The Minor Intimacies of Race by Christine Kim

Author:Christine Kim [Kim, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, American, Asian American Studies, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, Canada
ISBN: 9780252098338
Google: L53cCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2016-04-30T04:09:07+00:00

CHAPTER 3

Diasporic Fragility and Brokenness

Korean War Legacies and Structures of Feeling

In “I=You,” her essay on digital identity politics, Kara Keeling explores difference within collective identification via an examination of cinema, an advertising campaign, and digital storytelling. Introducing her argument with Audre Lorde’s words about women of color feminism as the “house of difference” and a turn to Brent Hayes Edwards’s insights into diasporic décalage, which he describes as “a changing core of difference; it is the work of differences within unity, an unidentifiable point that is incessantly touched and fingered and pressed” (Edwards qtd. in Keeling 55), Keeling proposes “I=Another” as “an equation in which difference functions in and as the index” (57) for thinking about how identification and disidentification operate within racialized collectives and diasporic formations. She reads The Fourth World War, a documentary film that positions antiglobalization struggles in places such as Argentina, South Korea, and Palestine as part of a global collective protest, as producing a “we”—what I would call a public—through “a collectively forged faculty of hearing” that begins to break down the divisions between subjects (73). Although Keeling’s examination is grounded in examples taken from black cultural studies, these insights into collective identity can productively be transposed onto the field of Asian diaspora studies. As a formation that coheres together generations of people and cultures dispersed throughout the globe, diaspora offers a language of belonging and shared understanding for those who identify as part of it; diaspora is, in other words, one means of creating an intimate public. And yet, given that narratives of diaspora generate their affective power by bringing together generations of people who continue to share a collective identity, what discursive space exists for difference and, more specifically, for recognizing competing registers of diasporic affect and sentiment within Asian Canadian publics? Keeling interprets The Fourth World War as leaking various stories into each other in order to produce “in the film’s viewers a common sense of solidarity, a desire for an alternative globalization, and an intuition that its achievement is possible through sustained struggle” (70), and I wonder if a similar public exists in an Asian Canadian context, one capable of embracing diasporic décalage and still being moved affectively and toward forms of social and political action.

In this chapter, I turn to Asian Canadian and Asian American art and literature to engage with differences in relation to diasporic memory and sociability, focusing specifically on how Asian North American publics are formed through their relation to an imagined Asia, and how this informs their locations within North America and as part of a transnational network. In order to think through these social negotiations, I rely on two primary examples. I begin with installations by David Khang, an Asian Canadian visual artist, to work through the transnational circulation of affect for a Korean diaspora. Khang’s work is provocative for what it suggests about the resistance from various publics to racialized feelings in the aftermath of global war, whether they are tied to 9/11 or the Korean War.

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