Strange Future , livre ebook
301
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English
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2005
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301
pages
English
Ebooks
2005
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
10 novembre 2005
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9780822387497
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Sometime near the start of the 1990s, the future became a place of national decline. The United States had entered a period of great anxiety fueled by the shrinking of the white middle class, the increasingly visible misery of poor urban blacks, and the mass immigration of nonwhites. Perhaps more than any other event marking the passage through these dark years, the 1992 Los Angeles riots have sparked imaginative and critical works reacting to this profound pessimism. Focusing on a wide range of these creative works, Min Hyoung Song shows how the L.A. riots have become a cultural-literary event-an important reference and resource for imagining the social problems plaguing the United States and its possible futures.Song considers works that address the riots and often the traumatic place of the Korean American community within them: the independent documentary Sa-I-Gu (Korean for April 29, the date the riots began), Chang-rae Lee's novel Native Speaker, the commercial film Strange Days, and the experimental drama of Anna Deavere Smith, among many others. He describes how cultural producers have used the riots to examine the narrative of national decline, manipulating language and visual elements, borrowing and refashioning familiar tropes, and, perhaps most significantly, repeatedly turning to metaphors of bodily suffering to convey a sense of an unraveling social fabric. Song argues that these aesthetic experiments offer ways of revisiting the traumas of the past in order to imagine more survivable futures.
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Publié par
Date de parution
10 novembre 2005
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9780822387497
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
S T R A N G E F U T U R E
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Strange Future
M I N H Y O U N G S O N G
P E S S I M I S M A N D T H E
1 9 9 2 L O S A N G E L E S R I O T S
D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
D U R H A M A N D L O N D O N 2 0 0 5
∫D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y 2 0 0 5 P R E S S
A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D
P R I N T E D I N T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S O F A M E R I C A
O N A C I D - F R E E P A P E R$
D E S I G N E D B Y R E B E C C A G I M É N E Z
T Y P E S E T I N M I N I O N B Y K E Y S T O N E T Y P E S E T T I N G
L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S C A T A L O G I N G -
I N - P U B L I C A T I O N D A T A A P P E A R O N T H E L A S T
P R I N T E D P A G E O F T H I S B O O K .
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Contents
Prefacevii
Introduction: When the Strange Erupts in Culture1
Racial Geography of Southern California27
The Black Body in Pain: Rodney King andStrange Days68
Culture of Wounding: The Riots andTwilight100
Mourning Los Angeles134
A Diasporic Future? Historical Trauma andNative Speaker165
Epilogue: Bearers of Bad News199
Notes215
Works Cited257
Filmography271
Index273
Preface
Strange Futurewritten with two beliefs in mind. First, academic was criticism is too important to be deprecated in the name of a thoughtless populism. One of my colleagues gave substance to this belief when she said to me one day, after a visiting speaker said something about not liking to read critical essays, that she did not appreciate this comment because the critical essay is the most elegant form of expression she knows. Perhaps long after my colleague has forgotten ever saying this, the last part of this statement has stuck with me. It signals a preference for a kind of writing that is habitually put down as too elitist, too removed from what really matters to people, and so on. In private conversations, I too have found myself engaged in this kind of populism, trying to demonstrate to the person I happened to be talking to that I am not these things, that I am notthatkind of academic, that I should somehow be exempt from the scorn reserved exclusively for people who spend their days thinking. My colleague’s comment stopped me dead. Why do such denunciations so easily roll o√ my tongue, and why is it that such denun-ciations are so often greeted by people who should know better with a conspiratorial smile or a silence that suggests complicity? This is surely a problem, especially given the demonstrable fact that it matters what academics write. We address some of the most important and pressing concerns of our times; we have the power, and the leisure, to start conversations that will otherwise never begin; we have the freedom to explore and develop ideas that are often, in many other circumstances, risky to state too openly. If we do not, therefore, defend a taste for what we do for a living, we have already partially conceded the serious nature of our work and, in the process, made it that much more di≈cult to defend our right to speak di≈cult, complicated, occasionally inchoate, and often unpopular thoughts. Against those who wish to strip this right from us, and there is a rising chorus to this e√ect, we must be able to respond that it matters what we do, even if we (much less frequently than
is asserted) make factual errors, say something o√ensive, put out an idea that isn’t fully thought through, express ourselves in a manner that is not easily comprehended, concern ourselves with topics that seem overly rarified. Indeed, we should be able to say that what we academics do for a living is not a right but a necessary social imperative. Not how dare a professor say something that sounds anti-American, thus abusing a privi-lege that can be taken away, but how admirable that he or she is willing to be so courageous at a time when fear and reaction demand conformity of thought like a vise squeezing all of us from top to bottom, side to side. How liberating, we should say, to come across someone willing to struggle with obdurate concepts in a way that doesn’t speak down to the reader. Second,Strange Futurewas written with the belief that focusing on the specific—whether it be a single historical event, a single geographical local, or the struggles of a single ethnic or racial group—is one of the best ways to ground discussion about issues of far-ranging significance. The very development of my research into a book supports this belief. This research began as a study on Korean American literature, which I under-took largely because I am of Korean descent and I was interested in thinking about how others like myself had carved out a place in the world of creative expression. As I began work on this study by reading recent novels by young Korean American authors, I discovered that I needed to learn more about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. It was a pivotal event for many Korean Americans, and much of the scholarship about Korean Americans kept returning to this event. Finally, as I researched the riots, trying to understand why it was so significant for my ethnic group, I be-gan to understand that (1) I couldn’t focus just on my group if I wanted to write about the riots and (2) the issues raised by everything I was reading addressed some far-reaching questions about the changing meaning of race, economic relations, national identity, and mass mobility within and across national borders. Thus,Strange Futuredeveloped from the specific to the much more general, while remaining insistent on a firm commitment to the specific-ity that sparked its creation in the first place. It is for this reason that I call this book a work of Asian American studies. The focus on a single racial group, and even the focus on a single ethnicity within a particular racial
. . . viiiP R E F A C E
group, enabled me to write about issues that potentially a√ect everyone who reads this book. Of course, it has become common sense that, as Anne Cheng puts it, ‘‘race studies holds much intellectual capital in academic research today’’ (2001, 169). But I fear that this observation is only superficially true. The mention of race outside academia is greeted with a great deal of hostility, so much so that it often feels as if an actual thought police exists to bully people away from talking about race in public except in the most dismissive way possible. If there is intellectual cachet in studying race within academia, this cachet does not translate well into what happens beyond its walls. Even within academia, as well, there is an undeniable suspicion that we are paying too much attention to race and that race ought not to matter quite so much as some assert, because it gets in the way of thinking about more important matters, such as the classics, humanity, and universal experiences. Such criticisms are almost always stated as if a concern with race automatically militates against concerning ourselves with these other matters. And finally, underlying the suspicion that we pay too much attention to race in academic criticism is the assumption that attention to the specific—it hardly matters what the specific is—can only interest those who are being specified, so that Asian American literature is only inter-esting to Asian American readers, feminist studies only interesting to women, queer theory only interesting to gays and lesbians, and so forth. Obviously, I believe this assumption is wrong. Although there are no guarantees, attending to the specific, and especially to the specific that is frequently overlooked, has the capacity to draw us outside of ourselves and into deep contact with others whose living concerns overlap our own. This is so partially because none of us are defined by any one thing and because none of us can remain isolated for very long. A lack of attention to the specific, on the other hand, only encourages a view from afar, like trying to find out how people live in their homes by observing their movements from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit.
IT SHOULD GOwithout saying that I received an extraordinary amount of help. Several chapters were written from scratch while I enjoyed a postdoctoral fellowship sponsored by the Asian American Studies Pro-gram at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Susan Moynihan,
. . . P R E F A C Eix
