching can “circle out” the harm; we are “always-already encompassed and interpenetrated by marine plastic.”22 So marine plastic has decimated the enlightenment ontology of “hyperseparation” of man as holding an autonomous space distinct from every other nonhuman interference; rather, the circle that man thought boundarized him against any harm has been permanently undermined, and hyper-relationality through plastic toxicity and ambivalent entanglement and plastic’s “ability to cohere and assert ‘force-fullness’ on massive (and micro-) scales”23 have transformed our definitions of existence, our relationalities in the plastisphere. I prefer to call this “plastic imperatives” or cosmopolitan motilities.

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A conceptual model of the potential trophic routes of microplastics across marine vertebrate and invertebrate groups. The blue dots are polymers that are less dense than seawater (i.e. PE and PP) and the red dots are polymers that are more dense than seawater (i.e. PVC). The dashed arrows represent the hypothesised microplastic transfer. (Juliana A. Ivar do Sul, Monica F.Costa, “The Present and Future of Microplastic Pollution in the Marine Environment,” Environmental Pollution, Vol. 185 (2014), 360)

This is our modern-day “plastic connect”: our shared plastic habitat where we all—humans and nonhumans—are plastic creatures, a kind of “interimplications of forms of life with inorganic forms.”24 In fact, the community of plastian25 discovers a new meaning in “entanglements”: plastic entangles through interspecies connect and through what we call the plastic debris in the form of a “fishing line slowly strangling seals, and plastic bottle rings giving hour glass figures to turtles. These are physical relationships—contact between animal bodies and plastic materials.”26 Catherine Phillips argues this state of the plastic sea through the principle of “trace”: the vestiges, “enduring fragments,” understood as “out of place” and abject with a “half identity [that] still clings to them.” This phenomenon is hugely entangled with prospects of unexpected history and narrative of survival and sustenance. Within discard studies, such trace and micro waste—the “rubbish”27—have complicated the issues of biotic survival; it is when ignored and untraceable traces promise futuristic

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instabilities.28 Kim de Woolf is right to observe that “in the plastisphere, humans, disciplines, and ocean creatures ‘become with’ plastic. As they travel, indeterminate plasticspecies bodies not only ‘become-together,’ but ‘become-apart,’ in practices that sort kinds of materials and kinds of species, both living and nonliving. And plastics are named as potential species in return.”29This refers to a geontological power that makes claims on a new mode of governance, a governance that works on the indistinction among life, death, and nonlife (within the frame of my argument here, it is the plastic). Elizabeth Povinelli’s arguments around “potentiality” and actuality prompt me to think of the “capacity” of plastic to change life— the nonlife and life-losing distinctions, staying interterritorialized and, hence, reconfigurating the agency of governance and governmentality.30 If plastic sea has triggered new modes of power to measure and control, think of ways to informationalize and figure the materiality of the ocean, this governance is not dependent on one side of the agency; the sea itself is agentic with plastic making the modes of discursive governance ambivalent through nonlife potentiality. Lehman sees World Ocean as the fourth figure (moving beyond the three figures that Povinelli argues for31) of geontopolitics. He argues that “as a possible fourth figure, the World Ocean is, like the other figures, another complex entity that occupies the institutions of contemporary planet-scale government.”32 The emerging sea impacts on the understanding of power and geopolitical monitoring and oceanographic mensuration with nonlinear dynamics, disequilibria, dispersive materiality, and an excess. This excess of the nonliving—potenza of plastic—is what blurs the distinction between life and nonlife and, thus, geontologically, provides a fresh sea-sense.

Albatross Unbound What kind of a sea does the Albatross fly now over? Has the sea unworlded before the bird in a different affect and effect? How is the bird worlded with the changing materiality of the water, texture of the air, the sunlight filtering through ozone-depleted zones, the gradual extirpation of fellow species, and the altering character of the intestine as years roll by in a plastic-overwhelmed planet? The test and taste of living is under gradual transformation. Coleridge wrote a “voyage” poem benefitting from Wordsworth’s reading of George Shelvocke’s A Voyage round the World by Way of the Great South Sea, performed in the years 1719–1772 (1776) that had the

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episode of the albatross shooting, an adroit, typically Coleridgean, mix of geography and supernaturalism, the historical and conceptual correspondence with James Cook’s voyage, Francis Drake sailing through the Magellan Strait, Frederick Martens’s The Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland, Alexander Dalrymple’s A Collection of Voyages Chiefly in the Southern Atlantick Ocean, mining the expedition narratives (Martin Frobisher in the 1579s, John Davis’s rediscovering Greenland in the 1580s, Arctic voyages through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). In The Rime of the Modern Mariner (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011), Nick Hayes demonstrates his green and blue consciousness that is deeply distracted by plastic pollution, oil spills, relentless and inexorable sea contamination, a hugely conscious poetic mind that engages with ecocide, waste, filth, and other anthropocenic dimensions. So if the sea for Coleridge was imaged out of his readings, his engagements with travel writings, and, of course, his imagination and had ice and the albatross overhead, Nick Hayes’s sea has a reality that is portentous and perditious: the reality of a plastic sea and the albatross with plastic in its stomach, gutting its intestines. The “modern” mariner’s ship left the “harbour gracefully” and “slid through soapy lotion.” He watched the “flotsam on the wash … with little else to do”: So took my gun to practise aim. And shot a bottle or two. But shooting plastic sitting ducks. Soon failed to entertain; I lowered my gun … and saw a bird. And picked it up again.

But this time he aimed at a “creature” that “soared high above” and brought it crashing upon the deck. It was just an albatross. In the wake of the shooting, after a peaceful afternoon, trouble broke out with the “chugging engine” dying, the wind falling still, as the ship “slid into” the “North Pacific gyre”: A desert of subtropic brine, A lifeless Maelstrom. A stifled silence cloaked the sky, Bereft of seabird song.

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Berated by his crews, the mariner looked across the sea and, to his utter dismay, found them beset by a “wash of Polythene,” “swathes of Polystyrene,” “bobbed with tones of Neoprene,” and Polymethyl and Methacrylate. The slimy creatures of the ancient mariner have been replaced by Tupperware and bottletops, bottled bleach, and tyres and a variety of plastic detritus creating a “funeral pyre.” Here the albatross transcorporalizes from a bird to plastic in a kind of transvaluation where the good omen of the bird for Coleridge transforms for Hayes into the sinister truth of plastic death and dismay. It is not the death of the bird in Roy Campbell’s “The Albatross,” not Pablo Neruda’s albatross in “Ode to the Voyager Albatross,” or the extinction of the albatross in Ian Irvine’s novel The Last Albatross. This is not Baudelaire’s albatross either. If Colerige’s ghost stood on the deck, Hayes’s ghost declared its existence “nine fathom deep,” manifesting in nylon nets, acrylic, foam, and polymers as they netted and degraded almost all sea creatures—birds and fish. The despairing sailors, bone dry in their throat and flummoxed in the doldrum air, hung the carcass of the albatross around the neck of the mariner: “I bowed to take my Cross.” Slung around his neck, the bird was rotting with a “nylon gauze” tangled in its chest: “Its kidneys, withered by the sun, were strangled by this mesh/ A Plastic bag hung round its bones and decomposed like flesh.” This is a new albatross: a different nature, antiromantic. Albert Ross, the massive albatross in Nicola Leigh’s Blue Spaghetti,33 can only bring “plastic” back from the sea for her chicks: “So one windy day, when he/Was out fishing/No red fish could be spotted/ Out swimming/ New food had arrived that/ was all blue and stringy/He scooped it up to try, and/ named it ‘Blue Spaghetti’/ He flew on home feeling like a/ winner/ Ready to share this new blue/ dinner/ But the birds hated their new/blue soup/ It was chewy! And sloppy!” In as remote a location as Midway Atoll there are more than 1.5 million Laysan albatrosses that have plastic in their stomach. Plastic has found its way into their digestive systems, even though they inhabit a near inaccessible part of the planet beyond human reach. In fact, with observed concentrations in the world’s oceans of up to 580,000 plastic pieces per square kilometer, the prediction is that plastic ingestion will reach ninety-nine percent of all sea bird species by 2050.34 Research has shown that the stomachs of Laysan albatrosses have pebbles, charcoal, plastic caps, hard plastic, bottles, tubes, broken pieces of toys, bags (polyethylene), kukui nuts (Aleurites moluccanus), walnut (Juglans cineria), squid beaks, wood, and sponges. This diversity of

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“stomached” ingredients raises questions as to the ingestion, transference, and contamination processes: In dry seasons the water in the lagoon is low and many birds die on the exposed flats. During rainy periods the water rises, the disintegrated albatross skeletons are broken apart, and the plastic and pumice pieces float ashore and are deposited at the high-water line. Although Bartsch recorded that a Laysan Albatross regurgitated Scaevola berries, it is a behavioral characteristic of albatrosses (as well as some other pelagic birds) that items (food or other things) are rarely ingested on land. It is therefore not surprising that nearly all of the foreign material found in the dead birds floated. In consideration of the pelagic feeding behavior of albatrosses and the above observations, it is concluded that the plastic and pumice items were picked up at sea by the parents and then passed on with regurgitated food to the young.35

This raises an argument centering on the complex ways interacting between two supposed points of a journey: plastic production and the intestines of the albatross. Plastic debris floating on the sea has surfaced through a complex web of sources, routes, and flight paths that, to the birds, are exciting and exotic, enticing these birds into “picking” plastic as food and food as plastic for themselves and their offspring. This is the complexity and entanglement of ingestion as a game, a necessity, and strategic selection. Stacy Alimao argues that “climate change, sustainability, and antitoxin movements make environmentalism a practice that entails grappling with how one’s own bodily existence is ontologically entangled with the well-­ being of both local and quite distant places, peoples, animals, and ecosystems. Campaigns against plastic link not only coastal regions but also inland zones to the mushrooming plastic found in the oceans.”36 Across the land and sea, plastics have declared their presence in forms that are durable, malleable, degradable, nondegradable, sinister, and toxic. In fact, plastic “not only spreads while maintaining its molecular form, but the plasticizers that are added to plastic (one or more of a possible 80,000 chemicals added to make plastic pliable or pink or heat-resistant) leach and off-gas; detached from the polymer bond, they are able to move into the surrounding environment and whatever bodies may be found there.”37 So plastic gathers, adsorbs, accumulates, leaches, morphs, mineralizes, is resistant and revolting, and shows up in lighters, wrappers, bags and dumps, ocean gyres, and in our bloodstreams and innards, “bio-­ accumulating up the food chain.” And, again, as “plastics gain in toxicity

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their value depletes, they are cast off, re-entering market chains for what little profit can be made from recycling, spreading their accumulated toxins wherever they go. They are then sifted, filtered through, recognized for their worth by those who cannot afford to participate in this throw-­ away culture, for those who are also placed elsewhere, out of sight of the markets of capital that rely on invisible labour in order to perpetuate this system.”38 Within a labor-intensive, garbological, and fast-capitalist system, plastic continues to spread, is recycled, enhancing the complex networks of access and excess. The translocationality of plastic through plastic pervasiveness and scopious contamination represents a spatial consciousness where plastic seeps into salt, water, soil, animal and human bodies, media, and our psyches, mostly in nonlinear, nonhierarchical, fragmentary mobility and fluidity; it does not discriminate between its point of origin and eventual destination, race, ethnicity, color, religious affiliation, cultural heritage, or political beliefs. Thus, plastic provokes connections/ comparatism with a difference that speaks of becomings, dispersions, and immanence. The albatross is the modernist dilemma of “finitude”: a bird or a phenomenon that does not wait for independent agency or will to execute an engagement. It is an event in “slow violence,” for what we do to ourselves happens to it as well. Our dying reflects on its dying too: an otherization achieved through “dying.” This is the modernist predicament of “death in life.” Is our ecocidal fate an albatross syndrome? As Coleridge’s sea sees ice crack and growl, roar and howl, to trap a ship, Hayes’s sea finds itself in plastic splatter, messy and colorful, deceitful and seductive, killing and forbidding. This is the plastic fit. Here the mariner does not need to shoot the bird, for the bird stands shot by a different kind of human agency: man’s discovery of a substance about which he does not know what to do to avoid being dehumanized. This calls for an anthropogenic disaster and both the mariner and the albatross share a plastic identity—a new community in plastic sharing, a plastic bondage. One of the interesting things to observe is how the albatross, the mariner, and the sea are intermeshed in plastic, a transubstantiation that sees a valuational rephrasing of the Coleridgean expression of “blue sky bending over all” changing into “all bending before plastic.” It is plastic, plastic, everywhere, not a drop to drink sans plastic. The modern mariner, as it were, has shot himself down with a plastic crossbow. Which albatross, between the one that has plastic and the one without it, is more real? The hyperobjectified sea provokes a sublimic thinking, a

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“being-­quake” (in the words of Timothy Morton). The plastic in the stomach of the albatross petrifies the mariner into thinking the invisible hyperobjects around him that defy the “mathematization of knowing.” Morton writes well: “The overall aesthetic ‘feel’ of the time of hyperobjects is a sense of asymmetry between the infinite powers of cognition and the infinite being of things. There occurs a crazy arms race between what we know and what is, in which the technology of what we know is turned against itself. The arms race sets new parameters for aesthetic experience and action, which I take in the widest possible sense to mean the ways in which relations between beings play out.”39 It is the relationality that, in an anti-Romantic way, has brought about a deindividualization where nature is seen to construct itself: the romantic imaginary is not exclusively the Coleridgean secondary imagination only, but the “nonlocality, temporal undulation and phasing” that hyperobjects have brought. The sea, its waters, creatures, birds, the sky, the breeze are interobjectified, enmeshed. “Every interobjective space,” argues Morton, “implies at least one more object in the vicinity: let us call this the 1 + n. Writing depends on 1 + n entities: paper, ink, letters, conventions. The human anthropomorphizes the cup and the cup cup-omorphizes the human, and so on. In this process there are always 1 + n objects that are excluded.”40 Plastic can stick to us in ways and means that are unfathomable, on scales that are often immeasurable, in moments that are, most often, unguarded. This hyperobjectification, rather, interobjectivity, stares back at the modern mariner in his wounded sensibilities. The sea appears uncanny as objects external to the common culture of sea habitation emerge to project a disturbing “dwelling.”The mariner “stared at the hypoxic sea this stewing acid brine,/And noticed then this plastic mass was covered in a slime./ I looked a little closer and felt my eyes dilate:/ For slopped across the bobbing dross … was a film of tunicates./ A myriad of jellyfish of krill and salp/ And squid … which were covered in confetti of plastic bottle lids.” Plastic denaturization tricks sea creatures into ingestion through its color and shape and appearance; plastic cheats man’s system with greater stealth and steadiness. Artist Dara Herman Zierlein41 presents it resonantly through her “Baby New Years Plastic World.”

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I am tempted to appropriate Edmund Burke’s notion of “symmetry as sublime” to interpret this syndrome as immanent symmetry where the sublime is in finding plastic in man, in all biotic nonhuman creatures, in animals cut off from the direct heat of human civilization at remote places on the planet, in near-inaccessible corners of this Earth and in depths of sea unexplored and unfathomed. This is the time of “plastic symmetry” (plastic [t]here) and the intensity and immanence of such plastic symmetricization is sublime. Plastic made us think; but, now, beyond corelationalism, plastic is thinking is relationality and assemblaging that are beyond human will and cognition, emerging from the realm of the nonanthropogenic. The apparition meeting the modern mariner does not merely metonymize sustainability and survival; it clearly problematizes the whole event of “withdrawal.” The Burkean paradigms of self-preservation and terror in the construction or emergence of sublime change into a fragility

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of helplessness considered as sublime. A withdrawal from plastic cannot change our plastic-meshed existence; if withdrawal comes in the form of abstinence, we are still temporally boggled to figure the phasing out of plastic. So wholesale withdrawal from plastic is an impossibility in the modern world’s use and commercialization, global capital, and industrial pressure, and hence, withdrawal can mean reduced consumption and production, which, again, leaves the plastic-messing alive in the fray. This is the sublimity of fragility, a somewhat loosely understood interobjectification whose end is always much more extended and complicit than what we envisage. Plastic has made us reflect on our limits. It is the ceaseless “quake” of plastic, our plastic-beings, plastic status. As an existential affect, eco-aesthetic and material-cultural in nature, the albatross—the “coming together” of Coleridge’s avian guest, Hayes’s plastic-hurt bird, and the plastic hit Laysan—signals our “staying with trouble” entwined as it is “in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.” The modern mariner then finds himself in Chthulucene, which Donna Harraway explains “is a compound of two Greek roots (khthôn and kainos) that together name a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth.”42 If plastic exists in the intestines of the albatross, plastic is inside the mariner’s body too. It has democratized our plasticizenship. This is the Chthonic: “they writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters, and places of earth. They make and unmake; they are made and unmade. They are who are.”43 Plastic is the mariner’s “oddkin.” We are in the times of plastic compost: “We become-with each other or not at all. That kind of material semiotics is always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly. Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitude. Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence.”44 The sea for the mariner, then, is holobiontic: complex patternings involving multiple sea creatures, manifestations of plastic debris, oil, flotsam, sludge, albatross, mariner, and his crews. This is a deeply problematic relationality, a kind of “symbiotic” assemblages where the “knottings” and clottings of existence and relatings are bounded, formal, anthropogenic, intraactive, imminent, immanent. This is intermaterial sympoesis. Plastic changed the politics of our skin-borders. We are suddenly and ardently embattled within a new poetics of relationality,

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immunity, language, means of absorption and ingestion, and what Harraway calls “disease as relationship.”45 We are, thus, faced with the thesis of extinction and sustainability within a complicated dialectics of struggle. How can our engagement with plastic and, increasingly, plastic’s relationality with us keep up the sustainability game?46 Interestingly, sustaining with plastic is what Hayes’s modern mariner emotes and exemplifies. Our eating, drinking, cultural and aesthetic constructions, relationship with the nonhuman, circumambient eco-­ poetical materialities are as much in plastic and with plastic as our presentness, past, and futurism. Plastic, then, has brought us into interobjectification and in a subject-object divide: the mariner has plastic as much as the albatross and, yet, aghast and pertrified, he watches the Hypersea growing in its unfamiliarity and disconnect from him. Thus, plastic fraternity and fractality become simultaneous. If the ancient mariner overcomes the “sliminess” to accept his participation in the life of whatever is alive, the modern mariner cannot help being webbed in the life of things. Interestingly, we are confronted with two kinds of sea: not merely an old sea and a new one, something that is not meant to be argued as a sea that is new with submarines and cruiseliners, as contrasted with the old, which had more whales and other endangered species. The sea is getting “newer” each day, transforming itself like the forest cover in the land within a “yet-to-be-born” nature that bespeaks our fragility and extinction; it is the Hypersea—the Gothic art of extraordinary objects coming together through oil spill, plastic litter and contamination, sound pollution, and a rare marine plunder of egregious dimensions. If the ancient mariner’s sea called for his participation in God’s world of creation—the state of “blessing” in agape, all within the arch of the blue sky—the sea for the modern mariner revolts and revulses, making the participation a helpless surrender, a shudder of being where the smoky and choky sky rules over all, “both man, and bird and beast.” Morton argues that the “problem of human beingness,” declared Sartre and Lacan, is the problem of what to do with one’s slime (one’s shit): “The slimy is myself.” So ultimately, is sliminess not the sacred, the taboo substance of life itself? One word for this is Kristeva’s abject, the qualities of the world we slough off in order to maintain subjects and objects. Ecological politics is bound up with what to do with pollution, miasma, slime: things that glisten, schlup, and decay.”47 The being of the mariner and being of the sea “quake” up into a crooked straightness of a relationship.

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Dead albatrosses are evidence of how our creation has surpassed the creator to build a freedom and independence to “morph” (in the words of Bruno Latour) the anthropos.48 If the anthropos “has become a determining force in novel ways—indeed, collective maker, an inscriber of planetary history at the level of stratigraphic signals” and if “humankind has become a global geological force in its own right,” then the discovery, dissemination, and damage of plastic have exceeded the anthropos and recursively compelled individuals to rethink its limits, the sense and possibility of limits. The anthropos under plastic peril is the new universal threatened with self-transformation and self-revision. If plastic was the surprise of the anthropos at the beginning of the last century, plastic today is the surprise that has met individuals on the other side. The counterinsurgency is the uncanny dehumanizing process of writing back the history of planet life, the planet discourse: “we have been invented” (Lisa Robertson, “The Weather”). The worldview now is the plastic net. The albatross, finally, is bound and unbound at the same time.

Notes 1. Sylvia A. Earle observes that “even now, less than 5 percent of the ocean below a hundred feet or so has been seen, let alone explored. The wonder is not how little is known about the ocean, but rather how much, considering the difficulties until recently of getting around on the surface, and how limited access is today, even to the average depth of the ocean, two and a half miles down.” See Earle, Foreword, x. 2. “The sea—that place ‘long lost, but a world that, in the deepest part of [our] subconscious mind, [we have] never wholly forgotten’—teaches us important lessons about ourselves and our relation to the cosmos: We seek to ‘explore and investigate even [the sea’s] most remote parts, so that [we] might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively’”: Carson, Sea Around Us, 15. See Bell, “The Language of Discovery,” 9. 3. Carson, The Sea Around Us, 13–14. 4. Bell, “The Language of Discovery,” 12. 5. See Jeremie Brugidou and Fabien Clouette, “AnthropOcean: Oceanic perspectives and cephalopodic imaginaries moving beyond land-centric ecologies,” Social Science Information, Vol. 57.3 (2018), 368. 6. See Kimberly Peters, “Touching the Oceans,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 45: 1& 2 (Spring/Summer 2017), 281. 7. Carl Zimmer, “Hypersea Invasion,” Discover Chicago Vol. 16, Issue 10 (Oct 1995): 76–87.

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8. “Hypersea is a previously unrecognized biogeophysical entity-the body fluids of eukaryotic organisms and the inhabitants of those fluids like a series of bays, estuaries, and inlets, or a dispersed chain or coral reef, each with its own endemic set of species.” See Mark A.S.  McMenamin and Diana L.S.  Mc Menamin, Hypersea: Life on Land (Columbia University Press, 1994). The sea is inside us; it is about time we rethought the perspective of the sea on the land for our evolution on land is somewhat a recreation of the sea inside us—synthesis, exploitation, organicity and development. 9. Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 10. Elspeth Probyn, “The Ocean Returns: Mapping a Mercurial Anthropocean,” Social Science Information 57(3), 2018, 389; also see Probyn, “Eating/ Space/Media,” Geoforum, 84, 2017, 243–244. Also see Probyn, Eating the Ocean (Duke UP, 2016), with special reference to the chapter “Oceanic Habitus.” 11. Probyn, “The Ocean Returns,” 390. 12. A.  Shotwell, “Water and Ocean,” Cultural Studies Review 23(2), 2017, 186. Quoted in Probyn, “The Ocean Returns.” 13. Philip E. Steinberg, “Of other seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions,” Atlantic Studies, 2013 Vol. 10, No. 2, 165; also see Kara Lavender Law, Skye Morét-Ferguson, Nikolai A.  Maximenko, Giora Proskurowski, Emily E. Peacock, Jan Hafner and Christopher M. Reddy, “Plastic Accumulation in the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre,” Science, New Series, Vol. 329, No. 5996 (3 September 2010), 1185–1188. 14. See Hester Blum, “‘Bitter with the Salt of Continents’: Rachel Carson and Oceanic Returns,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 45: 1 & 2 (Spring/ Summer 2017), 289. 15. Probyn, “The Ocean Returns,” 391 16. Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean (University of California Press, 2009), 23. 17. See Jon Anderson, “Relational Places: The Surfed Wave as Assemblage and Convergence,” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 30, No. 4 (2012): 570–587. 18. Huang, “Ecologies of Entanglement in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” Journal of Asian American Studies. 19. Garrett Hardin, “From ‘The Tragedy of the Commons,’” The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (ed.) Richard Dawkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 263–66. 20. Patricia Yaeger, “Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA, Vol. 125, No. 3 (May 2010), 530. 21. Ibid., 533. Also of interest is Annie M.  Cranstoun, Ceasing to Run Underground: 20th century Women Writers and Hydrological Thought,

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Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New  York, 2016. See Helen M. Rozwadowski “Technology and ocean-scape: Defining the deep sea in mid-nineteenth century,” History and Technology, an International Journal, 17:3 (2001), 217–247. Also, on “network archaeology” see N.  Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 22. Audra Mitchell, “Thinking Without the Circle: Marine Plastic and the Global Ethics,” Political Geography 47 (2015), 77. 23. Mitchell, “Thinking without the Circle,” 78. See I. Shaw and K. Meehan, “Force-full: Power, Politics and Object-Oriented Philosophy,” Area 45(2), 216–222. 24. Elizabeth Grosz, 2013, 235. 25. Plastian the Little Fish, Kindle edition. 26. Kim De Wolff, “Plastic Naturecultures: Multispecies Ethnography and the Dangers of Separating Living from Nonliving,” Body & Society, 2017, Vol. 23(3), 26. 27. William L.  Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 10. 28. Catherine Phillips, “Discerning Ocean Plastics: Activist, Scientific, and Artistic Practices,” Environment and Planning A, 05/2017, Volume 49, Issue 5. 29. De Wolff, “Plastic Naturecultures,” 27. 30. See Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke, 2016); see Chapters 2 and 7 for some interesting observations. 31. See Elizabeth Povinelli, “Three Figures of Geontology,” in Anthropocene Feminism ed. Richard Grusin (Minnesota, 2017), 49–64. 32. J. Lehman, “A Sea of Potential: A Politics of Global Ocean Observations,” Political Geography 55 (2016), 121. 33. Nicola Leigh, Albert Ross, The Albatross, Blue Spaghetti (independently published on Amazon, 2018). 34. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150831163739. htm#:~:text=The%20researchers%20predict%20that%20plastic,eaten%20 plastic%20of%20some%20kind. 35. Karl W.  Kenyon & Eugene Kridler, “Laysan Albatrosses Swallow Indigestible Matter,” Auk, 86, Issue 2 (April–June), 1969, 339–343. 36. Alimao, Stacy, Exposed Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 131. 37. Davis, “Life and Death in the Anthropocene,” 350. 38. Davis, “Life and Death in the Anthropocene,” 350. 39. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 22. 40. Ibid., 89.

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41. I thank Dara Herman Zierlein for sharing her art work with me for this chapter. 42. Staying with the Trouble (Duke UP, 2016), 2. 43. Ibid., 2. 44. Ibid., 5. 45. Donna Haraway and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (Rouledge, 2000), 76. 46. See Matthew Griffiths, “Jorie Graham’s Sea Change: The Poetics of Sustainability and the Politics of What We’re Sustaining,” in Literature and Sustainability, ed. Adeline Johns-Putra, John Parham, Louise (Manchester University Press, 2017). 47. Ecology without Nature (Harvard University Press, 2007), 159. 48. M.  Ronda, “Anthropogenic Poetics,” Minnesota Review 83 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-­2782291.

CHAPTER 15

Agrarian Witnessing and Worlding for the Anthropocene William Major

I doubt whether I’m being overly bold in claiming that one fundamental fact of human life in the Anthropocene has it that disappointment, sadness, and anxiety are emotional states intrinsic to and resulting from an overarching sense of loss. To live in a time of radical systemic change marked by the increasing distance between the scale of the human and the scale of what the human has wrought transcends postmodern irony (never very effective as an ethos, anyway) and demands novel conceptual and affective tools that might, at the very least, help us abide. One challenge of the current moment is to locate explanatory and normative, if not pragmatic, models of thought and behavior out of which to fashion a life-­ affirming ethos that will help us adjust affectively to the unworlding of the world, that is, putting aside briefly the question whether or not it is possible to undo unworlding on a scale that might be practically feasible (for instance, the immediate cessation of fossil fuel capitalism globally and a

W. Major (*) Department of English, Hillyer College, University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_15

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switch to renewable energy sources), the affective reality of anthropogenics must be looked to. Are there models that offer not so much a palpable sense of wholeness and healing—very Holocene, these—as they do acknowledge the despair and, in this recognition, map paths of resilience and resistance? Where are such models to be found that will reworld or “form a world” [faire monde]1 all the better to respond to what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the glomicity—“a horrific blob world marked by ‘indefinite growth of techno-science … a correlative exponential growth of populations … a worsening of inequalities of all sorts’”?2 Rob Sean Wilson offers one compelling vision of what this might look like, a worlding or reworlding whose fashioning—I will propose at various points in this chapter— looks curiously like that of new agrarian place-making: “a historical process of taking care, setting limits, entering into, & making world-horizons come near & become local, situated, in-formed, [and] cared for” (104)?3 The question, of course, is whether this vision is either relevant or practical in the Anthropocene.4 In examining contemporary agrarian thought—notably that of its most elegant spokesperson, Wendell Berry—I juxtapose ideas of care, use, and place with the inevitable estrangement and threat that accompanies life in these times. What can a farmer from Port Royal, Kentucky—a forgotten space in a land of forgotten spaces—have to say about reworlding the world? I wish to ask whether in the present moment, which—disputes over its characterization aside—is the global moment, recourse to place-­ based ethics and locally informed care should have a purchase on our imaginations. As far as the global is concerned, it is of course more than a moment; it is a transcendence that goes beyond ideology, almost a kind of second nature, or even third, one in which the individual consciousness has been subsumed. Can an agrarian standard that is so obviously of another moment, another time, offer an effective or practical response to the perils of climate change and its explicit unworlding “[immonde], which …has never in history impacted the totality of the orb to such an extent.”5 This question is further complicated by the unpredictability and instability of the Anthropocene whose totality (the glomus) causes me to wonder what our affective lives will look like as the relative stability of the Holocene gives way. To address these and other topics, “agrarian witnessing and worlding” considers the mystery of place and, indeed, the mystery of what’s to come and proposes that the act of witnessing is essential if we are to reorient and adapt our affective lives to this new reality: “the fact that the world is destroying itself.”6 But I also would like to address

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whether place in the Anthropocene has a nature, whether the “nature of place,” as it were, can be trusted or positioned as either a concept or material entity that might provide a model for right use or ethical care and whether it is possible to “form a world” from it. To be sure, whatever version of nature and culture we choose that might offer a foundation or model for reworlding, it cannot simply consist of the indifferent shrug of late capitalism, as Rob Sean Wilson notes: “worlding should not be taken as just a gesture, then, or tactic in enacting processes of Late Capitalism as normative telos within the modernity telos of the Anthropocene,” nor should it “be equated to [the] dynamics of neoliberal globalization as it commonly is.”7 What I take Wilson to mean here is the deceptively difficult task of moving past the given of globalization to alternative practices that resist the overweening monstrosity that is late capital. Not so easy when the world is no longer home. Hope and fear are the Janus-faced twins straddling the zeitgeist in environmental and agricultural humanities. The all too human desire for hope in a changed future inevitably accompanies the dread that such hope is misplaced or, more properly, Pollyannaish. Andrew McMurry has it that that the “hopists” are mystified by “futurity, which is presumed to hold the solutions to problems that would cost the here and now too dearly to face.”8 For McMurry, “hope today is an abomination and should be put down” as it is too often a feckless substitute for action in the present.9 Faced with a host of unprecedented environmental challenges, the temptation is to look away, to go all in on hope (which inveterately arrives via technology and expertise) and thereby forestall that sense of overwhelming defeat when all hope is lost. Hope provides for the future by negating the present, however untenable both may be, by displacing the reality of the now onto future generations, even as those generations are undone by the very fact that this cake is baked. The climate crisis—even as much as it is here, now—has its death grip on what’s to come. Both the crisis itself and the hope that something, somewhere will be done about it are in this way elastic, like a chunk of saltwater taffy pulled and stretched on the endless machine of capital. Whatever hope there is now, you can be assured it will be even greater tomorrow—greater growth, as it were—even as the monster looms, no longer in the shadows but standing nakedly before us as hope averts its gaze. It seems inevitable that hope will continue to grow— like the economy itself—directly proportionate to the reality it purportedly negates. That is to say, like the economy itself, I do not know what we would do without it.

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I think it’s fair to say that whatever hope in the future many of us have, the thriving we may desire for ourselves and for those who come after will be at best compromised and at worst thwarted by known knowns and unknown unknowns. Endemic to hope, of course, is its kissing cousin, optimism, which today is inevitably articulated by a belief in technological advancement that borders on religion. That is to say, it too banks on futurity, which may never arrive in the guise that we might hope for. Lauren Berlant has named the inability to realize our desires and affections an example of “cruel optimism,” which she defines as “a kind of relation in which one depends on objects that block the very thriving that motivates our attachment in the first place.”10 We want to prosper, we wish to achieve, perhaps to become whole or at least to believe in a better future— and yet the objects and the ideas that we “attach” ourselves to ultimately disappoint; they make demands upon us that we cannot possibly theorize or execute, or that we do not wish to face. Berlant says that a good example is when “a relation in which you’ve invested fantasies of your own coherence and potential breaks down, [and] the world itself feels endangered,”11 which seems to me as good a definition of nature today as I’ve heard in a while. Berlant’s “cruel optimism” relies on the truism that humans are affective creatures—driven by emotions and feelings that connect us to each other and to the world, connections that hold the promise of fulfillment but often block the full realization of that promise. Consequently, there are always objects and relationships at play within Berlant’s “cruel optimism”—what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “not Me”—although it is easy enough to envision relations in which disappointment isn’t necessarily the emotional lingua franca of experience, even during the Anthropocene. I think McMurry and Berlant would agree that both hope and optimism hinge on an endless displacement of the present, one might even say, apropos of this essay, of the local, in favor of the global future, which, when it arrives, will be equally stunted by the reality that the present failed to fulfill the hope of the past and will thus have negated even the solace of nostalgia. Insofar as it has a way of diminishing hope, it is tempting to relinquish naming current and future existential challenges by looking away, since naming signals both loss and, to take some liberties with Berlant, a kind of cruelty—for those who are paying attention—over what we have wrought, which is also to say the cruelty of the future. That said, here is a partial list:

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Resource depletion, ocean acidification and plastification, urban and suburban sprawl, global climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss and species extinction, habitat destruction, invasive species, agricultural pollution, light and noise pollution, toxic waste pollution, environmental racism, sick building syndrome, urban heat islands, dead zones, pandemics.

But to name them is not necessarily to feel them; it is almost as if in their naming we have depersonalized the reality of the things themselves. Such naming is akin to the futurity of hope, always occurring elsewhere, spatially or temporally. Perhaps this is because these “syndromes,” “islands,” “habitats,” and “species” possess an abstract quality, not unlike the more comprehensive term “environment,” which Wendell Berry has always eschewed as bloodless and irresponsibly abstract. Other such disappointing abstractions include “economy” and “globalism,” both of which arrive on the back techno-utopianism. We know what they are and we understand what they mean, but we do not necessarily feel them—at least I don’t—in the same way that I feel a relationship with someone close to me, a relationship that could also be characterized as “toxic” or “polluted” or that makes me feel like an “island,” one that partakes of “change” and “loss,” or one in which I am theoretically “depleted” or even “invaded.” And while it is probably not all that relevant in the scheme of things how one person feels, it is nevertheless true that most of us characterize our relationship with each other and our environments using the language of emotion and feeling; we do this because we care. If we didn’t, affective language would be inappropriate, and hope and optimism would be devoid of their power. But such care needs to be qualified. I care more for my local community than I do for the “environment.” And while I may care about your children and wish them well, I care about my own family and community more deeply than I can possibly care for yours (notwithstanding recent critiques of place intimacy leveled by critics such as Ursula Heise and Janet Fiskio, among others). Even most conventional environmental ethics would appear to suffer from the abstractions of size and distance: the oceans, the rainforests, and the atmosphere. How am I to wrap my mind around them, much less my heart? What is this nature that we are supposed to care for, anyway, in the Anthropocene? And how are we to process the “cruelly optimistic” nature of nature when the object of our affection may not be what we think it is? It’s enough to throw our hands up and, as Jeffrey Bilbro warns, relegate our relations with the natural

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world to the “sublime,” which he argues “causes the human subject to feel small and insignificant.” While this may seem “promising for a less anthropocentric ethic,” in fact the “sublime experience depends on an inability to intuit an external order, [and thus] leaves the subject free to defend itself from this vast, scary world with whatever rational, technological means are available.”12 To address whether and to what degree local, place-based affection may offer some rebuke to the “cruelty” of the global (or the vastness of the sublime), I turn to Berry and new agrarian models of affection in an effort to posit an alternative to the unworlding that is arguably the most salient feature of modern life.

An Economy of Care When care runs against convention, when the aspirations of normative ethical behavior appear unrealizable amidst the “getting and spending” that “lay waste our powers,”13 it may be tempting to take Naomi Klein’s observation about the incompatibility of two arrangements as axiomatic: capitalism as currently practiced and an environmental ethic that might begin to address climate change are nearly irreconcilable—systems errors.14 Of course, this incompatibility can be observed in any number of political divisions in the United States. Environmental issues generally and climate change specifically are remarkably divisive, especially when rhetorically linked to either/or paradigms (climate or jobs? owls or employment?). And yet, an element that the either/or paradigm gets right is the acknowledgment that the work of systemic change is work indeed, and it’s work that may go undone. To that end, a Pew Research Center poll in 2016 noted that 75% of adults in the United States are concerned about helping the environment in their daily lives, but only 20% make an effort “all of the time.”15 In addition, between 1991 and 2016—arguably the years in which climate change moved to the forefront of American and world consciousness—the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as “environmentalists” dropped from 78% to 42%.16 What, in a time of both looming and increasingly present crisis, might account for these numbers? Among the powers of unworlding both rhetorical and material, can care be theorized as cruelly optimistic insofar as its promise appears so difficult to fulfill? And can care, with its affective and practical imprecision, offer a model for how to act in the world today? Perhaps so, but only if worlding is understood as incomplete, ongoing, and effectually a communal commitment to building alternatives to self-interest and shareholder-driven

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imperatives of state and corporate capitalism—“different ways of being in the world, in terms and stories of connecting to other worlds and opening everyday life to other lived local temporalities.” The new agrarian emphasis on localized care may be one world-building project “beyond colonialism and imperialism” but never free of their effects.17 That said, the new agrarian stress on care, usufruct, place-based ethics, and husbandry—not to mention what some critics have noted is a fairly patriarchal apology for gendered domestic roles—is not without its challenges. According to Berry and other agrarian writers, “care” is active, transitive, and holistic as it supports an ethic in which economic life is married to a set of values arrived at over time (considering, of course, the ever-­ shifting nature of those values, best dramatized by the statistics noted earlier). For the agrarian, such care includes something resembling traditional economic practices: oikonomia, good home management, with home as the point d’appui of local affections and material life (bearing in mind, of course, that this idea of home is a fairly rarefied ideal, found in fewer and fewer places in the United States). Berry’s focus on traditional home economics, however, highlights the fundamental tensions between the chaotic, fragmentary, and death-dealing practices of early and late capitalism—facilitated by resource extraction and the externalizing of costs—and the affection for place that agrarians ask us to practice. The former seem ever prior; they are certainly stronger, though certainly not because they inspire affective ties. Geographical proximity and the responsibilities and obligations that ensue are therefore antecedent to deeply felt connections, and thus what Wilson calls the “reign of globalization as a hegemonic world-order, the totality of the world-becoming market”— deeply interwoven with nearly all of our economic lives—runs antithetical to agrarian worlding practices.18 As I look out from the vista of my own suburban garden, it is both easier and more logical for me to care deeply about what I see and directly experience. That said, it is difficult to generalize from such experience, since there’s never any guarantee that these affective ties will bring about a revolution of consciousness. We are human; we destroy what we purport to love all the time, and it may be worth remembering that the earliest usages of the term care were deployed as a lamentation, grievous and deeply sorrowful. It is almost as if the practical application of an affective and responsible ethos to the earth or to one’s local environment has encoded within it a sadness or anxiety that naturally accompanies loss. I think Berlant would agree: it hurts to care.

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Perhaps this disjuncture between normative ethical practices in the ideal and actual living in the world of transnational capital could be reconciled or, at the very least, mitigated. Berry suggests we would need to realize a “connection” between self and world that “verges on identity,” one that might heal what he refers to as various economic, social, and cultural errors that rend humans from the world.19 He recognized several causes of this split over 40 years ago in The Unsettling of America (1977), noting that the so-called ecological crisis is actually one of “character,” “agriculture,” and “culture.”20 For Berry, most of what we do in the world obscures or mystifies our ineluctable ties to the earth. By contrast, the small farm (to take only one example) makes plain this connection, as by necessity it makes our use of the earth plain. Within the agrarian ethic, there’s no getting around the problem (and the solution) that all human activity makes use of the land, but the global economy hides such use, as if mystification and external costs were simply the price to be paid (when we are paying attention) for having an economy (or even being-in-the-­ world) in the first place. The intimacy of an economy of care (or an intimate economy) recognizes the demands nature ultimately makes on all of us and, equally important, the obligations we incur toward nature. These obligations are realized only within and through the kinds of economic practices in which selves and communities recognize their debt to and responsibilities for the land upon which a culture of affective connection is built.

Urban Worlding and Unworlding Looking awry at place-based ethics is de rigueur among ecocosmopolitans; it almost appears universally acknowledged that worlding is theorized as primarily an urban phenomenon, with rural and other marginalized peoples an afterthought: “Worlding practices and visions intend to create global cities and global citizens but not everyone is able and is intended to take part.”21 The urban and suburban world-making theorized as a particularly Asian phenomenon across the Pacific Rim—Aihwa Ong’s “globalism localized and circulated within and across urban sites, especially sites like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai”22—is a particularly noxious anathema to place-based and regional models of ethical living of the agrarian model. One is compelled to ask what the blissful denizens of those glass towers will be having for dinner. Will they care to acknowledge their food sources or those who produce them? Or will the material

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conditions of rural labor and the spoliation of the earth remain forever hidden by the very forces of the glomus, which some theorists of worlding would have us believe are freeing? Somehow, the contradiction between urban apparatchik liberation and rural despair is not sexy enough to inspire the cosmopolitan libido. Instead, the people are wooed by the “ongoing art of being global”23 and are led to believe (perhaps not without some justification) that it’s the new agrarian ethos of place-based ethics in need of reform. Within the discourse of environmental philosophy and criticism, the idea of place is highly contested, bearing as it sometimes does the taint of parochialism and an almost incorrigible blind spot when it comes to the lived lives of those who produce most of our food and to forms of difference that are not always reconcilable to rural homogeneity. I think some of these criticisms are warranted. However, the positioning of various forms of urban life and a cosmopolitan ethic (the latter of which is somehow universally conflated with respect and tolerance) is equally parochial.24 One criticism of placed-based ethics notes that agrarians fail to address the lives of peoples who live and work on racial, ethnic, and economic “margins,” that the agrarian ethic as currently theorized is at best incomplete, relying as it does on a model of property ownership and agricultural practices out of step with other forms of localism and food justice activism: “a lacuna remains between agrarian thought—with its steadfast commitment to place as the basis of ethics, citizenship, and democracy—and emerging social movements for food justice. The agrarian insistence on place implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, devalues the experience, epistemology, and ethical agency of migrant and transnational communities.”25 Janet Fiskio calls for “an agrarianism of the margins,” one that might better reflect “multiple and transitory ways of creating food, community, and place.”26 The reality of transnational capitalism, I think Fiskio would argue, still creates opportunities for resistance and community not reliant on traditional agrarian notions of domesticity and property ownership. Essentially, Fiskio sees place-based agrarianism as unable to account for itinerant peoples whose lives are deeply intertwined with industrial food production yet who manage to create forms of resistance and community. For Fiskio, an “agrarianism of the margins requires a reformulation of the ethical assumptions on which agrarianism is based—assumptions that fail to question in a fundamental way the grounds of agency.”27 That is to say, place itself must be considered less a static concept rooted in ownership and rural life and more a shifting ideal that acknowledges the realities of workers whose

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transient lives are often incompatible with the kind of rootedness upon which agrarianism is based. Fiskio’s insistence that place-bound ethics may not do justice to those communities that bristle against the deeply unjust industrial food production archipelago is more a welcome addition to contemporary agrarian ethics rather than a rebuke. Indeed, it’s safe to say that Berry himself might agree that the creation of ethical communities in any guise is a necessary precursor to the ethical treatment of the land, which is why it is a bit tendentious to suggest that Berry and new agrarianism’s focus on settlement “reinscribes the marginalization of migrant, undocumented, tenant, and temporary workers.”28 Nor do I think it necessarily fair to suggest that Berry’s poetics lacks the “capacity to recognize the subjectivity of those who inhabit the margins of the food system.”29 You can be sure that if Berry wrote a novel focused on the lives of migrant farm workers, for instance, he would be subject to a political chorus of disdain. Even for groups that are deeply subject to the whims of power and the shifting demands of capital yet still manage to create real communal bonds, it is still worth asking about the health of the land and the life it supports, and when such health is threatened or destroyed, then life itself is at risk (as is the beauty of creation).30 It may be possible, as Fiskio notes, “to engage in the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of spaces, over and over again”31—as she notes in several examples drawn from Helena María Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s documentary film The Garden (2008)—but this is hardly a recipe for long-lasting communal ties or sustained understanding of what a place needs to heal and thrive. After all, Berry’s poetics—along with new agrarians such as Wes Jackson, Gene Logsdon, and others—arguably do their best to highlight the marginality and exploitation of a host of peoples and lands. If Berry, as a farmer in rural Kentucky, does not make “urban gardeners, migrant workers, gleaners, dumpster-­divers, transients, squatters, and food sovereignty and food justice activists” the subject of his creative life, are we therefore to assume that the work that they do and the challenges they face are anathema to him?32 They may not populate the reaches of his creative life, but I nonetheless see parallels between one kind of agrarian ethic that situates itself firmly in a rural or semirural world and another that encompasses migrant and tenant workers. The difference may lie simply in what kind of world one wishes to inhabit.

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The Standard of Nature How we use the world is always freighted with any number of ethical questions, the most important of which asks us to consider what nature asks of us. Berry writes: Of course agriculture must be productive; that is a requirement as urgent as it is obvious. But urgent as it is, it is not the first requirement; there are two more requirements, equally important and equally urgent. One is that if agriculture is to remain productive, it must preserve the land, and the fertility and ecological health of the land; the land, that is, must be used well. A further requirement, therefore, is that if the land is to be used well, the people who use it must know it well, must be highly motivated to use it well, must know how to use it well, must have time to use it well, and must be able to afford to use it well.33

“The people who use it must know it well.” Now, whether or not people on the margins have the desire or the motivation to use the land well is perhaps less important than the reality that they may not always have the time or the standing to do so, as aptly demonstrated by Fiskio’s discussion of urban gardening collectives in the 2008 documentary The Garden.34 But how is one to know whether or not the land is well used? In what ways can agriculture be thought of as world-making rather than world-­destroying? How much time does it take to learn what the land needs?35 The necessity of production and the limits to be imposed on production are to be measured by what I consider a somewhat imprecise ecological idea: the “standard of nature,” which even Berry himself assures us “is not so definite or stable a concept as the weights and measures of productivity,” allied as the latter is to extraction and efficiency.36 The question that I am most concerned with, however, is not how we come to know “nature of the place”; rather, I am interested in whether place in the Anthropocene has nature, whether place or nature can be trusted or positioned as either concepts or material entities that might provide models for right use or ethical care. To that end, using place as the sine qua non of agrarian ethics is problematic not only because it may (or may not) recognize the lives of marginalized peoples; rather, we might well ask whether the relative stability of place can be a model for ethical use with the collapse of the Holocene. What is this thing that we are supposed to know well in order to use it well? Indeed, can we not say that the end of the Holocene signals that the agrarian standards of wholeness and health are

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as fragile as the Holocene itself? If so, I also wonder whether the worlding project is equally troubled, weighed down by the anarchic forces of anthropogenic climate change. It’s hard to create in a home when you have a raging drunk as a parent. What does it mean to have a working or emotional attachment to place today? How can we trust this attachment and learn from it? I am convinced that the agrarian notion of place is a necessary condition for the humility that predisposes one to care and to affective attachment, but such humility ought also to extend to the changes humans have wrought in the environment to the extent that we may not yet understand the lesson nature imparts. After a fashion, this is one of the central tenets of the new agrarianism—that is, that we will never have the whole picture or, if we do, we will not understand it. Our inability to know fully the effects of how we use the world, however, is now complicated by the world itself (as if it weren’t complex enough)—the entity that, if we were to pay attention, ideally offers lessons in humility and use. It may be that even as we attempt to learn from nature by practicing care and humility, we find that nature is not our wise friend, our reliable teacher. What I mean by this is that if one of the results of an affective connection to the land (“It All Turns on Affection” is the title of Berry’s National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Medal lecture)37 is the wisdom that goes beyond nature’s use value and extends to some form of mutual symbiosis between culture and nature, the latter may now be positioned as fickle in its instruction. This is part of Amitav Ghosh’s point when he notes that climate change has not had much of an impact on our stories, that our writers—the shapers of the stories we tell about the world—have yet to understand what we have wrought or, if they do understand, are loathe to dramatize their insights when realism demands the sort of quotidian story that fails to make room for catastrophe. “Are the currents of global warming too wild to be navigated in the accustomed barques of narration?” he asks. “The climate crisis,” he notes—as if channeling Berry—“is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination,” which I take to mean that climate change demands narrative strategies that go beyond realism.38 Ghosh wonders whether fiction can ever encompass the unpredictability that is more and more the prime characteristic of the natural world: “nature does certainly jump, if not leap,” and the “Anthropocene has already disrupted many assumptions that were founded on the relative climatic stability of the Holocene.” This era, then, might be characterized as the era of the “highly improbable: flash floods, hundred year storms, persistent droughts, spells of

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unprecedented heat, sudden landslides, raging torrents pouring down from breached glacial lakes, and, yes, freakish tornadoes.” What then, is this nature that is supposed to be our guide if it is true “that human beings are intrinsically unable to prepare for rare events”?39 If the impossible is now—or, in more common parlance, the future is here in all of its anarchic complexity—using “nature as measure” for our behavior may offer neither a practical nor affective model for what we are supposed to do, how are we supposed to use—since use we must? Here we arrive at the problem of how to take nature’s measure in the Anthropocene, when the thing itself—the object of knowledge and affection—is no longer what we thought it was; to use Ghosh’s formulation, perhaps something about nature resists conventional narration. This causes me to wonder how agrarian theory and practice might apply to a nature that is not there—or, more precisely, a nature that is too much there, uncannily so.40 Remember, for the agrarian the so-called nature/ culture split is at best an epistemological relic; thus, “if [nature] does not thrive, we cannot thrive.”41 But the agrarian typically doesn’t speak in such generalities; this place has needs and carrying capacities different from the next place. One ridge or watershed or stand of timber is not always the same as the next. The same goes for the farm. Narrowing the sphere of care is paramount: “The particular farm,” Berry writes, “must not be treated as any farm…Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of the particular place, means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love.”42 Particularity and scale help the farmer achieve this knowledge and its attendant affection, all of which bring the farmer closer to ethical use: “farming by the measure of nature.” And yet, the scale of anthropogenic climate change might require that the agrarian farmer (and theorist) concede to confusion, if not disappointment—that disjuncture between expectation and result when the object of care is no longer what it once may have been (I take it as a given that farmers are used to disappointment). I am asking: What happens when place is no longer available to be “known,” when the love that can still be acknowledged and celebrated is transformed not by a deficit of local care or particular acts of hubris but by the machinations of world system (the glomus)43—political, economic, social, and otherwise—which can never factor love into its equations, its metrics, and has irreducibly altered the object of affection? If we are firmly in the land of both disappointment and estrangement (the

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latter of which would have been familiar to the Romantics, though so much more is now at stake), we are also troubled to ask whether affective ties ought to be the primary ground for environmental ethics.44 It is difficult to understand nowadays how to act in and with nature or, more importantly, how to know nature (never mind that one may still “love” nature, as long as one is ready to be disappointed). What might this mean for agrarian notions of care and affection? Alexa Weik Von Mossner argues that “The tragedy of the Anthropocene…is that humans now ‘collectively wield a geological force’ but at the same time experience difficulties when trying to understand the potential consequences of the risks they are taking because they are too abstract and distant.”45 One effect of the scale of global climate change and the affective abstraction and overweening anxiety that results might be political, if not often personal, stasis: “The more various detrimental trends (in carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, sea ice loss, etc.) increase, the less we do about arresting those increases, the more anxiety and guilt we feel, the more affective impact the next graph or chart can have, and so on—a classic example of a feedback loop.”46 Where’s the love? As things get worse—as CO2 levels increase, ice caps melt, glaciers disappear, and hurricanes rage—the very notion of ethical human agency is undermined (“Think Globally, Act Locally”), and impotence in the face of a mighty raging God we ourselves have created becomes almost a given. What is left to know or to connect with? “What happens to our emotions when that environment changes drastically?” Von Mossner perceptibly asks.47 To which I reply, we change our expectations, look for new models, new stories. What would an unalienated relationship with contingency resemble? What fantasy do we wish to enact from here on out? Would it be agrarian? Native American? Amish? Buddhist? Is it time to learn how to die?

Learning to Die As a way of dealing with the fear and vicissitudes of life as a soldier in Iraq, the writer Roy Scranton turned to the eighteenth-century Japanese Samurai text the Hagakure, which he says taught him how to cope: “Learning to die means learning to let go of the ego, the idea of the self, the future, certainty, attachment, the pursuit of pleasure, permanence, and stability”48—he might call this the space he arrived at when he was able to shed carbon-fueled flow, a state that distracts one from “autonomous reflection or independent critical thought.”49 In combining the lessons of

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the Hagakure with philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of “disciplined interruption,” Scranton argues for a humanism that is Thoreauvian in its indifference to the vicissitudes of everyday life and all that would distract from a higher level of consciousness.50 Such “interruption,” Scranton implies, could be useful when faced with the uncertainty and existential threat of violent death in Iraq, but also when faced with the less proximate but equally urgent threat of the climate crisis. In short, “in recognizing the dominion of death and the transience of individual existences,” interruption grants one a kind of freedom: Responding freely to constant images of fear and violence, responding freely to the perpetual media circuits of pleasure and terror, responding freely to the ongoing alarms of war, environmental catastrophe, and global destruction demands a reorientation of feeling so that every new impulse is held at a distance until it fades or can be changed. While life beats its red rhythms and human swarms dance to the compulsion of strife, the interrupter practices dying.51

“A reorientation of feeling.” Interruption, as I understand it, is not to do nothing. “Interruption,” Scranton writes, “suspends continuous processes. It’s not smashing, but sitting with. Not blockage, but reflection.”52 Walt Whitman called this loafing, the better to “invite [his] soul” to contemplation and creation.53 Whitman knew how small we were, calling “man” this “gusty-temper’d little whiffet,” who must absorb “the great moral lesson of inherency,” symbolized most palpably by a tree: So innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes…this gusty-termper’d little whiffet, man, that runs indoors at a mit of rain or snow…Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think.54

I am reminded that the poet of the “barbaric yawp”55 had a neglected quiet side that would rather leave the astronomy lecture to look “in perfect silence at the stars,”56 the better to interrupt the deadened discourse of the academy. Such moments of humility are prevalent within Whitman: to “believe in those wing’d purposes,”57 to have the “look of the bay mare shame the silliness out of me,”58 to “conceive too much of articulation” and to “do nothing for a long time but listen,”59 to “turn and live awhile with the animals” who “do not sweat and whine about their condition” or

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“weep for their sins” or “make [us] sick discussing their duty to God.”60 “How many have wander’d so far away,” Whitman writes, “that return is almost impossible.”61 Whitman both describes and enacts Scranton’s “interruption,” and the death is that of the ego (admittedly, a strange thing to say about Whitman). Conversely, however—and I’m trying to be dialectical here—is it possible to know that tree anymore (putting aside whether it ever was possible)? When Scranton says that we need to find novel ways to adapt to the Anthropocene as a species, what he means is that we need to learn a certain stillness to prepare for the end of a way of life, perhaps best epitomized by the virtual (and literal) death of “carbon-based capitalism.”62 This will be not only politically challenging—to say the least—but difficult psychologically, as “humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today. It is hard work for us to remember that this way of life, this present moment [the Holocene], this order of things is not stable and permanent.” What can we do but “begin the difficult process of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality”?63 Perhaps quietude can be thought of as a type of worlding, albeit one at odds with the rapacity of the glomus and the noise of the modern. Scranton contends, however, that traditional humanistic study is necessary in redirecting us from ourselves toward this paradigm shift. “We need a new humanism,” Scranton argues, “a newly philosophical humanism, undergirded by renewed attention to the humanities.”64 One might remind Scranton that the centering of the human—even with its obvious advantages for the human—cannot be divorced from the extractive economy that brought us here. I don’t wish to lay overmuch blame at the feet of the humanities, but we should at least acknowledge that humanism itself is questioned in certain quarters for landing us on a beach that will soon be under water. That said, of course Scranton doesn’t argue that “new ideas”…“new myths”…and “new stories” will be enough to stop “ocean acidification, social upheaval, and species extinction” as much as they offer new templates for life in the aftermath or, at the very least, help us philosophize amidst the most proximate of existential crises.65 “What does one life mean in the face of mass death,” Scranton asks, “or the collapse of global civilization?”66 We will need to adapt, and we need stories to help us rearrange our expectations. One might well ask, however, whether these stories have been here all along. Scranton shares with Berry a skepticism about some of our most basic ideological commitments, particularly those that favor the Holocentric idea that permanent economic growth is viable.67 For Scranton these

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observations come as a revelation; it took his experiences of war and hurricanes, violence and anarchy, to enlighten him on the perilous present and future. For Amitav Ghosh, the danger inherent in simply living has always been with us even as it appeared to be mitigated by modernity; “the modern novel,” he notes, “unlike geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable,” by which he means that our stories function primarily as a “concealment of the real”—the ideology behind such “concealment” is that modernity tells us “Nature [is] moderate and orderly,”68 rather than fractured with catastrophe.69 Ghosh observes, however, that were we to consider the full scope of the world’s stories, we would indeed find a rich tradition of catastrophic events and nonhuman agents acting alongside the human such that the very idea of stability would seem more like a blip in time, ideological and certainly not to be trusted.70 While Ghosh’s focus is in part on the modern novel and its scripted silencing of these voices (“To the great majority of people everywhere, it has always been perfectly evident that dogs, horses, elephants, chimpanzees, and many other animals possess intelligence and emotions”),71 the point I wish to make here is one that leads somewhat away from the humanism that Scranton relies on to teach us the humility to carry on in the new world insofar as it can be implicated in the silencing of the very forces Ghosh says have been here all the time. These forces are now, in the Anthropocene, making themselves dangerously manifest, not unlike the tigers of the Sundarbans who are always watching, even as humans go about their business, and striking (or not) as they see fit. I am making several concurrent points here. One is that Scranton’s humanism may be necessary for thinking through the very humanism that helped put us here but that we cannot stop there since we must also come to the recognition that something else is in charge; perhaps this is the quiet and the humility of which he speaks. And though I am skeptical that the rich tradition of the world’s humanities will land us at a place in which we are prepared to die, it is just as likely that such study may in fact bring us back to where we started—not in a cycle of perpetual renewal, ouroboros-­like, but one in ever diminishing cycles of entropic despair. There’s no immutable law that states that humanism necessarily leads to enlightenment. And, as mentioned earlier, the transhuman utopia of the modern city seems like more of the same, as it “derives directly from ideals of human perfectibility, rationality, and agency inherited from Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment”72—essentially, more of what Scranton might undo if he could abandon his dedication to certain Enlightenment

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ideals. The other is that while it may have once been possible to rely upon “the regularity of bourgeois life” to give purpose and coherence to our everyday affairs73—including, most importantly, what we may have thought of as the regularity of nature itself—we may now be at a point where it will be difficult to understand the nature of nature since the ground upon which such understanding is built is now pocked with disaster. Where these two speculations converge is in the useful phrase “learning to die” in that it allows for an evolution in our thinking (“learning”) that may bring us to the psychological space Scranton says allowed him to survive his time in a war zone, namely, that we are already dead—we simply don’t know what to do except to press on as if little has changed. What is left but to record as witnesses the end game of the nature we thought we knew and the birth of something to which we may never affectively and effectively commune? Scranton’s humanism knocks hard against the critique of the human, best represented by Cary Wolfe’s idea that most forms of liberal thinking hardly question who’s doing the thinking and why: “One of the hallmarks of humanism—and even more specifically that kind of humanism called liberalism—is its penchant for that kind of pluralism, in which the sphere of attention and consideration (intellectual or ethical) is broadened and extended to previously marginalized groups, but without in the least destabilizing or throwing into radical question the schema of the human who undertakes such pluralization.”74 Even Scranton’s radical suggestion that we may already be dead as a civilization relies upon that civilization to offer a way out through a deeper appreciation for the humanities, the “comparative study of human cultures across the world and through time.”75 That is, he is not quite willing to abandon his conceptual centering of the human, even as I think he would acknowledge that it is that very centering that has brought us to this point. As a humanities professor myself I am sympathetic. Who would argue with a call for a wider appreciation for the “patient nurturing of the roots and heirloom varietals of human symbolic life” and the need for “teaching slowness, attention to detail, argumentative rigor, careful reading, and meditative reflection,”76 especially as such attention is inarguably lacking in a frenzied world driven by the ephemera of mass communication? Nevertheless, one does have the sense that Scranton would have us return to where we have always been, not listening to Whitman’s trees or Ghosh’s tigers but paying particular attention to our own greatness.

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My other critique of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is only that Scranton’s call for new systems of thought, “of meaning and economic distribution,” of “resilient social technologies in response to precarity and threat,” is a longstanding feature of certain quarters of American life.77 We have “interrupters” all around us. As I noted earlier, the Amish come to mind. Certain elements of Native American culture. New agrarian models. The “human limits” and “transience” that form part of Scranton’s diagnosis and prognosis for the new world, and whose acceptance he urges on us, are and have been readily available.78 These are not new ideas but only seem so given the depth of our commitment to an ethos bereft of voices, often rural, whose alterity renders them silent. There is, as it were, a deep fascination with urban life when it comes to worlding, as if only in those centers where millions come together in various configurations and flows is it possible to imagine the emergence of alternative models of being: “Worlding projects remap relationships of power at different scales and localities, but they seem to form a critical mass in urban centers, making cities both critical sites in which to inquire into worlding projects, as well as the ongoing result and target of specific worldings.”79 Thus, what Aihwa Ong calls the “the ongoing art of being global” is thereby linked to a passive acceptance of globality as a concept always already centered as an urban phenomenon, and those who live and work beyond the light of the city are to be neither seen nor heard.80 Here urban worlding gets the same treatment as humanism, making it difficult to conceptualize other world-­ making voices. The metaphysics of presence, however, always contains the trace of its dissolution, and just as Scranton’s humanism probably isn’t radical enough to resituate the human in relation to the world, it may be equally true that worlding as currently conceptualized partakes of a similar logic.

Mystery as a Guide I will speculate here on one idea that fulfills Scranton’s desire for a new paradigm that, arguably, is hardly new at all. It’s one that that may help us negotiate the tension between the estrangement of the unworld and the ethos of local care. Even though our knowledge of nature (even a nature that is no longer nature) is partial—and will ever be—we still must live in and use the world. “One of our problems,” Berry notes, “is that we humans cannot live without acting; we have to act. Moreover, we have to act on the basis of what we know, and what we know is incomplete.”81

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Berry here gestures toward one of his governing ideas, namely, that every act in the world must be accompanied by a respect for mystery. But who among us reacts well to ambiguity, especially when deployed to limit human behavior? To act responsibly, of course, means having an ethos from which one can make informed decisions. As noted earlier, however, any search for fundamental principles to help provide a foundation for an ethos of care is more than compromised by the “unthinkable” that is here now.82 Two problems therefore arise out of the necessity of finding a workable ethos for the right kind of use. The first is that the new nature, if you will, is an unreliable and fickle teacher. Second, use is always human-­ centered (typically centered around the urban human), and I see no way to get around this basic fact, posthumanism notwithstanding. What if a due respect for the mystery of what’s to come were to guide us in our efforts to reconcile ourselves to the Anthropocene? For Berry, the persons of Gloucester and Edgar in King Lear provide a partial guide not only to the limits mystery imposes but also to mystery’s role as redemptive force. When Gloucester is tricked by his son Edgar during his suicide attempt, he pleads, “Away, and let me die.” Edgar replies, “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.”83 The moral weight of the future pulls Gloucester away from his own “hubris…into the properly subordinated human life of grief and joy, where change and redemption are possible.”84 Berry’s reading of Lear informs his understanding of how to act in nature, providing a model for conceptualizing the “standard of nature” that can never be fully understood; it is never “predictable,” and it is certainly not “mechanical.”85 If indeed the measure of how to be in nature involves the miraculous, the mysterious, the unknown, we are now firmly in the realm of reverence, of faith, which for Berry inevitably rotates on a different axis from scientific understanding or even conventional ecological principles. Something inevitably escapes one kind of knowing: “to reduce life to the scope of our understanding…is inevitably to enslave it, to make a property of it, and put it up for sale.”86 And though his characterization of science is, at times, a caricature of what science is and does— as if scientists didn’t revere mystery, too—his point is taken: life is often unpredictable and cannot be “controlled,”87 and we must therefore learn how to “act in ignorance,”88 by which he means ignorance of what might be best for nature and ignorance of the effects of our use. Can unpredictability and instability—surely related to anthropogenic anarchy and chaos—form an ethical foundation for an ethos of care based upon limits? And how might this impact human behavior in the

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Anthropocene?89 I wonder sometimes whether Berry’s “standard” is too often projected as benign in its mystery, rather than being treated as the existential threat it has arguably become. Under local conditions, the weather today may be fine—just as “nature,” considered from one angle, is fine—but larger forces are in charge (the glomus comes in many flavors). Perhaps, then, local affiliation and affection are best understood as only the most viable alternatives to a story that is spinning out of control, a way of “hunkering down” at the center of the widening gyre, a way of being in the mystery without being overwhelmed by it as we mitigate the threat. Maybe the only response is to find a way to love the land and care for it in situ, in the place where one is, acknowledging of course that not all places are equal and keenly sensitive to the signs that something else is in control. One’s place is ever defined by the agrarian as the mysterious teacher, revealing some of its secrets even as we humans plod forward in ignorance—often making bad decisions, recognizing them as such only under the best of circumstances. If nature is a mystery and a mysterious teacher, then only by circumscribing one’s sphere of care and love can it be possible to learn what it means to make a world in conversation with our ignorance. What if reverence, even for the tumult of the Anthropocene, could deepen our commitment to ethical behavior, even if the object of love and care is, paradoxically, ever more remote, more cruel? If the love object disappoints—if nature is no longer nature, or at least what we thought it was—how does the agrarian ethic confront disappointment? As Berry says, “it is not possible to look at the present condition of our land and people and find support for optimism”; we must therefore ask what Berry and other agrarians are up to.90 It is, as I said, a love “of farming,” of the “nurture and growth of plants,” of the “presence of animals,” of the “outdoors,” of the “weather,” of working “in the company of…children,” living a life of “independence that farm life can still provide.”91 Is this not why Berry calls one of his books Another Turn of the Crank? He and his efforts are, arguably, those of a crackpot, a nut. I therefore speak about an object of love that is loved because it is cruel, more cruel, in that it has been inevitably and irreconcilably altered by both the indifferent and the lover, under constant threat and continually diminished: strip mining, soil depletion, mountaintop removal, the hollowing out and despair of rural America. What kind of love and affection is it, we must ask, when it begins to look like mere intransigence? Is such affection simply a coping strategy, what Scranton might call a preparation for the inevitable? Accordingly, the

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“practical harmony”92 between human culture and capricious nature may be a kind of fantasy, endlessly replaying its imaginary, endlessly inspiring love and despair, hope and disappointment: the anxiety of both knowing and not knowing what comes next, the love object always just out of reach. Reverence for the mystery will become more difficult as nature disappoints or more necessary or both, and we will be tasked to become more than human, or less than. I haven’t figured out which.

Solastalgia and the Act of Witnessing As if in response to the new agrarian attempt to find solace through humility in a home perpetually degraded, the philosopher Glenn Albrecht has coined a term to describe what it feels like to experience alienation, loss, and grief in the present. “Solastalgia,” he writes: is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault (physical desolation). It is manifest in an attack on one’s sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging (identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress (psychological desolation) about its transformation. It is an intense desire for the place where one is a resident to be maintained in a state that continues to give comfort or solace…It is the “lived experience” of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; of being undermined by forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived from the present. In short, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at “home.”93

Built into this concept is a fairly traditional notion of place or home, that which ideally provides security and identity, based on what Ghosh might call a narrative continuity inspired by the stability of the Holocene.94 This is the knowledge, if not the guarantee, that the hundred-year flood is, at best, an improbability. The warrant for solastalgia is the sense that tomorrow will look like today, and today like yesterday. For solastalgia to exist one must at one time have experienced home and place both relatively stable and loved: I claim that the concept has universal relevance in any context where there is the direct experience of transformation or destruction of the physical environment (home) by forces that undermine a personal and community sense of identity and control. Loss of place leads to loss of sense of place experienced as the condition of solastalgia. The most poignant moments of

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s­ olastalgia occur when individuals directly experience the transformation of a loved environment…I contend that the experience of solastalgia is now possible for people who strongly empathize with the idea that the earth is their home and that witnessing events destroying endemic place identity (cultural and biological diversity) at any place on earth are personally distressing to them.95

This description should give us pause, for if the Anthropocene is moving at an ever-increasing speed toward ever more climactic events, then it will never be possible to experience solastalgia again, except, oddly, nostalgically. What I mean here is that the “loved environment”—“the earth [as]…home”—will henceforth be tainted by the knowledge that this place is not what we think it is. Such was Bill McKibben’s lament over thirty years ago that we are experiencing the “end of nature.” This is not to argue that place cannot offer at least a semblance of solace or security; rather, the feeling might be something akin to living with an unfaithful spouse. You may still love him, but you may not ever trust him again. You may remember better times—and indeed enjoy good times in the present—but the present is ever tainted with the knowledge that what is is not what it could be. And what it could be will never be what it was. It’s tempting to deploy solastalgia to describe that agrarian conception of home. It’s obvious that Berry experiences various kinds of pain, distress, angst, turmoil, and anguish at the direction of modern life and its deleterious effects on the land, but this distress is mitigated by at least two relevant responses. One was described earlier—love and care and work. While it is certainly arguable that the very items that Berry cares for—the land, the topsoil, and the community and culture that develop from a healthy relationship between economy and land—are not what they could be, Berry nevertheless persists. The second is through the work of the witness. Witnessing is elegiac and hopeful. I am thinking of what McMurry notes is a stance and a practice of how to understand and be in the Anthropocene, “of collecting, with a certain sangfroid, accurate notes on the end-times…[taking] some comfort in getting the details right.”96 Such efforts are commensurate with belief, either in the redemptive and didactic properties of the natural world or in the human potential to do the right thing by recording for the future, implying as it does that there is a future upon which such details will have purchase. But there are other types of belief as well. The Christian is called to witness by the command of Christ, and it is not without relevance that Berry—whose Christianity is more

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often than not neglected by ecocritics such as myself97—makes no separation between his work as a writer and that as a farmer. He cannot “witness” otherwise. Without understanding that Berry’s life as a farmer/ writer is of a piece and is informed by a reverence for the mystery of creation, we might be tempted to understand his work through the lens of the jeremiad, that Old Testament screed lamenting the sins of the world. Berry’s witnessing, however, is somewhat different, for “getting the details right” also comprises learning humility through experience that does not condone the pessimism or “dignified acquiescence” of what McMurry calls the “decivilizationists.”98 Humility, related through the French and Latin to humble, further related to humus, whose etymology takes us right into the ground, the soil, the castings of worms, the decomposition of the corpus (the human, Adam—of and from the ground)99—humility here corresponds to learning how to die. But this isn’t the final word for Berry, as the fallen world is also ever redeemed, and such redemption cannot be fathomed without the human, who, after all, is commanded to “till” and “watch” the earth (variously translated as “watch,” “keep” “dress,” and “guard”), which is to say, to be a witness.100 When put in the context of biblical witnessing, the anxieties of the solastalgists and the pessimism of the decivilizationists—indeed, the entire apparatus of the “no hope” pessimism industry (which many of us might call the realism industry)—is surely mitigated by the work of the witness, who is not here to offer baseless hope or to merely denounce as much to transcribe—to copy and provide an accurate account: “doing your job” as you “check off the boxes as you spot the signs and portents.”101 Such a stance might help us learn to live with and through the tragedy as we note not only the “signs and portents” but also revere the mystery. The agrarian witness in the Anthropocene knows from experience that humans are fundamentally flawed, puerile, venal, and callow; yet fundamental to this work is the element of faith that we will one day read the signs correctly and follow them. We have yet to learn what the Anthropocene is teaching us, but the work of witnessing— which is also the work of making the world—has contained within it the presumption of a future, albeit one that may ever remain a puzzle. Built into the work of witnessing is the elegant, albeit frustrating, reality that we can’t know everything. What I mean here is that if you are looking for a trace of optimism in a story replete with bad news—and getting worse—you must contend with the enigma known as the future without its omnipresent ideal of hope. That climate change is a crisis, that our descendants will face existential challenges, that species loss will continue

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apace—all of these are inarguable. And yet, we don’t know exactly what life will look like several generations out. I am not arguing that the boat will turn. But I am struggling to pay due respect to the mystery, to the resilience and adaptability of the natural world (terms that are more and more appropriately applied to culture, though I’m not making an invidious distinction here). And the struggle is really whether the mystery of what appears to be an untenable though unknowable future offers a template for affective resilience and adaptability insofar as loss and its emotional doppelgangers anxiety and disappointment form the affective foundation for the Anthropocene. In this reality, will contentment or joy ever register with the same emotional valence as sadness or apprehension?102 From the point of view of how we relate affectively in and to our diminished world, perhaps our only choice is to continue our witnessing even as we attempt to tell different stories, not only about how we feel about the world but also about the material practices that provide meaning: human progress, economic growth, and the entire ur-story of fossil-­ fueled capitalism—arguably those elements that form the foundation of our material and affective lives. “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with,” writes Donna Haraway. “It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts.”103 To be sure, “it matters what worlds world worlds.”104 It matters that we “get the details right,” but even ethnography isn’t enough. Perhaps “learning how to die” is one new story, a way of adjusting our expectations, despite the largely Western cultural peculiarity that death is something that happens to other people—even in the middle of a pandemic. Perhaps we will learn to give in to disappointment, rearrange our affections, learn to love desecration. I do wonder how such a world will register emotionally generations from now, when I and perhaps many of you reading this will no longer be here to witness. How will this great unwinding, the greatest denouement ever, alter the fundamental expectations of our story in years to come? To paraphrase Ghosh, it will involve the emergence of catastrophe as a matter of course; we will need to learn how to integrate the unthinkable into the quotidian, guided by both the necessities of resilience and adaptation as well as by our inevitable sadness. It’s possible that in the agrarian ethic’s respect for the limitations imposed by the unknowable, we may find a template for how to live with a mystery that, until recently, has served as little more than an impediment to the obstinate pursuit of human desire. Yet if I know humanity, we will keep

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faith with the present story as long as possible, mixing ephemeral hope that things will improve with a relentless faith in technological solutions of the future by which that hope is absurdly if theoretically realized.

Notes 1. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World: or, Globalization (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 34. 2. David J.  Madden, “City becoming world: Nancy, Lefebvre, and the global-­urban imagination,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, no. 30 (2012): 776. 3. Rob Sean Wilson, “Worlding America’s Asia Pacific into Oceania: Concepts, Tactics, and Transfigurations Inside the Anthropocene,” 104. Help with this citation 4. Jeffrey Bilbro’s “Sublime Failure: Why We’d Better Start Seeing Our World as Beautiful” takes up the question of whether the local is an effective response to the global by arguing against those who, like Ursula Heise and Timothy Morton, invoke the sublime as method whereby the global sublime is a more effective way of relating to the chaos of the present moment: “I argue that representation of beauty encourages humility and responsible action while aesthetics that derive from the sublime elevate autonomous human reason and leads to a continued reliance on technology to master our material environment” (134). 5. Nancy, The Creation of the World, 34. 6. Nancy, The Creation of the World, 35. 7. Wilson, “Worlding America’s Asia Pacific into Oceania,” 94, 95. 8. Andrew McMurry, Entertaining Futility: Despair and Hope in the Time of Climate Change (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2018), 78. 9. Andrew McMurry, Entertaining Futility, 78–79. 10. Lauren Berlant, “On Her Book Cruel Optimism.” Rorotoko, June 5, 2012. http://rorotoko.com/interview/20120605_berlant_lauren_on_ cruel_optimism/. 11. Berlant, “On Her Book Cruel Optimism.” 12. Bilbro, “Sublime Failure: Why We’d Better Start Seeing Our World as Beautiful,” South Atlantic Review, 80, nos. 1–2 (2015): 136. 13. William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us,” Poetry Foundation. 14. Naomi Klein’s 2014 book, This Changes Everything, argues that free market capitalism and the regnant neoliberal ideology underpinning it will require a revolutionary shift if we are serious about addressing climate

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change. While she does not call for an end to capitalism, Klein recognizes that “our economic system and our planetary system are now at war” (21). 15. Monica Anderson, “For Earth Day, Here’s How Americans View Environmental Issues.” Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-­tank/2017/04/ 20/for-­earth-­day-­heres-­how-­americans-­view-­environmental-­issues/. 16. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans’ Identification as ‘Environmentalists’ Down to 42%.” Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/190916/americans-­identification-­ environmentalists-­down.aspx. 17. Wilson, “Worlding America’s Asia Pacific Into Oceania,” 113. 18. Wilson, “Worlding America’s Asia Pacific Into Oceania,” 103. 19. Wendell Berry, “The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity,” Another Turn of the Crank, (San Francisco: Counterpoint, 1995), 75. 20. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997). 21. Zach Lee, “Eco-cities as an Assemblage of World Practices,” 2, no. 3 (2015): 186. 22. Wilson, “Worlding America’s Asia Pacific Into Oceania,” 116. 23. Aihwa Ong, “Worlding Cities: or, the Art of Being Global,” in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): 3. 24. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s apologia for even some of the detrimental effects of the global economy, especially as it relates to the family farm: “So the time of the successful farming family has gone [in Ghana]; and those who were settled in that way of life are as sad to see it go as some of the American family farmers whose lands are being accumulated by giant agribusinesses. We can sympathize with them. But we cannot force their children to stay in the name of protecting their authentic culture; and we cannot afford to subsidize indefinitely thousands of distinct islands of homogeneity that no longer make economic sense” (104). I would imagine that Appiah’s cavalier approach to the victims of global capitalism is shared by any number of neoliberal apologists who are certain that their own way of life isn’t threatened. See Appiah, Cosmopolitanism. 25. Janet Fiskio, “Unsettling Ecocriticism: Rethinking Agrarianism, Place, and Citizenship,” American Literature, no. 2 (June 2012): 302. 26. Fiskio, “Unsettling Ecocriticism,” 302. 27. Fiskio, “Unsettling Ecocriticism,” 319. 28. Fiskio, “Unsettling Ecocriticism,” 308. 29. Fiskio, “Unsettling Ecocriticism,” 308.

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30. On the importance of beauty as a form of ethics in response to the sublime, see Bilbro, “Sublime Failure.” 31. Fiskio, “Unsettling Ecocriticism,” 319. 32. Fiskio, “Unsettling Ecocriticism,” 309. 33. Wendell Berry, “Nature as Measure,” in Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, introduction by Michael Pollan (San Francisco: Counterpoint, 2009), 3–10. 34. Janet Fiskio, “Unsettling Ecocriticism,” 317–320. 35. In a 2019 interview in The New Yorker, Berry suggests that it takes a lifetime: “A good farmer is one who brings competent knowledge, work wisdom, and a locally adapted agrarian culture to a particular farm that has been lovingly studied and learned over a number of years. We are not talking here about “job training” but rather about the lifelong education of an artist, the wisdom that comes from unceasing attention and practice. A young-­adult non-farmer can learn to farm from reading, apprenticeship to a farmer, advice from neighbors, trial and error—but that is more awkward, is personally risky, and it may be costly to the land.” See Amanda Petrusich, “Going Home with Wendell Berry,” The New Yorker, July 14, 2019. Electronic. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-­ new-­yorker-­interview/going-­home-­with-­wendell-­berry. 36. Wendell Berry, “Nature as Measure,” in Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, introduction by Michael Pollan (San Francisco: Counterpoint, 2009), 3–10. 37. Wendell Berry, It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture & Other Essays (San Francisco: Counterpoint), 2012 38. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 8,9. 39. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 20, 21, 24, 25. 40. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 30. 41. Berry, “Nature,” 7. 42. Berry, “Nature,” 9. 43. Nancy, The Creation of the World, 34. 44. The role of affection in economic practices is the subject of both Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, “It All Turns on Affection,” and the subsequent book that shares its name, It All Turns on Affection. See also, William Major, “Wendell Berry and the Affective Turn.” 45. Alexa Weik Von Mossner, “From Nostalgic Longing to Solastalgic Distress: A Cognitive Approach to Love in the Anthropocene,” in Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, edited by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 56. 46. Nicole M. Merola, “‘what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this / minute atmosphere’:

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Juliana Spahr and Anthropocene Anxiety,” in Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, edited by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 43. 47. Von Mossner, “From Nostalgic Longing to Solastalgic Distress,” 52. 48. Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015), 92. 49. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 84. 50. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 91. 51. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 88. 52. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 87. 53. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 1855 in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 27. 54. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 789–790. 55. Leaves of Grass, 87. 56. “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 410. 57. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 37. 58. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 38. 59. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 53. 60. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 58. 61. Whitman, Specimen Days, 782. 62. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 19. 63. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 22, 23. 64. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 19. 65. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 19. 66. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 20. 67. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 22. 68. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 23, 22. 69. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 20. 70. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 63–66 71. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 64. 72. Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiii. 73. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 58. 74. Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, 99 75. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 98. 76. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 99, 108. 77. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 23.

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78. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 24. 79. Aihwa Ong, “Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global,” 12. 80. Ong, “Worlding Cities,” 3. 81. Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle, (San Francisco: Counterpoint, 2000), 10. 82. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 33. 83. Berry, Life is a Miracle, 5. 84. Berry, Life is a Miracle, 5. 85. Berry, Life is a Miracle, 5–7. 86. Berry, Life is a Miracle, 7. 87. Berry, Life is a Miracle 9. 88. Berry, Life is a Miracle, 11. 89. For a lengthier discussion of the tensions between the “vast, formless, and purposeless” nature of the sublime and the “imaginative perception of form and purpose” which is the subject of beauty, see Bilbro’s argument in favor of the latter’s ability to “grant the individual subject a heightened sense of its place in the global, ecological system while respecting the enormous complexities of these systems” (136, 139). 90. Wendell Berry, “Conservation and the Local Economy.” Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 10. 91. “Conservationist and Agrarian,” in Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, introduction by Michael Pollan (San Francisco: Counterpoint, 2009), 74–75. 92. Berry, “Conservationist and Agrarian,” 14. 93. Glenn Albrecht, “‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity.” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, no. 3 (2005): 45. https://www.academia.edu/21377260/Solastalgia_A_New_Concept_in_Health_and_ Identity. 94. Ghosh argues (in part) that narrative fiction—specifically the novel—is concerned with “regularity,” with excising the exceptional, such as large-­ scale, catastrophic events (17). Thus the novel as form is now incompatible with life in the Anthropocene: “The Anthropocene has already disrupted many assumptions that were founded on the relative climatic stability of the Holocene. From the reversed perspective of our time, the complacency and confidence of the emergent bourgeois order appear as yet another of those uncanny instances in which the planet seems to have been toying with humanity, by allowing it to assume that it was free to shape its own destiny” (21–22). 95. Albrecht, “‘Solastalgia,’” 46. 96. McMurry, Entertaining Futility, 110. 97. Notable exceptions include Shuman and Owens, as well as Bilbro. 98. McMurry, Entertaining Futility, 109.

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99. Robert Alter, Genesis, translation and commentary (New York: Norton, 1996). Alter notes that the “Hebrew etymological pun is ‘adam, “human,” from the soil, ‘adamah (8, footnote 7). 100. Alter, Genesis 8. 101. McMurry, Entertaining Futility, 111. 102. Indeed, after the International Conference on Critical Food Studies at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, on December 12–14, 2019—where I delivered a version of this paper—Australia’s bushfires reached their peak, ultimately consuming at least 46 million acres. The coronavirus pandemic emerged roughly simultaneously and has of this writing resulted in nearly 3.3  million deaths worldwide. 103. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 12. 104. Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble,” Open Transcripts, Lecture, May 9, 2014, http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/anthropocene-­capitalocene-­chthulucene/.

Works Cited Albrecht, Glenn. 2005. ““‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity”.” PAN: Philosopy Activism Nature 3 (2015): 41–55 https://www.academia. edu/21377260/Solastalgia_A_New_Concept_in_Health_and_ Identity. Alter, Robert, translation and commentary. Genesis. New York: Norton, 1996. Anderson, Monica. “For Earth Day, Here’s How Americans View Environmental Issues.” Pew Research Center. (April 20, 2017). https://www.pewresearch. org/fact-­t ank/2017/04/20/for-­e arth-­d ay-­h eres-­h ow-­a mericans-­v iew-­ environmental-­issues/. Accessed May 27, 2020. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006. Berlant, Lauren. 2012. “On Her Book Cruel Optimism.” (June 5, 2012). Accessed May 25, 2020. http://rorotoko.com/interview/20120605_ berlant_lauren_on_cruel_optimism/. Berry, Wendell. “Conservation and the Local Economy.” In Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, by Wendell Berry, 3–18. New York: Pantheon, 1992. ———. “Conservationist and Agrarian.” In Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, by Wendell Berry with an introduction by Michael Pollen, 67–79. San Francisco: Counterpoint, 2009. ———. It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture & Other Essays. San Francisco: Counterpoint, 2012. ———. Life Is a Miracle. San Francisco: Counterpoint, 2000.

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———. “Nature as Measure.” In Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, by Wendell Berry with an introduction by Michael Pollan, 3–10. San Francisco: Counterpoint, 2009. ———. “The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity.” In Another Turn of the Crank, by Wendell Berry, 64–85. San Francisco: Counterpoint, 1995. ———. The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. 1977. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997. Bilbro, Jeffrey L. Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015a. ———. “Sublime Failure: Why We’d Better Start Seeing Our World as Beautiful.” South Atlantic Review 80, nos. 1–2 (2015b): 133–158. Fiskio, Janet. “Unsettling Ecocriticism: Rethinking Agrarianism, Place, and Citizenship.” American Literature 84, no. 2 (2012): 301–325. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Haraway, Donna. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Jones, Jeffrey M. “Americans’ Identification as ‘Environmentalists’ Down to 42%.” Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/190916/americans-­ identification-­environmentalists-­ down.aspx. Accessed May 27 2020. Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Lee, Zach. “Eco-Cities as an Assemblage of Worlding Practices.” International Journal of Built Environment and Sustainability 2, no. 3 (2015): 183–191. Madden, David J. “City becoming world: Nancy, Lefebvre, and the global-urban imagination.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012): 772–787. Major, William. 2018. “Wendell Berry and the Affective Turn.” In Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, and Environment, edited by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino, 117–132. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. McMurry, Andrew. Entertaining Futility: Despair and Hope in the Time of Climate Change. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2018. Merola, Nicole M. “’what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this / minute atmosphere’: Juliana Spahr and Anthropocene Anxiety.” In Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, edited by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino, 257–277. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Creation of the World: or, Globalization. Translated with an Introduciton by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Ong, Aihwa. “Worlding Cities: or, the Art of Being Global.” In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 1–26.

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Petrusich, Amanda. “Going Home With Wendell Berry.” The New Yorker. July 14, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-­new-­yorker-­interview/ going-­home-­with-­wendell-­berry. Accessed Scranton, Roy. 2015. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015. Shuman, Joel and L. Roger Owens, editors. Wendell Berry and Religion: Heaven’s Earthly Life. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009. Weik Von Mossner, Alexa. “From Nostalgic Longing to Solastalgic Distress: A Cognitive Approach to Love in the Anthropocene.” In Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, edited by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino, 51–69. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass 1855. In Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan, 1–145. New  York: Library of America, 1982a. Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days. In Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan, 689–926. New York: Library of America, 1982b. Whitman, Walt. “When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” In Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan, 409–410. New York: Library of America, 1982c. Wilson, Rob Sean. “Worlding America’s Asia Pacific Into Oceania: Concepts, Tactics, and Transfigurations Inside the Anthropocene,” 93–122. Help with citation. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Wordsworth, William. “The World is Too Much With Us.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-­world-­is-­too-­much-­ with-­us. Accessed June 1, 2020.

CHAPTER 16

Listening to Archipelago Rains Kim Tong TEE

between islands and peninsula there are memories of February lights    early morning rains.        and          I dream of Florence O Florence in winter white in the college library       dust and              shadow           slanting         toward the little space where you stand we read very closely the first stanza of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land siyue shi zui canku de jijie, kudi / zisheng dingxiang, hunza jiyi yu yuwang, yi chunyu / jiaodong daizhi de geng.      Afternoon comes and afternoon goes salt wind blowing from the strait.      Memories of the Nanyang the Nusantara from the monsoon soon rains fall down on the East Coast of the peninsula, yes hard rains fall down in Kaohsiung days and nights.        I was listening to Dylan’s Sara

K. T. TEE (*) Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_16

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O Sara          But here Heather has been listening to the fading rattle of the night train don’t go, don’t go out     Heather, you said                it is raining outside the typhoon is coming but hold on tight in this island of the south before going into the world to feel the pain of distant thunder. And I imagine feeling the prairie and touch the earth in you      That was nineteen eighty-nine.      Thirty years later I walk on the shore of the Westbay air looking toward the lighthouse on the distant cape as if listening to distant hunger for milk and honey, for freedom and democracy                     and racial equality fifty years ago, in May, in Kuala Lumpur memories walk down the shore of a bleak Western Australia coast with the eyes of a diasporic Anglophone Malaysian poet.   Memory of a thirteen-year-old Chinese boy in the peninsula’s east coast town bicycling down the streets in darkness,   remembering the translated lines of Pablo Neruda’s poems remembering the sound of the barking dogs that night like catching a falling star But in August I left the archipelago rains for this island called Ilha formosa a year before the Operasi Lalang, the action named after Imperata cylindrical remembering the diasporic Malaysian poet who crossed the peninsula to Boston after nineteen sixty-nine Yes you left the night the Southern rain stopped and I walked you down to the corner of the building and said au revoir when Dylan was still singing Sara O Sara. adieu, you said, a few years later. In May.

CHAPTER 17

Trans-Oceanic Psalm Craig Santos Perez

Ocean, we//had been your griot —Brenda Hillman

Praise your capacity for birth/ your swollen trench/praise every wave contraction/every dilating horizon/praise

Italicized phrases are quoted from or inspired by various scholars and poets, including Epeli Hauʻofa, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Rob Sean Wilson, Peter Neill, Sylvia Earle, Édouard Glissant, and Albert Wendt. The words chanted are the words for ocean in various Pacific languages. The epigraph is from Brenda Hillman’s poem “The Pacific Ocean,” from her book Practical Water (Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 26.

C. S. Perez (*) Department of English and the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_17

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your capacity for renewal/your fluid darkness/praise your tides & shores/your currents & gyres/praise your capacity to rise/ into clouds/your blessing of rain/your pulsing watershed/praise this blue planet/one world ocean/ praise our source/ of every breath/praise your capacity to endure/the power of those who named you aqua nullius/empty ocean/ those who mapped you as blank space to cross/void to be pillaged/ those who divided you into latitudes & longitudes/ who scarred your middle passages/ who claimed dominion & exploited your natural resources/praise your capacity for pain/as our trawling hands/breach/your open body/& take/ from your collapsing depths/praise your capacity to dilute/our sewage & radioactive waste/ our pollutants & plastics/ our toxic heavy metals & greenhouse gases/praise

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your capacity to bury/ our crimes/our slaves & refugees/praise your rituals of drowning/every dilating cry/every last breath/ is a memorial/to all we can’t take with us/praise our scattering of ashes/our burning pyres/praise your capacity to remember/ praise your routes & our migrations/ praise our submarine roots/praise your capacity to cleanse/ your rising temperature & tides/your relentless storms & towering tsunamis/your feverish rain & floods/praise your capacity for mercy/ for mass smothering your children & washing them ashore to save them from our cruelty/ to show us what we are no longer allowed to take /& to starve us/ like your corals are being starved/ like you are being starved of oxygen/praise

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your capacity to forgive/please forgive our territorial hands/please forgive our acidic breath/please forgive our violent radiating arms/please forgive our cabling veins/please forgive our concrete dams & pavements/please forgive our deafening sonar/please forgive our lustful tourisms/please forgive our invasive drilling and mining/please forgive our extractions & all our human acts of trespass/praise your capacity for mercy/please let our fathers catch just one fish/please make it stop raining soon/please let it rain soon/please spare our fragile farms/please spare our islands & atolls/please spare our villages & cities/please let us cross safely to a land without war/praise your capacity for hope/ praise your rainbow warrior & peace boat/praise your hokuleʻa & sea shepherd/praise your marine stewardship councils & sustainable fisheries/praise your radical seafarers & native navigators/ praise your sacred mother earth water walkers/ praise your activist kayaks & canoes/praise your ocean conservancies & surfrider foundations/ praise your marine sanctuaries & protected areas/praise your whale & shark finning bans/ praise your no take zones/praise

17  TRANS-OCEANIC PSALM 

your capacity for echo location/we chant     tasi/kai/tai/moana nui/vasa/         tahi/lik/wai tui/daob/wonsolwara all our words that translate into creation stories & song maps/praise your capacity for communion/ praise our common heritage/ praise our pathway & promise to each other/praise our endless saga/our most powerful metaphor/praise this vision of belonging/this endless horizon of care/praise the once and future oceania flowing through us all/

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Afterword: Reworlding as Hope in the Anthropocene Shiuhhuah Serena Chou

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. —Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope (1989)

In the 2021 summer camp organized by the Taiwan Top Science Student Project, Professor Emeritus Chung-Ho Wang of the Institute of Earth Sciences at Academia Sinica gave a plenary talk entitled “Global Warming Challenges and Adaptations” to over four hundred high-school teachers from across the island. In the short span of fifty minutes, Wang had been invited to “bridge scholarship and middle school pedagogy … and eventually expand students’ global vision and enhance their humanist and social concerns.”1 His rich and informative online PowerPoint talk summarized his years of comprehensive research on climate change and welcomed his audience to the Anthropocene in bold font, showcasing state-of-the-art atmospheric science data and numbers and converting complex scientific abstractions into graphs, narratives, and living examples and concepts. In his conclusion, Wang prescribed concrete actions that individuals and governments alike can take, not to mitigate, reverse, or “avoid” climate change,

S. S. Chou Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4

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as billionaire-turn-philanthropist Bill Gates has envisioned, but instead to “adapt” to the impacts of this human-driven ecological crisis that has come to be called the Anthropocene. Unlike his earlier talks addressed to experts and the public, Wang ended his lecture to teachers of younger and future generations with a hopeful, upbeat, and even sermonic message: “Stay in faith, stay in hope, stay in love, stay alive.”2 As the moderator of economist Ching-Cheng Chang’s plenary talk on climate change and food waste reduction, I had the privilege of participating in Wang’s and Chang’s wryly hopeful (or was it hopefully despairing) conversation. I appreciated their expertise and political commitments as they shared their insider’s view concerning specific actions and measures that experts, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and (inter)governmental organizations have undertaken in the planetary fight against climate change. I also admired how they even managed to transmit a glimmer of hope in the last few minutes of their talks, whether by alluding to St. Paul’s most iconic and repeated teachings from Colossians 1:35 (Wang) or promising, under an overtly capitalist logic, that “crises are opportunities” (Chang). Pushing beyond the tired binaries that often regulate debates in the humanities and social sciences, Wang and Chang instead sought to problem-­solve within disciplinary conventions, so they forged useful, real-­ world tactics and plans, from eating less meat and implementing early-­ warning systems in case of disaster to formulating dryland agricultural crop production models. The strengths, opportunities, and hopefulness Wang and Chang conveyed, however, were deeply disturbing. For one, as Rob Sean Wilson notes in his essay “Snowpiercer as Anthropoetics,” the mixed feelings of disappointment, powerlessness, guilt, and melancholia over the status quo ironically manifest the collective death wish of late capitalist bodies. Entangled by layers of global-local synergies and tensions, the hope of multisited bodies for a total collapse of neoliberal capitalism has paradoxically been tinged with a desire to implement geo-engineering fixtures— however capital-­ intensive and socioecologically unjust these “green” technologies are.3 Wang’s and Chang’s narratives offering hope should prompt further study of resistance tactics and help rebuild politics and poetics: What does it mean when scientists, economists, experts, and the public resort to faith, belief, and affect? How do teachers, dissenters, networked activists, and visionary reformists generate and formulate hope in the face of dire eco-­political conflicts and refugee migrations, work regime

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dismantlement, farm-ocean biodiversity loss, and other deworlding conditions that the authors of this edited volume have uncovered? In the allegorical dystopian film Snowpiercer (2013), South Korean director Bong Joon-ho ends with what Bong himself calls a “very hopeful ending.” For him, the march of the two sole human survivors (who happen to be innocent multicultural children, a male and a female) toward a snowed-in mountainscape overlooked by a polar bear redeems the violence and despair generated by the wreckage of the life-sustaining, Noah’s Arc-like train that is both a metaphor for both the genius of geo-­ engineering and the neoliberal matrix.4 Rather than a site of retreat and escape of stoics, the nonhuman world becomes the site of a reset button, a place of radical hope, where human–nonhuman relations are activated at the core of a world-making ethos and tactic that Rob Sean Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery first called worlding in their pioneering collection they titled The Worlding Project (2007). How can such “nature” and other “greening” practices sanction, mobilize, and reconfigure toward offering “spaces of hope” (David Harvey), otherwise called a pluriverse (Arturo Escobar), a symbiotic Chthulucene (Donna Haraway), or an ecology of “wild temporalities” and (post)colonial capital undoings (Pheng Cheah)?5 Where can one ground and situate these trusting, sympoetic, and radical forms of hope, as Raymond Williams envisioned in his 1989 study of socialist commitments and political struggles, especially when the current geological epoch is named the awful Anthropocene (or what environmental historian Jason W.  Moore calls the Capitalocene) to reflect Homo sapiens’ omnipresent aggressions?6 Why, or how, offer hope in a time of rampant deworlding and life-world dismantling? Departing from the quasi-apocalyptic cautionary tales that figures like Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and Luc Besson had published and screened a decade earlier, Wang and Chang in effect participated in the bourgeoning discourse of relief and rebuilding where titles from Octavia Butler’s dystopic novel Parable of the Sower (2019) to popular and scholarly books such as The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook (2017), Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016), Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (2019), and Mimi Sheller’s Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (2020) would uncover counter, alternative, latent, and emergent practices, tactics, ethics, and politics of surviving in or coexisting with what is the Earth’s bleak Anthropocene-­ laden future. While prefiguring survival strategies and emergency preparedness read as hope seems like driving a nail in the coffin that announces

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the beginning of the endgame, the genre of survival, reinhabitation, resilience, and reworlding brings to the fore the taken-for-granted dynamics of progressive, antiglobalizing practices, politics, and imaginaries. Worlding, as Wilson suggestively puts it in The Worlding Project, is “part of an active and vigilant process of post-colonial creation and resistance to global capital,” a reckoning aimed at “openings of time and consciousness to other values and multiple modes of being, projection, and survival.”7 As a tactic of resistance, such worlding practices would demystify, debunk, disentangle, and revolt against the synergies of global neoliberalism in both militant and nonviolent forms through protests, demonstrations, everyday practices, poetics, and critical interventions from protest demonstrations like Occupy Wall Street to building gardens and rewilding the city. Worlding literary and critical analyses would unearth and historicize uprisings, social movements, and activism and world-building poetics as forms of resistance and community in the face of a deworlding telos. What often got buried and lost within ardent critiques of enemies, fervent political struggles, and other worlding efforts are the “truly prospective politics” (Williams) or affirmative “transformations” (Jefferess) of reworlding—or what we would call worlding’s efforts at relief, rebuild, or “creation” (Wilson).8 To call attention to these reworlding practices and frameworks is to revisit forms and levels of poesis across disciplines and sites that take place before, amidst, and after political uprisings and street demonstrations in order to critically examine the ethos and tactics of reworlding as forms of “prospective politics” and hope. Donna Haraway, for instance, studies indigenous arts and alternative practices and theorizes the possibilities and limits of “kin-making” as “sympoesis” during postcapitalism9; more affect focused, Judith Butler problematizes the ethics and politics of vulnerability in resistant frameworks and as ways of generating personal political agency.10 Scott Slovic crosses disciplinary boundary lines and uncovers empirical experiments to develop a salutary sense of precarity during the Covid-19 pandemic and no less disruptive global environmental catastrophes. In such contexts of implicit reworlding as an environmentally regenerative vision, I am also thinking of Australian landholder Zarna Carter, who returns her land to the Nukunu Wapma Thuras, Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado and wife who planted a forest to which animals returned, or farmers who team up with scientists turn the soil to create permaculture. Hope embedded and enacted in such practices is neither a blind faith nor an ungrounded utopianism or intellectual exercise

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but instead embodies affirmations of possibilities and recognitions of limits of overlooked forms, tactics, and economies of world-making. In Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, Olivia Laing considers whether “gardening [is] an art form” and subsequently whether art is or can enact energies and forms of resistance.11 Arundhati Roy asks “whether the attempt to always be precise, to try to get it factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on.”12 In the face of real-­ world crises and global warming hitting peak emission, we are often powerless, pondering how we can mobilize actions and whether our changes ever amount to anything. But as the authors and essays in Geospatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture begin to suggest and to enact, to reworld is to ponder, theorize, and embody world-making practices reflecting various forms and tactics of renewal and hope. As Laing writes, “Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises.”13 This collection begins to theorize and articulate the long temporality and deepened spatiality it will take to enact our suggestive and capacious subtitle, Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene. This is the hope animating the reworlding dynamism we would offer beyond the death drives and ill-fated submissiveness to the telos of deworlding.

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Notes 1. The translation is mine. See Taiwan Top Science Student Project, “Homepage,” August 1, 2021, http://ps1tw.astro.ncu.edu.tw/ttss/. 2. Chung-Ho Wang. July 29, 2021, PowerPoint talk, “Climate Change Challenges,” delivered at the 2021 Social Science Summer Camp, Taiwan Top Science Student Project. See also Bill Gates’ latest book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (2021). 3. Rob Sean Wilson, “Snowpiercer as Anthropoetics: Killer Capitalism, the Anthropocene, Korean-Global Film,” boundary 2, 46.3 (August, 2019): 211. See also Rob Sean Wilson’s introduction to this collection, Geospatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture. 4. Joon-ho Bong, “Director Bong Joon-ho Breaks Down Snowpiercer’s Ending,” interview by Simon Abrams, Vulture, June 29, 2014. 5. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012); Pheng Cheah, What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Durhan: Duke University Press, 2020); and Donna Haraway, Staying with Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 6. Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (1989), 118; Jason Moore, “The Capitalocene. Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44.3 (2017): 597. 7. Rob Sean Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery, eds., The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2007), 212. 8. Williams, 118. David Jefferess, Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation (Toronto, U of Toronto P, 2008), 3–4. 9. Haraway, 58. 10. See Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” Vulnerability in Resistance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 12–27. 11. Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 126. 12. Arundhati Roy, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), 3. 13. Ibid.

Index1

A Activism, 22, 53, 59, 64, 65, 102, 104, 105, 118, 130–133, 137–149, 209, 238, 275, 312 Affiliative bond, 59 politics of identity, 40 African American, 51, 56–61 African American pop culture, 52 American literature (see Minority, literature) Agrarianism, organic, 275, 278 farm, 276 Albatross, 247–262 Alex, Kim, 72–75, 77, 78, 83 Ali, Tariq, 137–149 Aliens, 104, 208, 220, 227, 230, 240, 247, 248 illegal, 126 Alternative world, 137–149 American literature, 129 Anime, 201–221

Anthropocene, 267–292, 309–313 Holocene, 9, 268, 277, 278, 282, 288, 296n94 Anthropologies of magic, 98 Anthropology, 10, 56, 76, 79, 98, 108, 193 ethnography, 79, 195, 207, 291 Anthropos, 262 Appropriation, 210 culture, 51, 60 Archipelago Islands, 21 Oceans, 21 Architect, 91 Archive, 191, 192, 194, 195 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 190 Asian American studies identity, 62, 117, 118, 125, 128, 129 literature, 118, 128–130, 132, 133 minority, 66, 117

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. S. Chou et al. (eds.), Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4

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316 

INDEX

Asian and Pacific Islanders, Oceania Pacific, 20 Taiwan, viii, ix, 54, 55, 309 Asia-Pacific Central Asia, 23 East Asia, 10, 38, 39, 122, 128, 129, 161, 203, 204 Oceania, 1–31 Atoll, 236, 242n44 Island (see Island) Ocean (see Ocean) Authoritarian regimes, 23, 137 democracy (see Democracy) B Balik, 164 to return, 164 Balikbayan, 157–182 Philippines, 157, 159, 162, 164 Balikbayan box, 85, 157–179 Bandung Films, 138 Berry, Wendell, 268, 271–274, 276–279, 282, 285–287, 289, 290, 294n35, 294n44 agrarianism, 273, 276, 287 Biblical, 91, 188, 290 transfiguration (see Transfiguration) Biogeophysical entity, 263n8 Biospheric connectedness, 204 biosphere, 204 Bloody Mary South Pacific (the musical), 12 Book of Saladin, 137–149 Border border control, 122 crosser, 120–122 Border-crossing, 12, 121 Borderlands, 116–119, 121–129 Brazil, 8, 186 Yamashita, Karen Tei (see Yamashita, Karen Tei)

C Care, 10, 19, 20, 67n10, 96, 194, 197, 268, 269, 271–274, 277–280, 285–287, 289 China (People’s Republic of China, PRC) authoritarian regimes, 23 global capitalism, 2, 8, 15, 293n24 Chinkstronaut, 65, 66 Chou, Shiuhhuah Serena, 3, 23 Chthulucene, 260 Anthropocene, 311 Citizens, 11, 17, 149, 160, 178, 274 exiled, diaspora Jewry, minority, 45 Climate, 3, 8, 9, 242n51, 272, 278, 281 Climate change, 21, 201, 203, 205, 227–240, 256, 268, 271, 272, 278–280, 290, 293n14, 309, 310 extreme weather, 3, 7, 231–233 in the Pacific, 231 Climate fiction (Cli fi), 230 Cold war, division era, 35, 37, 39, 123, 228 US/USSR, 240n7 PRC (see PRC) Colonialism, 13, 16, 121, 124, 134n9, 139, 273 decolonization, 15 Comfort zone, 131 Community, 14, 26n12, 44–46, 53, 61, 64–66, 74–79, 100, 101, 112n18, 121, 124, 128, 144, 169, 174–178, 203, 205, 208, 217, 220, 252, 257, 271, 274–276, 288, 289, 312 Comparative approach, relational, 130 translation (see Transfiguration; Translation) world literature, 130 Connections, v, 14, 36, 37, 44, 52–56, 61, 63, 82, 99, 100, 102,

 INDEX 

119–125, 128, 158, 162, 164, 165, 167, 172, 188, 189, 204, 206, 207, 237, 238, 250, 257, 270, 273, 274, 278 techno-culture (see Globalization) Contact, 5, 97–102, 112n22, 127, 148, 252 borderlands (see Borderlands; Translation) Conversion, 124, 131, 173 Cosmopolitanism eco-cosmopolitanism, 204–207, 214, 216, 220, 221 subaltern cosmopolitanism, 71–83 Cosmopolitan motilities, 251 borders (see Borderlands; Borders) lines of flight (see Borderlands) Covid, 312 global pandemic, 9 Crawford, Danielle, 227–240 Cruel optimism, 270 Crusade, 137–149 Cultural studies, vi, 4, 118 D De Mata, Fritzie A., 157–179 Decolonization, 15 Defector, 115–117, 122–125, 131, 132, 133n1, 133n4 border crossing (see Border-crossing; Refugees) Democracy, 2, 41, 42, 117, 275 Deworlding, 2–16, 21, 23, 110, 111, 227, 229, 233, 235, 239, 311–313 Diaspora, 38, 45, 47n5, 116, 118, 119, 123, 124, 128, 157–179 Division system, 22, 23, 40, 68n16, 107, 115–133, 213, 272 Korea, North and South, 119 Drone, 99, 100, 239

317

Dylan, Bob, 27n22 conversion (see Conversion) transfiguration, 27n22 E Earth, 6, 14, 22, 23, 187, 188, 190, 210, 215–219, 234, 237, 239, 249, 259, 260, 273–275, 289, 290, 311 East Asia Asia, 161 Asia Pacific (see Asia-Pacific) Oceania (see Oceania) Ecocidal, 257 Ecocriticism, 251 Ecology, 201, 202, 205, 220, 229, 236, 248, 249, 311 Ecopoetics, 20, 22 Empire, 10, 13, 15, 40, 44, 90, 116, 117, 132, 160, 165, 189, 209 Entanglement, 128, 134n9, 229, 251, 252, 256 cultural studies (see Cultural studies) Environment disaster, 27n25, 235 environmental consciousness, 203, 240 Environmentalism, 201, 207, 256 social movements (see Social movements) Ethnography, 79, 195, 207, 291 Extreme weather, 3, 7, 231–233 F Farm ocean, 311 Filipino diaspora, 157–179 Filipinos, 157–162, 164–167, 178–181 Film, vi, 7, 22, 23, 36–44, 46, 47n2, 47n8, 48n14, 56, 72, 74, 77–80,

318 

INDEX

134n8, 138, 203, 204, 214, 221, 227–240, 240n1, 240n2, 240n4, 242n46, 258, 276, 311 studies, 56 Flow, 11, 45, 46, 74, 120, 164, 173, 201–221, 228, 229, 250, 280, 285 Fresh Off the Boat, 49–66, 66n2, 67n7, 67n10, 67n12, 67n15 Friction, 46, 201–221 Futurity, 129, 269–271 reworlding (see Reworlding) G Gardening, 277, 313 agrarianism, 275, 276, 278 Geo-fantasy, 35–39 cli-fi, 230 Geontological power, 253 Geopolitical fantasy, 45, 46 Geopolitics, 11, 40, 118, 131, 132, 237 Geopolitics of relation, 124, 125, 128–130 Gift, 16, 90, 124, 125, 158, 159, 161, 162, 175, 177, 178 Global politics, 139, 221 globalization (see Globalization) Global capitalism, 2, 8, 15, 293n24 Global citizenship, 205, 220 Global environmental citizenship, 213–220 Globalization, vi, 4, 5, 9–11, 13–17, 19, 22, 23, 25n5, 26n11, 30n47, 39, 72, 75, 79, 80, 118, 123, 124, 130, 131, 133, 139, 140, 143, 158, 161, 162, 164, 180, 269, 273 Global trade winds, 233 Global warming, 7, 201, 216, 230, 278, 313

Glomicity, 14, 30n47, 268 deworlding (see Deworlding) Godzilla, 187, 242n46 H Happening, 15, 77, 80–83, 123, 194, 217, 247 Hip-hop, 49–66 Hiroshima, 187, 237 nuclear, 187, 237 Historical novel, 138–141, 143, 145–149 History, v, vi, 7, 10, 20, 36–38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47n2, 55, 59–62, 65, 67n9, 72, 73, 75–78, 81–83, 116, 119, 121, 124, 127, 128, 130, 137–149, 158–160, 164–166, 178, 180, 189–192, 194, 201, 216, 219, 229, 232, 235, 236, 238, 240, 242n46, 242n53, 252, 262, 268 Holocene Anthropocene, 9, 268, 277, 278, 296n94 speculative (see Speculative) Hope politics of hope (see Williams, Raymond) wryly hopeful, 310 Huang, Eddie, 49–66 Human metahuman, 90 posthuman, 202, 212 rights discourse, 117 Humanism, 76, 77, 281–285 Hurricanes, 86, 227–240, 280, 283 extreme weather, 231–233 Hurricane terminology, 232 Hyper-object plastic, 257, 258 sublime (see Sublime)

 INDEX 

Hypersea, 248, 249, 261, 263n8 Oceania (see Oceania) Pacific Ocean (see Pacific Ocean) I Identification trouble, 39–46 Identity collective identity, 74 minority (see Minority) Immigration, 52, 124, 129, 130, 158 border crossing (see Border-crossing; Borderlands) Imperialism, 16, 72, 75, 83, 116, 117, 124, 139–141, 143, 145, 203, 207, 228, 273 Inter-Asia, 3, 8, 13, 18, 20, 24 Inter-Korean division, 116, 131, 133 Korea, North and South (see Korea, North and South) Internment, 196 Interobjectivity, 258 Interracial alliance, 56–61 Interruption, 19, 281, 282 Island, ix, 5, 12, 17, 20, 21, 54, 55, 186, 231, 233, 249, 271, 293n24, 309 Israel, 45, 153n74 J Japan, 10, 29n38, 37, 39, 40, 44, 83, 163, 186–193, 196–198, 203, 204, 209–212, 215–217, 228, 235, 237, 239 Japanese American, 190, 191, 193, 196 Joseonjok (Korean Chinese), 117–121, 123–125, 127, 129, 130, 134n8 Journalism, 96–111 Journey, 52, 53, 125, 143, 162, 172, 235, 256 law of the nomad, 175, 177

319

K Kaiju eiga, 228 film, 228 genre, 228–230, 237, 240n4 Godzilla (see Godzilla) Kim, Soyoung, 3, 24n2, 72–75, 77–80 Kinship, 175, 176, 215 Korea, North and South, 119 Koryo Saram, 72–75, 77–79, 83 L Labor, 68n16, 76, 123, 137, 158–161, 163, 164, 169, 173, 174, 176, 180, 275 Labor migration, 158, 178 Lebanon, 98, 111n2 Liao, Pei-chen, 137–149 Literature genre, 140 narrative, 118 nationalism in (see Cultural studies; Nationalism) poetics of (see Poetics; Transfiguration) politics of, v, 130 M Magic, 95–111 Marine, 21, 31n62, 235, 247, 249, 251, 252, 261 oceanic, 21 Masculinity gender, 56, 57 whiteness, 57 Mauss’s A General Theory of Magic, 104, 110 Media, vi, 59, 111n2, 120, 130, 164, 189, 203–208, 212, 213, 220, 221, 257, 281 flows, 203–208

320 

INDEX

Melville, Herman, 185–189, 198 Moby Dick, 186–189, 198 Michener, James, 12 Middle East Iraq, 99, 112n22 Israel (see Israel) Lebanon (see Lebanon) Syria, 100 Migrant, 39, 74, 118, 120–123, 126, 128, 130, 159–161, 164, 166, 176–178, 249, 250, 275, 276 Migration, 37, 52–56, 60, 73, 115–133, 137, 158, 160, 161, 178, 180, 205, 310 Militarism, 209, 210, 239 war, 239 Militarization, 229 Minority, 64, 75–79, 116, 117, 119, 123, 124, 128 literature, 77, 128 politics of identity (see Politics of identity) Model minority, 52, 60, 66, 66n3, 124 Multispecies assemblages, 215 Mystery, 216, 248, 268, 285–288, 290, 291 N Nationalism, 124, 145, 164, 201–224 Nature landscape, 4 pastoral and georgic, 193, 251 Neoliberalism, 17, 18, 312 Neoliberal matrix, 311 global capitalism (see Global capitalism; Globalization) New Age (see New Age) Neruda, Pablo, 255 Noah’s Arc-, 311

North Korea, 79, 118–120, 122–126, 128, 130–133 North Korean-China borderland, 118, 122 North Korean defector, 115–117, 133n1, 134n4 North Korean Refugee Adoption Act of 2011, 117 Nuclear, 7, 10, 11, 187, 210, 216, 219, 227–231, 234–240, 240n7, 242n46, 242n53 O Ocean acidification, 249, 271, 280, 282; climate change, 280 oceanic ecopoetics, 20 Oceania ecopoetics of, 20 Utopic politics (see Utopia) Oceanization, 249 Otaku, 209, 210, 216, 219 Outmigration, 158, 160, 164 P Pacific, 39, 55, 189, 227–240, 249 South Pacific (musical), 12 See also Oceania Pacific Islander, 238 Pacific militarized decolonization, 15 Pacific Ocean, 3, 227–229, 234–236, 239 Pacific Rim, 3, 8, 16–18, 228, 229, 241n7, 274 Oceania (see Asia-Pacific; Oceania) See also Asia-Pacific Parham, John, 201–221 Place place-based, 205, 268, 273–275 place intimacy, 271

 INDEX 

Planet Earth, 219 Plastic, 11, 106, 186, 187, 249–262 discourse, 249 identity, 257 sea, 247–262 symmetry, 259 Pluriverse, 311 Poet, 6, 14, 90, 281 Poetics, 5, 14, 18, 26n9, 81, 90, 146, 254, 260, 276, 310, 312 Poetry, 50, 90 poetics, 5, 14, 18, 26n9, 81, 90, 146, 254, 260, 276, 310, 312 Politics of identity, 40 Portal, 229, 237 Postcolonial, 3, 8, 10, 15, 16, 25n3, 26n11, 28n30, 40, 44, 81, 138–142, 145, 147–149 historical fiction, 139 Posthuman/Posthumanism, 202, 212, 215, 286 R Radical, 21, 150, 242n53, 267, 284, 285, 311 Radical politics, see Williams, Raymond Rains droughts, 278 extreme weather, 231–233 Refugee connections, 119, 124 Refugees, 7, 53, 96, 100, 106, 115–133, 310 Region, 3, 7, 8, 14, 20, 21, 23, 37, 77, 81, 111n2, 142, 229, 232, 239, 256 regionalism (see Asia Pacific; Oceania) Remittance, 157, 161, 181 Representation literature, v, vi, 131 politics of identity (see Decolonization; Politics of identity) Returnees, 118, 123, 125, 126, 128, 130

321

Reworlding, 2, 5, 9–16, 21, 23, 108, 109, 140, 268, 269, 309–313 Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific, see South Pacific S Social movements, 275, 312 Solastalgia, 288–292 South Pacific, 12, 20, 188, 233 Speculative fiction, 230 futures, 187 States of fantasy, 44 Stereotype, 52, 64, 66n3, 79, 123, 191 Story, 9, 15, 47n2, 50, 51, 61, 65, 72–75, 77, 78, 80–83, 99–101, 107, 108, 110, 112n11, 116–118, 121, 125, 129, 132, 139, 140, 142–144, 147, 166, 167, 170, 171, 174–176, 178, 186–188, 190, 192, 214, 215, 230, 250, 273, 278, 280, 282, 283, 287, 290–292 politics of identity (see Politics of identity) Storytelling literature, 73 poetics (see Poetics; Transfiguration) Subaltern national, 124 Sublime, 4, 259, 260, 272, 292n4, 296n89 T Taipei, 2, 53, 55 Academia Sinica (see Taipei; Taiwan) Taiwan, 3, 50, 52–55, 63, 67n9, 161, 297n102 Oceania (see Oceania; PRC) politics of identity (see Politics of identity) PRC (see PRC)

322 

INDEX

Television, vi, 99, 111n2, 201, 203, 204, 206, 212, 213, 228 Toxicity, 227–240, 251, 256 Transborder, 121 Transcorporeality, 248 Transfiguration, 1–31 Translation, 107, 190, 214 Transnational, 11, 12, 38, 42, 54, 117, 119, 128, 203–208, 212–214, 217, 220, 221, 274, 275 Transnationalism, 201, 203, 206 ecological, 201–221 global capitalism, 8 neoliberalism (see Globalization; Neoliberalism) Transpacific, 2, 8, 10, 28n31, 49–66, 116–118, 125, 128, 129, 228, 229, 236 Asia Pacific (see Asia Pacific; Oceania) Oceania (see Asia Pacific; Oceania) Pacific Rim, 228, 236 Trauma, 6, 7, 27n18, 104, 105, 112n10, 127, 192, 228 Tsunami, 305 extreme weather (see Extreme weather) U Universe, Parallel, 91 Gaia hypothesis (see Oceania) Speculative futures (see Speculative futures) Unworlding, 6, 9, 15, 140, 267, 268, 272 See also Deworlding U.S. military bases in the Pacific, 238, 240 decolonization (see Decolonization) militarization (see Militarization)

U.S.-Philippine relations, 159 Utopia, 238 Utopian politics, see Utopia V Violence, 2, 54, 58, 73, 95–111, 112n22, 117, 121, 128, 140, 145, 147, 191, 228, 231, 281, 283 slow, 2, 257 Visible difference, 50, 57, 58, 64 politics of identity (see Minority; Politics of identity) W Wang, Chih-ming, 13 War, 7, 11, 27n18, 38, 43, 44, 66, 72, 73, 90, 96, 97, 99–103, 105, 106, 108–110, 112n10, 117, 118, 129, 130, 139, 142, 144, 191–193, 197, 232, 236–240, 281, 283, 284, 293n14, 313 Weather climate change, 21, 201, 203, 205, 227–240, 256, 268, 271, 272, 278–280, 290, 293n14, 309, 310 extreme weather, 3, 7, 231–233 White Terror era, 50 Williams, Raymond, 132, 309, 311 Wilson, Rob, 3, 27n22, 80, 81, 116, 133, 198, 229, 268, 269, 273, 310–312 Witnessing, 101, 232, 267–292 World environmental citizenship, 204 Worlding/deworlding/reworlding, 2, 5, 7–10, 13, 15–19, 21, 23, 62, 66, 71–83, 95–111, 140,

 INDEX 

179, 229, 247–262, 268, 269, 272, 274–276, 282, 285, 309–313 for the Anthropocene, 267–292 ethos, 11, 13, 15, 311 Heidegger, Martin, 15, 28n30, 82 practices, 8, 17–19, 273, 274, 312 Spivak, Gayatri, 28n30 tactics, 2, 3, 5, 10, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 23, 100, 311, 312 Worlding Asia, 2, 14, 18, 19, 21–23, 24n2, 313 Worlding Project, 4, 10, 13, 14, 19, 29n42, 278, 311, 312

323

World-making, 4–6, 10, 12, 15, 16, 22, 23, 49–66, 96–98, 102, 108, 274, 277, 285, 311, 313 See also Worlding World order, 9, 132, 140, 273 globalization, 273 Writing violence, 106–110 Y Yamashita, Karen Tei, 186, 189, 192, 193, 195, 196 Z Zone, v, 161, 253, 256, 284 See also Region