Transpacific Literary/Cultural Studies by Hsiu-chuan Lee
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2023
This article takes classrooms as crucial sites to explore the critical challenges and opportuniti... more This article takes classrooms as crucial sites to explore the critical challenges and opportunities arising from Asian American studies’ relocation to Asia. Taking a cue from Erin Manning’s theory on “the minor gesture,” I conceive classroom dialogism as operating not as much to pass on inured thoughts as to generate “minor” forces that push knowledge into movement. Specifically, I argue that the confrontations and encounters of various nationalist, culturalist and imperialist perspectives—which usually contribute to the differences and difficulties of teaching Asian American studies in Asia—may be taken less as obstructions than as “minor” activators that push for renewed knowledge structures. Section one of this article reads selected teaching accounts to not only highlight the implications of Asian classrooms’ readings of Asian American texts in the power dynamics between Asia(s) and America(s), but also excavate from students’ readings and responses the habitual models of receiving Asian American studies in Asia. Section two then turns to my experience of teaching an undergraduate Asian American literature course in Taiwan to explore classrooms’ potential to usher in the time and space needed for opening habitual thinking paradigms into movement and variation. By mobilizing in classroom switches and exchanges between thinking positions and interpretive frames, I invoked from the documentary film Voices in the Clouds (2010) the intersecting life stories of Atayal, Han Taiwanese, Asian Americans and Americans to underscore the importance to think in terms of historical change and human movements.
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Cultural Studies, 2022
This article studies baseball played at ‘the margin of empires.’ It attends to the manifestations... more This article studies baseball played at ‘the margin of empires.’ It attends to the manifestations of ‘baseball complex’ – the persistent sociopsychological a!ective force for baseball that derives from personal experiences/memories and political/historical institutions – in two geohistorical contexts: Japanese American internment in the US during World War II and Taiwan around the 1930s under Japanese rule. Besides historical references, newspaper reports and critical scholarship, two films are taken as core texts of analysis: Desmond Nakano’s American Pastime (2007), which enacts a story of baseball in the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, USA during the second World War, and Umin Boya’s Kano (2014), which tells the story of Kano baseball team emerging from Taiwan under Japanese colonization. My reading draws attention to the stratified power structure that characterizes the margin of empires and suggests to move beyond the binary comprehension of baseball as either a tool of acculturation and colonization (for the imperial and dominant) or a medium of social ascendancy and cultural assimilation (for the colonized and minoritized). I argue that baseball not only could be utilized by those holding power or those obviously minoritized/colonized, but could be needed urgently by those caught in-between the powerful and the disempowered, such as the marginalized whites assigned to guard over Japanese Americans on sites of the internment or the Japanese relegated to Japan’s colony in Taiwan. Moreover, by foregrounding baseball’s trans-Pacific trajectory and exploring baseball’s entanglement with the triangulated power processes between the US, Japan, and Taiwan, I challenge the static meaning of baseball while testing out cinema’s value in simulating historical situations and changes.
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Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2018
Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013) responds to the radical global interconnectedness o... more Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013) responds to the radical global interconnectedness of today's world. I coin the term " minor cosmopolitics " and explain its indebtedness to as well as differentiation from " minority cosmopolitism " and " minor transnationalism " to explore the world-making potentials of mi-noritized individuals and the minor dimension of cosmopolitics in this novel. If we look at the relationship between the novel's two protagonists, Ruth and Nao, as that between a reader and a writer, we see how energy and matter on a small scale, in particular the energy and matter embedded in the words used in literary writing and reading, can actively engage with a scale as large as the world. Specifically, A Tale for the Time Being draws on quantum mechanics as a trope and sees words as quantum particles that illuminate the plasticity and multiplicity of space and time. Instead of aiming at a position of transcendence over the world, the novel tests out the possibilities of delivering, through words, worlds out of historical ignorance and amnesia, based on the quantum rules of randomness and undecidability.
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Tamkang Review, 2012
This paper studies the intermingling of the imagination of Asia-Pacific and the formation of Asia... more This paper studies the intermingling of the imagination of Asia-Pacific and the formation of Asian America. Analyzing the Japanese American Sansei writer Lydia Minatoya’s The Strangeness of Beauty (1999), which portrays the Japanese American experiences in the first three decades of the twentieth century, my reading first grounds the formation of Asian America in Asian Americans’ Pacific routes, thereby extending our understanding of Asian America to an Asia-Pacific dimension. Following this, I explore how Asian Americans’ trans-Pacific trajectories may help constitute an Asia-Pacific imagination that is embedded in the everyday materiality of this area. Specifically, my analysis hinges on a reading of the “I-story” created by the novel’s protagonist-narrator Etsuko Sone. Through an investigation of the discontinuous and relational nature of this “I-story,” I argue that The Strangeness of Beauty traces the meanderings and evolvements of Etsuko’s self and life. Instead of reinforcing the monolithic “I” pursued by conventional Western autobiographies, Etsuko’s “I-story,” which is indebted to the form of modern Japanese autobiographical fiction shi-shōsetsu, presents Etsuko as a Japanese American woman ceaselessly re-defined by the spatiotemporal multiplicities of her transmigratory experience across the Pacific. This portrayal of the Asian American “transmigratory” everyday, furthermore, retrieves “Asia-Pacific” from being a EuroAmerican construction. The Strangeness of Beauty envisages Asia-Pacific as neither a mythic space of transnation nor a geo-political place constrained by the bipolarity of the East and the West, Asia and America, or Japan and the U.S. It replenishes Asia-Pacific with Asian Americans’ engagements with the connections and confrontations within and between Asia, America, and the Pacific.
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Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature , 2012
This essay studies Jessica Hagedorn’s novel as a literary intervention into the imperial configur... more This essay studies Jessica Hagedorn’s novel as a literary intervention into the imperial configuration of the Philippines. Drawing on Lacan’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” this essay suggests that the Filipino “nation” has been “purloined”— stolen, yet at the same time “prolonged”—extended, through a complex series of imperial intrusions, transnational displacements and encounters that account for the formation of new collectivity.
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This essay expounds the aesthetics and meanings of Scott Hicks’s feature Snow Falling on Cedars (... more This essay expounds the aesthetics and meanings of Scott Hicks’s feature Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) by attending to criticisms on this film’s slow pacing. First, I argue that it is not lengthy shots, motionless camera, lagging movement, or visual/aural minimalism that slows down Snow Falling on Cedars. The film feels slow because of the disintegration of its images and narrative, and the disconnection between its senses and plots. As the film’s signifying structure falls apart, time drifts away and overflows. The second section analyzes sequences selected from Snow Falling on Cedars to reveal the incoherence and discontinuity of images and sounds, of reality and recollections. I argue that Hicks splits narrative and characters, thereby undermining spectators’ screen identification and visual pleasure. The third section turns to trauma theory and contends that Snow Falling on Cedars is loaded with traumatic time. Filming death, wars, racial conflicts, and the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, Snow Falling on Cedars seeks in traumatic duration opportunities to explore and generate social logics and meanings. I conclude that Snow Falling on Cedars does not simply experiment with an aesthetic style of slowness; being slow is an ethical move to obtain the time needed for probing into self-other encounter, past-present convergence, and cross-racial communication. Snow Falling on Cedars ultimately introduces a vision in which the trauma of Second World War brings together people of different colors and the memory of mass relocation no longer belongs exclusively to or affects only Japanese Americans.
本文從史考特‧希克斯(Scott Hicks)執導的電影《雪落香杉》(Snow Falling on Cedars, 1999)節奏太慢的問題出發,探索「時間」在電影形式與意義建構上扮演的角色。論文首先釐清,《雪落香杉》的「慢」,不是因為鏡頭剪接速度太慢、攝影機移動速度太慢、或是演員動作與場景調度太慢,而是畫面與敘述分離,造成感知與情節脫鉤,時間因此逸出觀影者的視聽與思維統合而四處漫延的「慢」。論文第二部分細讀《雪落香杉》片段,說明希克斯運用了畫面剪輯與聲音的不連貫,創造一種記憶¬不支撐現時╱現實(the present/reality),時空斷裂,記憶主體粉碎的聲、畫不同步經驗,於形式上挑戰觀影者的鏡像「快」感。第三部分轉至創傷理論,說明《雪落香杉》一片的時間能量,其實來自影片傳衍(transfer)創傷的意圖。《雪落香杉》拍死亡、拍戰爭、拍種族矛盾、拍日裔美國遷徙營(Japanese American relocation camp),其漫延過情節和敘述的時間,正是「創傷時間」的具形呈現。筆者主張《雪落香杉》之「慢」,除了實驗一種電影美學形式,更有延展創傷時間「後遺」(belatedness)與「延遲」(prolongation)效應的意義。「慢」可以是一種倫理,讓《雪落香杉》在創傷「時延」(duration)之中探索一個人我交會、記憶交融、跨越膚色界線的思維,讓二戰創傷滲入影片中每一個族群,而遷徙營也不再只是專屬於日裔美國人的歷史記憶。
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Toni Morrison by Hsiu-chuan Lee
英美文學評論, 2016
This essay reads Jacques Derrida and Toni Morrison side by side, with a view to meditating on the... more This essay reads Jacques Derrida and Toni Morrison side by side, with a view to meditating on the meaning (or non-meaning) of the secret, and exploring literature’s symbiotic relationship with secrecy. Reading a series of Derrida’s and Morrison’s works related to the topic of “the secret,” which include Derrida’s “Responding to/Answering for:
The Secret” (1991b), “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering’” (1992) and “Literature in Secret” (1999b); and Morrison’s “A Knowing So Deep” (1985), Playing in the Dark (1992), her Nobel Lecture in Literature (1993) and “The Future of Time” (1996), I argue that secrecy does not pose an epistemic obstacle or hermeneutic limit to either Morrison or Derrida.
Rather, comparing the process of literary creation to “playing in the dark,” Morrison finds in the darkness of the secret a threshold time-space of literary “becoming,” while Derrida explicitly advocates the idea that literature is “in place of the secret” or literature “responds to the secret” in order to drive forward a future dimension of avenir. Derrida is concerned about a secret that hides nothing, a secret without depth. For him, literature is capable of keeping (the life of) the secret not because literature has to conceal knowledge but because “literarity” makes literature as unfathomable and elusive as the secret in relationship to meaning. Contentions like these find strong resonance in Morrison’s works. Indeed, both Morrison and Derrida seek in “the secret” the force to cut open existing cognitive systems; both also consider literary practices valuable as long as these practices are able to ride on the cognitive opening of the secret for generating movement from the
edge of knowledge.
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Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) encourages a meditation on literature’s interaction with history. ... more Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) encourages a meditation on literature’s interaction with history. Focusing on the way in which “novel time” operates here to challenge the serial, diachronic conception of history, I seek in A Mercy a space to negotiate the historical distance between periods, events, and peoples. The shifting tenses of narrating voices introduced by the novel, along with the linkages that memories create between times, prompt the spreading-out of seventeenth-century American history into a textual network of elastic ligaments and a kind of dialogism. Moreover, challenging the logic of ethnic division and racial segregation, A Mercy elucidates the proximity of different races in early American history. It enacts cross-color intimacy as a new way of conceiving the origins of American culture. Morrison’s writing about history in A Mercy is not simply a return to the past or a retrieval of the repressed. By evoking a lost age and digging out from what has disappeared logics and ideas that resist existent historical lines and racial categorizations, the novel fosters in its textual present an intermediary agency for negotiating the structure of history, thereby ushering in new historical epistemes.
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Asian American Studies by Hsiu-chuan Lee
The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique, edited by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Guy Beauregard, and Hsiu-chuan Lee, Temple University Press, 2020, pp. 1-17., 2020
Co-authored by Guy Beauregard, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, and Hsiu-chuan Lee.
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Amerasia Journal, vol. 42, no. 3, 2016, pp. 43-68.
Co-authored by Pin-chia Feng, Hsiu-chuan Lee, Shyh-jen Fuh, Guy Beauregard, and Chih-ming Wang. T... more Co-authored by Pin-chia Feng, Hsiu-chuan Lee, Shyh-jen Fuh, Guy Beauregard, and Chih-ming Wang. This forum engages with the Summer Institute in Asian American Studies (SIAAS) project, a multi-campus initiative dedicated to furthering Asian American Studies in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia. Since our first event in Taipei in 2013, the SIAAS project has brought together students and scholars and community and cultural workers from four continents for a series of summer institutes that have featured formal talks, seminars, roundtable and panel discussions, literary readings, film and video screenings, research sharing sessions, field visits, and small-group break-out sessions led by scholars from around Asia. This forum investigates the stakes involved in organizing and contributing to these events. We ask: What are some of the conditions that have made our project possible in Taiwan? How have SIAAS events changed our views of Asian American Studies and its presumed subjects of analysis, especially concerning its engagement with "Asia"? In what ways have these events affected our teaching and learning, both inside and outside the classroom? And what might the SIAAS project indicate about the institutionalization of Asian American Studies as it has taken an international turn?
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This essay takes the development of Asian American studies in Taiwan as an example for exploring ... more This essay takes the development of Asian American studies in Taiwan as an example for exploring the shifting role of Western cultures (tentatively generalized as “Euro-America”) in Taiwan’s foreign literary studies (tentatively generalized as “us”). The first part traces and unravels Taiwan academia’s “special affinity” toward Asian American studies. Though linking “Asia” and “America” in its name and contributing to racial mixture and cultural creolization, “Asian America,” as this essay suggests, does not necessarily bridge the distance, much less set up a point of convergence, between Asian and American cultures and histories. Instead, the increasingly diversifying Asian American population and their diverging itineraries cast into relief the centrifugal propellant and anti-sameness potential of Asian America. Drawing on the psychoanalytic dialogic model of transference that pushes open the affective contours of selves and others, this essay further probes the transferential time-space evoked by Asian America: not only do Asian American traumatic experiences of immigration, migration, and diaspora compel differentiations of selves through encounters with others but Asian American studies have intervened into the power hierarchy between “Euro-America” and “us,” forcefully generating unprescribed minor networking across Asia and the Pacific. This essay ultimately proposes a minoritizing transformation of “Euro-America”: to comprehend “Euro-America” not as a hegemonic and static entity but as a minor and centrifugal “other” that Taiwan’s foreign literary studies could possibly converse with through transferential affects.
本文以亞美研究在台灣的發展為例,思考台灣外文學門(暫稱「我們」)媒介西方文化思潮(暫稱「歐美」)的策略。論文從台灣學生與學者對亞美的認同(或誤認)談起,主張「亞美」雖然在名號上讓「亞」、「美」連體,移民與混血的過程在物質與身體歷史上讓「亞」、「美」難分彼此,亞美故事其實不斷延展與複雜化「亞」、「美」的距離和想像,亞美論述的發展,也從強調美-亞連繫,轉而鋪陳「亞」與「美」之內與之間的離心張力與「反同」(anti-sameness)潛力。為了釐清「距離」與「反同」在論述建構上的意義,筆者挪用了精神分析「同」中延「異」的立論方法,特別是「傳會」(transference)在談話治療裡讓自我與他者互相傾聽創傷,開展彼此感知時空的概念,探索亞美研究在「美」、「亞」之間建構的「弱勢傳會」路徑:除了具體的亞美移民、遷徙、與離散經驗形構了「亞」、「美」個人情感聯結,亞美研究作為一個論述場域,還介入了「我們」與「歐美」競合及協商的過程,從美國研究的一支,逐漸延展與分化為亞際與跨太平洋認知網絡開展的介面。論文最後提出「創傷歐美」的想像,企圖將「歐美」從台灣外文學門的強勢他者,轉化為一個類似亞美的動態複元場域,思考「我們」與「歐美」在彼此的弱勢經驗中,建立傳會聯結的可能。
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relation to life and death and his invocation of the idea of spectral haunting (in light of the D... more relation to life and death and his invocation of the idea of spectral haunting (in light of the Deleuzian “nonorganic vitalism”) as the genuine source of life in postcolonial cultures, this article conceives a life-begetting Asian American ethno-politics via a reading of the ethno- and biopolitics represented in Ruth Ozeki’s novel All Over Creation. I argue that All Over Creation intervenes in the discussion of Asian American ethno-politics of life and death not simply because it engages with food politics and advocates agricultural biodiversity, but also because it creates narrative linkages between biodiversity and ethno-diversity. First, by telling the story of a Japanese war bride, All Over Creation brings to the fore Japanese war brides to emphasize their significance as the “ghostly figures”—or “random seedlings”—occupying the margins of both Asian American and white communities. Moreover, the novel introduces “seed-dissemination” as a(n) (agri)cultural logic that makes “Asian American” less a category of hereditary permanence than an avenue for one to generate and become others. All Over Creation spells out affirmative life forces that sprawl from the migratory trajectories of people and seeds (or “people as seeds”)—trajectories that bring disorganizing force to the inherited logic or vertical continuity of both agricultural and ethnic cultural productions with lateral networking and changeable relationships.
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Investigating the narrative history of Japanese American relocation camps, this paper studies the... more Investigating the narrative history of Japanese American relocation camps, this paper studies the changing modes of relocation narratives and seeks in the efforts of activating the relocation’s traumatic contagious force a new model and ethics of writing history. I propose to read the Japanese American relocation not simply as an event that occurred in a historical past but as a trauma. In the case of the former, the relocation studies call for a return to a specific time and place and a restoration of Japanese American internees’ experiences. In the case of the latter, emphases are shift to the impact of the relocation, whose transferential potential is not confined to any singular time, place, generation, or ethnic group. The first part of the paper surveys the significance and limitations of existing narratives that give the relocation different meanings. The second part draws on Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth, E. Ann Kaplan, and Jill Bennett to explore the temporal belatedness of trauma and locate in “traumatic time” a space of critical negotiations and conceptual innovations. The last section analyzes John Sturges’s Hollywood feature Bad Day at Black Rock (1954) as a textual example to illustrate the contagiousness of relocation memories across time and beyond the Japanese American community.
這一篇論文爬梳日裔美國遷徙營(relocation camp)敘述的歷史,討論既存的遷徙營敘述,也試圖建立一個以創傷理論為核心的遷徙營敘述模式。論文主張視日美遷徙營為不只是一樁發生在過去的歷史事件,而是一個歷史創傷:作為歷史事件,遷徙營有其發生的特定時空,敘述遷徙營是為了回到歷史過去以還原史實;作為歷史創傷,遷徙營記憶的「時間後延性」(temporal belatedness)則足以連繫不同時空,敘述遷徙營的重點也不再只是史實挖掘,而是透過不斷的歷史敘述與傳衍的過程,去延伸事件的衝擊力與渲染力。論文第一部分先勾勒出一個日美遷徙營的敘述史,了解遷徙營歷史在不同論述情境下被賦予的不同意義,並討論這些不同敘述模式帶來的論述意涵與侷限。接著,我援引拉卡柏(Dominick LaCapra)、卡露思(Cathy Caruth)、凱普蘭(E. Ann Kaplan)、以及班涅特(Jill Bennett)等學者對創傷結構與歷史書寫的見解,特別是創傷如何締造記憶時延的動能,思索創傷時間如何能被挪轉為有意義的文化批判時間,並藉此導引出一個敘述遷徙營的新模式。論文最後一部份從創傷跨界與時延的角度閱讀史塔吉(John Sturges)執導的《黑岩喋血記》(Bad Day at Black Rock; 1954),透過對日美遷徙營歷史一個創傷式的閱讀,探索遷徙營創傷效應穿越時間與族裔邊界的可能。
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While the mass internment of Japanese Americans in World War II has highlighted the Asian exclusi... more While the mass internment of Japanese Americans in World War II has highlighted the Asian exclusionism and racial persecution in the United States, this paper aims not simply to reassert an Asian American politics against racism but to find in the process and aftermath of Japanese American internment an important sociopolitical arena for our critical meditation on and creative imagination of race relations in the U.S. Probing into Asian Americans’ intermediary position in the conventional black-white racial dyad, the first section of this paper draws on Colleen Lye’s idea of “racial form.” Instead of conceiving race as determined by inherent biological features or indicating transhistorical entities, Lye proposes to read race as “form” (which is constituted by active social relations) and privileges the formal and stylistic creativity of literary and cultural texts to invent racial forms. The second and third sections of this paper move to Japanese American internment and study the case of Estelle Ishigo in Steven Okazaki’s documentary Days of Waiting (1990). Attending to Ishigo’s cross-racial life story, my reading not only explores the changeable contours of racial categorization in the context of the internment but also reveals the inadequacy of the “whites vs. Japanese Americans” critical model in excavating the cross-racial dialectics evoked by Days of Waiting.
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This paper attempts to understand “Asian America” not as one nation, but as constituted by multip... more This paper attempts to understand “Asian America” not as one nation, but as constituted by multiple families in a shifting web of space, time, genealogy, and identification. Analyzing the Japanese American families in Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World (1989) and Lydia Minatoya’s Talking to High Monks in the Snow: An Asian American Odyssey (1992), I restore Asian American studies to its familial dimensions, seeking in individual households the radical spaces from which a re-signification of “Asian America” is made possible. First, probing into the complicated implications of “unhome,” I demonstrate Kadohata’s attempt to re-read the seeming Japanese American “homelessness” in the post-World War II era into a position of socio-historical intervention. Then, I study the domestic complexities as presented by both texts, exploring how the makeshift nature and transnational origins of individual Japanese American families challenge the genetic continuity and domestic enclosure of a national family model. Asian American families as such must be known not simply as tools of genetic integration or cultural assimilation, but as spaces of national, ethnic, cultural transgressions and gender, generational, transnational negotiations. The change and development of Japanese American communities are, in one way or another, embedded in the establishment, extension, movement, and/or disintegration of individual families.
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本文著眼亞美性別政治,思考性別議題或女人介入亞美論述對亞美想像的貢獻和啟示。論文由湯亭亭《女鬥士》(The Woman Warrior)中的「無名女人」(No Name Woman)意象談起,一... more 本文著眼亞美性別政治,思考性別議題或女人介入亞美論述對亞美想像的貢獻和啟示。論文由湯亭亭《女鬥士》(The Woman Warrior)中的「無名女人」(No Name Woman)意象談起,一邊指出早期亞美女人遭逐出家門與消音匿名的困境,但以更多篇幅思索「無名女人」後裔反書「無名」為跨族跨國命名空間,翻轉「棄卻」(abjection)為社群向外向它者延伸的可能,進而為編織亞美文學不爭取純種而爭取時空蔓延的陰性系譜鋪路。論文首先討論數部經典亞美女性作品,思考亞美女性書寫如何轉化「無名」處境為社群綿延的開端。緊接著,我舉出數部作品中亞美個人棄卻亞美母親的傾向與滅種焦慮的例子,說明相對於某些亞美男性角色自我設限的「純種要求」與對「父之名」的堅持,不少亞美敘述反而能以「無名」為傳承介面鋪衍出父權焦慮以外族裔繁衍的契機。論文最後藉由對「宮籟」概念的討論,延伸出「宮籟緣起」(choric cause)的論點,藉由理論指出許多亞美女性角色在亞美歷史與文化發展中扮演如「宮籟」般「無名」但容許雜音、萬流涵匯的介面──她們的「不純」或者成為促成亞美社群蔓延與生存的關鍵。
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本文討論潔西卡.海格苳﹙Jessica Hagedorn, 1949- ﹚作品《香肉族》﹙Dogeaters, 1990﹚中「女人敘述國族」的弔詭和顛覆性。論述涵蓋兩重點:「帝國殖民與國族主義... more 本文討論潔西卡.海格苳﹙Jessica Hagedorn, 1949- ﹚作品《香肉族》﹙Dogeaters, 1990﹚中「女人敘述國族」的弔詭和顛覆性。論述涵蓋兩重點:「帝國殖民與國族主義」和「複製國族、擬像國族」兩部份由分析菲國之被殖民歷史與西方國族教條共謀的關係下手,指出《香肉族》摹寫菲律賓為「複製」西方國族不成之「擬像國族」;「跨國情書、女人織國」及「景觀身體、陰性反書」兩部份則由海格苳「跨國女人」的視角出發,思考女人介入國族敘事,以其陰性潛能編織傳統「國族」之外另類社群的可能。
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Transpacific Literary/Cultural Studies by Hsiu-chuan Lee
本文從史考特‧希克斯(Scott Hicks)執導的電影《雪落香杉》(Snow Falling on Cedars, 1999)節奏太慢的問題出發,探索「時間」在電影形式與意義建構上扮演的角色。論文首先釐清,《雪落香杉》的「慢」,不是因為鏡頭剪接速度太慢、攝影機移動速度太慢、或是演員動作與場景調度太慢,而是畫面與敘述分離,造成感知與情節脫鉤,時間因此逸出觀影者的視聽與思維統合而四處漫延的「慢」。論文第二部分細讀《雪落香杉》片段,說明希克斯運用了畫面剪輯與聲音的不連貫,創造一種記憶¬不支撐現時╱現實(the present/reality),時空斷裂,記憶主體粉碎的聲、畫不同步經驗,於形式上挑戰觀影者的鏡像「快」感。第三部分轉至創傷理論,說明《雪落香杉》一片的時間能量,其實來自影片傳衍(transfer)創傷的意圖。《雪落香杉》拍死亡、拍戰爭、拍種族矛盾、拍日裔美國遷徙營(Japanese American relocation camp),其漫延過情節和敘述的時間,正是「創傷時間」的具形呈現。筆者主張《雪落香杉》之「慢」,除了實驗一種電影美學形式,更有延展創傷時間「後遺」(belatedness)與「延遲」(prolongation)效應的意義。「慢」可以是一種倫理,讓《雪落香杉》在創傷「時延」(duration)之中探索一個人我交會、記憶交融、跨越膚色界線的思維,讓二戰創傷滲入影片中每一個族群,而遷徙營也不再只是專屬於日裔美國人的歷史記憶。
Toni Morrison by Hsiu-chuan Lee
The Secret” (1991b), “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering’” (1992) and “Literature in Secret” (1999b); and Morrison’s “A Knowing So Deep” (1985), Playing in the Dark (1992), her Nobel Lecture in Literature (1993) and “The Future of Time” (1996), I argue that secrecy does not pose an epistemic obstacle or hermeneutic limit to either Morrison or Derrida.
Rather, comparing the process of literary creation to “playing in the dark,” Morrison finds in the darkness of the secret a threshold time-space of literary “becoming,” while Derrida explicitly advocates the idea that literature is “in place of the secret” or literature “responds to the secret” in order to drive forward a future dimension of avenir. Derrida is concerned about a secret that hides nothing, a secret without depth. For him, literature is capable of keeping (the life of) the secret not because literature has to conceal knowledge but because “literarity” makes literature as unfathomable and elusive as the secret in relationship to meaning. Contentions like these find strong resonance in Morrison’s works. Indeed, both Morrison and Derrida seek in “the secret” the force to cut open existing cognitive systems; both also consider literary practices valuable as long as these practices are able to ride on the cognitive opening of the secret for generating movement from the
edge of knowledge.
Asian American Studies by Hsiu-chuan Lee
本文以亞美研究在台灣的發展為例,思考台灣外文學門(暫稱「我們」)媒介西方文化思潮(暫稱「歐美」)的策略。論文從台灣學生與學者對亞美的認同(或誤認)談起,主張「亞美」雖然在名號上讓「亞」、「美」連體,移民與混血的過程在物質與身體歷史上讓「亞」、「美」難分彼此,亞美故事其實不斷延展與複雜化「亞」、「美」的距離和想像,亞美論述的發展,也從強調美-亞連繫,轉而鋪陳「亞」與「美」之內與之間的離心張力與「反同」(anti-sameness)潛力。為了釐清「距離」與「反同」在論述建構上的意義,筆者挪用了精神分析「同」中延「異」的立論方法,特別是「傳會」(transference)在談話治療裡讓自我與他者互相傾聽創傷,開展彼此感知時空的概念,探索亞美研究在「美」、「亞」之間建構的「弱勢傳會」路徑:除了具體的亞美移民、遷徙、與離散經驗形構了「亞」、「美」個人情感聯結,亞美研究作為一個論述場域,還介入了「我們」與「歐美」競合及協商的過程,從美國研究的一支,逐漸延展與分化為亞際與跨太平洋認知網絡開展的介面。論文最後提出「創傷歐美」的想像,企圖將「歐美」從台灣外文學門的強勢他者,轉化為一個類似亞美的動態複元場域,思考「我們」與「歐美」在彼此的弱勢經驗中,建立傳會聯結的可能。
這一篇論文爬梳日裔美國遷徙營(relocation camp)敘述的歷史,討論既存的遷徙營敘述,也試圖建立一個以創傷理論為核心的遷徙營敘述模式。論文主張視日美遷徙營為不只是一樁發生在過去的歷史事件,而是一個歷史創傷:作為歷史事件,遷徙營有其發生的特定時空,敘述遷徙營是為了回到歷史過去以還原史實;作為歷史創傷,遷徙營記憶的「時間後延性」(temporal belatedness)則足以連繫不同時空,敘述遷徙營的重點也不再只是史實挖掘,而是透過不斷的歷史敘述與傳衍的過程,去延伸事件的衝擊力與渲染力。論文第一部分先勾勒出一個日美遷徙營的敘述史,了解遷徙營歷史在不同論述情境下被賦予的不同意義,並討論這些不同敘述模式帶來的論述意涵與侷限。接著,我援引拉卡柏(Dominick LaCapra)、卡露思(Cathy Caruth)、凱普蘭(E. Ann Kaplan)、以及班涅特(Jill Bennett)等學者對創傷結構與歷史書寫的見解,特別是創傷如何締造記憶時延的動能,思索創傷時間如何能被挪轉為有意義的文化批判時間,並藉此導引出一個敘述遷徙營的新模式。論文最後一部份從創傷跨界與時延的角度閱讀史塔吉(John Sturges)執導的《黑岩喋血記》(Bad Day at Black Rock; 1954),透過對日美遷徙營歷史一個創傷式的閱讀,探索遷徙營創傷效應穿越時間與族裔邊界的可能。
本文從史考特‧希克斯(Scott Hicks)執導的電影《雪落香杉》(Snow Falling on Cedars, 1999)節奏太慢的問題出發,探索「時間」在電影形式與意義建構上扮演的角色。論文首先釐清,《雪落香杉》的「慢」,不是因為鏡頭剪接速度太慢、攝影機移動速度太慢、或是演員動作與場景調度太慢,而是畫面與敘述分離,造成感知與情節脫鉤,時間因此逸出觀影者的視聽與思維統合而四處漫延的「慢」。論文第二部分細讀《雪落香杉》片段,說明希克斯運用了畫面剪輯與聲音的不連貫,創造一種記憶¬不支撐現時╱現實(the present/reality),時空斷裂,記憶主體粉碎的聲、畫不同步經驗,於形式上挑戰觀影者的鏡像「快」感。第三部分轉至創傷理論,說明《雪落香杉》一片的時間能量,其實來自影片傳衍(transfer)創傷的意圖。《雪落香杉》拍死亡、拍戰爭、拍種族矛盾、拍日裔美國遷徙營(Japanese American relocation camp),其漫延過情節和敘述的時間,正是「創傷時間」的具形呈現。筆者主張《雪落香杉》之「慢」,除了實驗一種電影美學形式,更有延展創傷時間「後遺」(belatedness)與「延遲」(prolongation)效應的意義。「慢」可以是一種倫理,讓《雪落香杉》在創傷「時延」(duration)之中探索一個人我交會、記憶交融、跨越膚色界線的思維,讓二戰創傷滲入影片中每一個族群,而遷徙營也不再只是專屬於日裔美國人的歷史記憶。
The Secret” (1991b), “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering’” (1992) and “Literature in Secret” (1999b); and Morrison’s “A Knowing So Deep” (1985), Playing in the Dark (1992), her Nobel Lecture in Literature (1993) and “The Future of Time” (1996), I argue that secrecy does not pose an epistemic obstacle or hermeneutic limit to either Morrison or Derrida.
Rather, comparing the process of literary creation to “playing in the dark,” Morrison finds in the darkness of the secret a threshold time-space of literary “becoming,” while Derrida explicitly advocates the idea that literature is “in place of the secret” or literature “responds to the secret” in order to drive forward a future dimension of avenir. Derrida is concerned about a secret that hides nothing, a secret without depth. For him, literature is capable of keeping (the life of) the secret not because literature has to conceal knowledge but because “literarity” makes literature as unfathomable and elusive as the secret in relationship to meaning. Contentions like these find strong resonance in Morrison’s works. Indeed, both Morrison and Derrida seek in “the secret” the force to cut open existing cognitive systems; both also consider literary practices valuable as long as these practices are able to ride on the cognitive opening of the secret for generating movement from the
edge of knowledge.
本文以亞美研究在台灣的發展為例,思考台灣外文學門(暫稱「我們」)媒介西方文化思潮(暫稱「歐美」)的策略。論文從台灣學生與學者對亞美的認同(或誤認)談起,主張「亞美」雖然在名號上讓「亞」、「美」連體,移民與混血的過程在物質與身體歷史上讓「亞」、「美」難分彼此,亞美故事其實不斷延展與複雜化「亞」、「美」的距離和想像,亞美論述的發展,也從強調美-亞連繫,轉而鋪陳「亞」與「美」之內與之間的離心張力與「反同」(anti-sameness)潛力。為了釐清「距離」與「反同」在論述建構上的意義,筆者挪用了精神分析「同」中延「異」的立論方法,特別是「傳會」(transference)在談話治療裡讓自我與他者互相傾聽創傷,開展彼此感知時空的概念,探索亞美研究在「美」、「亞」之間建構的「弱勢傳會」路徑:除了具體的亞美移民、遷徙、與離散經驗形構了「亞」、「美」個人情感聯結,亞美研究作為一個論述場域,還介入了「我們」與「歐美」競合及協商的過程,從美國研究的一支,逐漸延展與分化為亞際與跨太平洋認知網絡開展的介面。論文最後提出「創傷歐美」的想像,企圖將「歐美」從台灣外文學門的強勢他者,轉化為一個類似亞美的動態複元場域,思考「我們」與「歐美」在彼此的弱勢經驗中,建立傳會聯結的可能。
這一篇論文爬梳日裔美國遷徙營(relocation camp)敘述的歷史,討論既存的遷徙營敘述,也試圖建立一個以創傷理論為核心的遷徙營敘述模式。論文主張視日美遷徙營為不只是一樁發生在過去的歷史事件,而是一個歷史創傷:作為歷史事件,遷徙營有其發生的特定時空,敘述遷徙營是為了回到歷史過去以還原史實;作為歷史創傷,遷徙營記憶的「時間後延性」(temporal belatedness)則足以連繫不同時空,敘述遷徙營的重點也不再只是史實挖掘,而是透過不斷的歷史敘述與傳衍的過程,去延伸事件的衝擊力與渲染力。論文第一部分先勾勒出一個日美遷徙營的敘述史,了解遷徙營歷史在不同論述情境下被賦予的不同意義,並討論這些不同敘述模式帶來的論述意涵與侷限。接著,我援引拉卡柏(Dominick LaCapra)、卡露思(Cathy Caruth)、凱普蘭(E. Ann Kaplan)、以及班涅特(Jill Bennett)等學者對創傷結構與歷史書寫的見解,特別是創傷如何締造記憶時延的動能,思索創傷時間如何能被挪轉為有意義的文化批判時間,並藉此導引出一個敘述遷徙營的新模式。論文最後一部份從創傷跨界與時延的角度閱讀史塔吉(John Sturges)執導的《黑岩喋血記》(Bad Day at Black Rock; 1954),透過對日美遷徙營歷史一個創傷式的閱讀,探索遷徙營創傷效應穿越時間與族裔邊界的可能。
In the first section Thien dwells on creative writing’s mediating role in historical representation and comments on her relationship with characters and readers. The second section discusses the inspiring role of music and the meaning of music, silence, and mathematics in politics and for individual characters. The third section deliberates on the motif of “the Book of Records” and the implications of taking “compiling” and “copying” as creative forms. Thien turns in the last section to the connection between June Fourth and the Cultural Revolution. She also compares her writing with Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma (2008) and discusses writing as a way to connect generations.
The conversation took place at Milk and Honey Cafe at 1119 Newkirk Ave, Brooklyn, New York, on Feb. 21, 2018. The transcript has been read and confirmed by Thien.
analyze the characters of Weronika and Véronique to demonstrate their “ex-sistence” (existing outside) or “exile” vis-à-vis the narrative symbolic of the film. Finally, I look at Kieślowski’s employment of alternative narratives and point out that his need to tell his story repetitively renders his film self-deconstructive in its attempt to express femininity. Briefly, this paper suggests that the male gaze/narrative of The Double Life
of Véronique may, following the topographical logic of the Moebius strip, arrive at its obverse “surface,” showing the underside of a masculine cinematic language and casting into question an attempted male metalanguage.
Women’s consumption of gothic romance has been an important subject of study in contemporary popular culture. This paper analyzes Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976), exploring the complicated relationship between contemporary female readers and the gothic production/consumption. Briefly, a metafiction dramatizing the production and consumption of gothic romance, Lady Oracle juxtaposes its female protagonist’s realist confessions and her gothic writings, significantly subjecting the mechanic reproduction of popular romance to serious cultural critiques. The first part of this paper, “Gothic Consumption as a Screen,” interrogates the escapism of gothic romance. It casts into question the idea of gothic romance as a screen concealing social reality. “Gothic Space as a Maze” then explores the multi-layered and maze-like space of desire evolving alongside each gothic reading. It lays bare the trajectories of a gothic reader’s sadism/masochism and melancholia. Finally, “Gothic Women in Dissimulation” investigates the possibility of constructing from the act of gothic reading a subversive space of female dissimulation. As demonstrated in Lady Oracle, female readers may identify with multiple roles in each romance. The seemingly passive gothic consumption may be transformed into an active self-construction.
The essays in this collection provide a sharper understanding of how Asian/Americans have been subjected to human rights violations, how they act as subjects of history and agents of change, and how they produce knowledge around such subjects. The contributors examine refugee narratives, human trafficking, and citizenship issues in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. These themes further refract issues of American war-making, settler colonialism, military occupation, collateral damage, and displacement that relocate the imagined geographies of Asian America from the periphery to the center of human rights critique.
Contributors: Guy Beauregard, Annie Isabel Fukushima, Mayumo Inoue, Masumi Izumi, Dinidu Karunanayake, Christine Kim, Min-Jung Kim, Christopher Lee, Hsiu-chuan Lee, Vinh Nguyen, Christopher B. Patterson, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Madeleine Thien, Yin Wang, and Grace Hui-chuan Wu.
More details about this collection are available here:
http://tupress.temple.edu/book/20000000009423