Truth and Fiction on Haiti: The Real Victim speaks was content wise a very problematic read for me. Neither am I familiar with any of these authors, nor with the magazines, so it is hard to judge the substance. However, Majorie Valbourn claims, that McClelland did not seek for the victims approval to portray her experiences. This is a legitimate critique, if it is correct. Rather low down is her statement of “McClellands ‘questionable’ truth about her personal experiences.“ She does not provide any evidence or proof of this claim, which makes it fictional as well. She criticizes McClelland on a very personal level, which seems to be out of place for me.

The Female Journalists & Researchers Respond To Haiti PTSD Article is directed to the editors, which makes their respond in contrast to Valbrun less personal already. Furthermore, their critique is to reconsider the representation, which is based on a generalization of Haiti, which McClelland presents within her article. The critiques seem to be justifiable.

Valburn is afraid that public’s trust in journalism is undermined. I think if public questions articles it is just an act of enlightenment;  and enlighten be the journalists aim.

In the end, it needs a recipient who questions, checks different perspectives and builds is opinion only after this process. Furthermore, this position should be dynamic.

I think Leela Fernandas concept minorization of the world, introduced in chapter 6 of Transnational Feminism in the United States, could be one way to dynamize (does this verb exist?) this process of positioning. The transnational perspective would ask you to minoritize your home country, for example the US. She describes this adding of a transnational perspective, as a simple „inclusion of one more category of the ‚other‘. I think it is interesting, that she chooses the word inclusion over integration though. Inclusion means to not just integrate in an existing system, but to change the system to make something actually fit. This means inherently, that not just one ‚other‘ is added, but that the original perspective, is overthought, and also changed.

Fernandes

I am glad that Fernandes is talking about the "market driven organization of the production and consumption of knowledge." As I move through academia, the sense of faddishness and cliquishness has been surprising. In particular, I have been frustrated by what she calls "the new stylistic or linguistic turn of phrase" (p.195) which seems to be mandatory for publication. For social scientists, who might be assumed to share a concern with the ways in which institutions like education affect people differentially on the basis of class, it seems peculiar that what we publish should be written in a style that is linguistically inaccessible to ordinary citizens.

That said, once I figured out what was meant by an “ethic of risk”, I found her discussion of the matter useful, although I can only hope that I understood her correctly. There is danger in the attempt to translate other peoples’ worlds into academic knowledge, but it is unethical to try to play it safe. The fieldwork I am proposing for my dissertation will be among African-Americans. As one of my classmates said to me, “Wouldn’t it be better for an African-American to do that study?” Yes. Yes it would, but I don’t  see anyone ready to take it up, so I have been trying to figure out how to do this ethically. Yet I have been acutely aware that this is a project which is entirely my idea. It’s a fairly hot topic with the people who have the power to grant funds. It’s a topic that is dear to the heart of my advisor. These are things that are important ingredients for a successful dissertation – what Fernandes refers to as the politics of fieldwork. But it may not be a hot topic with the people in the community I will be asking to participate.

I hope I can design a study that will produce knowledge that is helpful to the community. I have to write a proposal for something that I think will contribute to the well-being of its subjects, as well as to the theoretical edifice of my discipline, get it approved by a committee of professors, and get it funded by some committee of experts in public health. Will this proposal be something that the local community finds valuable? Quoting Welch, Fernandes writes, "...within an ethic of risk, actions begin with the recognition that far too much has been lost and there are no clear means of restitution" (p.131). When I start talking to potential informants, I may find out that there is something else they wish I would study, or I may find out that they agree with my classmate and want me to get out of the neighborhood. It seems better to talk to potential informants first, recognizing that I might be going back to my advisor and saying, “They would rather I studied something else.” The ethic of risk – to decide to care and to act although there are no guarantees of success.

So, Fernandes’ discussion of a practice-oriented approach, with attention to the practice of ethical principles as knowledge is produced, contains suggestions that I should keep as a list above my desk. Pay attention to how you are gaining access to informants and to information. Think about what kinds of questions should (or should not) be asked. Make sure your subjects have the information they need. When you write your papers, think about who will be using it, for what purpose, and who will profit from it. Your subjects should profit from it. She suggests being an engaged witness, not merely observing, but in the sense of bearing witness, testifying, or speaking out on behalf of others. The witness in a field setting changes the dynamics, and there is the danger of putting one’s informants in a bad position. This makes perfect sense, but what can I assume about the way that my presence will change the dynamics in a given situation? Above all, I need to be willing to give up a degree of control, to develop and rethink my research goals and agendas in collaboration with members of the local community.

 

January 12, 2010 4:53:10 PM

January 12, 2010 4:53:10 PM

How you know you’re sad a book is over:

1. You read the acknowledgments slowly (like you may recognize a name

2. You flip bak to the beginning to reread the introduction (just to make sure the author did what they said they were going to do)

3. You reread the entirety of the pages you dogeared

4. You go back and double underline your favorite passages

5. You contemplate ordering every book in the bibliography

Those are all things I did when I finished Why Haiti Needs New Narrative by Gina Ulysse. 

Gina Ulysse for President

When looking at what the President of Haiti needs to possess, I would say- an understanding of the complex and misunderstood history of the country, the challenges, the corruption. But also the beauty. Someone who is motivated by and inspired about the future of Haiti. I nominate Gina Ulysse. She is motivated by one thing: systematic changes in Haiti (42). She has “knowledge of our country’s extremes and knows that change will not come to Haiti without conscious and radial approaches. Otherwise, Haiti’s future will abound with more man-made disasters” (52). She is a self proclaimed “die-hard Haitiphile” (59). 

Lot bo dlo & the Haitian diaspora 

Gina Ulyyse is a member of the Haiti’s large diaspora. What is known as the tenth department, the 1million+ Haitians "on the other side of the water” yet remain connected to Haiti. 70% were impacted directly by the earthquake, the other 30% were one degree of separation. “Diaspora communities produce various cultural formations that travel back to and are consumed in their place of origin” (Fernandes, 61). Across the ocean, after the earthquake, she wrote and was a voice for many in Haiti. She remained connected to the culture of both Haiti and the US, a transnational feminist. 

Why do people hate Haiti?

Gina Ulysse makes it clear that there is a PR problem with Haiti. Throughout her essays she talks about the perceptions and stereotypes of everything from race to class to religion. “The day when Haitians as a people, and Haiti as a symbol, are no longer representatives of or synonymous with poverty, backwardness, and evil is still yet to come” (Ulysse, 26). 

“Hate is an intense emotion; it involves a feeling of ‘againstness’ that is always, in the phenomenological sense, intentional. Hate is always hatred of something or somebody… Hate may respond to the particular, but it tends to do so by aligning the particular with the general; 'I hate you because you are this or that’, where the ‘this’ or ‘that’ evokes a group that the individual comes to stand for or stand in for” (Ahmed, 49).

In the same way that Americans responded to Slumdog Millionaire, Haiti itself “provides a safe and uplifting representation of poverty that allows American audiences to both mediate their own economic anxieties and also project these anxieties on an 'other' country that can still be viewed as distant and inferior” (Fernandes, 76). 

Ahmed describes the concept of affective economies, which I understand as referring to the way that emotional reactions are distributed and gain value through repeated verbal expression. Fernandes quotes her, and expounds on the idea through her analyses of how The Bandit Queen and Slumdog Millionaire were used to reinforce notions of Indian barbarism and corruption. Ulysse also refers to the way transnational media productions perpetuate affective patterns for their audiences, with the trope of the white guy gone native who takes up the battle against colonial power. Both Fernandes and Ulysse raise the question of how the subaltern can be given voice, in transnational atmosphere where agents of colonizing nations are deciding what media will be funded and distributed.

Ahmed points out the way certain phrases and words come to be linked to issues around particular groups, what Goffman would call ‘framing’. A recent example of this in the U.S. was the use of the word ‘thug’ to describe Baltimore teenagers acting out in the aftermath of the Freddie Gray shooting. Or how repetition of the phrase ‘kept us safe’ served a double purpose of instilling fear and reinforcing an image of the President as protector-in-chief during the years following September 11.  If such a phrase is repeated often enough, the association ‘sticks’, and become hard to combat through rational discussion. It is interesting to see how now that association is being deconstructed only now, as Donald Trump makes the point that was certainly brought up at various times in the past decade, which is that Bush actually failed to keep us safe. Whole books were written about that in the mid-2000’s, so what were the forces that kept the public’s eyes closed then, and why are they ready to open them now? While this may seem off-topic, the underlying question is about how the affective economy can be manipulated, and by whom. Who is it that could challenge the framing of teenagers as thugs?

In class the other week, we performed an exercise of word association with France and Africa that demonstrated what all three of these authors are arguing. The representations of minority groups and “third world” populations in both scholarly papers and public media have reinforced images of France that are largely positive, while those of Africa are largely negative. With regard to Haiti, all we hear is the negative – the corruption, disorganization, devastation, disease – it always appears as a backward and hopeless case. I expected, as I read Ulysse, that I would find a more positive portrayal, that at some point I would find the stories of heroism and community she occasionally made reference to. Sadly, they never appeared beyond a mere glimpse. While I am sure, on an intellectual level, that she is telling the truth when she asserts that there is more to Haiti than poverty, danger, and hopelessness, her book did nothing to alter my affective view of the country.

With regard to the voice of the subaltern, which Fernandes dwells on, this seems quite a dilemma. If Spivak is right, that no one can speak on behalf of the subaltern without subjecting her to the influence of existing power structures (e.g., the academy), then what would be preferable? If the subaltern speaks to the researcher, we cannot be sure that she is speaking frankly, or whether a justified failure of trust suppresses the honest expression of opinion or feeling. If she does speak frankly, the question remains whether the researcher is able to hear and translate in a way that maintains integrity – that conveys to the audience an accurate depiction of the subaltern’s message. If the voices of subalterns are frankly opened, and translated with integrity, then at the next level of choice, who is deciding which voices are worthy of presentation to a larger audience? In Slumdog Millionaire, the decision to replace a civilized female lawyer with a brutal male interrogator substituted a trope of barbarism for the more realistic expression of democracy. One has to wonder if the movie would have been as successful had such alterations not been made. Or for that matter, whether the movie that was made did any good in terms of changing the world’s image of India, and if it could have done any good by insisting on more fidelity to the original story, even if that meant a reduced audience.

The Organization of Hate - Sara Ahmed

            Ahmed’s chapter two is very illuminating on the subject of hate; her affective economies are the most interesting part. While I believe I understand how she is using affective economies to unpack and place hate, her Marxian connection was somewhat lost upon me. I understand her connection of emotion working as capital means that the emotion is essentially works as an advantage, giving it more power as it circulates. Her language was somewhat difficult to unpack, but I think I got to the idea she is conveying about affective economies. The link to Marxian capitalism was what convoluted the idea for me; while I understand her intention was for clarification, it served to further confuse me. However, her example for how affective economies functions on the bodies of refugees served as a better clarification point, and brought up some interesting thought processes for me.

            Ahmed’s example of the speeches William Hague gave about asylum seekers was in aiding the understanding of how affective economies function in the everyday. The language Hague uses to talk about refugees and the nation conflate asylum seekers with burglary and the nation with victimization and exploitation. This victimization of the nation allows for despotic invasion over certain bodies because of the conceptualization of this “bogey man” that could be any body within certain groups. Hague’s language is used to talk about asylum seekers in the year 2000 that “swamped” or “overwhelmed” Europe – it’s funny how things change.

            I work at an advertising agency in Birmingham that specializes in health care advertising. They recently wanted to help the influx of Syrian refugees that have been covered in the news recently. The email implores everyone to donate anything because “these poor people need our help!” It echoes the circulation of Hague’s language about asylum seekers in 2000 – note that they are now referred to as refugees, which further places the nation as the good neighbor letting people into their home. When station began covering the emigrants it began by covering what these people were running from, the hardships they’d suffered and how people wanting to help could do something. However, that narrative is all but depleted; it has been replaced with the crisis that Europe is facing because they are “accepting” so many refugees. This kind of language is circulated redundantly in news cycles now, which gives these new immigrants the image of being leeches that are sucking the wealth of the nation. It is interesting how this affective economic works on and through bodies, but the focus is on the “victim” not the bodies absorbing language and being affected by it.

            Ahmed’s need to focus on the bodies affected by hate is unusual in that people do not usually focus on the affected bodies. The current news cycles talk about the immigrants in statistical terms: where they emigrate from, where they settle or gain asylum and how it is affecting that country economically. I found it interesting how this colonialist perpetuation of hatred is ingrained in the media so much so that they absent-mindedly distribute and reproduce hatred almost hourly. Similar to Ahmed, I’m curious how this perception of this group of immigrants is internalized within their bodies. They are the true victims within and around this discourse. How this hatred is absorbed and enacted on these bodies will be interesting to see.  

Why Haiti Needs New Narratives

In reading for this week, I found myself reflecting a lot about the ways in which emotions, sentimentality, can be used in ways that belie their often innocuous surface reading. In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, I can remember friends and family members who expressed such great sympathy of those people down there in Haiti–oh, how they MUST be suffering. In the same breath, however, it was made clear that there were proper, and improper, victims in Haiti that needed our help or did not, respectively. It was, in hindsight, an exercise in the very narratives that Ulysse claims in Haiti Needs New Narratives are some of the most destructive–a proverbial White Savior looking on in horror from Above as some bodies who were once invisible become legible in the rubble of the Earthquake while others remained beyond the view just beneath the surface, either unnoticed or overlooked. What an eye-opening revelation for me as I read for this week. I was then required, politely forced, to consider the web, with all its stickiness, of symbolic meanings that enveloped the world around that crisis; this web created a global reaction that, like my own family's, rendered some bodies important within the aftermath while others were ignored or forgotten. This rendering of legibility in the aforementioned aftermath comes stacked with power relations and operated within existing structures of privilege that allowed mostly white, mostly middle- and upper-class Western folks to decide who was worth saving, and who was not.

Thus, I was thinking within Ahmed's conception of a cultural politics of emotion in which emotional reaction, depending on to whom the emotions belong, are valued in such a way as to become globally realized, extending the power to make decisions about the legibility of others, however temporarily, to you. As I think about the readings for this week more, I am faced with another of my own senses of implication. It is amazing, now that I have the experience and time, to look about to those narratives and see myself as part of that (privileged) affective community that "mourned" those lost in the earthquake, even though I did not necessarily have the ability at that time to enact my new-found global sense of humanitarian "responsibility." But, I do remember feeling badly about those poor children without being able to understand that so much more was happening just beneath the narrative surface. I, nonetheless, am implicated in what is now an historical (temporal) point in time where the operations of global structures of power made things seem so intimate–and, for some, they were–and yet so removed from the situation that mourning could happen by us good white-folks from the comfort of our homes, lamenting the conditions of those poor people while sipping sweet tea from a mason jar. For perhaps the first time this semester, I have seen myself as part of this global economy, though I now have the language to attempt to resist its enveloping stickiness. It seems that capitalism, which is something that has been touched on by my classmates, is partly responsible, but it cannot be all. Racism, too, seems to be so instrumental in these narratives, but as you look for the instances where racism lives, you see that gender comes into the fold as well. Thus all of these narratives of Haiti, all of the political ramifications of affect and emotion, show the multi-layeredness of these global situations. It is inescapable, then, the implications of Haiti narratives for those of us who did not feel badly for all Haitian, but for some; who ignored the suffering of so many because they did not seem worthy of even the shallowest of sympathies; who remember wanting to be able to help, but not enough to ask Haitians what actually needed to be done; who wanted to see themselves as saviors of people, but only certain ones. It has been a lot to think about.

        In her introduction of Transnational Feminism Leela Fernandes examines the visual knowledge through representation in public spheres. New technologies play an important role in visual representation. This development is highly important as national borders are crossed with ease, they are therefore not important, which makes them ultimately fictitious. A change in political and cultural life is an automatic consequence. Nevertheless, the existence of new technologies can be used as a tool for states at the same time. This has to be kept in mind my while analyzing the impact of film and television on cultural identities and forms for example. 

In chapter 3 Fernandes analyses the power these forms of knowledge have, in relation to the national context; she therefore presents the power of these knowledge representations. She focuses on two cultural products, Bandit Queen and Slumdog Millionaire. These movies are examples of how a reproduction of subjectivity is performed. Political science perspectives are interweaving with affective economy. She shows how uneven this relationship is, resting on the corresponding forms of labor production (64). Social change is therefore shaped by power, knowledge, representation, and ethical implications. These materials become constructed identities, which raise segregation and privileges. A way to form an identity is to say what one is not. 

       In The Organization of Hate Sarah Ahmed uses the same concept. Her starting quote was very interesting in these terms “It is not hate that brings the rage into the heart (…) It is love“ (42). This sounded confusing at the very first read; but while she tries to position hate which we could consider the unknown, she sais what it is actually not. She positions it in relation to the oppposite, in this case love. Shortly, she positions opposites to define what something is, or is not. In her essay she shows in particulat how hate can attach to collective or individual bodies. It then becomes a narrative of the body. And this narrative is created by the privileged one, actually trying to exclude him or herself.

      In Haiti Needs New Narratives, Gyna Ulysse gives an example of how Haitians after the earthquake of 2010 are viewed. The narrative are backwards people, incapable of helping themselves. The Haitian bodie is narrowed down, with ignoring many parts of their history. At the same time they do not have the power to change this transnational narrative. They are the construction of the privileged, again, the one who tried to define him or herself in relation to this body, for example as a savior.

The Cultural Politics of Emotion

The Cultural Politics of Emotion complicated the political economy, emphasizing the emotions of hate and love as a key component that allows for the systematic positioning of peoples in this international hierarchy. The use of the word economy when talking about emotions alludes to the process that enable materials to become commodities that segregate, isolate, and privilege certain countries, regions, and identities at the expense of others. While materials become commodities that might strengthen national ties, the acceptance and division of the ideas of entitlement and access to these commodities need an acceptance of emotion to facilitate the value of these commodities. Hate is a process, a process that is created as an opposition of love but often times ignored because love is a device used by to justify one’s own identity. Yet unfortunately, in order to construct one identity and or one emotion, there needs to be what it is not or an opposite.

            While Ahmed explored how “hate is the production of the ordinary”, Fernandez’s comparative analysis of Indian films demonstrate how difference is constructed against the norm. This construction “against” or attempt of the acknowledgment of difference in media often times reinforces certain norms-in one case the rising middle class- is often times influenced by Western ideology and interpretation that inadvertly perpetuates and often times ignores the history of certain places, peoples, and involvement of the international community that have created the reality people live in.

            This cultural authority over the production of knowledge further stigmatizes and ascribes a certain intellectual progress for developing countries; Ullysse shows how this assumed and often strewed knowledge of said countries-in this case Haiti-influences how the world responds to disasters and tragedies. In Haiti’s case, blackness and the religion of Vodou has caste the country as deserving of the tragic earthquake while simultaneously having the world feel entitled to exploit or save the country in the name of humanitarian work. The perceptions and reality of what happened to Haiti during the earthquake show how emotions are a commodity, influencing how these singular, constructed narratives of Haiti that have historically been used to uphold American and European exceptionalism(and all the hegemonic ideals this exceptionalism upholds).  These narratives that have been constructed of Haiti showcase how exclusionary processes of privilege and the access to power are that often contradict or silence the reality of those persons on the ground, power that leads to authority, whether that be economic or political authority, or entitlement to use someone or someplace’s tragedy to make one’s self feel like they are doing their duty of operating love. Which is ironic because it does the opposite in reinforcing hate.

Why Haiti Needs New Narratives

In Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, Gina Ulysse — a Haitian-American researcher — discusses the problematic discourse surrounding the Haitian narrative, particularly but not limited to surrounding the Haitian Earthquake. She speaks about the narrative that strips Haitians of any agency, specifically mentioning more than once where an American journalist only cared to translate one word of a Haitian mother's narrative: threw. An entire mother's life, plus her identity as a mother, was collapsed into one word and displayed for all of the U.S. to see: Haitian mother's are so careless, so inhumane, so tearless that they would throw away the bodies of their deceased children and leave. Beyond that, Haitian children were labeled orphans. Bodies were thrown into mass graves without proper identification. Tourists were given expedited care, while Haitians fell in the margins and disappeared. Haitian women were raped, their bodies labeled worthless and despicable.

Ulysse argues that Haiti doesn't need a savior. Haiti especially doesn't need a white savior, such as Bill Clinton that said he was the financial backing of Haiti, but "if its not about money, that's something Haitians needs to resolve among themselves" (p. 69) The rhetoric that currently exists to describe Haitian bodies too often forgets Haiti's entire history. Such rhetoric have so commonly been used to refer to Haiti and Haitian bodies that they have become common cliches to describe Haiti. In the end, Ulysse understands that Haitians don't embody these narratives though. Haitians themselves don't have the privilege to rewrite the Haitian narrative.

Ahmed argues that these narratives — narratives of hate written by the white victims — are a form of economic capital. Rhetoric that implies a country's inability to cope or progress alone threatens its existence as a nation. Very similarly, this reminds me of an earlier reading that questioned who is the author of history. Those in power, those that are privileged are always the ones with the pen, always dismissing the importance of the Other's history, religion, and narrative, more focused on its own. Language and rhetoric, then, becomes of utmost importance in speeches, historical documents and history books. The ignorance of the Other's culture can and most often times will skew the narratives written by the privileged.

Uprooting/Regroundings and Ahmed et al

           People are comprised of a myriad of experiences that are then conveyed imperfectly through words. Sometimes the spaces that are created with those words are too narrow and have to be reexamined. In the introduction of the book Uprootings/Regroundings, Ahmed et al brings up the conversation of how the ideas of ‘home’ and ‘migration’ should be examined through a lens of plurality as opposed to one that views them as specific points. This idea of fluidity really speaks to the nature of identity. In Adoptive Territories, Kim explores the relation that Korean adult adoptees have with identity and how they claim to navigate this terrain.
          The creation of identity is something that at once straddles both the private sphere as well as the public sphere. On page 86 of Adoptive Territories, Kim says "the identity of adoptees is not reducible to an ideal type such as that of diaspora, but rather is an ongoing production of a shared social imagination that has taken on transnational dimensions." The significance of this statement lies in two place, one in the ways in which there is an 'ideal' type of identity that is projected on to others often by those from a privileged position, and two in the conceptualization of identity as a 'shared social imagination'.
         People are all too often put into boxes by those around them. There is a regulation of identity by those of privilege that attempts to create a plane "with clear lines of connection among accepted categories of place, time, and identity" (Kim, 89). The obvious issue with this approach is the fact that identity is not linear. Identity isn't something to be pinpointed on a line. Beyond the complexity of identity, there is also the issues of how identity and mobility are regulated through positions of privilege. Ultimately borders and nation states are creations that have little reality beyond what we give them. However, as seen with the body politics that accompanies mobility, they have been given a lot of power or are overseen by those given a lot of power. In direct correlation with the Kim reading, these issues of mobility and identity are manifested not only in overt ways such as the severance of ties with birth mothers during adoption in order to cross international borders, but it is also seen in the nuances of daily interactions, such as a conversation held by an adult adoptee and a taxi driver in which the driver asserted that the adoptee was Korean.
         In many ways identity can be seen as a 'shared social imagination' and the recognition of this aspect of identity allows for there to be a deeper and more insightful look into identity constructions. Identity has often been conflated with merely being a manifestation of genetic predisposition. This is intrinsically flawed in that it does not allow for identity to construct and reconstruct itself, not does this logic allow for any fluidity of identity. Our brains are constantly absorbing information and computing that information in order for us to perceive the world around us. Feelings of togetherness, belonging, and acceptance are major parts in our construction of identity. This is exemplified by the ways in which many of the adult Korean adoptees felt accepted by others who has similar and shared experiences as themselves. 

Home away from home.

*I JUST REALIZED THAT LAST WEEK ALL THAT POSTED WAS MY OUTLINE FOR MY BLOG, NOT THE REAL CONTENT. HAHAHA. Apparently I'm not great at blogger/draft/publish. THIS IS AN UPDATE. So sorry!*

Home away from Home. 

What would it mean to be born one place and taken to grow up somewhere else- different people, different country, different continent. How would that happen? Elena Kim gives the history, benefits, missteps and opportunities of transnational adoption in Adopted Territory. “Transnational adoption is a phenomenon that may be precipitated by a social crisis of the welfare state and actualized through the extraordinary abilities of ordinary people, but, as these examples illustrate, its full collaboration as a system dependent upon the coordination of a range of technologies: national family and immigration legislation; expert knowledge and universal notions of children's best interest; missionary, development and humanitarian charitable projects; the circulation of images in the production of transnational imageries and affects; and the availability of international communication and transportation technologies” (71). 

Christian Americanism + anticommunism = adoption

Adoption is something I’ve been familiar with for the majority of my life. One of my best friends from childhood was adopted. My parents were foster parents. In my catholic school, there were big families who at some point thought- what’s one more? and adopted internationally and domestically. Everyone was motivated by the “Christian morals” Kim talks about. They had verses like-

“Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” Matthew 18:5 ESV

"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” Matthew 28:19 ESV

hanging on their kitchen walls. 

And that’s not a bad thing. It’s not altogether a bad thing. It makes sense to me that after years of fighting communism the American media and international propaganda would encourage the rescuing of as many “orphans” as possible. But the American (and European) transnational adoption phenomenon desperately needed to be examined. What happens when a child from South Korea is forced to grow up white? Is the disconnect from their heritage and disregard for their culture worth getting to grow up in the suburbs of Lansing, Michigan? We assume so. 

What about the children that were painted as “orphans” but weren’t really? Wouldn’t that be something to celebrate? After 4 years of being in an orphanage your biological parent is found! A family reunion! Instead, across an ocean Americans were feeling cheated. “In the cases of Sul Ja and Chong Ja present discordant moments that bring to light cultural assumptions and social structural relations. In both cases, assumptions about opportunity, entitlement, and familial ownership were rhetorically mobilized by desiring Americans in their attempts to adopt the children they had decided were theirs” (69). That’s when you know the Christian Americanism, as Kim calls it, has morphed  into American entitlement. 

Online communication + major conferences = Korean adoptee community

I used to love eBay. You could find things you didn’t even know needed. I would get bored and shop for my favorite things- I would type “headband” or “Zeta Tau Alpha” or “Burberry” into the search field to find something I didn’t even know existed but then instantly needed. The internet is funny that way. 

The picture Kim paints of people building online community just by searching “other Korean adoptees” is amazing. Community is a difficult thing to create, but technology made it easier for the Korean adoptee community to connect over blog posts, shared experiences, plan for in person conferences. The world is getting smaller. 

I love the idea of community that connected each of the text this semester so far- the ICIs traveling together, the Haitian women crossing the border together, the Dominican women helping take care of each others children. The Korean adoptees sharing their unique, but similar experiences. In a world of turmoil, striving, often suffering- the human connection is priceless. 

Things I found helpful when navigating this texts. 

ethnicity- a social group that shares a common and distinctive culture, religion, language or the like.

race- a group of persons related by common descent or heredity; a socially constructed category of identification based on physical characteristics, ancestry, historical affiliation, or shared culture. 

culture- the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group.

transnational- going beyond national countries or interest; comprising persons, sponsors, etc, of different nationalities.

international- between or among nations; involving two or more nations.

emigrate- to leave one’s place of residence or country to live elsewhere.

immigrate- to enter and usually become established; especially: to come into a country of which one is not a native for permanent residence.

migrate- to move from one country, place, or locality to another.

Ahmed and Adoptees

Ahmed and Adoptees

My favorite quote from Ahmed is on page 56: “Attending to the politics of hate allows us to address the question of how subjects and others become invested in norms such that their demise would be felt as a kind of living death.” This is one of the phenomena I noticed during the life I led before going back to school, and one of the topics I hoped to explore in my formal studies. I find her explanation a little hard to follow, but I think she makes at least a couple of points that are useful. One is that people tend to become emotionally invested in social structures and institutions that they (or perhaps their ancestors) created, so it is not only the threat of loss of economic or political power which drives the opposition to waves of immigrants or to any group whose presence threatens the established mode.

While one can analyze the psychological aspects of the individual who performs a hateful act, such understanding is never to be used to excuse the performance of that act.  It might be a predictable aspect of human nature that, when a pre-existing ratio of demography or political power begins to transform, those who had been in the majority are going to feel threatened.  They are not justified in acting on that emotion – hate is not a crime, but certain acts that are indicative of hate are crimes. At this point, she moves on to discuss the effects of hate on the objects of hate, and abandons what, to me, would be equally interesting – any discussion of how this predictable (normal) response to shifting population dynamics could be managed in such a way as to minimize its likewise predictable effect of violence and sickness.

As the Matsuda quote (p.58) points out, racist and hateful acts have real effects on their objects – there are numerous studies which support this assertion – therefore I am puzzled by the criticism leveled on the following page, with which Ahmed concurs. Butler is saying that the effects of hate speech/signs are not determined in advance, and I think she means that reactions to hate speech vary between individuals, but I doubt Matsuda meant that every person who becomes the object of a racist act will react in the same way. I think the meaning of Matsuda’s assertion lies in statistically demonstrable effects – not immutable physical laws. The participants in Kim’s research are examples of how the effects of racism are differentially distributed. Depending on individual sensitivity and the environment in which they were raised, the effects of racism in the United States had different effects on the adoptees.

The adoptive parents may have thought (and still think) that they can, by their own “color-blindness” or by exposing their child to Korean culture, that they can protect them from the difficulties of being an Asian child in a white family, in a white community. I think the essential problem here is that the parents do not really know what is going on out there. Unlike, say, the African-American parent who has lived with racism and discrimination, and so can offer their child counsel born out of experience, the white American parent has never encountered what their child will inevitably encounter on the faces and in the actions of their schoolmates, co-workers, and chance public meetings.

During my master’s research on men in the 19-25 age range, I interviewed a well-to-do white woman who worked for the government in the area where I conducted my research. I was interviewing her for background information on the history of city policies, school environments, et cetera. She had two adopted a children, a girl of Latin descent, and an African-American boy who happened to be in the age range I was studying. I was struck by the optimism of her view, which we discussed in the interview, on where race relations stood in the community. She wanted her son to participate in my research, but he was not eager and ethical concerns would have complicated such participation. However, I had opportunity to observe him with his peers at the skate park, and I also interviewed leaders in the Black community there. I do not think that everything was as copacetic as the well-to-do white mother wanted to believe.

otherness within others

For me this weeks readings focus on mobility, kinship, citizenship and notion of family/ "home". As we have mentioned in previous weeks mobility in a transnational view symbolizes privilege and only made accessible to those with privilege. In relations to the "eligible adoptee"(45 Kim) whose adopted parents have privilege "combined with an American sense of entitlement and cultural superiority" to chose the orphan they want to be a part of their family. As for me i took Kim's analysis on adopted koreans and their experience to self identify within national, ethnic and familial belongings within their new "homes" as being forced to the subjectivity of being alienated and casted as other. THus, they are can never fully embody white nor be korean enough to korean americans. "Unable to fit normative categories of personhood, demonstrate how identity and kinship are forged at the blurred intersection of the biological and the social"(Kim, 86).

Kim and Ahmed

"Being grounded is not necessarily about being fixed; being mobile is not necessarily about being detached" (Ahmed et al., 1, emphasis original).

I begin here with this early quote from the introduction to Uprootings/Regroundings because the readings for this week seem to be pointing us towards an understanding that "home" is far more complex than how we may have conceived of it previously. Uprootings/Regroundings makes this work central in its investigation into the ways that concepts of home and migration can problematically "entail the displacement of others from their homes," repeating a cycle of "spatialized relations of power" (6). As Ahmed et al. state in the closing of the introduction, "In gathering this work together, we seek to trouble simplified claims concerning the nature of home and migration in contemporary lives and worlds" (15). In grappling with the idea of "home," and its ties to mobility/movement/migration, I attempted to work through the problematic relationship between our considerations of what it means to "be at home" and what it means to "displace" others from their home. More broadly, I thought a lot about the ways in which the subject is both constructed by the sense of belonging to others (in a way, being at home with them) and through the sense of belonging to oneself (perhaps by knowing, understanding, and articulating one's identities).

In her book, Adopted Territories, Eleana J. Kim finds the same problematic of understanding the self in relation to others and in relation to place as being central to the difficulties with which Korean adoptees must negotiate in understanding both themselves and their relations to others. This struggle for understanding the self in relation to others is a very important focus of Kim's book, which situates "Korean adoption and the emergence of the Korean adult adoptee counterpublic within the political and economic transformations of the late twentieth century" (38). In relation to Ahmed, Kim displaces our commonly held consensus about the meanings and understandings of "home" and belonging. I think that it is important to understand that both of these works are challenging liberal notions of individualism and mobility, which are necessary in the process of our conceptions of self-making and self-knowing. In other words, the more I can move away from home and come back; the more I can relate to my family of origin; the more I can use economic resources accrued by family, the more liberally Me I can be and belong, both to my family and to myself. This point is a focus in Kim: "Adoptee's daily confrontations with the problematics of belonging suggest that dominant epistemes of personhood and self-making–kinship, race, and nation–continue to be powerfully salient despite the breakdown of biogenetic definitions of family, the defunct myth of the biological basis of race, and the predicted erosion of power of the nation-state under globalization" (130).

Importantly, I think that these questions raised by Ahmed and Kim are necessary to our class' contestations of the liberal subject and the role of the global in our displacement of the West from our ostensible feminist interventions. As Ahmed notes, "We take as a model those feminist studies that have been concerned with the intersectionality of race, class, gender and sexuality in the making and theorizing of transnational domains…These approaches have laid the groundwork for our own thinking about feminist and post-colonial interventions in the realm of the transnational and global, suggesting both that the nature of uprootings and regroundings are linked to such differences and that a focus on these differences requires new ways of theorizing home and migration" (3). It is in our rethinking of home that allows us to reorient ourselves to understandings of (queerer) homes; homes built through bounding outside of familial ties, where we belong more completely to ourselves and to others.