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(un)translatability in distance

Led by Sixing Xu

Xinyi Li

(un)translatability in distance

Readings

Jiayang Fan, “Han Kang and the Complexity of Translation,” New Yorker, Jan 8, 2018.

In 2016, the English translation of Korean writer Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize, which for the first time was awarded to a Koreanlanguage novel. The book, translated by British translator Deborah Smith, was later accused by Korean Americans of containing errors and even “embellishments” that don’t exist in the Korean text.

How to negotiate one’s distance to an unknown/unattainable origin? Is “the origin” still a useful concept to situate subjects in translation?

Rey Chow, “Translator, Traitor; Translator, Mouner (Or, Dreaming of Intercultural Equivalence).” In Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languging as a Postcolonial Experience, 61–77. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Rey Chow, educated in Hong Kong and US, professor researching film, postcoloniality, and ethnicity;

Highlight sections: “The Ineluctability Of Betrayal ” and “The Challenge Of Intercultural Equivalence” ;

How to practice “coevalness” in cultural, organizational, and curatorial work, etc?

Shu-Mei Shih, “Cosmopolitanism among Empires.” In Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. 165–182. University of California Press, 2007.

Shu-mei Shih is a literary theorist, born in South Korea to Republic of China immigrant parents, educated in Korea, Taiwan, and US. This book inaugurated a new field of study called Sinophone Studies.

Shih’s chapter discusses many issues in transnational cultural practice (literature, art) — hyperlocal and universalistic/cosmopolitan themes; decontextualized, commodified cultural practice; and the untranslatability among contexts and transnational borders.

Highlight sections: “Untranslatable Ethics” and “Can Cosmopolitanism Be Ethical?”

Vivian L. Huang, “Distance, Negativity, and Slutty Sociality in Tseng Kwong Chi’s Performance Photographs.” In Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, 135–154. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.

Professor of race and performance studies. They explore the strategic redeployments of inscrutability in contemporary Asian American performance across media, and how feeling distant as insistently relational could be used for the social potential of affective relating.

Highlight sections: “Distant Feeling, Distant Relations,” “Present Distant Witness,” “In the Distance”

Part I From literary translation to expansive

translation

etymology

early 14c., translaten, “remove from one place to another,” also “render into another language, turn from one language to another”

Movement of texts, Movement of bodies

“When the movement of texts (translation) is linked with the movement of bodies (migration), issues of language and culture necessarily collide with questions about politics, history, race and imperialism—the very contexts of migration and diaspora.”

Kitchen Table is an homage to the Kitchen Table Press founded by Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde in 1980 devoted to publishing feminist works by women of color; But also invokes the domestic space and the space of intimacy

Translation at the kitchen table

Foregrounding translation as motion/movement that simultaneously takes place across languages, cultures, bodies, places, politics, and ideologies, etc.

a marker that defines, in different degrees, the “diasporic life,” as the diasporic subject negotiates their relationship to here and there, origin and destination, they often find themselves simultaneously translating and being translated, or being mistranslated

Dictionary Of Word Origins by Joseph

T. Shipley

“[T]ranslation can be an intimate act, and many of us use our translation skills in non-professional as well as professional capacities. Some of us, when we translate, call on our family (rather than colleagues) to help us with challenging passages or words. Some second generation, diasporic and indigenous writers who speak (or partly speak) an ancestral language at home might find the discourse of mastery fraught, especially when access to a language has been lost through historical violence and dislocation. And some of us experience translation all the time in our bodies, names, homes, movements and daily lives even if we are not translating from one text to another.”

Madhu Kaza, “Editor’s Note: Kitchen Table Translation”

Madhu Kaza, “Editor’s Note: Kitchen Table Translation”

translation in controversy

Jiayang Fan, “Han Kang and the Complexity of Translation,” New Yorker, Jan 8, 2018.

… also, as in a controversial site of contention - the asymptotic movement toward the origin; the figure of the fidel traitor: “traduttore, traditore” (translator, traitor); the alleged legibility (the translation) and inevitable obscurity (the original); the subject who puts in effort to make things comprehensible (the translator) and the object who remains inscrutable and incomprehensible (the translated, or untranslated, untranslatable)

Han Kang and the Complexity of Translation

The English-language versions of Han’s work have won wide acclaim. Are they faithful to the original?

By Jiayang Fan

January 8, 2018

How literal must a literary translation be? Nabokov, who was fluent in three languages and wrote in two of them, believed that “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.” Borges, on the other hand, maintained that a translator should seek not to copy a text but to transform and enrich it. “Translation is a more advanced stage of civilization,” Borges insisted—or, depending on the translation you come across, “a more advanced stage of writing.” (He wrote the line in French, one of several languages he knew.)

In 2016, “The Vegetarian” became the first Korean-language novel to win the Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded to both its author, Han Kang, and its translator, Deborah Smith. In the Englishspeaking world, Smith, at the time a twenty-eight-year-old Ph.D. student who had begun learning Korean just six years earlier, was praised widely for her work. In the Korean media, however, the sense of national pride that attended Han’s win—not to mention the twentyfold spike in printed copies of the book, which was a fairly modest success upon its initial publication, in 2007—was soon overshadowed by charges of mistranslation. Though Han had read and approved the translation, Huffington Post Korea asserted that it was completely “off the mark.” Smith defended herself at the Seoul International Book Fair, saying, “I

would only permit myself an infidelity for the sake of a greater fidelity.”

The controversy reached many American readers in September of last year, when the Los Angeles Times published a piece by Charse Yun, a Korean-American who has taught courses in translation in Seoul. (The article extended an argument that Yun had first made, in July, in the online magazine Korea Exposé.) “Smith amplifies Han’s spare, quiet style and embellishes it with adverbs, superlatives and other emphatic word choices that are nowhere in the original,” Yun writes. “This doesn’t just happen once or twice, but on virtually every other page.” It’s as though Raymond Carver had been made to sound like Charles Dickens, he adds. This isn’t, in Yun’s view, a matter merely of accuracy but also of cultural legibility. Korea has a rich and varied literary tradition—and a recent history that is intimately entangled with that of the West, particularly the U.S. But few works of Korean literature have had any success in the English-speaking world, and the country, despite its frequent presence in American headlines, does not register in the popular imagination the way

that its larger neighbors China and Japan do. Han Kang seemed to fill that void—or begin to, at least. But if her success depended on mistranslation, how much had really got through?

“T“The Vegetarian” (Hogarth) is fable-like in structure. It centers on the vivid self-destruction of a single human body. That body belongs to a housewife named Yeong-hye, who is described by her husband, Mr. Cheong, as “completely unremarkable in every way.” For Mr. Cheong, who has “always inclined to the middle course in life,” this is part of her appeal. “The passive personality of this woman in whom I could detect neither freshness nor charm, or anything especially refined, suited me down to the ground,” he says. But there is one thing Mr. Cheong does find remarkable about her: she hates wearing bras—she says they squeeze her breasts. She refuses to wear them, even in public, even in front of her husband’s friends, even though, he says, she doesn’t have the sort of “shapely breasts which might suit the ‘no-bra look.’ ” He considers this shameful.

he Vegetarian” (Hogarth) is fable-like in structure. It centers on the vivid self-destruction of a single human body. That body belongs to a housewife named Yeong-hye, who is described by her husband, Mr. Cheong, as “completely unremarkable in every way.” For Mr. Cheong, who has “always inclined to the middle course in life,” this is part of her appeal. “The passive personality of this woman in whom I could detect neither freshness nor charm, or anything especially refined, suited me down to the ground,” he says. But there is one thing Mr. Cheong does find remarkable about her: she hates wearing bras—she says they squeeze her breasts. She refuses to wear them, even in public, even in front of her husband’s friends, even though, he says, she doesn’t have the sort of “shapely breasts which might suit the ‘no-bra look.’ ” He considers this shameful.

One morning, Mr. Cheong finds his wife discarding the meat in their refrigerator. She has become a vegetarian, she tells him, because she “had a dream.” Before, he could think of his wife “as a stranger . . . someone who puts food on the table and keeps the house in good order.” Now he feels embarrassed and betrayed. Eventually, he is aroused by her insolence, and he begins to force himself on her. Overpowered, Yeong- hye goes limp. Her muted non-reaction evokes, for him, images from Korea’s past as an occupied nation: it is “as though she were a ‘comfort woman’ dragged in against her will, and I was the Japanese soldier demanding her services.”

Yeong-hye’s decision not to eat meat is received as an appalling rebuke by her entire family, especially her father, a Vietnam War veteran whose violent tendencies suggest the traumas of the battlefield. (More than three hundred thousand Koreans served alongside American soldiers in that conflict.) During a family meal, orchestrated as an intervention of sorts, he attempts to shove a piece of sweet-and-sour pork down his daughter’s throat. In response, Yeong-hye slits her wrist as the entire family watches in horror. Finally, she is institutionalized.

Near the end of the book, Yeong-hye’s more conventional-seeming sister, In-hye, visits her in the hospital. Three years have passed since the family

Korean critics have lamented the supposed overreach of Han’s English translator. Photograph by Park Sung Jin for The New Yorker

in horror. Finally, she is institutionalized.

Near the end of the book, Yeong-hye’s more conventional-seeming sister, In-hye, visits her in the hospital. Three years have passed since the family dinner, and In-hye has begun to realize that her role as the “hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.” At the hospital, Yeong-hye has withered to sixty-six pounds. Refusing to speak or to accept food in any form, she has spent much of her time attempting to imitate a tree: doing handstands and basking in the sun. Han Kang has said that the character of Yeong-hye was inspired by a line from Yi Sang, a modernist poet of the early twentieth century who was heavily censored under Japanese rule, and whose work evokes the violence and agitation of imperialism. Yi described catatonic withdrawal as a symptom of oppression. “I believe that humans should be plants,” he wrote.

If Yi was consumed with the collective trauma of colonialism, Han focusses on suffering of a more intimate and personal nature. But her writing, too, is rooted in Korea’s history. This, according to Charse Yun, is what risks getting lost in translation. One of the reasons that “many Western readers find so much contemporary Korean fiction to be unpalatable,” he writes, is the passivity of its narrators. Smith, however, emphasizes “conflict and tension,” making Han’s work more engaging for Western readers than a faithful rendition would be. When Yeong-hye ignores a question from her husband, for instance, he says that it is “as if she hadn’t heard me,” in Yun’s literal translation of the passage. In Smith’s version, her husband asserts that she is “perfectly oblivious to my repeated interrogation.”

Yet what makes Yeong-hye an affecting character isn’t a matter of any

heightened aggression or more overt struggle. “The Vegetarian” reads as a parable about quiet resistance and its consequences; it’s also a ruminative probing of Korean culture, in which questions of agency and conformity have particular resonance. These are the questions at the heart of Han’s work.

Han Kang was born in 1970 in Kwangju, a provincial city near the tip of the Korean Peninsula with a population, at the time, of around six hundred thousand. Her father, Han Seung-won, is a noted novelist and the recipient of numerous literary awards. (In the past decade, Han has won many of the same prizes.) Both of Han’s brothers are writers, too. Her father was a teacher as well as a writer, and the family moved frequently for his work. As a child, Han attended five different elementary schools, and she sought constancy in books.

The family left Kwangju, for Seoul, in 1980, when Han was ten, shortly after Chun Doo-hwan, a general nicknamed the Butcher, seized power in a coup and declared martial law. Peaceful student demonstrations in Kwangju were met with violence: soldiers shot, bayonetted, and beat protesters and bystanders. A civilian militia, made up of students and workers, took weapons from local police stations and forced the Army into a temporary retreat in the city’s suburbs. The event, which has been

compared to China’s Tiananmen Square massacre, lasted nine days; at least two hundred, if not two thousand, people died (the government estimate is about tenfold fewer than unofficial tallies). Though Han’s family did not suffer personal losses in the massacre, the name of her birth city became, for her, a metonym for “all that has been mutilated beyond repair.”

after Chun Doo-hwan, a general nicknamed the Butcher, seized power in a coup and declared martial law. Peaceful student demonstrations in Kwangju were met with violence: soldiers shot, bayonetted, and beat protesters and bystanders. A civilian militia, made up of students and workers, took weapons from local police stations and forced the Army into a temporary retreat in the city’s suburbs. The event, which has been compared to China’s Tiananmen Square massacre, lasted nine days; at least two hundred, if not two thousand, people died (the government estimate is about tenfold fewer than unofficial tallies). Though Han’s family did not suffer personal losses in the massacre, the name of her birth city became, for her, a metonym for “all that has been mutilated beyond repair.”

“Human Acts,” Han’s most recent novel, also translated by Smith, tells the story of the massacre. It begins with a fifteen-year-old boy, Dong-ho, waiting for a rainstorm and for the return of the military, which has filled his city with dead bodies and separated him from his best friend. Dong-ho goes out to look for his friend but is recruited by demonstrators to catalogue corpses housed in a local government building. (The morgue is full.) There the boy encounters death’s methodical attack upon the flesh— the way open wounds are the first to rot and how toes “swelled up like thick tubers of ginger” into the most grisly shade of black.

Dong-ho asks why the mourners sing the anthem—“As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them”—the others react with surprise. “But the generals are rebels, they seized power unlawfully,” one responds. “The ordinary soldiers were following the orders of their superiors. How can you call them a nation?” Dong-ho realizes that the question he really wants to ask is much larger, and more abstract, or perhaps it is a bundle of questions, about the persistence of cruelty and the meaning of freedom. His epiphany echoes In-hye’s realization, in “The Vegetarian,” that her survival has not been a triumph but its opposite, because it has come at the cost of her dignity.

Strains of South Korea’s national anthem periodically filter into the building; it is sung during the funeral rites being held outside. When Dong-ho asks why the mourners sing the anthem—“As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them”—the others react with surprise. “But the generals are rebels, they seized power unlawfully,” one responds. “The ordinary soldiers were following the orders of their superiors. How can you call them a nation?” Dong-ho realizes that the question he really wants to ask is much larger, and more abstract, or perhaps it is a bundle of questions, about the persistence of cruelty and the meaning of freedom. His epiphany echoes In-hye’s realization, in “The Vegetarian,” that her survival has not been a triumph but its opposite, because it has come at the cost of her dignity.

In the fourth chapter, after the military has retaken Kwangju, Dong-ho, hands raised in surrender, is shot and killed by soldiers. Each of the novel’s chapters focusses on a person affected by his short life: the highschool student who grows up to be an editor tasked with censoring the facts of the massacre; the undergraduate turned political prisoner who ultimately commits suicide; the factory girl who becomes a labor activist; Dong-ho’s mother, who remains haunted, every day, by her son’s death. The book experiments extensively with second-person narration, and Han plays with that “you” throughout it, inscribing the reader and implicating us in the wreckage.

The book’s most striking chapter is “The Boy’s Friend, 1980,” which centers on Jeong-dae, a classmate of Dong-ho’s who was fatally shot when the two boys went out to watch the crowds. Dong-ho crouched in the shadow of a building, watching his friend’s feet twitch as rescue attempts led to the murder of others, and, finally, as soldiers dragged off the dead. The story of Jeong-dae is narrated by his soul, tethered to his corpse as it drains of blood at the base of a growing mountain of bodies, like a wilted balloon caught in the branches of a tree. As Dong-ho teaches us the language of dead bodies, Jeong-dae elucidates the struggles of a soul as it comprehends its body’s death. Souls that touch one another but can’t quite connect are described as “sad flames licking up against a smooth wall of glass only to wordlessly slide away, outdone by whatever barrier was there.”

Unlike Dong-ho, who tries to resist his memories, burying them in shame, Jeong-dae seeks refuge in his past as a way of avoiding the sight of his

also relief in the diagnosis of the injury.

Unlike Dong-ho, who tries to resist his memories, burying them in shame, Jeong-dae seeks refuge in his past as a way of avoiding the sight of his mangled corpse. In Han’s books, those who distance themselves from their histories are fated to live lives worth barely more than death. The characters who embrace their own horrors at least have the hope of freedom. Unspooling the story of such memories is painful, but there is also relief in the diagnosis of the injury.

In an essay about translating “Human Acts,” published in the online magazine Asymptote, Deborah Smith describes reading Han’s work and being “arrested by razor-sharp images which arise from the text without being directly described there.” She quotes a couple of her “very occasional interpolations,” including the striking phrase “sad flames licking up against a smooth wall of glass.” Charse Yun, in his essay about “The Vegetarian,” declares his admiration for Smith’s work but argues that it is a “new creation.” Smith insists that the phrases she added are images “so powerfully evoked by the Korean that I sometimes find myself searching the original text in vain, convinced that they were in there somewhere, as vividly explicit as they are in my head.”

This isn’t what’s normally meant by translation. One might compare it to the collaborative work of a writer and an editor; Han has said that the process, for her and Smith, involves considerable back-and-forth, “like having a chat endlessly.” The latitude of Robert Lowell’s poetic “imitations” comes to mind. (Yun cites Ezra Pound’s “Cathay.”) And yet what Smith describes is the effect that any writer might hope to coax from her reader: a feeling so visceral that it’s as if she had absorbed the text into her own experience. It also seems deeply in tune with Han’s purpose as a writer. In 2015, Han wrote about a translation workshop that she attended in England, during which Smith and others labored to turn one of her stories from Korean into English. In an essay about the experience, Han describes a dream she had while she was there. “Someone was lying in a white bed, and I was quietly watching them,” she writes. (The essay was also translated by Smith.) Though the sleeping figure’s face was covered by a white sheet, she could hear what the person was saying. “I have to get up now . . . no, that’s too flat.” Then “I really will have to get up now . . . no, that’s too bland.” And: “I have to leave this bed . . . no, that’s awkward.” A good translation, Han’s subconscious seems to suggest, is a living, breathing thing, which must be understood on its own terms, discovered from beneath the great white sheet. Han recalls, “In the session that morning, everyone enjoyed hearing about my dream. (I have come to realise that it is possible for someone’s nightmare to make many people happy.)”

“Human Acts” ends with a chapter titled “The Writer, 2013,” which is about Han. (The book was published in South Korea the following year.) In it, we learn that Dong-ho is a real person, whose life overlapped with Han’s in indelible ways. In an interview in 2016, Han said that writing about Jeong-dae and Dong-ho was so excruciating that

uman Acts” ends with a chapter titled “The Writer, 2013,” which is about Han. (The book was published in South Korea the following year.) In it, we learn that Dong-ho is a real person, whose life overlapped with Han’s in indelible ways. In an interview in 2016, Han said that writing about Jeong-dae and Dong-ho was so excruciating that

said that writing about Jeong-dae and Dong-ho was so excruciating that she often produced as few as three or four lines in a day. To write about the Kwangju massacre, she explains in the book, she had planned to pore over historical documents, but she found herself unable to continue, “because of the dreams.” In one, she was met with news of a mass execution that she had no power to stop. In another, she was given a time machine, and promptly tried to transport herself to May 18, 1980. Perhaps it is the hope of any writer to have a subconscious so tightly tethered to her work, but Han’s dreams—where characters surface, as if “through the heart of a guttering flame,” as she puts it in the interview, which was also translated by Smith—are sweat-soaked affairs, self-directed interrogations in which she is victim and villain at once. The horrors may differ for Han and Yeong-hye, but they are hewed from the same dark place, where memories of brutality persist, and take on phantasmagoric lives of their own.

In October, Han wrote an Op-Ed for the Times about watching, from Seoul, as North Korea and the United States engaged in a potentially devastating diplomatic disaster. “Now and then, foreigners report that South Koreans have a mysterious attitude toward North Korea,” she writes. “Even as the rest of the world watches the North in fear, South Koreans appear unusually calm.” But that is merely the surface, Han insists: “The tension and terror that have accumulated for decades have burrowed deep inside us and show themselves in brief flashes.” For Han, the project of writing is, like translation, a kind of unearthing: she must exhume these buried feelings, and return a sense of agency both to her fictional characters and to those whose lives inspire them.

In “The White Book,” a new work translated by Smith and published in the U.K. in November, Han reflects on her mother’s pain at losing an infant daughter and meditates on the act of mourning. The color white serves as a symbol of death, grief, birth, and artistic creation; Han leaves several pages in the book blank. (One thinks of her nightmare about translation, in which a white sheet cloaks phrases she is trying to get right.) She wanted her writing to “transform, into something like white ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound,” she explains. Most of all, she needed to write about the pain of her sister’s death, because “hiding would be impossible.”

In March, the President of South Korea, Park Geun-hye—whose father, the military strongman Park Chung-hee, was President during the Vietnam War, and was assassinated months before the 1980 coup—was

Published in the print edition of the January 15, 2018, issue, with ousted for influence-peddling. The scandal convulsed the country. In Han’s Times Op-Ed, she recalls a series of demonstrations that she took part in last winter, before the younger Park left office. It was one of the largest citizens’ rallies in Korean history. Protesters blew out candles to symbolize descending darkness. “We only wanted to change society through the quiet and peaceful tool of candlelight,” Han writes. It is a gesture that could have been borrowed from Han’s imagination, or from her dreams. A flame is an ephemeral and fragile thing that can serve at once to memorialize the dead and light the way for the living. ♦

Translation in controversy

Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World at the Guggenheim

The controversies/violation of animal rights - culture/context mistranslated?

Also, the lack of translation in text-based works in the show:

“With great emphasis on language, it is important to note that many works that incorporate text as medium are not translated—or perhaps they cannot be translated. Far from standalone pieces, these artworks acquire meaning through circulation, contextualization, and audience-making.”

Banyi Huang’s review on Brooklyn Rail, https://brooklynrail. org/2017/11/artseen/Art-and-China-after-1989-Theater-of-theWorld/

total illegibility and nonsense, a refusal to be understood, a missing or completely absent origin

Garbed English and made-up Chinese characters, performance in Beijing in 1994 - Xu Bing moved to the US in 1990.

Xu Bing: “These two creatures, devoid of human consciousness, yet carrying on their bodies the marks of human civilization, engage in the most primal form of ‘social intercourse.”

One body of text’s (English letters) violent penetration (literally) of another (Chinese) - violence disguised as “social intercourse” “communication”.

Text as body, the moving/migrating body (the pigs were literally moved to the gallery space to do this performance)

a disguised illegibility, a secret yearning to be understood; the task of the migrant translator: at once translating (subject) and being translated (object)

Xu Bing, Book from the sky, 1987–1991

Xu Bing, Square Word

Xu Bing, A Case Study of Transference, 1994.

What are some of the translating/being translated at the kitchen table/office desk scenarios you’ve experienced?

What was being translated? Who were you translating to? To whom were you being translated?

as the subject to be translated, and the translator performing translation

If translation is a contentious site that marks diasporic life, where do you find yourself in this vague space? What do you identify as your origin(s)?

Is origin still a useful concept?

Status of language influence disclosure of linguistic identity; design is making information experientially knowable

Part II

Translated intercultural equivalence (Chow) and untranslatable ethics (Shih)

translated intercultural equivalence and coevalness

translation as (ap)proximate

Not Like a Native Speaker

on languaging

as a postcolonial experience

Ba Jin: writer, translator and anarchist, studied abroad in France in 1928. Influenced by the New Cultural Movement 1915 and May Fourth Movement 1919.

Family, serialized in 1932 to 1933 and published as a single volume in 1933; Semi-autobiographical novel that focuses on the intergenerational conflict of an upper class family. The family elders upheld fengjian & patriarchal beliefs, and the kids of the family represented the progressive voices and values coming from both movements; Mourning of the family patriachthe wailing women are depicted as delirious, premodern, uncivilized, inferior.

Rey Chow, born and raised in Hong Kong, educated in both Hong Kong & US; Book was published in 2014

Ba Jin, Family (1931–32)

Master Gao, the patriarch in Ba Jin’s classic Jia ( Family , 1931 ), has just died. 1 In keeping with age-old mourning rituals, the Gao family hosts an elaborate funeral, with a group of female mourners present at the funeral parlor, collectively performing the customary mournful wailing whenever guests arrive to pay respects to the dead. In a novel of substantial length, such a narrative detail seems rather insigni fi cant, 2 but what makes it remarkable is the manner in which it is observed and described:

Th e women behind the curtains were having a hard time. Since guests kept arriving, the number of times they had to wail kept increasing too. At this point, wailing had turned into an art; it had, moreover, the function of socializing with guests. For instance, if, while the women were chatting or eating, the musicians started playing [to signal the arrival of guests], they would have to burst into a loud cry instantaneously—and the more sorrowfully, the better, of course. But most of the time they were simply shrieking as there were no tears. Th ere had also been farces, as when signals of guests arriving and departing were confused. Mishearing “guests departing” for “guest arriving,” the women would wail for a long time only to discover that it was unnecessary; or else, not knowing that guests had come, they remained utterly quiet until the master of ceremony prompted them, whereupon they would all of a sudden explode into a wailing noise. 3

Inserted in the midst of a family saga that was based on autobiographical elements and that has been viewed, in the decades since it was fi rst published, as an allegory of China’s di ffi cult transition into modernity (replete with melodramatic tensions and con fl icts among di ff erent generations of the Gao family), this tonally derisive portrayal of mourning is, to say the least, evocative. At the level of the plot, the incident signals the much longed-for passing of an older era: with the death of the beloved but intransigent patriarch, who has so dominated the entire clan, including the life choices of its youngest members, there can now, perhaps, be hope for a di ff erent kind of future. Th is gradual dri ft from a close-knit community mired in a privileged, semifeudal past (the old China) toward what may be deemed an enlightened collective way of life—one that may not be immediately accessible but

3

TRANSLATOR, TRAITOR; TRANSLATOR, MOURNER (OR, DREAMING

OF INTERCULTURAL EQUIVALENCE)

[A] process of systematic fr agmentation . . . can . . . be seen in the disciplinary carve-up of the indigenous world: bones, mummies and skulls to the museums, artwork to private collectors, languages to linguistics, “customs” to anthropologists, beliefs and behaviours to psychologists. To disco v er how fr agmented this process was one needs only to stand in a museum, a library, a bookshop, and ask where indigenous peoples are located. Fragmentation is not a phenomenon of postmodernism as many might claim. For indigenous peoples fr agmentation has been the consequence of imperialism.

— Linda Tuhiwai Smith , “ Imperialism , History , Writing , and Theory ”

Since 1900 non-Western objects have generally been classi fi ed as either primitive art or ethnographic specimens.

— James Clifford , The Predicament of Culture

TRANSACTING UNTIMELY NATIVE REMAINS

Of the numerous memorable scenes in early-twentieth-century Chinese literature, one holds a special tenacity for me, with a resonance that does not seem to diminish with the passage of time. Is it a coincidence that it happens to be a scene of mourning?

reform. 4 In light of this type of value making, the women’s demonstrative wailing comes across as an embarrassment because it seems so anachronistic. As the women mourn the dead in accordance with tradition and custom, tradition and custom have, from the narrator’s modernized perspective, deteriorated into sheer noise.

THE INELUCTABILITY OF BETRAYAL

Unlike the novelistic paradigm made familiar by a classic such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre , in which postcolonial alterity is personi fi ed by the so-called mad woman in the attic—in other words, in which postcolonial alterity is conveniently con fi gured as a state of imprisonment that is simultaneously a state of exclusion from the main halls of power in imperial England 5 —in the case of Jia this division between cultures is replaced by a division within the same culture, indeed the same family. Serving as a stand-in for the consciousness of the most rebellious characters of the Gao family, Ba Jin’s third-person narrative voice, which stages the mourning women as an audiovisual spectacle of nonsense, is caught up in an implicit act of re fl exivity. In such re fl exivity, it is one’s own culture, so to speak, rather than a faraway, little-known other culture (as in the case of Jane Eyre ), that becomes the occasion for scorn and estrangement; it is one’s own culture that takes on the ghostlike otherness of the mad woman. O ft en accompanied by the modernist aesthetics of defamiliarization (the extreme version of which presents one’s own culture as inhuman and cannibalistic), such cultural re fl exivity is symptomatic of an earlier moment of the global process of modernization. Th e sizeable collection of marginalized social fi gures—what in today’s critical vocabulary are called “subalterns”—in early-twentiethcentury Chinese fi ction alone provides numerous imaginary witness accounts to this global process. One thinks, for instance, of the lower-class servant or country characters depicted by Lu Xun’s haunted educated narrators; the abject male students stranded abroad or in unfamiliar Chinese towns in Yu Dafu; the impoverished, physically ill, and emotionally disoriented women in Xiao Hong; and the peasants, manual laborers, prostitutes, domestics, wet nurses,

Cultural reflexivity: One’s own culture becomes the subject of ridicule and estrangement, the undesirable, depressive other

is at least constitutive of an imagining of the decades ahead—indeed characterizes Ba Jin’s entire narrative action. In this vein, the gesture of taking leave of the family (whether ideologically or physically), as personi fi ed by two of Master Gao’s grandsons, Juemin and Juehui, brings the narrative to a meaningful close. In retrospect, we may say that Ba Jin’s fi ctional plot stands in e ff ect as a political wish, a will toward a realm of potentiality that was, at the time of the novel’s writing, equated with modernization and its progressive rationality (or requisite disenchantment). Against this idealistically plotted action, the detail of the wailing women, like the depiction of other family rituals, practices, and superstitions throughout the novel, amounts to something of an exotic ethnographic fi nd, whereupon an indigenous custom receives the spotlight not for the signi fi cance it carries in its conventional context, but rather for a displaced kind of e ff ect—as an absurd drama seen with fresh—that is, foreignized— eyes. As the passage from Linda Tuhiwai Smith given at the beginning of this chapter indicates, this fragmenting or partitioning of the indigenous culture in the form of a residual object, on display for a haughty anthropological gaze, is quite typical of post-European imperialist systems of knowledge production of the past few hundred years. In spite of—and perhaps because of—its embeddedness in Chinese cultural history, this scene of ritualized mourning is thus consciously presented as a farce. Instead of a straightforward portrayal of its supposed function of grieving the dead, this practice of mourning is now given a harsh second look as a ridiculous collective routine, one that is not only hypocritical (there are no tears, the narrator tells us) and poorly executed (the women miss or confuse the signals of guests arriving and leaving), but also indicative of a culture trapped, as it were, in a kind of premodern, clannish barbarity. All that has remained, or so it appears from Ba Jin’s narrative, is a decrepit form of socialization, discharged perfunctorily by some shrieking females. As I have pointed out in an earlier analysis of the novel, this acute sensitivity to the increasing vacuity of long-standing cultural forms is accompanied in Ba Jin’s text by the investment in a new kind of value making, one that fi nds in narratalogical and psychological modes of interiorization (as opposed to external expression and the public performance of rituals) a preferable means of resistance and

even scholarly ways of handling translating. (As we know, proper scholarly tools such as etymologies, dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias, archives, databases, and the like are always necessary but never su ffi ciently helpful.) In addition, this (ap)proximate notion of the translator readily—and appropriately—accentuates a number of important issues in cross-cultural dynamics. First, whereas the term narrator focuses attention on the act of storytelling, the term translator underscores the fact that storytelling, too, is a form of exchange, 10 which may, under certain circumstances, take the speci fi c form of transcribing one language (or system of literacy) into another. In the case of Ba Jin’s novel, for instance, we can see that the scene of mourning is, in e ff ect, presented in an implicit act of exchange, which shows it up to be a language, or a system of literacy, that no longer makes sense or has currency. Th e agent of exchange—the force that renders this language or literacy dysfunctional or obsolete—is none other than a certain translator. Serving in this case as the narrative consciousness, this translator not only reports the scene in question but, in the process of doing so, transcribes it into another code, another language and literacy, against which the original scene becomes newly legible precisely by being disparaged and devalued as silly, hypocritical, and inauthentic. Albeit implicit, this other code is providing the terms for evaluating this scene, but not vice versa.

Second, whereas in East–West cultural relations the emphasis tends to be placed on the e ff ects of translating Western terms into non-Western languages, which consequently must modify and remake themselves in order to accommodate the Western terms (e.g., English, French, or German terms being translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and so forth), Ba Jin’s scene of mourning foregrounds the e ff ects of a reverse translation : namely, what happens when what is Chinese—at that time, the 1930 s, de fi nitely not ranked as a metropolitan or global language/literacy—is translated, in this case by being rendered into the (narrative consciousness’s) language/literacy of modernization. From the standpoint of the language/literacy of modernization, there is obviously no need to modify or remake itself in accordance with this other language/literacy: instead, the latter is simply recoded as inferior and delivered as a caricature.

Translation involves “a form of exchange… which shows it up as a language, or a system of literacy, that no longer makes sense or has currency ”—rendered obsolete by a certain translator

Reversing the values typically given to the original (superior) and the translation (always a copy)

rag pickers, and other illiterate hangers-on in Mao Dun, Lao She, Ding Ling, Shen Congwen, Xu Dishan, and Rou Shi, to mention just a few. For those who know something about this literature and its history, such visibility of disenfranchised populations is nothing new. A much less considered point, however, is that this epochal re fl exive rendering of an indigenous tradition by way of depressive scenarios (and depressive characters) may also be compared to an act of translation. In invoking translation at this juncture, I should quickly add that I am not adhering strictly to the common de fi nition of the translator as a professional word worker who carries meanings from one language into another. 6 Instead, I would like to explore translation and translator by way of something (ap)proximate—namely, the notion of an arbiter of values , as embedded in disparate cultural literacies or systems, under the condition that James Cli ff ord has referred to as the “pervasive postcolonial crisis of ethnographic authority.” 7 (My exploration is thus itself a translation of the more conventional understanding of translation as a transfer of words, whether intraor interlinguistically. 8 ) As Cli ff ord writes, although the postcolonial crisis of ethnographic authority has been felt most acutely by formerly hegemonic Western discourses, “the questions it raises are of global signi ficance. Who has the authority to speak for a group’s identity or authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? . . . What narratives of development, loss, and innovation can account for the present range of local oppositional movements?” And “how do people de fi ne themselves with, over, and in spite of others? What are the changing local and world historical conditions determining these processes?” 9 Th e advantage of a(n) (ap)proximate, rather than a technically precise, use of the terms translation and translator , then, is quite clear. In a fashion parallel to Michel Foucault’s notion of the énoncé (as discussed in the preceding chapter), such a(n) (ap)proximation allows one to include around the parameters of translation a consideration of such illegible and o ft en unconscious elements of languaging as accent, tone, texture, habit, and historicality as well as what is partially remembered, what is erroneous but frequently reiterated, and, ultimately, what remains unsaid and unsayable—all of which bear on transactions of the most basic meanings but tend to elude more positivistic or

Tradutore,

Traditore

de fi ned as the capacity to act among and across languages/literacies, such agency places such an intellectual in the position of a cultural translator/ arbiter. Th e task of this cultural translator/arbiter is not faithfulness to the original (the colonized native culture), but rather an explicit betrayal: the disavowal and intercepting of the original (as something out of sync and out of place) are now deemed a sine qua non for the native culture’s continued survival. In this form of translation, as we have seen with Ba Jin, even the original culture’s way of mourning the dead has become suspect and must be overhauled. In ways that resonate with deconstructive investigations of translation, betrayal appears to be an ineluctable reality in postcolonial intercultural translation. But this is due less to the semiotic cum philosophical assertion, made famous by theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, that language is never completely identical with itself and thus always already a failure (that is, failing to reach its intended destination) 11 than to the fundamental unevenness in the world statuses of di ff erent languages—the unevenness between, say, Tagalog and Spanish, Swahili and English, or Cherokee and French. In this latter context, betrayal is much less a manifestation of the nature of language as such (that is, language’s nonidentity with itself) than it is an injunction against those languages/literacies whose circulations have not been driven by the motors of imperialist or capitalist success. As Lydia H. Liu succinctly puts it, “In thinking about the translatability between historical languages, one cannot but consider the actual power relations that dictate the degree and magnitude of sacri fi ce that one language must make in order to achieve some level of commensurability with the other.” 12

“The predicament faced by the native intellectual in a postcolonial situation”

The task of this cultural translator/arbiter is not faithfulness to the original (the colonized native culture), but rather an explicit betrayal: the disavowal and intercepting of the original (as something out of sync and out of place) are now deemed a sine qua non for the native culture’s continued survival.

ONE WAY OF “GOING NATIVE”: THE MELANCHOLY TURN

A further intriguing aspect of Ba Jin’s text is that the translation enacted by the narrative consciousness, too, amounts to a kind of mourning. Distinct from the women’s shrieking noise, which has turned into an outmoded

A result of the “ fundamental unevenness in the world statuses of different languages”

Th ird, this reverse translation demonstrates a fact that is crucial but seldom emphasized: the inequitable temporalities in play between the original language/literacy (the one to be translated) and the target language/literacy. Whereas in most conventional practices of translation the original, being there fi rst, is typically given priority as the criterion against which the translation, which comes subsequently, must try to measure up, in Ba Jin’s narration the original is made inadequate and inferior precisely through the act of translation , through being rendered into a language/literacy that comes secondarily. In the translation undertaken by a forward-looking narrative consciousness intent on modernization, the scene of a ritualized mourning can be discerned or made intelligible only as a manifestation of backwardness. Instead of being endowed with primacy, superiority, and respectability (as the original tends to be), the ritual’s temporally precedent status is (re)cast as regression, a source of shame. By bringing to the fore issues of exchange, cultural inequity, and the reversal of temporally inscribed values normally conferred on original and target languages/literacies, the fi gure of the translator thus helps crystallize problems of unevenness that are inherent to postcolonial cross-cultural encounters. Notwithstanding the “crisis of ethnographic authority” mentioned by Cli ff ord, such encounters o ft en require that some languages/systems of literacy be delegitimated, if not altogether dispensed with, whereas others (usually those propelled by imperialist and capitalist successes) gain recognition as the general equivalents—indeed, as the metalanguages or metasystems—with which to evaluate those languages that are deemed weaker or less successful, even as the stronger and more successful ones seem only to be maintaining their legitimacy as themselves.

The direction of translation (translating Western terms into non-Western languages) and its reversal—which demonstrated “the inequitable temporalities” between the source and the target

Understood in these terms, the fi gure of the translator foreshadows the predicament faced by the native intellectual in a postcolonized situation, in which to be a mediator between cultures is, as the idiomatic expression “ tradutore, traditore ” would have it, to be a traitor—in particular, a traitor to one’s native culture. Th at is to say, if the agency of the postcolonial intellectual (the native speaker, writer, thinker, educated person, professional, and so forth, to continue the discussion from the preceding chapter) is

bisexual leanings that we arrive at an identity that is socially acceptable; yet, like Freud’s melancholic, we are forever haunted by that loss and the ambivalence it signi fi es. Butler’s move of melancholizing gender is eminently enabling. Unlike Ba Jin’s narrator, she allows for a compassionate second look at cultural phenomena that might seem queer and intolerable to an arrogantly judgmental gaze. By substituting an indistinct and unveri fi able (because psychic) state, loss, for an absolute origin, and by zeroing in on a kind of disability (not being able to let go) around such loss, Butler, like Freud before her, makes melancholia far more theoretically attractive than straightforward mournfulness, thus paving the way for other lost objects to (re)enter the postcolonial, postmodern cultural scene and to (re)claim their share of epistemic legitimacy. Following Butler’s lead, Anne Anlin Cheng, for instance, takes the Freudian lineage in the direction of race by arguing that racial identity formation in the United States is also fundamentally melancholic. 16 By operating through notions of the mainstream (with the white person as the standard ideal) and the margin (populated by nonwhite others), processes of racialization produce, Cheng argues, in fi nitely “lost” or inassimilable racial others whose existence nonetheless continues to disturb and destabilize U.S. nationality. As in Butler’s analysis of heterosexuality, Cheng considers the normative, privileged white American identity as a melancholic outcome of the repression of racial heterogeneity, which remains nonetheless encrypted in the nation’s history and memory. As Cheng writes, “While all nations have their repressed histories and traumatic atrocities, American melancholia is particularly acute because America is founded on the very ideals of freedom and liberty whose betrayals have been repeatedly covered over.” 17 In the various chapters of her book Th e Melancholy of Race , Cheng analyzes literary and cultural texts by African American and Asian American authors to explore in depth the manifestations, rami fi cations, and residues of this fraught process of racialized national subject formation. Cheng’s contemporaries, such as David L. Eng and Ranjana Khanna, share the revisionary impulse of her readings of the a ft ermath of American and Euro-American histories. 18 Th e admirable work of each of these critics deserves a fullfl edged discussion on its own. For my purposes, it su ffi ces to point out that the appeal

ethnographical remain, the narrative consciousness’s mourning belongs in a type of avant-garde political thinking, prevalent among Chinese intellectuals of the May Fourth ( 1919 ) era, that was fueled by a desire to abolish and leave behind everything traditional. Th is proactive impulse to modernize— so as to catch up with the West—continues to describe the ethos of much of the underprivileged world to this day, 13 and the fi gure of the translator thus stands simultaneously as a mourner, one whose drastic abandonment of the native culture is an inevitable by-product of inequitable cultural contacts. But what makes these connections among translation, betrayal, and mourning especially riveting in the contemporary discursive context is, I propose, the supplement of the melancholy turn. Th e lineage of this turn, of course, is most conveniently traced to Sigmund Freud. In his famous work of 1917 , “Mourning and Melancholia,” 14 Freud uses the term melancholia to designate a type of grieving process that, for some reason, cannot end. (As is well known, Freud distinguishes melancholia from “mourning,” which he considers healthy and normal because it can end.) Freud attributes this interminable pathological a ff ect to the melancholic subject’s essentially un fi nished relationship with the lost or dead loved object—so much so that the speci fi c grief over the object’s loss is now mixed up with an entire emotional complex involving not yet processed negative feelings such as resentment and guilt. Because the loved one is no longer around, however, these negative feelings end up being introjected and directed against the self, leading to the classic melancholic symptoms in the grieving subject of uncontrollable self-berating, self-devaluation, and withdrawal from the world.

In her work Gender Trouble , 15 the Jewish American feminist philosopher Judith Butler mobilizes Freud’s argument about melancholia as a new way to think about gendered identity formation, o ff ering the groundbreaking proposal that what is assumed to be a norm, heterosexuality, is itself the result of a socially imposed sacri fi ce or surrender of a homosexual or bisexual capacity for loving persons of the same sex. According to Butler, our gendered identity—especially if we are or believe ourselves to be heterosexual—is melancholic, for it is only by suppressing or giving up our original homoor

a colonized culture who were required to identify with the language and culture of the colonizer; the members of a subordinated ethnic community who had to assimilate to the dictates of mainstream America in order to survive: the losses exempli fi ed by these original cases are irretrievable, but the work of theory now o ff ers them a second-order reckoning. More important still, the work of theory now makes available a kind of time and space for the acting-out of the melancholia that, according to Freud, is symptomatic of an un fi nished process of grieving, itself the outcome of an incomplete relation between the self and the lost loved object. As a compensation for the betrayal inherent to the cultural translation that is modernization, which produces the native original as worthless, the melancholy turn has brought the task of the translator up to date. No longer a traitor, this transactor of untimely native remains now reemerges as a faithful melancholic. Th e fl ip side to the melancholy turn is o ft en a reinstatement of the plurality of languages, literacies, and cultures—a kind of confounding but invigorating call to living in diversity herea ft er. Th is profound kinship between inconsolable grief and a ffi rmative cultural politics is perceptively expressed by the British sociologist Paul Gilroy in the title of one of his books, A ft er Empire: Melancholia or Con v ivial Culture?

20 Is not this kinship the reason the melancholy turn seems, at the current juncture, o ft en accompanied by another kind of institutional a ff ect—an enthusiastic and o ft entimes activist advocacy of linguistic and/or cultural pluralism, of the virtues and bene fi ts of “going native” in language and culture study, in disciplines such as comparative literature and cultural studies? 21 As Harry Harootunian suggests, this tendency to embrace and valorize cultural otherness is part and parcel of the predominant inclusionary identity politics that since the end of the Cold War has displaced the older paradigm of area studies in contemporary Euro-American knowledge production. In the new paradigm, Harootunian writes, “the shadowy fi gure of the native informant [a fi gure associated with the authority of cultural experience and with language pro fi ciency] is now in full view on center stage.” 22 Needless to say, my point here is not to undermine the importance of our need to know languages and learn about di ff erent cultures. It is rather to under score and to probe the implications of the particular epistemic a ffi ni-

of the melancholy turn lies perhaps less in the a ff ect of un fi nished grieving per se than in the tremendous generative potential it carries. In terms of the present discussion about cultural translation, the melancholy turn marks the fl exibility of a nexus of intellectual energies, combining the claim to a certain original condition (be it language, literacy, sexuality, race, or culture) with the plaint that this original condition is irrevocably compromised, injured, interrupted, incapacitated, or stolen—in a word, lost. Th is twin rhetorical move, embracing both originariness and loss in ways that are at once essentializing and deconstructive, gives rise to a plenitude of critical productivity. It follows that the melancholy turn is typically pursued in the form of a moral quest for justice on behalf of the vanished original: although it is not possible to overcome the mainstream culture that has defeated us, this quest implies, and although the grounds of the original’s legitimation might have been destroyed for good, we can at least be melancholic. 19 Indeed, if we think of the work of contemporary theory (in the general sense of speculative or abstract work) as a type of translation, the position occupied by those who adopt the melancholy turn may once again be compared to that of a translator. Unlike Ba Jin’s narrator, whose translation of the original native culture casts it derogatorily in the form of meaningless noise, those who cultivate the melancholy turn are intent on undoing the destructive e ff ects resulting from this condescending type of intercultural translation. If Ba Jin’s narrative actively disengages from a tribal mourning ritual on account of its nativeness (which has become synonymous with awkwardness and backwardness), the translation performed by those who adopt the melancholy turn consists rather in a belated and o ft en therapeutic endeavor to go native , to restore to such native experiences (which have been demeaned or immolated) their due attention and validity. (Such a move is, arguably, not entirely distinguishable from that of returning to these experiences their proper funereal rites, in ways that are reminiscent of, say, Antigone’s insistence on giving her slain kinsman a proper burial.) In temporal terms, this restorative translation attempt makes way for slow-motion rewindings of the present, revealing, as though on a video recording, what might have been there at an earlier moment. Th e originally bisexual or homosexual person who was coerced into conforming to heterosexuality; the members of

The melancholic subject’s entanglement/never-ending relationship with what was lost Butler - heterosexuality is the result of a socially constructed surrender of the homosexual/bisexual desire, melancholic because it is achieved by suppressing of such longings

The flip side - linguistic nativism and cultural plurality

retranslate the wounds of strangers into our own language that healing and reconciliation can take place. Th is is ultimately what Ricoeur intends when he describes the ethics of translation as an interlinguistic hospitality. Th e world is made up of a plurality of human beings, cultures, tongues. Humanity exists in the plural mode. Which means that any legitimate form of universality must always— if the hermeneutic model of translation is observed— fi nd its equivalent plurality. Th e creative tension between the universal and the plural ensures that the task of translation is an endless one, a work of tireless memory and mourning, of appropriation and disappropriation, of taking up and letting go, of expressing oneself and welcoming others. 25

Fully noting the di ffi culties involved in any act of translation, including the di ffi culty imposed by the untranslatable, Ricoeur nonetheless advocates linguistic equivalence—that is to say, comparability or commensurability— as the viable way of rethinking translation’s ethos. 26 What is evocative about this notion of equivalence, I would like to add, is that equivalence is not exactly something ready-made, like a preexisting or already-present condition, but rather something to be created: the “true nature of equivalence,” according to Ricoeur, “is produced by translation rather than presupposed by it.”

An equivalence without identity

(Paul Ricoeur)

Coevalness (Johannes Fabian)

a sharing of time that, importantly, is “not given but must be accomplished [and can be denied]”

ties in question. If the call for linguistic and cultural pluralism is a phenomenon that has been, to borrow a term from Naoki Sakai’s work on translation and subjectivity, co fi gured with the equally prevalent adoption of the melancholy turn in contemporary theory, 23 where exactly are we heading? Th at is to say, if the pursuit of linguistic nativism and cultural pluralism, on the one hand, and the pursuit of melancholia, on the other, turn out to be partners entwined in the same neoliberal moral economy, each providing accompaniment for the other as in a collaborative musical performance, where does this partnership leave the problematic of intercultural translation and, with it, the postcolonial legacies of temporal inequity and global unevenness? Can linguistic nativism and cultural pluralism be the real solution to such inequity and unevenness?

27 Whether at the level of strictly linguistic transfers or at the level of intercultural transactions, Ricoeur’s suggestion implies that equivalence should be more precisely recognized as a challenge, as something to strive for rather than something that has already been securely attained. In this regard, equivalence brings to mind the anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s well-known concept of “coevalness,” a sharing of time that, importantly, is “not given but must be accomplished [and can be denied]” 28 and that is predicated less on a presumed contemporaneity of all cultures than on an ever-renewable and ongoing project of constructing such contemporaneity. Like coevalness, equivalence in this instance is not a mere assertion of temporal or spatial coexistence, but a vision that, even though predictably met with obstruction and sabotage at regular intervals, will always retain within its operating premises the fundamentals of exchange and reciprocity that underlie intercultural transactions.

Rey Chow suggests that the equivalence and coevalness between cultures, however dissimilar those cultures might seem, ought to be a type of potentiality we seek and explore

THE CHALLENGE OF INTERCULTURAL EQUIVALENCE

In his late work, the French theorist Paul Ricoeur likewise draws on Freud’s writings on mourning and melancholia to discuss the labor that is translation, but unlike many who turn to melancholia as an a ffi rmative gesture of cultural redress and repair, Ricoeur argues instead for the necessity of mourning. What needs to be mourned (that is, given up), he writes, is the goal of the impeccable translation. In Ricoeur’s words, this is “the work of mourning . . . applied to renouncing the very ideal of the perfect translation .”

In the place of the perfect translation, he proposes the notion of “ linguistic hospitality ,” in the light of which equivalence, rather than complete identity, becomes the foundation of translation: “A good translation can aim only at a supposed equivalence that is not founded on a demonstrable identity of meaning. An equivalence without identity. Th is equivalence can only be sought, worked at, supposed.”

24 As Richard Kearney comments, Indeed, Ricoeur goes so far as to suggest that the future ethos of European politics, and eventually of world politics, should be one based upon an exchange of memories and narratives between di ff erent nations, for it is only when we translate our own wounds into the language of strangers and

ultimate question of equality between white people and black people .” 31 Such equality—the signal that the partners in interaction are peers—however, is precisely what intercultural translation can endeavor to enunciate even as it apprehends, as it must, the undeniable existence of cultural limits and incompatibilities. 32 Achebe’s pointed criticism of Conrad bears signi fi cance for a consideration of intercultural translation in still another respect. Unlike many discussants of translation, Achebe is not exactly interested in the transfer of meanings from one language into another (as in the more technical sense of translation). His focus is rather on the codes of transevaluation between cultures that are implicitly set into motion by the act of writing—and even when an author is using a single language. By his account, intercultural translation, replete with the e ff ects of transevaluation, can happen just as readily within a single language (or linguistic act) as it can through an ostensible transfer among di ff erent languages. To this extent, we may go so far as to say that it is precisely when Conrad juxtaposes “Africa” and “England” monolingually (in English) that a certain—and, to Achebe, racially coded—pattern of segregation and hierarchization of cultures becomes the most detectable. As in Ba Jin’s treatment of the wailing women, here, too, a seemingly monolingual rendering and translation, burdened between the lines with an ethical imperative of modernization and its pro-Western variety of comparison (yet free from the distraction of the back-and-forth tra ffi c between the technicalities of two languages), sheds light on some of the most serious stakes involved in intercultural as well as interlingual translation. As Jacques Derrida has argued, the paradox of the double postulation “We only ever speak one language” and “We never speak only one language” is “the very law of what is called translation.” 33 On being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 , the acclaimed author Derek Walcott gave a moving speech about the people in whose name, he said, he stood. Referring to the consoling pity with which the Antilles, his homeland, have typically been regarded by travelers, Walcott offered an unyieldingly critical statement on the kind of intercultural translation that specializes in melancholia—and that ultimately leads to the denial of cultural equivalence and commensurability (because, by melancholia’s

I hope readers will have sensed by now that in emphasizing intercultural equivalence as a challenge, I am not simply recommending additional acquisition and possession in the form of the summons “Let’s go pick up more languages and more knowledge about other cultures—the more, the better!” Rather, in the spirit of Chinua Achebe’s critique of Joseph Conrad’s rendering of Africa in Th e Heart of Darkness , I want to suggest that the equivalence and coevalness between cultures, however dissimilar those cultures might seem, ought to be a type of potentiality we seek and explore—that is, regardless of the number of languages in v ol v ed and even if only one language appears in use . Achebe introduces the issue of equivalence and coevalness through a diagnosis of Conrad’s stylistic approach to blackness:

When a writer, while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact, is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. . . . Conrad chose his subject well—one which was guaranteed not to put him in con fl ict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths. 29

In the terms of our discussion, this “role of purveyor of myths” is also the role of a type of intercultural translator, one who is worried, as Achebe puts it, by “the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry” between Africans and Europeans, between the River Congo and the River Th ames. 30 In reading Conrad’s narrative language, indeed, his famous style, as symptomatic of racial discrimination (a move that understandably makes many Conrad readers uncomfortable), what Achebe has foregrounded is none other than the loaded practice of value judgment—and, with it, the questions of equivalence, comparability, and commensurability—in intercultural translation. Notably, in the process of making such value judgments, Achebe writes, the kind of liberalism that “touched all the best minds of [Conrad’s] age in England, Europe, and America” “ almost always managed to sidestep the

3. TRANSLATOR, TRAITOR; TRANSLATOR, MOURNER (OR, DREAMING OF INTERCULTURAL EQUIVALENCE)

1 . Ba Jin, Jia (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1985); Pa Chin, Family , trans. Sidney Shapiro, introduction by Olga Lang (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1972; based on the edition published by Foreign Languages Press, 1958).

2 . For instance, the passage has been omitted in Shapiro’s abridged translation (note 1).

3 . Ba Jin, Jia , 327, my rough translation.

4 . See Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: T he Politics of Reading B etween West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 96–102.

5 . Th e implications of this confi guration are, as is well known, made explicit by Jean Rhys in her remarkable translation of the story of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre into the novel Wide Sargasso Sea (fi rst published in 1966) (New York: Norton, 1982).

6 . For stimulating examples of contemporary studies of translation and bior multilingualism, see Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism , foreword by Meaghan Morris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Lawrence Venuti, Th e Scandals of Translation: T owards an Ethics of Diff erence (New York: Routledge, 1998); Doris Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); Emily Apter, Th e Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); the collection Profession 2010 (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2010); and Sherry Simon, Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (New York: Routledge, 2012). Th is is, of course, only a small and woefully incomplete list from a rapidly expanding subfi eld.

7 . James Cliff ord, Th e Predicament of Culture : Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 8.

8 . For a classic discussion of the various possible types of translation (intralinguistic translation or “rewording”; interlinguistic translation or “trans-

temporal logic, every endeavor undertaken by the formerly colonized has to be belittled as mere secondor third-rate or, at best, belated imitation). Walcott’s trenchant remarks seem especially perspicacious in light of the foregoing discussion: Th ese travellers carried with them the infection of their own malaise, and their prose reduced even the landscape to melancholia and selfcontempt. . By writers even as refreshing as Graham Greene, the Caribbean is looked at with elegiac pathos, a prolonged sadness to which Lévi-Strauss has supplied an epigraph: Tristes Tropiques . Th eir tristesse derives from an attitude to the Caribbean dusk, to rain, to uncontrollable vegetation, to the provincial ambition of Caribbean cities where brutal replicas of modern architecture dwarf the small houses and streets. Th e mood is understandable, the melancholy as contagious as the fever of a sunset, like the gold fronds of diseased coconut palms, but there is something alien and ultimately wrong in the way such a sadness, even a morbidity, is described by English, French, or some of our exiled writers. It relates to a misunderstanding of the light and the people on whom the light falls. Th ese writers describe the ambitions of our un fi nished cities, their unrealized, homiletic conclusion, but the Caribbean city may conclude just at that point where it is satis fi ed with its own scale, just as Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveler or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture. Th ere might be less of Tristes Tropiques a ft er that. 34

lation proper”; intersemiotic translation or “transmutation”), see Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in On Translation, ed. Reuben A. Brower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 232–39.

9. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 8, 289.

10. The notion of translation as exchange is highlighted in the title of a collection of erudite essays on the linguistically mediated encounters between China and the West: Lydia H. Liu, ed., Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999).

11. See, for instance, de Man’s and Derrida’s discussions of Walter Benjamin’s oft-cited essay “The Task of the Translator”: Paul de Man, “ ‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’ ” in The Resistance to Theory, foreword by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165–207, 209–48, and The Ear of the Other: Otobiography Transference Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 93–161. For my discussion of Derrida’s and de Man’s readings in relation to cultural production in the postcolonial, postmodern context, see part 3 of Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

C6505.indb 142

ian—on his return trip to Bulgaria after an eighteen-year absence. See “Dialogism and Schizophrenia,” trans. Michael B. Smith, in An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, ed. Alfred Arteaga (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 203–14.

22. Harry Harootunian, “ ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’ After Area Studies,” positions 20.1 (2012): 16. Harootunian argues that the recent turn to the native (in various versions of identity studies) tends to replicate problems

of studying other cultures that have remained unresolved in the older paradigm of area studies.

23. See, for instance, Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 52.

142 3. TRANSLATOR, TRAITOR; TRANSLATOR, MOURNER

24. Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan, introduction by Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 2006), 23, 23, 22, Ricoeur’s emphasis in all cases.

25. Richard Kearney, “Introduction: Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Translation,” in ibid., xx.

7/30/14 1:12 PM

12. Lydia H. Liu, “The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign,” in Tokens of Exchange, ed. Liu, 34–35. Despite such power relations, Liu suggests that the relationship between “dominated” and “dominator” languages in processes of translation should be viewed in terms of coauthorship; see especially pages 34–37 of her essay.

13. For a persuasive reminder of the point that the quest for a modern life in the European sense continues to hold validity for disenfranchised peoples in places such as Africa, see Simon Gikandi, “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2001): 627–58.

14. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 152–70.

15. See especially part 1 of Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

3. TRANSLATOR, TRAITOR; TRANSLATOR, MOURNER 141

16. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

17. Ibid., 10.

18. See David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). See also Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, afterword by Judith Butler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

19. By contrast, Paul Gilroy, in invoking the term melancholia, is critical of it as a form of postimperial nostalgia; see Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). For another critical reflection, see Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” in Loss, ed. Eng and Kazanjian, 458–65. Brown argues that the gesture of embracing melancholy, especially when made on the left, may lead to potentially conservative and self-destructive outcomes despite putatively progressive aims. For related interest, see also Slavoj Žižek, “Melancholy and the Act,” Critical Inquiry 26.4 (2000): 657–81.

20. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004). Gilroy’s arguments about conviviality can also be found in Postcolonial Melancholia

21. A refreshing exception is provided by Tzvetan Todorov, who offers a compelling account of the malaise and psychological oppression he experienced as a result of his own bilingualism—his fluency in both French and Bulgarian—on his return trip to Bulgaria after an eighteen-year absence. See “Dialogism and Schizophrenia,” trans. Michael B. Smith, in An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, ed. Alfred Arteaga (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 203–14.

22. Harry Harootunian, “ ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’ After Area Stud-

26. Ricoeur’s notion of equivalence should be distinguished from the notions of dynamic relevance and cognitive easefulness that some theorists advocate as proper ways of approaching translation. For a succinct discussion of these notions, see Lawrence Venuti, “Introduction,” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001): 169–73. Venuti’s discussion is an excellent introduction to Derrida’s essay “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” trans. Lawrence Venuti, Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001): 174–200. Through a reading of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and a translation of Hegel’s terms Aufheben and Aufhebung into the French relever and relève, Derrida proposes that the “relevant” translation be thought of in terms of an elevation and replacement that preserves or seasons what it denies or destroys (thus bringing out the taste and quality of the original even better).

27. Ricoeur, On Translation, 35, Ricoeur’s emphasis.

28. Johannes Fabian, “If It Is Time, Can It Be Mapped?” review of Eviatar Zerubavel’s Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), History and Theory 44 (February 2005): 119 n. 13. See also Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

29. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” in Fictions of Empire: Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad; The Man Who Would Be King, Rudyard Kipling; and The Beach of Falesá, Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. John Kucich (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 375. Achebe’s essay was originally published in Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts and Public Affairs 18 (1977): 782–94.

30. Ibid., 374.

31. Ibid., 378, my emphasis.

3. TRANSLATOR, TRAITOR; TRANSLATOR, MOURNER 143

32. In this regard, I find the following passage by Natalie Melas pertinent, especially if the words comparison and comparatist are (for the purposes of the present discussion) replaced by intercultural translation and intercultural translator: “If culture is a limit that only appears when two entities come into contact, and a limit therefore that does not enclose cultures on the model of subjects but reciprocally marks them off as singular, then comparison as the appearing-in-common of that limit is conceivable as an act of enunciation from that limit, not from a magisterial and transcendent position beyond it. The position of such a comparatist is not separable from cultural limits and limitations” (All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007], 103; see also 85–90 for a thoughtful assessment of the debates around Achebe’s criticism of Conrad as well as a shrewd analysis of Achebe’s essay).

33. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7, 8, 10, and throughout. See chapter 1 for a more extended discussion of Derrida’s book.

34. Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” in What the Twilight Says (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 75–77.

4. THINKING WITH FOOD, WRITING OFF CENTER: THE POSTCOLONIAL WORK OF LEUNG PING-KWAN AND MA KWOK-MING

distance and untranslatability of ethics

Shu-Mei Shih, Cosmopolitanism among Empires.” In Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. 165–182. University of California Press, 2007.

Sinophone culture as a translated Chinese culture in diaspora

Sinophone concerns the dissonance and heterogeneity of “Sinitic languages as well as their speakers living in different locales”, providing a conceptual framing to shift away from Han-centrism and cultural essetialism, connecting marginal groups in and out of geographic and ethnic boundaries.

The linguistic dissonance of the film registers the heterogeneity of Sinitic languages as well as their speakers living in different locales. What it engenders and validates, ultimately, is the heteroglossia of what I call the Sinophone: a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a historical process of heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has been taking place for several centuries. What the film makes audible, hence also visible, is confirmation of the continuous existence of the Sinophone communities as significant sites of cultural production in a complex set of relations with such constructs as “China,” “Chinese,” and “Chineseness.” (Shih, 2007, p. 4) untranslatability in transnational cultural practice

Visuality and Identity

Sinophone Articulations across the Paciﬁc

- in Against Diaspora: Discourses on Sinophone Studies (2017), Shu-mei Shih made an argument “against diaspora/antidiaspora” as “diaspora has an end date.”

- critiques ethnocentrism of the national diaspora: racist misrecognition of Americans as white is similar to the ethnicized reduction of the Chineseness as the Han majority.

- Mandarin is already a translation; speakers are approximating each other

—Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982) culturally deﬁned) on the other. Their constitutive relationship is a relationship between part and whole (Sinophone culture is a part ofTaiwan culture). I set up two frameworks below—one is that ofempire and imperialism, and the other that ofcosmopolitanism.

Colonialism is a substance with no name [today]. Empire has never waned. Its specter is circling around.

—Wong Bik-wan, Records ofPostcoloniality (2003)

In the last analysis, one is a member ofa world community by the sheer fact ofbeing human; this is one’s “cosmopolitan existence.”

THE AGE OF EMPIRES AND, ESPECIALLY, THEIR SIZES

It is instructive to consider how our contemporary imperial formation relates to the immediately preceding one as analyzed by Eric Hobsbawm in his magisterial The Age ofEmpire, 1875–1914. Ifwe can roughly assert that the post-1914 imperial formation is characterized by the continual rise ofthe United States as the single most powerful empire in the world, one can make a useful comparison with the previous age, when Britain was the imperial center ofthe world. Hobsbawm argues that the last age ofempire must be explained mainly in economic and political terms. He lists seven main characteristics ofworld economy as the bases for the particular form empires took during the previous age ofempire: broad geographical expansion; increasing pluralization; revolution in technology; concentrated capital and rationalized production; mass production fueling the rise ofa consumer economy in which goods from far-flung regions were made available and in ever greater quantity; the rise ofo‹ce and other service sectors; and finally, growing convergence between economics and politics. 1 In other words, the geographical expansion ofeconomy was both the cause and the eªect ofthe territorial expansion ofempires, while overproduction set oª by rationalized mass production led to the need to create overseas markets and cull resources from overseas. This was the time when capitalism became truly global, ushering in global capitalism as we know it. Global capitalism, then and now, seeks inexpensive and the most thoroughly exploitable labor and maximum profit through an unequal national and international division oflabor. 2

Ofthe six major empires carving up most ofthe world at the time—Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States—Britain was the one whose economy was most intimately enmeshed with the economy in the colonies in the sense that it beneﬁted the most from the colonies. For the other empires, Hobsbawm notes, political motivations were sometimes more important than economic ones. Italy, Germany, and the United States expanded colonies not for economic interest but for the sheer status that the expansion conferred. 3

Cosmopolitanism among Empires

It seems again to be the case that the age ofempire is upon us, and it behooves us to consider this return ofthe age ofempire in the contemporary historical context in order to ask the question whether a Taiwan cosmopolitanism is possible. The aim ofthis contextualization is to search for ways ofunderstanding cosmopolitan expressions ofSinophone cultures such as Taiwan’s, even while metropolitan cosmopolitanism at large increasingly exhibits greater and greater imperial intentions, and the pressures ofnew forms ofimperialism appear to be narrowing the space for cosmopolitan potentials from the margins. This chapter analyzes one ethically responsible form ofcosmopolitanism from the margins that deﬁes regulative logics and politics oftransnational recognition. It also seeks to establish Sinophone culture as but one aspect ofTaiwan culture. Oral, written, and visual languages ofTaiwan’s multiculture exhibit the Sinophone’s resistance to China-centrism on the one hand, while they also show how the Sinophone transitions to the Taiwanese (multiethnically and multi-

economically. Culturally, even while Taiwanese cultural nationalism has become more successful in delineating its own cultural lineage as connected to but distinct from China, economic intimacy with China is creating substantial lobbying voices within Taiwan government for political concession to China. In the end, Taiwan’s relationships with the United States and China are based on deep economic and political entanglements that characterize the current situation. The situation is in every turn exacerbated by the U.S. position ofambiguity, which, in actuality, is a policy ofcontradiction. The U.S.’s contradictory policy promotes democracy in Taiwan (whose logical goal will be independence) and recognizes only “One China” (whose logical goal will be China’s occupation of Taiwan). This contradiction belies the hypocrisy ofthe United States toward its putative protectorate, Taiwan. Taiwan therefore is left with little leverage to either pressure the United States to recognize it, or pressure China to give up its territorial ambition toward Taiwan. The realm left over for greater maneuvering to engender possibilities oftransformation is, in this situation, the realm ofculture. As contemporary Taiwan discourses have shown, culture as both lived experience and discourse oªers a fertile ground as well as eªective means to forge new identities and to imagine new futures. The discourse ofTaiwan consciousness and Taiwan identity has proved its power and eªectiveness in less than two decades, and it is still in the process of continuous (re)construction and (re)writing. There are many indications that people in Taiwan are living in a time ofchange, from the rewriting ofhistory books to the renaming ofstreets and parks. A large-scale transformation ofconsciousness is under way, even though it appears to be only gradual. The refashioning of Taiwaneseness is undergoing its due process in all its contestatory and contradictory ways, as the o‹cial discourse increasingly comes to adopt a multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual orientation. What can Taiwan’s culture do, then? Rather, how has Taiwan’s culture done? To answer this question, I will set up the second framework, that ofcosmopolitanism, in the following section.

> Viet Thanh Nguyen’s essay, when Asian American literature becomes imperialist

COSMOPOLITANISM, MULTIPLICITY, DANGER

Studies ofimperialism and empire have consistently neglected the cultures ofthe colonized. Hobsbawm’s book discussed above is clearly more concentrated on economics, as he seeks to explain the rise ofempires in correspondence with the change

- cosmopolitan potentials from the margins - to understand cosmopolitan expressions of Sinophone cultures - decenter Sinophone culture as but one aspect metropolitan cosmopolitanism, vernacular cosmopolitanism

ofthe United States is not news, as the activities ofClub 51 have been fully related in Taiwan and Sinophone newspapers in the United States. Club 51 wishes to persuade the U.S. Congress to formally annex Taiwan as its fifty-first state so that it can be freed from the threat ofChina. 11 Whether one considers this entirely absurd or not, it is revealing that a distant and casual observer ofTaiwan such as the fictional character Xavier de C*** would hit upon the same point. By some measures, Taiwan may be seen as a neocolony ofthe United States, ifby colonialism we suggest the right ofthe colonized to rely on the mother country for protection in times ofdanger. From various American recommendations for the United States to occupy or annex parts ofTaiwan since the time ofCommodore Perry, to America’s active engagement to transform Taiwan into a capitalist society through the creation ofan economic comprador class, the actual neocolonial relationship between the United States and Taiwan is similar to those between the United States and its other more obvious colonies such as the Philippines and Puerto Rico. 12 In this regard, others have called Taiwan as eªectively a protectorate ofthe United States. 13 In truth, it is the “soft power” ofthe United States—“the diªusion ofpolitical ideas, educational know-how, and a sometimes omnipresent popular culture”—that distinguishes the American empire from previous European empires. 14 What can be more telling than to simply note that Taiwan is now a model democracy (a.k.a. a model minority) with a high percentage ofits upperechelon technocrats, educators, and bureaucrats holding advanced degrees from the United States, and the youth there are more familiar with Hollywood films than they are with those made by local directors.

While the United States continues to maintain a policy ofambiguity in regards to the tension across the Taiwan Strait, the call ofChina presuming itselfto be the father country ofTaiwan continues with hundreds ofphallic missiles pointed at Taiwan with tacit approval from the United States. 15 It is not a secret that Taiwan is forced to maneuver cleverly and skillfully between these two empires, struggling to establish its own discursive authority in a context where the two empires presume to talk for Taiwan, posture on behalfofTaiwan, or make decisions for Taiwan. Taiwan history is the history ofsuccessive colonialisms and ambiguous relationships with China. To that extent, the current situation is not new. What is new is the particular imperial formation in which Taiwan’s economy and general well-being has become so intimately dependent both on the United States and on China. In either relationship, it is impossible for Taiwan to extract itself Cosmopolitanism among Empires

In examining varieties ofcosmopolitanism from diªerent subject positions, we may oppose the vernacular form against the metropolitan form. The word vernacular is often defined in opposition to what is standard, major, mainstream, or dominant, such as the language ofthe nonelite or the language ofmarginalized intellectuals and the colonized. So ifmetropolitan cosmopolitanism is defined as that capacity to espouse multiple cultures and multiple languages in the center by metropolitan intellectuals, vernacular cosmopolitanism may be a way ofdescribing the marginal people’s interculturalism that is similar to but essentially diªerent from metropolitan cosmopolitanism. Vernacular cosmopolitanism may be bilingual in a metropolitan language and Taiwanese, Hindi, Korean, or another nonmetropolitan language, for instance, while metropolitan bilingualism may speak only metropolitan languages. There is definitely a hierarchy oflanguages and the kind ofcosmopolitanism each implies; oftentimes, what gets recognized as cosmopolitan itselfis open to questioning, as it is not immune from discursive power politics, or cosmopolitics. Ifwe go with the broad definition ofvernacular cosmopolitanism above, vernacular cosmopolitanism, set up in contradistinction to metropolitan cosmopolitanism, can challenge metropolitan cosmopolitanism in several ways: (1) by threat ofsimilarity and hybridity that unsettles its dominion (we can be cosmopolitans too; and yes, some ofus speak French and/or English— this is Bhabha’s strategy, discussed above); (2) by expanding its idiom to include nonstandard and marginal languages and cultures (a project ofrecuperation); (3)

in the multifaceted relationships ofproduction, including market expansion. When he does analyze culture, he notes that even though metropolitan culture was definitely aªected by the imperial formation in terms ofthe familiar technologies ofexoticism and Orientalism, the age ofempire was characterized by a surprising consistency in the way the metropolitan centers viewed the rest ofthe world as “inferior, undesirable, feeble and backward, even infantile.” 16 What this means is that besides a few notable cases ofinfluence (such as African primitivism and Japanese exoticism), metropolitan imperial cultures were not aªected by the existence ofcolonies in any integrated fashion. Edward Said’s book Culture and Imperialism clearly disagreed with such a perspective by showing how profoundly colonialism and imperialism shaped canonical Western literature during the age ofempire, but the analytical pivot ofthe book is on the imperial narrative psyche, not on that ofthe colonized. 17 Said’s immense influence since the publication of Orientalism, combined with the work ofthe Subaltern Studies group and Gayatri Spivak’s strand ofdeconstruction, eventually engendered the emergence ofpostcolonial studies, which came to include the study ofthe literature and culture of the colonized. But decades ofpostcolonial studies have flaunted binaric, Manichean models ofcriticism privileging a model ofresistance and containment. When a third term is introduced to the binarism, though rarely, it is the third term that is predominantly characterized by abjecthood and silence (the subaltern cannot speak, after all, according to Spivak), or mimicry and hybridity (containing both aspects ofthe colonized and the colonizer, per Homi Bhabha). 18

Cosmopolitanism among Empires

In a signature essay entitled “Woman in Diªerence,” Spivak analyzes the colonized woman’s body as an aporia that exceeds imposed signification by nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism, all ofwhich are mobilized by binarisms. In order to refuse imposed signification, however, the body must be in a state ofutter abjection: a corpse “putrefied with venereal disease, having vomited up all the blood in her desiccated lungs.” 19 The subaltern cannot speak in a language that can be understood, and hence she cannot speak; her putrefied body can escape imposed signification, but in the end it is nothing but the abjected body. The third term is, then, possible only in a state ofextreme abjecthood. In Bhabha’s framework, the third term is the mixture ofthe colonizer and the colonized that disrupts their boundaries and thus threatens colonial authority. The problem with this latter framework is that ifnot recognized as a challenge to colonial authority, hybridity can simply be a symptom ofthe colonization ofthe colonized, who were made Cosmopolitanism among Empires ] 171 [ to become cultural hybrids under the weight ofcolonial imposition. Hybridity of the colonized in and ofitselfdoes not necessarily pose any threat to the metropole; ifanything, it may just be an eªective proofofthe assimilating power ofthe culture ofthe metropole. To shift the context to that ofTaiwan, where the per capita gross domestic product rivals that ofsome First World countries, its place on the edges ofempires is a dramatically diªerent one from that ofcolonial India. Spivak’s subaltern is the absolute economic subaltern, ultimately very diªerent from the gallery of subjecthoods possible in Taiwan. We find all manner ofpossibilities in Taiwan’s cultural terrain, including abjecthood and hybridity, but we also find the possibility for cosmopolitanism, specifically defined. How do we understand the cosmopolitan yearnings ofa small country vis-à-vis contemporary empires? How does it live through the dangers ofthe constant state ofpsychological and political war under the shadow ofempires?

by the transnationalization ofcapital—that self-absorbing criticisms ofBritish colonialism served to promote the careers ofpostcolonial studies scholars 24 —echoes many other critiques ofwhat is sometimes viciously dismissed as victimology. While much ofthe critique ofidentity politics may be theoretically unsound and empirically flawed, as Linda Alcoª has convincingly shown, 25 the bind ofHegelian dialectical dynamic continues to dictate the terms ofstruggle as action and reaction, domination and resistance, marginalization and centralization, and other such binary struggles and duals in search ofsublimation. The question ofthe multiplicity ofaddress for a given struggle is oftheoretical importance here, because multiplicity is more than an aggregation ofmultiple binarisms. Multiplicity implies the possibility ofa given actor or agent mediated by and mediating multiple sources so that its intention and address need to be analyzed via multiple frames, contexts, and references. The multiple mediations ofa given artwork require the substitution ofbinaric models by an openness to multiple references with perhaps less clearly delineated horizons ofunderstanding but a promise ofnew meanings and new possibilities ofsignification. The multiplicity here is not the multiplicity without responsibility, which metropolitan cosmopolitanism can legitimately be faulted for, but multiplicity as a necessary consequence and choice ofthose agents caught in the midst ofand maneuvering among multiple imperial configurations. It is also not the multiplicity ofa ressentiment-driven vernacular cosmopolitan, whose worldly horizon is oftentimes the extent ofpredominantly metropolitan culture spiced with fashionable ressentiment to it, and whose multilinguality and multiculturality are gestures ofprotest that reveal, more than anything else, a lovelike obsession with the metropolitan West. We oftentimes see, for instance, that self-styled marginalists are in the core more Eurocentric than the centrists. The upper-class marginalists who claim their marginality due to their race are very willing to flaunt their Eurocentric pedigree over those underdogs forced into the margin. The vernacular realm is not immune to class politics. Instead ofseeking the third term by first setting up binaric models, then, as did postcolonial theorists discussed earlier, a notion ofmultiply mediated cosmopolitanism on the margins ofempires allows for a much more expansive discussion of a given work ofart or text without having to sacrifice complexity, which may include meanings that are likely to cause discomfort. Time and again, unseemly aspects ofa theorist’s work (such as Martin Heidegger’s association with Nazism and

multiply mediated cosmopolitanism on the margins of empires allows for a much more expansive discussion of a given work of art or text without having to sacrifice complexity

danger of “victimology”

by angry protests and exuberant expressions of ressentiment so that vernacular cosmopolitanism can be “recognized” in a Hegelian dynamic ofrecognition; and (4) by unseating metropolitan cosmopolitanism altogether (ifthis is ever possible). In the U.S. context, vernacular cosmopolitanism ofits minority peoples has it as its objective to be recognized as a viable option, an articulation ofdiªerence, and ultimately, a project to claim a portion ofthe center. In the international context, vernacular cosmopolitanism ofmarginal countries aims not only to flaunt its qualification for membership in the unequal terrain ofworld culture, which I have called “asymmetrical cosmopolitanism” elsewhere, 20 but also to disseminate alternative possibilities to Western-centric cultural standards and norms. Indian Nobel Prize–winning writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore would be a prominent example ofa vernacular cosmopolitan from a non-Western site. Struggle within the uneven terrain ofcosmopolitics, here understood not in terms ofthe politics ofdemocracy across the world, 21 but in terms ofthe politics ofcosmopolitanism, is part ofthe scenario for Indian postcolonial studies in the United States (even though the “real” object ofdiscourse is Britain), 22 as well as part ofthe scenario for ethnic studies in the United States. Each is undergirded by a certain culture ofprotest, and each is a project ofarticulating abjection on the one hand, and articulating counterdiscourses on the other. On one side is grievance and sadness; on the other side, discursive empowerment through recuperations ofthe vernacular. The agenda ofarticulation and recuperation, however, may dangerously cross over to a discourse ofvictimology, which vernacular cosmopolitanism needs to judiciously guard against. Art historian Hal Foster comments on the negative aspects ofthis tendency with biting satire: “For then as now self-othering can flip into selfabsorption, in which the project ofan ‘ethnographic self-fashioning’ becomes the practice ofa narcissistic self-refurbishing .... Who in the academy or the art world has not witnessed these testimonies ofthe new empathetic intellectual or these flaneries ofthe new nomadic artist?” 23 The artist as ethnographer is Foster’s object ofderision here, but the general point is about the self-serving potential ofmisapplied or disingenuous identity politics, about self-othering becoming self-absorption, selffashioning becoming “self-refurbishing,” to the extent that all critical content is neutralized and the work ofart becomes a work ofnarcissism and self-promotion in the name ofidentity. ArifDirlik’s equally satiric critique ofpostcolonial theory as the moment postcolonial intellectuals have arrived in the American academy aided Cosmopolitanism among Empires

the untranslatability among contexts and context-based representations

[ Cosmopolitanism among Empires

“There is a symbiotic relationship between national allegories and international attention, one conducive to the other.”

Jacques Derrida’s relationship to Heidegger’s work) shock us into disbeliefand place us in an ethical conundrum, purists ofmeaning that American scholars tend to be. To return to the situation ofTaiwan, then, the postcolonial model and the model ofcosmopolitics are useful but limited. Although it is a minor country on the margins ofglobal imperial formations and under the shadow ofmultiple hegemonies, it is also one ofthe top ten trading partners ofthe United States. It is politically ostracized from all sides, but it has a vibrant culture and a strong contingent ofcultural workers working in multiple directions with multiple traditions. In the context ofheavy competition for size and hegemonic inﬂuence among empires, the portability and visibility ofTaiwan’s visual culture, in its paradoxical lightness and smallness, is endowed with the power ofchanging perceptions and transforming imaginaries precisely because it works through and with multiple registers and references that can move beyond the obsession with injury, China, and the West. This cosmopolitanism draws on the resources ofTaiwan’s multiculture as well as world culture with multiple forms and objects ofaddress, so that it is possible to break from the circuit ofoppression and marginalization. In an ironic sense, then, this is the kind ofcosmopolitanism that lives well with dangers, not because ofa certain kind ofmasochistic need to make sure that one’s powers “may not slumber,” as Kant theorized, 26 but because immanent danger is the existential condition oflife in Taiwan under the shadow ofempires. To live within this existential condition is to have no luxury to philosophize that all that humanity should strive for, peace, is achieved by setting the necessary precondition ofperpetual war so that it can be overcome. The two-part process that Kant described posits the premise ofwar as that which necessitates its structural overcoming through law and other rational means for peace to be possible. For the situation in Taiwan, the state of perpetual war is not just the premise but the result, which awaits its conclusion each time threats are uttered across the Taiwan Strait. Danger is therefore not the luxury to keep cosmopolitanism honest; it is the very condition ofa cosmopolitanism that seeks to breathe a bit lighter and deeper while wearing a straitjacket.

ETHICS

The protagonist in question in this chapter is Wu Mali, an installation artist who has challenged all known authorities in her work, be it political ideology, gender oppression, and the exploitation ofThird World labor, as well as their intersecCosmopolitanism among Empires ] 175 [ tions. In a set ofantagonistic works, much like those ofHung Liu discussed in chapter 2, she articulated her critique ofTaiwan society, government, and its culture ofsexism. What distinguishes her from Hung Liu, in these early works, however, is that her politically and socially charged critiques were articulated within Taiwan with specifically local viewers and audience in mind. Unlike other transnationally situated artists, filmmakers, and writers who either strategically deploy political or national allegory for the purpose ofimmediate recognition, or creatively utilize essentialized cultural material in postmodern form to give exoticism a contemporary and politically correct twist, Wu Mali aims her political allegories and culturally specific articulations for local consumption, local viewing, and local critique. Her internationally exhibited works are often quite divergent from these works. Instead ofthe flexibility and translatability that we find in Ang Lee’s early work analyzed in chapter 1, we see instead a certain principled position on the untranslatability among contexts and context-based representations. These include the often-discussed series, the Formosa Stories (Baodao wuyu), installed and exhibited at Taipei’s IT Park Gallery in 1998. Three ofthe five pieces within this series are specifically women-centered installations, and these are Epitaph ( Muzhiming, 1997), Stories ofWomen from Hsin-chuang ( Hsinchuang nuren de gushi, 1997), and Formosa Club ( Baodao binguan, 1998). In Epitaph (see color plate 6), Wu arranged the testimonials offemale relatives ofmale victims ofthe 228 Massacre in 1947 on both sides ofa U-shaped exhibition space, with a video ofwaves hitting against rocks placed in the middle ofthe space. Wu’s political critique is clear: she recuperates the repressed histories offemale victims in the commemoration ofthe 228 Incident; a herstory against history’s ellipsis ofwomen. At this level ofreading, the piece is a typical feminist work that argues for the inclusion ofwomen in the writing ofhistory. The video installation in the middle, however, demands something beyond this reading. In the monotonous and iterative movement and sound ofthe waves against the rocks, Wu evokes nature’s expansiveness, depth, and persistence, a washing away ofpain, or a chipping away at or an eroding ofthe hardness ofsuªering, whereby gendered suªering can be both embraced and transcended. The point is not just critique—the ruthless criticism ofeverything possible—but the possibility oftranscending that critique. The mode ofressentiment should not be the perpetual mode ofbeing. In Stories ofWomen from Hsin-chuang, testimonials ofHsin-chuang female textile workers are recorded onto the texture ofthe cloths hung on three sides of

UNTRANSLATABLE

challenge the hypocrisy and hegemony ofhistory, while at the same time aªording means ofhealing or transcendence for the women involved. They are, one can say, clear feminist representations ofa gendered intervention into history within the national terrain ofTaiwan, the targeted audience being local Taiwanese. In their overt gestures toward Taiwan’s national history, these installations can be putatively considered national allegories, but they are not meant for consumption in the global multicultural market where national allegories sell well. There are two issues involved here. An obvious obstacle to the commodification ofTaiwan’s national allegory is the lack ofclarity as to how well it might sell—unlike countries such as China with consequential size and international power or those clearly Third World countries with corruption to expose and the so-called intractable traditions to overthrow (such as the practice offemale circumcision and the veil, for instance), Taiwan is not known to the world for having had a particularly harrowing national history (even though it does in actuality) due to its political alignment with the U.S. right as well as its economic prosperity. Neither does Taiwan hold the world’s fascination in any particular area, given its lack ofclout in international politics. 28 For a minor and minoritized country such as Taiwan, in other words, even the commodification ofnational allegories is a luxury. After all, it was Hong Kong around 1997, with the world paying it much attention, when the greatest number ofnational allegories were produced. There is a symbiotic relationship between national allegories and international attention, one conducive to the other. The second issue ofgreater relevance here is in relation to the questions of ethics ofrepresentation that does not translate across national and transnational terrains. By the untranslatability ofethics I suggest that social critique should maintain its relevance within a given, specific context in order to prevent it from becoming commodified. When social critique, in the form ofnational allegories, is taken out ofcontext, and is thus decontextualized, its political meaning is easily commodified. The ethical potential ofthe former—social critique in the original context—is lost once it is taken out ofcontext, because it is that decontextualization that most readily allows for commodification. This can be illustrated by the contrast between the works ofHung Liu and Wu Mali. Hung Liu’s critique ofthe Cultural Revolution occurs not in China but in the United States; she is therefore not subject to potential censors within that original context, nor will her work have political eªect for those who are most immediately connected to that event. A decontextualized Cultural Revolution cri-

“By the untranslatability of ethics I suggest that social critique should maintain its relevance within a given, specific context in order to prevent it from becoming commodified.”

Cosmopolitanism

the U-shaped wall, words weaved into cloth, giving words form, texture, and materiality (see color plates 7 and 8). Ifhistory is the record ofmale heroes with all the power and means ofrepresentation in the printed page and other media, the medium that organically captures the experience ofthe female textile workers would be the cloth itself. They are thus recuperated as not merely producers of cloth garments, but producers ofherstory; their work not merely existing for its exchange value, but for its gendered ideological and cultural value, implying larger symbolic meanings. The verbosity ofthe testimonials in their quantity and density reveal the strong subterranean desire ofthese female workers to speak for themselves, rather then to be spoken by, of, or most frequently, forgotten. Not only do their stories sewn into cloths register their hardship, their protest, but also through this form ofexpression, these life stories are transformed to representation, to art. Like the Freudian talking cure, the representation ofthe stories also heals. Sewing becomes a form ofwriting, the patterns oftheir lives shown as patterns on cloths. In Formosa Club, Wu Mali is at once at her most ironic and most recuperative (see color plate 9). Telling Taiwan history from the sixteenth century on from a sexual perspective as the history built upon the exploitation and commodiﬁcation offemale bodies, Wu reinscribes the masculinist metaphor ofthe colonized nation as the raped woman into a feminist critique ofthe multiple patriarchal forces that have depended upon Taiwan women’s sexual labor for political and economic gains. The grand narratives ofthe nation, be it the colonialist, the Nationalist, or the Taiwanese, hide behind them the blood and sweat ofthe most unspeakable form oflabor. Recuperating this history thus exposes the hypocrisy ofthe national and economic narratives ofTaiwan’s success. Hence the ironic placement ofa framed calligraphy ofSun Yat-sen’s Confucian, moralistic phrase “ Tianxia wei gong ” (Serving the Public under Heaven) 27 on the wall: the grand rhetoric is parodied to suggest male nationalists call for women to serve the public by serving men sexually. The entire island ofTaiwan, the beautiful island Formosa, is a sex club, serving the Japanese soldiers as “comfort women” during the Paciﬁc War, the American GIs during the Vietnam War, the Japanese tourists during the heyday ofJapan’s “sex tourism” to Taiwan, ifnot local clientele ofall hues and classes. The trinity ofcolonialist, nationalist, and capitalist expansion depends upon the dispensing of surplus male libido over the exploited bodies oflocal women. All three pieces are eloquent articulations ofhow herstory is the underside of history, repressed, elided, exploited, and silenced, needing to be recuperated to Cosmopolitanism among Empires

here the distance is quite literal, the spatial distance

CAN COSMOPOLITANISM BE ETHICAL?

We may conclude the above discussion by noting that the pandering ofnational allegory by non-Western artists in the metropole constitutes an ethical problem in the sense that their objects ofcritique are far away from the metropole, whose centrality or superiority is thus not questioned or threatened. Such distancing techniques are similar in mechanism as self-exoticization or self-Orientalization; it is an other-directed victimology that does not challenge the metropole. Rather, the metropole is comforted by the safe distance between the sites oftrauma and itself. Ifsuch is the case, then the question before us is whether the obverse ofnational allegory is a certain kind ofcosmopolitanism, and how, paradoxically, this minor cosmopolitanism is the ethical stance ofa Taiwan artist refusing to fall into the self/other dynamic oftransnational representation.

Wu Mali has remarked, very sharply and astutely, on the politics ofself-presentation in the transnational context on various occasions. She never thought she should choose “the most suitable and the most good-looking” outfit to wear to go out to the transnational art market, or she should adorn herselfin fineries like “an imperial concubine waiting for the emperor’s visit,” and nor should she worry endlessly about how “an artist should sacrifice herselffor the country.” 29 In these very straightforward comments, she refutes the strategy ofusing national allegories for transnational consumption, refuses the passive role ofa minor artist waiting to be “recognized,” and denies the nation the discursive monopoly over her work. In essence, she refuses transnational politics ofrecognition in global multiculturalism and the role ofa representative for her nation. In these refusals, Wu extricates herselffrom the fast routes to recognition in both the global and local contexts. She thus liberates herselffrom the clichéd logic ofthe relationship between the global and the local, whose promise ofrecognition is rejected, albeit with cost. This refusal to play the game according to the rules ofrecognition is where the ethicality ofher work lies. A short analysis oftwo pieces ofinstallation art by Wu Mali that draw on world culture in very innovative ways is in order. These two pieces have traveled widely around various cities in the world, and it behooves us to consider the absence of national allegorical impulse in these works. The examples in point are The Library series and The Sweeties series. The Library was first exhibited at the Venice Biennial of1995. Two sets ofthree metal bookshelves line the two walls on each side ofa

Ha Jin: When the exiled become the local, “the local then becomes a place of consequence and political investment.”

Cosmopolitanism among Empires

Wu Mali: Aims her political allegories and culturally specific articulations for local consumption, local viewing, and local critique.

tique is problematic when it serves to construct the exiled subject’s past in China as distress in self-conscious contrast to the present condition ofopportunity and self-expression in the United States. That teleological narrative is an eager immigrant’s form ofassimilationism. Similarly, the moment when the Chinese immigrant writer who writes in English, Ha Jin, narrativizes lives and experiences in the United States, rather than traumas that happened in China, is the moment when Ha Jin becomes a local writer rather than an exiled writer. The local then becomes a place ofconsequence and political investment. In other words, ethicality does not translate across national and transnational boundaries. The other important contrast pertains to the possession and use ofcultural materials. Most ofthe immigrant art from China that has gained prominence in the United States at the turn ofthe twenty-first century is profuse with cultural signs and symbols that are easily recognizable as Chinese. Xu Bing’s Book ofthe Sky series and Gu Wenda’s work with Chinese calligraphy are two prominent examples ofhow the deconstruction and critique ofChinese tradition (be it Confucian or Maoist) forms the core oftheir conceptual works. “China,” so to speak, is the cache, the rich repository ofcultural materials and elements that are available for the immigrant Chinese artists’ use, as their claim on that repository is supposed to be unquestionable. Hung Liu’s critique offoot-binding falls into the same category, as does her use ofimages from the imperial court ofthe Qing dynasty in the Last Dynasty series ofoil paintings. Without the cache of“China” as cultural capital, how do Taiwan artists enter the transnational terrain? What decipherable local cultural elements do they “own” to mark their nationality and ethnicity in particular, or uniqueness in general? For reasons explained in the previous chapters, even though the Sinophone culture as a translated Chinese culture in diaspora can serve as this resource, its users themselves are often paralyzed by anxieties and ambivalences due to the confusion over what is Chinese, what is Sinophone, and what is Taiwanese. Consequently, as Taiwan searches for a foothold in the transnational arena ofcultural circulation, Taiwan artists find no ready recourse to master cultural codes easily recognizable by international audiences to make sense ofa particular critique. If we look at the work ofWu Mali, who ofall ofTaiwan’s female artists is probably the most frequently exhibited outside Taiwan, we find a tendency toward universalistic, or shall we say, cosmopolitan themes, themes that have moorings in Western culture as much as Taiwanese and Sinophone cultures. Cosmopolitanism among Empires

For her internationally exhibited works, instead of being a minor artist waiting to be “recognized,” she refuses “transnational

politics of recognition in global multiculturalism and the role of a representative for her nation.”

large window. Rows ofbooks are placed on these metal shelves, and in the middle is a table with a glass bottle filled with shreds ofpaper (see color plate 10). Upon closer inspection, these books bearing all kinds ofclassic titles turn out to be clear acrylic boxes filled with shredded paper. The books include the Bible, Buddhist sutras, Confucian texts, Greek mythology, Nobel Prize–winning works ofliterature, and so on, and they are all shredded to pieces, stu‹ng the acrylic boxes lining the shelves as well as the glass jar on the table in the middle ofthe installation (see color plate 11). While the shredded books make a clearly critical commentary on the world’s canonical culture and literature, they also stand autonomously as objects d’art emerging from the destruction ofclassics. By debunking classics from various parts ofthe world, the reified culturalisms that these classics represent are literally dissolved into shreds ofpaper, which are material embodiments ofa new global culture remade from the classics, rematerialized, or as Wu Mali puts it, becoming something like monosodium glutamate. 30 This act ofclearing is also an act ofagency, deploying global resources ofculture as she sees fit. The other work is called Sweeties ofthe Century from 1999. Wu Mali had several exhibitions ofthis show in various sites (Germany, Taiwan, the United States, etc.), and the main idea ofthe installation is a kind ofreminder that historically significant figures from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, no matter whether they were villains or heroes, were all once children. By evocative presentation ofthe sharedness ofchildhood, Wu suggests the possibility ofa utopic, universal humanism. She “makes big people small again,” so to speak, 31 and thus goes back to the childhood moments as unknown promises that could have turned out diªerently. The portraits ofHitler, Rosa Luxemburg, Eileen Chang, Lin Hwai-min, Petra Kelly ofthe Green Party in Germany are all included and juxtaposed in an unchronological fashion. Depending on the sites ofthe exhibition, she has also called the series Victorian Sweeties (because the exhibition was in a Victorian building, etc.). This last composite image entitled Sweeties ofthe Century shows Oscar Wilde, Michel Foucault, Eileen Chang, Lin Hwai-min, Wu Da-you, Ernest Hemingway, and Taiwan’s vice president, Annette Lu. 32 Wu assumes a degree ofagency toward the resources ofworld culture and approaches them with the same level ofseriousness or dedication as she did to providing political commentary on Taiwan in her earlier work. Rooted in a multiplicity ofaddress, these site-specific works dare to ponder universal themes; deploying a multiplicity ofreferences, these works dare to refuse the particularisms

“A decontextualized Cultural Revolution critique is problematic when it serves to construct the exiled subject’s past in China as distress in self-conscious contrast to the present condition of opportunity and self-expression in the United States.”

ofnational allegory and self-Orientalization (in postmodern garb), and take the risk ofnonrecognition. One may align this position with other nonreactive vernacular cosmopolitanism that seeks to go beyond ressentiment, beyond what Manthia Diawara has called “the identity prison-house.” 33 But the vernacular cosmopolitanism thus conceived and transcended is a form ofarticulation within one nation-state and thus does not transport readily to the transnational context. Wu’s position in the transnational context, in refusing and challenging cultural particularism, is historically speciﬁc to Taiwan’s position on the edge ofempires, where even the articulation ofressentiment does not have any ready cache per se. She enters the transnational as a cosmopolitan artist perhaps because even national determinations are a luxury. Hers is a form ofhyperbolic universalism articulated by a minor transnational artist, which may exaggerate cosmopolitan access, but in the end attesting to the vision that cultural work is the site oftransformative social practice when political and other realms are thoroughly colonized by the contesting and colluding wills ofempires.

26 Wu Mali, Sweeties of the Century (2000), composite imagery. Used with permission of the artist.

vak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 77–95. The quotation is from p. 94.

20.Shu-mei Shih, The Lure ofthe Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 2001), chap. 5.

21.Cosmopolitics as a politics ofdemocracy in the world is how Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah use the term in their Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1998).

22.The process ofsubstitution here involves (post)colonial ressentiment expressed against Britain becoming a popular theory in the United States academy.

23.Hal Foster, The Return ofthe Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 180.

24.ArifDirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age ofGlobal Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). The title chapter referenced here is chapter 3.

25.See Linda Alcoª’s Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) . A chapter from this book entitled “In Defense ofIdentity Politics” was delivered as a lecture at UCLA, Transnational and Transcolonial Multicampus Research Group lecture series, January 11, 2005. Also see her “Who’s Afraid ofIdentity Politics?” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament ofPostmodernism, ed. Paula Moya and M. Hames-Garcia, 312–44 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 2000), for an earlier critique ofidentity politics. I discussed this essay in some detail in the introduction.

Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983), 34–36.

26.Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,” in Perpetual ] 216 [ Notes

27.The original meaning is meant to promote a consciousness for public service as opposed to narrow focus on individual or private gain.

28.Here the only exception may be Taiwan cinema, whose auteurs such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang have a small following in international ﬁlm circles.

29.These remarks are from “Rumors about the Venice Biennial Participants” (eryu feiwu Weinisi shuangnianzhan mingdan chulu), China Times Daily, March 11, 1995; Chen Shun-chu, “How Far Is the International ‘Stage’? To Act in a Drama across the Ocean?” (guoji xiuchang you duo yuan? piaoyang guohai qu banxi?), The Artist (yishujia) 314 (July 2001): 10; letter to the author by Wu Mali, dated November 14, 2000.

30.http://web.ukonline.co.uk/n.paradoxa/maliwu2.htm

31.Information originally available at http://www.apt3.net/apt3/artists/artist_bio/mali_wu _a.htm.

32.Eileen Chang, Lin Hwai-min, and Wu Da-you are household names among Taiwan’s educated. Eileen Chang is a Shanghai writer exiled to Taiwan and the United States, whose work continues to fascinate generations ofscholars and readers, thus engendering a school ofstudy called “Chang Studies.” Lin Hwai-min, the artistic director ofCloud Gates Dance Company, is considered a national treasure in Taiwan for his contribution to Taiwan arts and for his international reputation. Wu Da-you is a scientist at the Academica Sinica, the highest research institution in Taiwan.

33.See Manthia Diawara, In Search ofAfrica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998),

31. CONCLUSION 1.The phrase comes from Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 2003). 19.Mahasweta

alog, Hong Kong Arts Center, June 23, 1997, to July 12, 1997.

1.Eric Hobsbawm, The Age ofEmpire, 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 50–55.

2.Ibid., 34–45.

3.Ibid., 67–68.

4.David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

5.Ross Terrill, The New Chinese Empire and What It Means For the United States. (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

6.A spate ofrecent scholarship has focused on China during the Qing dynasty as an empire. From this perspective one may infer that twentieth-century China was more an anomaly in a long imperial tradition, which may find its newest expression in the twenty-first century. See, for instance, Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest ofCentral Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2001). It is also telling that Qing imperialism is suddenly becoming a hot topic just when China is beginning to flex its muscles in the international scene.

7.Xavier de C*** , Empire 2.0: A Modest Proposal for a United States ofthe West, prologue by Régis Debray, trans. Joseph Rowe (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004). That Debray’s book somehow captures an incipient structure offeeling in the West is seen by the fact that Timothy Garton Ash’s book Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future ofthe West (New York: Random House, 2004) proposes uniting the West and spreading democracy in the same vein with utmost seriousness.

8.de C***, Empire 2.0, 34, 43, 131.

9.Ibid., 53.

10.Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003).

11.For more information on Club 51, see chapter 2.

Notes ] 215 [

12.V.G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism (1978; repr., London: Verso, 2005), 67, 114, 291.

13.Perry Anderson, “Stand-oª in Taiwan,” London Review ofBooks (June 2004): 12–17.

14.Kiernan, America, 364.

15.Refer back to chapters 3 and 4 on the intricacy ofTaiwan’s relationship with China.

16.Hobsbawn, Age ofEmpire, 79.

17.Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993.)

18.Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation ofCultures, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313 (Chicago: University ofIllinois Press, 1988); Homi Bhabha, The Location ofCulture (New York: Routledge, 1994), see esp. chap. 4.

19.Mahasweta Devi’s story discussed and quoted in “Woman in Diªerence,” in Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 77–95. The quotation is from p. 94.

20.Shu-mei Shih, The Lure ofthe Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 2001), chap. 5.

22.The process ofsubstitution here involves (post)colonial ressentiment expressed against

How Chow and Shih’s positions and perspectives on translation differ?

Can we imagine a world of interlinguistic and intercultural coevalness and equivalence?

Or: is this kind of imagination constructive or even necessary?

How to practice “coevalness” while negotiating the ethics of translation in artistic, cultural, curatorial, and organizational work? What ethical questions are involved in such imagination and practice of coevalness?

- Coevalness is intellectually comprehensive as a concept, but hard to put in practice, or even imagine concretely; it’s not just multiculturalism

- What’s the possible harm of such imagination (post-raciality doesn’t exist)

“Translation” is presumed one-directional; how do we make space for the participants to make efforts to approximating from multiple sides?

Part III

Varied distances, translatability, and relatability

opacity of inscrutable surfaces

aesthetic and affective encounters, practicing sociality other-wise, social potential of affective relating

“Historically, inscrutability has been employed as a powerful Orientalist discourse through which a masculinized Euro-American subjectivity emerges, producing the centrality of the Western knower who names the racial, gender, religious, and/or national other as ‘impenetrable or unfathomable to investigation; quite unintelligible, entirely mysterious. ’ The particulars of the Orientalized person, place, and/or thing are often flattened, homogenized, and objectified in the process, appearing as a surface that can or cannot be penetrated.”

> Viet Thanh Nguyen from Oriental to “Asian American”

surface relations give time/space for forms of feminist, queer, trans, and Asian diasporic world-making

“When further considered, however, the casting of the Asian as ‘inscrutable other’ also suggests a racialization wherein the other knows something that cannot be accessed from without. To come into being as an inscrutable other is to have claim to modes of doing, knowing, and being that are inaccessible from an outside perspective. To claim inscrutability from an Asian diasporic positionality, then, is to protect a creative space and time in which minoritized lifeworlds may exist for their own audience.”

> vagueness

racialized and gendered tropes as aesthetic dynamic and affective mood useful as rhetorics vaguely Asian is also an aesthetic dynamic and affective mood

“With this book, I hope to offer conceptual frameworks for interpreting and practicing sociality other-wise, with critiques of the elevation of knowing over relating, and for extending curiosity for affective modes whose social potentials are currently dismissed. (Huang, 2022, p. 35)”

“Surface Relations explores aesthetic modes of inscrutability through queer racial forms of invisibility, silence, impenetrability, flatness/flexibility, distance, and withholding.”

Vivian L. Huang, “Introduction” In Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.

distant feeling, distant relations

Vivian L. Huang, “Distance, Negativity, and Slutty

Sociality in Tseng Kwong Chi’s Performance

Photographs.” In Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, 135–154. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.

DISTANCE , NEGATIVITY

, AND SLUTTY SOCIALITY IN TSENG KWONG CHI ’ S PER FOR MANCE PHOTO GRAPHS

Asian racial modes of critique are entirely obfuscated by the reiterative public casting of Asian Americans as bland model minorities with no needs, creativity, or politics of their own. Yet Asian American and diasporic people nevertheless navigate political realities and make internal space to negotiate racialized feelings of loss and grief that are often publicly disavowed. From Mika Tajima’s installed environments, Surface Relations now shifts to another artist’s affectively flat and distant relationship to his environs. While Asian American communities have been repeatedly described as invisible, silent, and withdrawn, this chapter studies the ardently relational work of performing distance. These mournful and campy moods and modes attenuate

Asian American people to minoritarian life, to the cleavages between invisibility and silence that permit presence and the possibility of shared existence. These sad, mad modes of racial being—the inscrutable difference of Asiatic racialization—need to be recognized as minoritarian to create the potential for collective sharing out and building with that does not stall at a defense of Asian American legitimacy.

in this chapter, then, as a form of racial attunement, I mean to theorize the capacious possibility of distance, not as a mode of turning away and making relationality impossible but as a queer diasporic practice of relating, widening the aperture of social possibility.

Tseng Kwong Chi as the Inscrutable Chinese

In a thirty-six-inch-square gelatin print titled Disneyland, California, 1979, two familiar figures stand beside one another (see figure 5.1). To the viewer’s left, the Disney character Goofy poses in a cheeky stance, and to the right stands a man wearing sunglasses and a suit made notorious by Mao Zedong. In the background, striped table umbrellas and neatly manicured hedges set the stage for the eponymous amusement park in Southern California. Both Goofy and the uniformed man face the camera, though their postures are strikingly different. Goofy (performed by an anonymized actor donning a Goofy costume and character head) stands with his left knee sharply bent toward the man and his right leg extended toward the camera, revealing the sole of a cartoonishly big shoe.2 Goofy’s head is slightly downcast as if in the midst of a playful guffaw, the white glove of his left hand brought to his mouth and his right arm bent in a four-digited wave to the camera. In this meticulously rehearsed pose, the performer of Goofy appears to deliver on his namesake.

While Goofy embodies the floppy friendliness of the Disney canine, the figure beside him stands rigid with stoicism. Though this foreign- uniformed

Distance, Negativity 137

figure may not quite be a household name as Goofy, I would suggest that the costumed man in this photograph performs the role of the “inscrutable Chinese” as an instantly recognizable, if imprecise, figure in the American imaginary. Just as much a consumable and iconic character as Goofy, the inscrutable Chinese in this photograph stands tall with arms along his side, directly facing the camera as if not acknowledging Goofy’s presence beside him. From the looks of his tensed body and facial expression, the inscrutable Chinese could be photographing himself with a statue or a building, as much as another sentient being. He betrays no affective regard for Goofy. The man stands

with his black boots together, his mouth pressed in a line and his eyes covered by black, reflective sunglasses. A white shirt with sleeves and a collar peek out from under the man’s utilitarian overshirt, where an identification badge is clipped to his left breast pocket, displaying a bespectacled headshot of him. Unlike the actor for Goofy, the performer of the inscrutable Chinese is not anonymized to the viewer, for the photograph signals to his role as the photographer. A shutter release cord connects Tseng Kwong Chi’s right hand to the bottom edge of the photograph, toward the viewer.

Tseng Kwong Chi’s campy performance of inscrutable Chinese in his expansive self-portraiture series from 1979 to his death at age thirty-nine, in 1990, epitomizes the queer sociality made possible through surface relations. Performing surface through facial withholding and virtuosic photography, blending conventions of self-portraiture, landscape photography, and tourist photography, Tseng embraces the abject inscrutability ascribed to Chinese and Asian people and hails queer forms of viewing that allow for promiscuous sociality even in visual solitude. Tseng’s minoritarian aesthetic of distance in his prolific photography work positions his body as a kind of mirrored surface to his surrounding environments, occasioning reflection on his coordinates of time and space. This chapter thinks through the performance of distance in negotiations of Asian masculinity, where distance is less about privacy, pride/shame, or insularity and more about queer attunement to comparative (if not comparable) racial histories of violence and a visible bodying forth that memorializes rather than abets the erasure of minoritarian stories.

In this image, one of his many Disneyland photographs, Tseng’s performance as the decidedly ungoofy Chinese other, in the wonderland of the Mouse House, ironizes visuality as artifice. In the amusement park, Goofy or any Disney character is expected to be outgoing and warm, actively sought out for group photos and autographs. When one asks for a photograph with Goofy, one might anticipate a certain affective response to standing by the character’s side and—whether that in actuality might include delight, fright, suspicion, or humiliation—the compulsory comportment would be one of happiness. Tseng as the inscrutable Chinese, in rigid visual and affective contrast to the floppy Goofy, however, reveals no warmth in this photograph. Meanwhile, Goofy, with his predetermined facial expression, appears not to notice Tseng’s serious countenance. This picture contrasts the ubiquity and enforced warmth of Disney characters like Goofy with the recognizability and inscrutability of the Chinese other in one frame. Both performers play their parts with such virtuosity that there appears to be no live dynamic between them.

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Such deadpan performances of the inscrutable Chinese were the subject of Tseng’s self-portraiture career, creating a persona in the “Mao suit”–donning foreigner whose authority few interlocutors appeared to question. A downtown darling of 1980s New York City, born in British-occupied Hong Kong and educated in Paris, Tseng sutured the lines between life and art with an oeuvre of more than 100,000 photographs. Using the camera as a social passport, Tseng worked as a photojournalist for glossy magazines like gq and Vanity Fair and the downtown publication Soho Weekly News, where he documented his gallivants in photo essays, including crashing the Met Costume Gala in 1980 or photographing some of the most powerful neoconservative politicians of the Reagan administration while smirking in a seersucker suit. From 1979 to 1989, Tseng would travel around the continental United States, photographing himself with his father’s Rolleiflex camera and a shutter release, and across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with assistant and boyfriend Kristoffer Haynes and a Hasselblad camera. Amy Brandt describes Tseng’s “performance as a perpetual tourist, masquerading as a Chinese official, and a globe-trekker whose ironic presence conjures the displacement and disjunctive realities of the Asian diaspora.”3 In Christine Lombard’s short film East Meets West, Tseng describes himself as a performance artist bodying forth “an inquisitive traveler, a witness of [his] time, and an ambiguous ambassador.”

performing Asian alienness as hypervisible yet inscrutable quietly spectacularizes the omission of Black, Indigenous, and migrant laboring bodies

relationship between the foreign figure embodied by Tseng, and sites of settler colonial violence and Indigenous struggle

It may be misleading to call Tseng’s photographs self-portraits, since Tseng’s persona in these portraits troubles fidelity to the concept of self. In much of the series, as in the one with Goofy, Tseng’s fisted right hand holds a shutter release, a technical device that allows him to compose, feature in, and capture the portrait. Tseng’s performance of the Asian alien has inspired many scholars, including Dan Bacalzo, Iyko Day, Warren Liu, Mari Matsuda, Sean Metzger, Chandan Reddy, and Joshua Chambers-Letson. As Bacalzo observes, Tseng’s portraits obscure if not refuse the concept of an authentic self. His identification badge, featuring a passport-style portrait with him donning the mirrored sunglasses, reads “Visitor/Visiteur” and “SlutForArt”— the former a nod to both his presumed foreigner status and his art training in Paris and fluency in French (a fact that surprised and impressed Yves Saint Laurent when interviewed at the Met Gala) and theorized here as Tseng’s performance of distance, and the latter appellation to be discussed in this chapter as promiscuous migrant sociality.

Tseng’s artful shenanigans in the first year of his ambitious series, known together as East Meets West and The Expeditionary Series, critique the racial affective norms of common sociality.4 Tseng’s photographs show how

Asian racialization disrupts social norms of belonging based on warm capitalist aesthetics and positive affect. This chapter analyzes the portraiture of Tseng Kwong Chi to theorize distance as an aesthetic and affective mode of disidentificatory inscrutability employed by Asian American and diasporic performers. To position distance as an Asian American and diasporic affect, as a racial feeling as well as a racial form, we need look no further than the contemporary political landscape of feeling and race, and how the perception of Asian Americans’ lack of positive personality would structure or reproduce racial discourse in our times.

Distant Feeling, Distant Relations

Distance (between people and land, people and history) in Tseng’s work is spatial—spanning coordinates across the Americas, Western Europe, and Japan—as well as temporal, the series accumulating over the ten-year period and end of the artist’s life (not essential, but redundant) of aids -related illness. Tseng’s art making in the 1980s, at the height of hiv terror and state homophobia, was powered by and constitutive of a queer downtown arts lifeworld. Distance is aesthetically registered through Tseng’s deliberate coordination of space and time over the course of this series. We sense out distance in the relationship between his figure and the background and foreground, distance in the viewer’s relation to 1979, for example, or between where one is viewing or reading this and his travels in the Badlands of South Dakota. Distance, too, is registered as affect in Tseng’s stoic performance, a campy distance that winks from behind mirrored sunglasses and withholds intentionality or context for why he was where he was, when he was.

Questions of belonging via distance resonate for immigrant, Asian, and queer demographics in the United States. As David L. Eng writes, “Suspended between departure and arrival, Asian Americans remain permanently disenfranchised from home, relegated to a nostalgic sense of its loss or to an optative sense of its unattainability.”5 Describing Asian America as a “siteless locale with no territorial sovereignty,” Eng reminds readers that “queer entitlements to home and nation-state remain doubtful as well.”6 The materiality of distance and place are precisely what Tseng emphasizes in his travel series. The artist’s biography further supports a transnational mode of being both here and there. Tseng was born in 1950 in Hong Kong; immigrated with his family in 1966 to Vancouver, Canada, and then to Montreal; finished his art training in Paris in 1977 first as a painter, then as a photographer; and moved to New York in 1978. A self-proclaimed “snow queen” who

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it invokes the affinities between the affective and the spatial

lived on three continents in his abbreviated life, Tseng strategically deploys discourses of the Asian perpetual foreigner as doing something more than recounting presiding rhetorics of unassimilability. An analysis of the visual codes in Tseng’s photographs registers important social and ethical implications for Asian inscrutability.

A rhetoric of distant feeling is useful for a robust theory of Asian inscrutability because it invokes the affinities between the affective and the spatial. “Distant” describes something far away in space or time, or (of a person) not intimate; cool or reserved. Feeling distant reminds us that it is through feelings that we map our worlds. Feeling distant marks a racialized affect that looks singular and separate. Moreover, feeling distant acknowledges a separation that is spatially marked and informed by the diasporic, the migratory, and the transnational. Thus, “distant” as a concept bridges the language of geography and the language of affect. Distance signifies an abstraction that separates two or more things, without specifics of measurement. The relationship between space and feeling of course need not be correlative: one can be touching something and yet feel distant from it. Conversely, one can be continents or years away from something and feel close to it. I understand distance as bringing more texture and nuance to conversations on racialized affective life, including that on racial melancholia, isolation, loneliness, and depression. Legally, politically, and historically, this distance has been structured by policies of Asian exclusion, antimiscegenation, deportation, incarceration, labor exploitation, and other forms of social alienation.

Tseng’s performance of distance through portraiture registers Asian and queer diasporic practice in the visual historical record. To feel distant is to identify a separation from the norm, to experience difference on the body and in the psyche. To feel distant is not to feel close and yet it is also to index an object from which to feel distant. In this sense, feeling distant emphasizes the relational aspect of what can feel like a solitary experience. Further, since one can feel distant to multiple things at once, and since “distance” does not privilege either location (of “here” or “there”; nation or diaspora; settler or Indigenous) as major or minor, central or marginal, I find distance a useful concept to both work against antirelational and binaristic logics and insist on a constellation of relations.7

Tseng’s work teaches me about the relationship between Asian visuality and distance as affective comportment. As studies evidence, and as those of us working with and living as Asian American youth learn, it is difficult to feel unseen in a rhetorical landscape where visual representation is equated with existence, warm feeling with humanity. Visual reflection is desired and

desirable for modern subject formation. As chapter 1 explores, omitted realist repre sentation holds undeniable psychic effects for invisibilized minorities. What the metric of visual repre sentation c annot perceive or track as desirable, however, are those modes of desiring, being, and becoming that are not premised on reflection but instead occasion other forms of selfmaking and being in time and space, other forms that may seem fractured or out of joint with a 1:1 ratio of self and image. Asian American culture evidences that realist reflection is not the only mode of becoming, self-knowing, and world-making. Distance, as a disidentification from an Asian burden of liveliness in the expression of cheer and hospitality, is another necessary and vital mode.

To be clear, I do not wish to romanticize feelings of alienation but rather to illuminate the social labors of alienation. Rather than being antirelational, feeling distant is insistently relational since it indexes a liminal space between. Feeling distant recognizes that feeling differently and feeling different are in fact forms of doing the emotional work for collective belonging—a belonging that does not depend on the warmth of American multiculturalism. This affective labor is often rendered invisible, made to be nothing, a nothingness that this book archives through its aesthetic objects and its considerations of inscrutable epistemologies.

Happiness, Racialized Masculinity, and a Capitalist Emotional Culture

“Rather than being antirelational, feeling distant is insistently relational since it indexes a liminal space between.”

Attunement to affect discourse around Asian Americans’ unlikability equips readers with the ability to identify and critique a racialized affective economy operative in the United States, an affective economy that reproduces systemic values and inequities of race, gender, sexuality, immigrant status, and class. Sara Ahmed’s by-now famous formulation of a “feminist killjoy” orientation within “affective economies” critiques the charge often put on women, in particular, to smile and be happy for the comfort of others. Ahmed’s notion of the feminist as “affect alien” can support my idea here not only of feminists but of Asian Americans as interpellated subjects historically positioned to experience misogynist discrimination regardless of gender, and Asian Americans as affect aliens. Ahmed writes, “We cannot always close the gap between how we feel and how we think we should feel. To feel the gap might be to feel a sense of disappointment. . . . We become strangers, or affect aliens, in such moments.”8 Ahmed’s discursive “gap” here between feeling and desirable feeling names the distance that radiates around and between strangers

“[Tseng's photographs] are not about an inwardness of self-discovery or autobiography but gesture outward and around to his periphery, to his surroundings, widening the question of the relationship between the artist’s body and the site as historical residue, between the artist's body and the viewing subject, and then transversely, between the geopolitical site and the viewing subject.” (Huang, 2022, p. 161)

The sun highlights his uniform, such that the train conductor’s dark tie and suit,

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invisibility would suggest the absence of these figures and histories, I suggest that an Asian Americanist and queer visual practice of inscrutability, of humbling ourselves to a reading position of not knowing, allows us to see Tseng’s photographs as performing social distance toward different practices of historiography and embodied relation, ones that can easily be misread as apathetic, asocial, or antisocial but in fact are socially operative, socially performative.

Present Distant Witness

To further study the performative work of Asian distance in Tseng’s oeuvre, let us consider two other images from Tseng’s performance documents. In one, a short-haired, uniformed Tseng bends over a field of cotton blooms, cupping a boll of white fluff in the left hand, his right hand in a fist (see figure 5 3). Tseng’s face angles down toward the cotton, in three-quarters profile. His mouth is closed, and the sunglasses obscure the direction of his gaze. Clipped onto his left chest pocket is the identification badge. Though its written content is illegible to the viewer, the bright reflection from his sunglasses conveys an alien-like visage. He stands with his legs together but the flurry of cotton stems obscures his feet. The field of both soft and prickly occupies roughly three-fifths of the vertical space of the photograph, with a ribbon of light gray sky illuminating the top of the image. A sloped wooden roof and two leafless trees appear in the skyline. Other wise, the composition focuses on the tangle of cotton and the man dressed as a Chinese dignitary. The shirt appears wrinkled, perhaps from the trek to this position in the field, yet a crease down the right pant leg suggests attention to a crisp outfit. The title of the photograph, Cotton Field, Tennessee, 1979, locates us in a space of a historic, if generic, site of enslaved Black labor in the American South as well as a time that ramps up to neoconservative policies and neoliberalism. If, as in Bellows Falls, we consider Tseng’s visual presence as performing his not belonging, pivoting our attention, then, to the other wise starkly unpopulated surroundings, we note the absence of the cotton field workers who might be imagined in his place. And from there we note the invisibility of any enslaved people who worked colonial cotton plantations or sharecropped cotton fields under Jim Crow. The violent systems and visceral histories of cotton fields are not visually represented, however. Rather, Tseng, standing in a mess of sharp branches, displays a posture that suggests a sort of reverence and focus on the cotton’s bright fibers.

Tseng’s performance of communist drag and inscrutable witness in the American South inverts the work of visuality, of figural/tourist foreground and environmental background. An inscrutably queer viewing of his photograph

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150 Chapter 5 allows us to remember not only the enslaved labor of Black workers but also the relationship between Chinese migrant workers in those same cotton fields and shifting forms of racialization and racism. We may think with Gary Okihiro and Moon-Ho Jung, who write about coolies and cane, about the triangulation of white Americans, Black Americans, and Asian Americans. As Okihiro writes, “The African slave and Asian coolie were kinsmen and kinswomen in that world created by European masters.”20 Tseng’s photographs refuse the instrumentalization of Asianness to reinforce a binaristic Black-white racial hierarchy.

allows us to remember not only the enslaved labor of Black workers but also the relationship between Chinese migrant workers in those same cotton fields and shifting forms of racialization and racism. We may think with Gary Okihiro and Moon-Ho Jung, who write about coolies and cane, about the triangulation of white Americans, Black Americans, and Asian Americans. As Okihiro writes, “The African slave and Asian coolie were kinsmen and kinswomen in that world created by European masters.”20 Tseng’s photographs refuse the instrumentalization of Asianness to reinforce a binaristic Black-white racial hierarchy.

Chapter 5

150

In Monument Valley, Arizona, 1987, a grand landscape of ancient buttes, an expansive sky of clouds, and a foreground of desert flora overwhelm the viewer in virtuosic display (see figure 5.4). The left half of the photograph features a prominent landmass of sedimented rock, reaching up as though to touch a wide cloud that floats across the photograph. Between the camera and the rock stands a leafy tree, its thick trunk the darkest concentration in the photograph, contrasting with the bright white of the clouds above. On the right side of the landmass, near the center of the image, is a protuberance of note. On the same plane as the tree, in the right half of the photograph,

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Tseng stands in profile, facing up toward the landmass, wearing his uniform, sunglasses, and expressionless gaze. Behind him in the distance are other land formations, though his image is mostly framed by sky. A fluff y cloud floats above him as well, mirroring the landmass’s vertical reach on a smaller scale. Here, Tseng’s figure paradoxically blends in with the grand surroundings, the size and verticality of his person mirroring the land formation above; or perhaps, the land formation reflecting an elevated version of the human. The photograph suggests a reverential relationship between human figure and monumental landscape, one of recognition and splendor, and one effected by visual distance in the multiple backgrounds.

As with the Cotton Field photograph, a history of racial violence is all but invisibilized in Tseng’s photographs of Monument Valley. Though the image’s title does not make this explicit, Monument Valley is registered land of the Navajo Nation. Tseng’s photograph attunes the viewer to the relationship between the foreign figure embodied by Tseng, the self-proclaimed “Visitor/ Visiteur,” and the site of settler colonial violence and Indigenous struggle. Monument Valley may be read as the film site of John Wayne westerns, thereby representing the West in popular culture and signaling, at once, an iconic Hollywood American West as well as the haunted and spectacularized site of the attempted genocide of First Nations people.

I understand Tseng’s performance of inscrutable Chinese as embodying the distance, remove, and flatness that has historically been excluded and backgrounded. Tseng’s performing body as the inscrutable Chinese, paradoxically, embodies the aestheticization of Asian male labor as backdrop. If Tseng shows how Asian male performativity functions through the embodiment of distance, then we can read his self/landscape portraiture as doing something inventive with the camping and layering of distance and visual omission. That is, the landscapes of cotton field and desert plain often serve as the iconic literal background to US national imagery. And Tseng shows, too, that the Asian male figure functions as still another kind of racialized gender backdrop that is also fundamental to US national imagery in its distance. By foregrounding his costumed body in these landscape photographs, Tseng effects a layering of invisibilized histories and modes that have served as the grounds of US nation building. This layering is also a flattening since the photograph is constrained by its two-dimensionality, and so the photographs refuse a holistic capture. Tseng’s performative constellation of national backdrop enacts a queer relationship to distance, one that makes way for the negative image and occasions curiosity and intimacy between spaces. Tseng’s formal relation to these racialized landscapes opens out interpretations as to

how to understand the forms composed together. Distance, then, is not only a performance technique that Tseng employs in these photographs, mashing up portraiture with landscape photography; it is also a queer viewing practice that refracts our attention to what is not pictured.

Tseng’s performance of queer, promiscuous distance in these photographs positions inscrutable distance as an aesthetic form and affect that opens out Asian racial performativity as vitally imbricated in comparative racial studies and queer diasporic critique. Tseng enacts promiscuous and long distance as a queer relational form that follows Summer Kim Lee’s critique of the “compulsory sociability” of Asian Americans (recalling the low scores of positive personality) and performs distance on an interpersonal and disciplinary level, refusing white supremacist logics of what has been deemed appropriate racial subject matter.21 By looking at these images side by side, as well as studying others in Tseng’s prolific oeuvre, we may articulate a visual culture of inscrutability that both registers that which is invisibilized, as the violence of racial capitalism, and at the same time refuses figuration and positive comportment as the only claims to humanity and historical presence.

If we pull through the theme of the anticapitalist killjoy through Tseng’s photographs that implicitly comment on histories of racial capitalism, then we better understand the disruptive affective and political economies that his photographs occasion. The performance of distance has been thought in relation to the genre of landscape. Tseng’s play with tourist and landscape photography conventions allows a campy critique of how land is both monumentalized and erased of history, treated as inanimate matter untouched by time. The nonpresence of human figures is a convention of landscape photography, but one that has romanticized and ahistoricized the land. Iyko Day’s exquisite analysis of Tseng’s self-portraiture in iconic Canadian national parks (e.g., Banff ) offers an Asian Americanist critique of settler colonialist practices of celebrated Canadian nation-building landscape photography. Her scholarship reads Tseng’s work within discourses of eugenics, biopolitics, labor, and landscape photography. Day writes, “As an index of the abstract, degenerative value of nonreproductive, alien sexualities, [Tseng] highlights the eugenic spirit of white racial reproduction and regeneration projected onto the landscape.” 22 Day’s scholarship allows me to think through Tseng’s photographs in the Americas, including the Tennessee cotton field, Monument Valley, and Puerto Rico.

Distance need not be understood as antisocial or asocial but as a critique of the terms of sociality, and a refusal of being-in-time premised on closeness of vision or warmth of affect. As Day writes, “Given that landscape art

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of this period was broadly concerned with honoring nature’s vitality and universalizing power, the intrusion of Tseng’s alien body is a sign not of life-affirming incorporation but of extravagant degeneration.” 23 While some readers may interpret the alien body’s “extravagant degeneration” as a kind of antirelational shattering of the abject self, I theorize distance as a form of queer diasporic relationality, within an Asian Americanist orientation that critiques the antirelational thesis within queer theory. Asian Americanness necessarily bodies forth a queer opposition to the US nation in its nationalist and nativist imaging, in a way aligned with Muñozian queer utopia. Just as brown and Black kids cannot afford a politics of “no future” in Lee Edelman’s white-normative thesis, for alien, migrant, and transnational people (including children of immigrants), the future cannot be forsaken or taken for granted.24 Neither can the terms of migrant futurity be premised on spatial or temporal assimilation or visual incorporation. Though Asian insularity within the Americas may be narrated as a kind of antirelationality, I critique the rhetoric of insularity as something that may be a cipher for desirable optics of sociality.

The Promiscuity of Long Distance

To articulate distance as a mode of feeling, sensing, and relating is to reorient a common perception of Asians as self-sufficient and insular perpetual foreigners to the nation, as gestured to in Tseng’s identification as a visitor/ visiteur. My formulation of distance as a queer-of-color aesthetic mode also plays with the antinormativity of long-distance relationships and nonmonogamous relationships. I wish to hold space for these open, forms of intimacy. An external proscription of asexuality or hyposexuality onto Asian men writes these robust forms of sexuality and sociality out of possibility. However, Tseng’s photographs render a kind of promiscuous and robust

affects must be read as anticipating inscrutable worlds as well as inhabiting them in the present via performance. Further, Tseng’s performative distance not only evidences and enacts possibilities of movement, and the conditions for moving, but also invites the viewer’s possibility of being moved.

In the Distance

Tseng’s costumed figure quietly spectacularizes the omission of Black, Indigenous, and migrant laboring bodies within the photographic frame. Whether or not we, like Tseng, prostrate ourselves in front of these seething sites, we

are entangled in promiscuous relations across space and time. The stakes of interpreting Tseng’s photographs as a form of slutty visual historiography via distance is to refuse a narrative that renders Asian Americans visible through limited optics of model minoritarian assimilation, as desiring reflection through a straight white optic, as well as to refuse a reading practice that enforces queer intimacy as necessarily about a warm and accessible homonormative couple form. If there is something queer about Asian America, it is not only the grief that pervades immigrant, refugee, labor, and war histories but also the resilient tracks and bridges that Asian Americans and other p eople of color have built and rebuilt to continue to hold on to what remains through those losses, the histories and lives that persist everywhere we are. Though it may seem counterintuitive, distance is another form of bridging. Though Tseng is the only visualized human figure, he does not in fact stand alone. We viewers activate and witness his images, as I attempt to do here. By standing outside the exegesis of the image, we may find ourselves hailed into the frame, into this queer affiliation of space, time, and figure. Despite ongoing histories that a/sexualize Asian bodies—in relation to an economic mandate for racial utility, utility under racial capitalism—modes of critical desire persist and are enacted by quotidian and spectacular performances of robust, distant intimacy. The distance of foreignness is not necessarily or simply prohibitive of sociality or coalition; Tseng shows it to be a vital mode of embodied context. Tseng’s performance of promiscuous distance, then, is a way to both “stay in,” in Kim Lee’s idiom, and be out, literally outdoors and in public spaces, while also refusing the transparency or nonthreatening friendliness of normative Asian American comportment.33

Distance figures in a queer reading not only as cold refusal of the social but as an alternative mode of relationality, a form of intimacy that is not for the judgment of external viewers who long for welcoming looks so much as it is the expansive bridging and wide array of feelings that looking can enact. Intimacy here is less between two individuals and more, in Tseng’s photographs, conjured between histories of racial capitalism, opening space for queer Indigenous, enslaved, and migrant intimacies that exist through the promiscuous presence of his body. It is his body along with the viewer’s cognition that create a queer practice of looking with distance— performing as an inscrutable other who enacts a queer coalition that both practices and critiques identity politics—refusing the limited imagined visual subject of “Asian American” or “Asian diasporic” and drawing attention away from the phenotypic and toward the racial aesthetic of space, time, and belonging. The blurring of human figure and landscape is not an equivalence or reduction

but a productive twinning of animate forms, animate histories, that give shape to the matter of flesh and space, that render a cotton field a synecdoche of the transatlantic slave trade and a railroad train the symbol of Chinese labor together as the invisibilized grounds of American modernity.

Through language of the close proximal and the long distance, we may better sense out some of the ways that social misfits build their lives through relating to multiple spaces and times that pulse with memory, history, and sociality. Queers of color body forth marginal histories as foreground. Interpreting these photographs and the work of Tseng’s quotidian and documented performance, I think of my role as the viewer as well as his enactments of being-with. Tseng’s performance documents also invite and hail a kind of slutty distant practice of witnessing his travels and art/life. “SlutForArt” is also a reading method, then, one open to engagement, open to one’s desire to feel connected through thought and art.

may not appear obviously connected to the cannonballs of Puerto Rico, or the beached tank on the island, he performs the proximal/distant affiliation that refuses “easy representation” yet gestures to and arguably performs the “brown commons.” Writing of Martin Wong’s work within the Nuyorican art scene of the 1980s, Pérez continues:

Queer Coordinates of Distance and Proximity

A theory of the proximal allows us to talk about desire as a poetics rather than as a sleuthing of the implicated subjects’ interests, cathections, and sexual practices. Rather than an argument against such sleuthing or gossip, a theory of proximity is more nearly a way to make something out of the aporia created in the Latino archive by the bifurcation of race and sexuality into separate histories, and attend to the gaps and contradictions where queerness seems to be the missing conjunction but where its denotative confirmation is either ignored, inaccessible, or unspeakable.35

Pérez employs a phrase I adore from Muñoz’s idiom that, when read in others’ writing, sparks a lightbulb: “more nearly.” Pérez’s theory of proximity extends Muñoz’s “more nearly,” where the nearly is not about an arrival at a predetermined destination and not a teleological orientation to construct a judgment about being more or less near. Rather, it is about critical engagement moving one toward another, swerving into something else that is yet to be identified.

Roy Pérez frames as “a way to describe modes of queer affiliation that do not give themselves over to easy representation, but that nonetheless appear and unfold their drama in the aesthetic field.”

With Pérez’s work on proximity and this chapter on distance, I mean to make more space within queer studies for an interest in what could be called queer coordination, which I understand through Tseng’s prolific coordinates of space and time, all brought together through the prism of his body in the photograph. Viewing his photographs—piecemeal and through various media, including in person at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona; various exhibitions, including at the Grey Art Gallery, online, and in his estate holdings of artist-sister Muna Tseng’s downtown New York apartment—coordinates me, puts me in formation, looking for him as a predecessor to affiliate with across great distances. Queer coordination need not depend on closeness or conventional modes of intimacy that presuppose the ability to reach out and touch, the ability to fetishize the live by grasping it. Distance refuses that grasp or contact, which registers the pain and loss of distance but also insists on the possible pleasures and poignancies of and through distance, ones that queer, diasporic, migrant, refugee, adopted, and transnational subjects are most privy to, those of us who know home not by a specific given

In Tseng’s Tank, Puerto Rico, 1987, the artist stands on top of what looks to be an abandoned military tank at the beach (see figure 5.5). A cloudy sky encases the square image in a bright gray, and Tseng’s head forms the apex of a triangle silhouetted by his standing figure and the heavy tank. Along the edges, we see the sand and beach below and to the right of the tank; some beach flora and detritus appear at the photograph’s lower left edge. There appears to be wind sweeping Tseng’s crew cut into a cowlick, with his face looking up and out, above the camera, and his sunglasses reflecting clouds. The tank is immobilized and its details visually obscured in darkness. How might we interpret the artist’s stance atop this military vehicle of occupation, terror, and murder? We could interpret his figure as a strange general in a powerful stance of command; but that is not right exactly. Or consider Puerto Rico, 1987, in which Tseng’s figure is barely visible in the distance. What we see is an elaborate stone bridge or cove, one that is white and gray and textured such that its depth and dimensions are difficult to discern in the flatness of the photograph; the ocean beckons from the top half of the frame and the horizon line is punctured by the sun’s wink to the camera. Near the bright white of the sun’s nonimage is the backlit human figure whom we surmise is Tseng, feet together, arms behind his back; it’s not clear if he’s facing the camera or the sun; he is pure silhouette, the same dark gray as the landmass he stands atop in the darkened top-right quadrant of the photograph. Here we register so many distances—the camera’s relationship to the stone cove,

> unfinished, always something to be created “This equivalence can only be sought, worked at, supposed.” Paul Ricoeur quoted by Chow

Eng and Han, “The

5 Distance , Negativity , and Slutty Sociality in Tseng Kwong Chi ’ s Per for mance Photo graphs

Thanks to Muna Tseng and the Tseng Kwong Chi Estate; the Grey Art Gallery; and the Creative Center of Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson, for help with my archival work. Thanks also to the Performance Studies Summer Institute at Northwestern University, the Performance Studies Working

202 Notes to Chapter 4

1 Ahmed, “Killing Joy,” 588

2 It is worth noting the common male gendering of both Goofy and the inscrutable Chinese, despite the fact that the actor playing Goofy could, we might imagine, not identify as such outside the costume. The performance of masculine presentation will be further discussed in this chapter.

3 Brandt, “Tseng Kwong Chi and the Politics of Performance,” 38

4 I employ the language of affect through its use in queer theory, following thinkers including Teresa de Lauretis, Brian Massumi, and Jasbir Puar, after Sigmund Freud and Gilles Deleuze, as a visceral and transmittable sensation that limns, escapes, or precedes language. My discursive invocation of affect mimes something of what I suggest Asian American figuration performs, that is, a reproducible form that is useful in its gesture toward that which is not simple to formally assess and is ontologically more ephemeral and dynamic than discourse can allow. Though affect is not strictly material or visible, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, via Silvan Tomkins, identifies the familiar choreographies and other bodily performances of affect, notably the downward look or blush of shame (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling; Sedgwick and Frank, Shame and Its Sisters). Affect, as such, is performative—not in the misrecognition of it being willfully rehearsed and consciously executed but in its reiteration and capacity to form and enact bodies and other material forms in a shared world. Affect can be observed only in relation to something, as a viewer to a photograph, or a reader to a book. Affect is transmitted before language and, relatedly, before the separation of individual from others; thus, as Sedgwick shows, shame is individuating at the same time as it enacts a social form. Affect theory alongside critical ethnic studies is useful for my purposes here for its nuanced entry to conversations of personhood, agency, consciousness, and affect, which are not limited to what can be the static positivism of biology or sociology. As Muñoz writes, affect is “descriptive of the receptors we use to hear each other and the frequencies on which certain subalterns speak and are heard or, more importantly, felt” (“Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 677). And, following Muñoz, affect allows a discussion of racial performativity and, here, the performative “doing ” of Asian Americanness.

5 Eng, Racial Castration, 204

6 Eng , Racial Castration, 32

7 Indeed, this was evidenced by Tseng’s presentation of these photographs in various configurations and groupings, rearranging their layout for each gallery installation.

8 Ahmed, “Killing Joy,” 581

9 Schueller, “Claiming Postcolonial America,” 177

10 Santa Ana, Racial Feelings, 15, 22. Consider erin Khuê Ninh’s description of “the Asian immigrant family” as “a production unit—a sort of cottage industry, for a particular brand of good, capitalist subject” (Ingratitude, 2).

Notes to Chapter 5 203 Group at Harvard University, the Association of Asian American Studies conference, the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences seminar on Performance Studies in Spring 2019, and the Asian American student activists of Wesleyan University for inviting me to share work from this chapter.

11 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 680

12 Santa Ana, Racial Feelings, 14

13 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 89

14 Yoon, “Learning Asian American Affect,” 296

15 Yoon, “Learning Asian American Affect,” 294

16 Yoon, “Learning Asian American Affect,” 297

17 Eng and Hom, q&a , 1

18 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 8

19 S. Lee, “An Asian Man Who Likes Math.”

20 Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams, 42

21 Kim Lee, “Staying In,” 29

22 Day, Alien Capital, 92

23 Day, Alien Capital, 82.

24 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 95; Edelman, No Future

25 Perhaps I should clarify that my theory of slutty distance is not based on biography, that is, whether Tseng was or was not in long-distance or polyamorous relationships.

26 Bacalzo, “Portraits of Self and Other,” 87

27 S. Lee, “An Asian Man Who Likes Math.”

28 I think of long-distance relationality as in conversation with but not wholly encompassed by what in the social sciences is referred to as a long-distance relationship (ldr )

29 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 92

30 Tongson, Relocations, 23; citing Jennifer Terry, “Proposal: Remote Intimacy,” application for the University of California Humanities Research Institute working group seminar “Queer Locations: Race, Space and Sexuality” (Winter/Spring 2004), 2

31 See also Magat, “Looking After the Filipina Caregiver.”

32 Manalansan, “Servicing the World,” 217–18

33 Kim Lee, “Staying In.” I also learn from Tina Post’s formulation of expressionlessness in relation to shine and Black expressive cultures in her article “Williams, Walker, and Shine.” Post formulates expressionlessness as “a certain fungibility of context” that resonates with the work of Asian surface and distant relation in Tseng’s photographs (90). Writing of blackbody blackface performers, Post writes that “expressionlessness allowed for a successful performance of black respectability because it allowed subjects to highlight and invest selfhood in the aerials that they wore or surrounded themselves with” (93). Tseng’s distance and Post’s expressionlessness diverge here as Tseng’s performance reads less as self-serious respectability and more about campy foreignness.

34 Pérez, “The Glory That Was Wrong,”

anta Ana, Racial Feelings, 15, 22. Consider erin Khuê Ninh’s description of “the Asian immigrant family” as “a production unit—a sort of cottage industry, ticular brand of good, capitalist subject” (Ingratitude, 2). uñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 680 anta Ana, Racial Feelings, 14 bha, The Location of Culture, 89 oon, “Learning Asian American Affect,” 296 oon, “Learning Asian American Affect,” 294 oon, “Learning Asian American Affect,” 297 Eng and Hom, q&a , 1 edgwick, Touching Feeling, 8 . Lee, “An Asian Man Who Likes Math.” ihiro, Margins and Mainstreams, 42. ee, “Staying In,” 29 Alien Capital, 92 Alien Capital, 82 Cruising Utopia, 95; Edelman, No Future erhaps I should clarify that my theory of slutty distance is not based on biography, that is, whether Tseng was or was not in long-distance or polyamorous relationships. acalzo, “Portraits of Self and Other,” 87 . Lee, “An Asian Man Who Likes Math.” hink of long-distance relationality as in conversation with but not wholly encompassed by what in the social sciences is referred to as a long-distance relationship (ldr )

29 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 92

31 See also Magat, “Looking After the Filipina Caregiver.”

32 Manalansan, “Servicing the World,” 217–18

“

[…] cultural work is the site of transformative social practice when political and other realms are thoroughly colonized by the

contesting and colluding wills of empires.”

(Shih, 2007, p. 182)

34 Pérez, “The Glory That Was Wrong,” 281

204 Notes to Chapter 5

Photo: CFGNY

How does you practice (or some other creator) navigate hyperlocal and universalistic/ cosmopolitan themes, and varied distance among contexts and borders?

Shih: using national allegory/cultural elements while creating from a distance could be a selfexoticization “victimology ”

Huang: - distance technique for a surface performance of inscrutability, making time/space for forms of feminist, queer, trans, and Asian diasporic world-making - inscrutable surfaces that resist translation

Can we create from a distance without claiming the origin of our own?

How might we use distance as a strategy?

Colophon

Session Leaders

Sixing Xu

Xinyi Li

Design

Xinyi Li

Lulu Yao Gioiello

Paper

Hammermill Fore 20lb

Typeface

Authentic Sans !Týpa!

Printing

Reprographics Lab,

School of Design, Pratt Institute

2025AAAinA-LC-reader-4

(un)translatability in distance

(un)translatability in distance

Part I From literary translation to expansive

translation

Movement of texts, Movement of bodies

Translation at the kitchen table

translation in controversy

Han Kang and the Complexity of Translation

Part II

Translated intercultural equivalence (Chow) and untranslatable ethics (Shih)

translated intercultural equivalence and coevalness

Not Like a Native Speaker

3

TRANSLATOR, TRAITOR; TRANSLATOR, MOURNER (OR, DREAMING

OF INTERCULTURAL EQUIVALENCE)

THE INELUCTABILITY OF BETRAYAL

ONE WAY OF “GOING NATIVE”: THE MELANCHOLY TURN

(Paul Ricoeur)

Coevalness (Johannes Fabian)

THE CHALLENGE OF INTERCULTURAL EQUIVALENCE

distance and untranslatability of ethics

THE AGE OF EMPIRES AND, ESPECIALLY, THEIR SIZES

Cosmopolitanism among Empires

COSMOPOLITANISM, MULTIPLICITY, DANGER

ETHICS

UNTRANSLATABLE

Part III

Varied distances, translatability, and relatability

opacity of inscrutable surfaces

distant feeling, distant relations

DISTANCE , NEGATIVITY

, AND SLUTTY SOCIALITY IN TSENG KWONG CHI ’ S PER FOR MANCE PHOTO GRAPHS

Distant Feeling, Distant Relations

Happiness, Racialized Masculinity, and a Capitalist Emotional Culture

Present Distant Witness

The Promiscuity of Long Distance

In the Distance

Queer Coordinates of Distance and Proximity

Colophon

Further Reading