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Thursday, December 27, 2012

on "Where are you From"?

I sometimes get asked "Where Are You From?"

This question is asked of me by people of many different backgrounds. Sometimes they are White/Anglo-Australian, sometimes they are European, sometimes they are Aboriginal Australian, sometimes they are other people of Asian descent.

Arlene Textaqueen, who describes themself as "brown... a non-Indigenous person of colour living on stolen Wurundjeri land in the area also known as Melbourne, Australia," has written a poem about being asked this question on their blog. The poem itself is understandably indignant, self-consciously defensive and naming of some of the potentially problematic assumptions that some people have in asking that question...

"Why do you ask?
Is it your curiosity in the ‘origin of my features’?
Is it your fascination for ‘other’ cultures and what they have to offer you?

Why do you desire to establish an exact definition of my difference?
Why do you assume I desire, and am able, to define this difference to you?

Do you show the same interest in determining the ‘ethnic make-up’ of every white face that you see?
Isn’t everyone from somewhere?
Do you not have a heritage?
Why does whiteness make yours invisible yet my brownness make mine subject to your anthropological investigation?

"

Textaqueen acknowledges that the poem is addressed to white people, and then goes on to articulate how they had performed this poem once at a RISE book launch and poetry slam. RISE is the first refugee and asylum seeker organisation in Australia to be run and governed by refugees, asylum seekers and ex-detainees, and is based here in Melbourne.

Textaqueen writes,
"My poem is addressed to white people, like most of my poetry, but it’s not for them. Judging from the laughter it received from many people of colour in the audience (POCS made up the majority of attendees), the people I had hoped would get it, really got it. I did see some uncomfortable white people and this was unfortunately acknowledged by the MC, Victor Victor, after I left the stage, when he apologised if anyone was offended, because that wasn’t ‘our’ intention as it was a night about ‘positivity’. Ramesh, CEO and co-founder of RISE, did ask him to take back the apology, which he did the next time he was on stage. Is there any person, especially any white person, who couldn’t do with being challenged on their less obvious (to them) racisms? And how, and why, should I do that without making some people uncomfortable? Especially considering, as a person of colour living in a white-centric world, I’m always adapting to ‘uncomfortable’ circumstances."

They then go on to give excellent critique and commentary about a culture of white "do-gooder"ness which is also predicated, though perhaps more subtly, on white supremacy and entitlement.


****

"Where I am From!"

While I acknowledge the anger and frustration that Textaqueen is articulating in their post around this question, I have a different experience around this.

First of all, recently, at a RISE Festival fundraiser gathering which I was volunteering at in Federation Square, I was asked "Where are you from?" all day long by African men and women, many of whom are from recently arrived migrant and refugee backgrounds. I would, in turn, ask them the same question, at which point I would hear their stories of migration from here to there, Somalia to Ethiopia, Eritrea to the UAE, and the eventuation of our bodies to being here together, in Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia (on stolen Wurundjeri Aboriginal land).

Our asking these questions of one another was, of course, contextualised by the fact that the whole daylong event was being run by people of colour, and while nominally intended for a broad audience, was disproportionately and visibly attended by other people of colour. That I was asked this question by African folks through the day did not strike me as coming from a place of entitled interrogation, but from a mutual urge to share of our personal history, to share in migrant solidarity, and, in my motivation anyway, in how we might build community together.

Of course, it is different when white people ask me this in white-dominant spaces, but there is a dynamic shift I want to help catalyse; in which this recourse to poetry, as Arlene has written, is less and less needed. Where I can measure the relative worth of a question not only by the extent to which it actively challenges white supremacist and white-normative ways of knowing, but also by the extent to which it is predicated on the shared commitments to learning and sharing of one another (and one another's histories), and to building connection and "country" with one another.

This also means that I am committed to exploring alternatives to addressing pieces on my racial anger toward white people in general. I am interested in building and nurturing a community of other people of colour who value our own subjectivity enough that we would write literature for one another, with one another as an intended audience, not simply in indictment of white people (as important as this may be in its own right), but in mutual inquiry as well.

I honour Textaqueen's anger; indeed, I share that feeling often, but the question "Where are you from" does not belong to white people, and I am personally invested in reclaiming it as a person of colour. "Where are you from" is also a way that people of colour become agents in anthropology (the study of human beings and comparative human cultures), of ourselves, of white people, and of the dominant (white hegemonic) cultures that we are a part of shaping and reshaping.

Personally, while contextually necessary, I am lethargic of a politics of ressentiment, of building personal and communal political identities and movements based primarily on outrage, indignation, and the introjection of our own Otherness. Let's build contexts together in which lethargy and righteous rage are not our modus operandi.

I believe being openly angry at white folks is one way that we "get over it".
(i.e. by naming and directing our anger at white people)

I would like to find some other ways as well, which include discourses, creative methodologies, and ways of being with one another, which go beyond looking for the most powerful ways to stare white people out of the room.

James Baldwin, on loving the innocent...



"The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words 'acceptance' and 'integration'. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know."

- James Baldwin
(Extract from 'Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation', taken from The Fire Next Time, Dial Press Inc & John Farquharson Ltd., New York, 1963, p22)

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Political Impotence

"In modern states, the citizen is politically impotent. A citizen, it is true, may complain, make suggestions, or cause disruptions, but in the ancient world these were privileges that belonged to any slave." 
- Mark Mirabello


I took this quote off of a new blog I'm reading:
Urban Dissent - Poetry is in the Street
http://urbandissent.wordpress.com/

A Quick Sketch on Developmental Justice

This post is mostly a rambling of my thoughts, not particularly coherent nor created for an audience, for now... But I want to get all of this out before I start creating more coherent posts about these issues.




First.

An observation:
That the post-Ken Wilberian "Integral theory" intellectual and organisational enterprise, (that I have noticed and/or been a part of, online, in the USA, and in Australia) is disproportionately White.



Second.

That unlike English language American Buddhist literature, post-Wilberian Integral Theory is also disproportionately not Jewish (which, from a normative perspective, says as much about English-American Buddhism's "Jewishness" as it says anything about the "goyim", non-Jewish hegemony of Integral theory).

I have been, in my spiritual and philosophical life, largely been influenced by both.



Third.

That through exposure to Ken Wilber's writings, along with meeting up with amazing folks at Sydney Integral, I was also exposed to the following, teleological theory-praxes of individual and collective adult development...

-> Don Beck and Chris Cowan's "Spiral Dynamics"
-> Susanne Cook-Greuter's "Leadership Development Framework"
-> Terri O' Fallon's independent work ... Terri is also one of the key staff in Pacific Integral, that runs the Generating Transformative Change (GTC) program that I have been a part of... (two of their alumni are based in Australia in New Zealand, so they formed South Pacific Integral to host the GTC in this region... I was part of the first cohort here).
-> Bill Tobert's "Action Inquiry"
and more...



Fourth.

Through my learnings and conversations, I have encountered that materialist theories of social justice begin to emerge at particular stages of the development of consciousness (of both individuals and collectives).



Fifth.

Through a few conversations with Terri O'Fallon, I have encountered the idea of Developmental Justice, which is the sense of justice which takes into account the "rights" of people to be "where they are at" developmentally... (i.e. strictly and dogmatically materialist conceptions of justice can themselves be theoretical and practical enactments of Developmental Injustice).



Sixth.

A consideration of the line... "We can measure the health of a nation by the way it treats its indigenous peoples."

(an additional consideration of how many Indigenous peoples (to my knowledge, of Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand, among many others for sure) hold the projections of the dominant national culture's hegemonic concerns around savagery, primitivism, "backwardness", and the associated pathologies of "early" cultural developmental levels... part of my interest in developmental justice, then, emerges from considering a few things:

1. These concepts of Indigenous people (as representations of "early" cultural developmental stages... e.g. hunter-gatherer, tribal, animistic, shamanic, etc.) are partially projections of dominant, modernist culture onto certain groups of people who claim Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage.
2. Some communities and individuals of Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage also introject these concepts, turning them into "self-concepts".
3. To the extent that there is, from a modernist perspective, a lived reality of "backwardness" among a disproportionately large number of people of Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage, then the health of a nation is partially contingent not only on how it socialises Indigenous/Aboriginal people (indeed, all people), into modernist ways of being/doing, but also on the extent to which it can graciously hold, the legitimacy of early developmental ways of being-in-the-world. 
4. How well do we nurture national cultures which hold and support spaces in which people can manifest these "early developmental" stages in healthy forms...?
5. This is true not just for indigenous people, but also for people who are of colonial/migrant heritage.
My friend Tim wisely points out that the ways that some people engage these "early developmental" stuff, in modernist, consumerist pathos, is through encouraging magical ideas of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, etc., but that these are unfortunately, in the context of modernity, encapsulated within a socialisation into consumerist culture
6. That Indigenous/Aboriginal folks are in a unique cultural/ancestral position to be curators of some of these early developmental stages as linked to Land...
i.e. not just in ways that are of or from early developmental perspectives, but as people who hold the unique struggle of integrating (and iterating) considerations of "early" development in "later" developmental considerations of developmental justice within a national and global culture, in the service of the health of the whole spiral [of human developmental potential] (to use language from Beck and Cowan).



Seventh.

This means, also, considering the ways that Integral Theory, in its hegemonic Whiteness (and straightness, and male-dominance, and upper classness, and American-ness, and so on), may re-inscribe some of the same materialist blindspots of modernist injustice, unwittingly.

(in my observation, tending toward exclamations which reveal privilege and ignorance, rather than outright, malicious oppressive intent)



Eighth.

This also means observing my own involvement in Integral, as the normative means through which I articulate or formulate theories and practices of enacting developmental justice.

Healthy skepticism.
Embracing, including, and integrating the baby AND the bathwater.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Butterflies and Cocoons


"When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons.
Somehow we're going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don't come suddenly"


- Sue Monk Kidd, from "When the Heart Waits"

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

We are building a new world together

Fireworks

It seems to me that a lot of the resentment around "political correctness" (whether vocally expressed on the right, or secretly felt by liberals and the left) is a resistance to what feels like a compulsory program of reconsidering and changing our speech, action, and how society is structured.

I do think that some of the ways that (well-meaning) people seeking social change frame the issue plays into that belief.

The fact is, though, that what is happening is that we are being invited to participate in creating a new world, one that is less racist, ableist, transphobic, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, classist, and so on. The key is to focus less on what you "can't" do and say, and more on the many new ways we can learn to communicate and behave. After all, why be content with merely acting out our unexamined oppressive attitudes (whether from the point of view of the group that "benefits" or because of internalized racism etc.)?

Take joy and pride in this creative endeavor, and don't be so afraid of making mistakes! Also, point out and be compassionate about the mistakes of others. If someone points out your mistake in a harsh way, figure out what you can learn anyway! Nobody tries to make someone else feel bad without feeling bad themselves.
We will not change the world for the better through guilt and shame, but by reminding each other of our better selves.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Diaspora

Chinatown

My parents, my brother, and I moved to Singapore when I was about six. It was my first immigrant experience. According to my parents, for a while after we moved into our new place, I kept asking when we would go home. An image that stays with me somehow is looking out the window of our fifth floor flat, watching my father walk across the carpark to get in the car to go to work.

In Singapore, my parents would today be called “foreign talent” (I’m not sure if the term was as in wide circulation in the 80s when we migrated), or perhaps “expats” (though that term to me always had connotations of whiteness). They were firmly in the professional class of lawyers, doctors, academics. In fact, many Malaysians moved to Singapore to find work, and that number has grown over the years. In 1990, Malaysians made up 3.7% of the population of Singapore. In 2010, that number was 9.7%.

The terms “foreign talent” and “expatriate” have a certain glamor about them, suggesting a successful, exotic, highly intelligent and/or capable person whose presence in a country is at the very least exciting. A “foreign talent”’s presence could inspire happiness or even gratitude in an imagined native born citizen, who benefits from the expertise and cultural goods that such a visitor brings. As this rather optimistic headline on a letters page of AsiaOne reads, "Majority say foreign talent is the way to go."

Of course, the deliberate use of these terms is in fact calculated to officially foreclose the possibility of (to render unthinkable, uncivilized) the very real resentment of actual citizens who perceive themselves displaced, put upon, or invaded. For those unfortunates who are marked as “migrants” there is little attempt to even mask this xenophobia.

It’s also worth noting that there are other immigrants in Singapore who are not generally referred to as “foreign talent,” but are rather “unskilled workers” or “migrant workers.” They are differently stigmatized (as prone to criminality and a source of disposable labor). However, just having the label of "foreign talent" does not protect one from being the target of "local" resentment or hatred.

After the Olympics this year, the issue of “foreign talent” was in the news in Singapore, and not always in a good way. At the Summer Olympics, Feng Tianwei, who was born in China and became a Singaporean citizen in 2008, won a Bronze medal in the women’s singles table tennis. She is Singapore’s first Olympic individual medalist in 52 years, and the only Olympic individual medalist since Singapore’s independence from Malaysia in 1965. (As a side note, Singapore’s first and only other individual Olympic medalist, Tan Howe Liang, who won the Silver for lightweight weightlifting at the 1960 games in Rome, was also a Chinese immigrant).

Feng’s win, perhaps predictably, triggered an outpouring of vocal ambivalence from Singaporeans on the internet. The Financial Times' brief survey of how the public debate over immigration has been playing out recently in Singapore is revealing:

Comments on social media sites were quick to point out that Ms Feng was born in mainland China and did not get Singapore citizenship until 2008. Meanwhile, 77 per cent of respondents in an online poll conducted by Yahoo Singapore said they were “not proud” of a “foreign import” winning an Olympic medal.

“Honestly, I cannot bring myself to feel proud for a foreigner to win a medal for us, although they carry our Singapore flag,” one person wrote on Yahoo’s Facebook page.

Xenophobia is an almost inevitable (some might say deliberate) product of a highly nationalistic government. In the U.S., there happen to be two slightly different parties that trade power espousing somewhat different flavors of what is essentially the same nationalist ideology, which is echoed by corporations and their media outlets. In Singapore, there is one ruling party that has been in power for quite a while, and that builds nationalism into school curricula and public media.

Never mind that, like the U.S., the majority ethnic/racial group in Singapore (Chinese) is itself descended from migrants, many of whom actually came to Singapore or Malaysia in living memory, and are relatively new immigrants to the region. Now that they (we!) are there, it’s time to turn around and keep someone else out. It seems to me that xenophobia is the dark shadow of any diaspora people who have attempted to make themselves a new home, and to cement their belonging-ness with the blunt tool of nation-building.

Currently, Israel is in the news because it has commenced a bombing campaign in Gaza, with the justification given being that Hamas launched a rocket into Israel. As with almost any new incident involving Israel’s ongoing project of militarized nationalism, it feels almost impossible to talk about competently without years of study of the history of the region. However, I think it is safe to say that there is some sympathetic resonance (in addition to the obvious political connection) between Israel’s attempt to suppress a native population, with the U.S.’s own long history of the suppression of and genocide against Native Americans by a government historically most committed to the advancement of white elites, whose ancestors left Europe, whether to escape religious persecution or to better amass wealth, and who consider North America to be home.

There is an almost unbearable tension in the hearts of a diaspora people between acknowledging their immigrant past and embracing their new home. Even when the immigration has not happened in one’s lifetime, this tension persists. Attempts to resolve it by jettisoning or minimizing the immigrant history and identity lead to xenophobia and genocide in a pathological and ultimately futile attempt to externalize what is in fact an internal battle by seeking to destroy or harm “outsiders” (despite being outsiders ourselves), or seeking to destroy those who were already here (whose existence is a constant reminder of our own foreign-ness).

While Asian Americans often criticize the (white) hegemonic view of them (us?) as “perpetual foreigners,” I wonder too if it might be wise to hold on to some of this identity as “foreign,” to not blend into (white) America the way that the Italians and Irish did, in order to not replicate the xenophobia and genocidal impulses connected to a (white) American identity.

Especially as a middle-class immigrant who gets along pretty well in predominantly white settings (whatever my actual comfort level), there is a strong temptation to believe that other stereotype, that Asians are the “model minority” and are virtually white. It’s a comforting idea, that maybe this phenomenon of (white) Americans treating or regarding me as “not belonging” here might one day come to an end. However, if the price of avoiding being the target of others’ xenophobia is to become xenophobic oneself, or to endorse genocide, then I think that price is not worth paying. Ultimately, all immigrants and their descendants must walk the harder path, but one that I think ultimately preserves our integrity and humanity, that of grappling with and healing our own woundedness, and re-learning the meaning of “home.”

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Lies I've Believed or Internalized Capitalism

I'm better than you. I'm a terrible person. I haven't done enough. There's nothing I can do. I should have done better. I don't deserve anything. I deserve better than this. I deserve more than you. You don't deserve anything. Nobody understands me. Everybody else is stupid. Everybody else is happy except me. I haven't suffered enough. I've suffered more than anyone. It's all my fault. It's all your fault. Nobody cares enough. I'm the only one who cares. I don't care enough. Things are always getting worse. You don't know how good you have it.

reductio ad absurdum


by the marvellous Australian poet, cartoonist and mystic,

Monday, November 12, 2012

On the Disingenuity of Gratitude


I have recently been involved in a number of small gatherings with other queer people of colour, and I am struck by a particular anemia that I have encountered in my recent life, with regard to the politics of Gratitude.

Often, marginalised people are told we/they "have it easy" in our conditions of relative privilege; for example, that I have it easy as a gay man here in Melbourne, Australia, because it would be far worse if I were in Singapore/Afghanistan/etc. Or that I have it easy here as an Asian man because at least I'm now, generationally entitled to the privileges of citizenship (post-the end of the White Australia policy). Or migrants (of colour) are told "If you don't like it, leave!". Or brown children who make our shoes in appalling conditions of wage slavery have it better than ... not having any work at all...

Of course, there is some legitimacy in orienting onesself to the world from a position of gratitude. First of all, it can be a soothing balm from the exhaustive element of constantly identifying with one's marginalisation. Several studies have shown preliminary findings that a regular practice of gratitude (simply acknowledging and appreciating the 'positive' things and relationships we have in our lives) is highly correlated with, if not causative of, one's experience of happiness and well-being.

From a strictly individual-psychological perspective then, it makes sense to count my blessings, to compare the pleasures of my current situation with the horrendous maleficence of previous countries/cities/polities I have known, and so on.

But of course, there is something mind-numbingly myopic about Ending one's political consciousness at the expression of gratitude.

Lia Incognita writes in her essay for Overland journal:
"Earlier this year, Overland published my personal essay ‘The Name and the Face’ as part of the CAL-Connections project. It was a reflection on language loss, racialisation and the myth of cultural authenticity from my perspective as a ‘1.5 generation’ Chinese-Australian. The essay developed out of a brief piece I read earlier in the year at POC THE MIC, an anti-racist performance night organised by and for people of colour in Melbourne, and open for anyone to attend. In a lot of ways I felt the essay wasn’t particularly radical, because all I really demand is to be able to tell my own story about myself. On the other hand, it’s radical, still, to even call white people white in this country, to say that this ‘is not a white country and never has been’. It’s radical, still, for immigrants of colour to talk about this country from any perspective other than sycophantic gratitude, because our citizenship is always considered conditional."



Sycophantic Gratitude

There is a fire in me that has been (re-)ignited since my recent connections with other queer people of colour here in Melbourne, particularly around leadership and social change, and in celebration of Diwali over a picnic in the Carlton Gardens just yesterday.

I sense in me a re-emergence of a sort of collective impatience that sees, in this 'sycophantic gratitude', a disingenuity, and an anemic quietism of false and privileged spirituality.

In his essay "Why I'm Angry" in the blog the Angry Asian Buddhist, the author writes of his interest in connecting with anger, as an Asian American Buddhist.

"for all their self-proclaimed open-mindedness, the high profile American Buddhist publications generally don’t let in that many Asian American authors. Tricycle is the worst culprit. It’s not as though we don’t exist—it’s just they don’t care enough. I make it my job to point this out because, maybe, someday, it might lead to actual change rather than a privileged complacency."


He then adds:

"There are plenty of other reasons that I blog here, but the main reason I maintain this site is because I’m encouraged by my readers. You may not see them leave comments, but I run into them all the time in the community. And, yes, they are angry—not writhing in conniptions, but seriously indignant. They are upset at a perceived injustice by predominantly White Buddhists of ignoring Asian Americans, who are the biggest part of Buddhist America."


In this, I am reminded of a conversation with my brother (who blogs here on PsychonautErotica as manoverbored), who shared with me that one of the problems with the term 'minority' in describing people of colour is that it actually conflates disempowerment with minoritarian status, which can thus effectively bypass serious engagement with issues of power and privilege.

After all, black and brown folks are actually the world's majority, and so, in the historical contexts of post-European-colonial and settler societies, how have people of colour come to be minorities in the first place?



A great meme that has been on my Facebook newsfeed recently:



And of course, the excellent Wanda Sykes, who beautifully uses humour to demonstrate some of white racial fears of impending minoritarian-status in the USA (and the concurrent dwindling of racial privileges that may be associated with this):




"Ain’t it funny the only time your race or gender is questioned, it’s when you’re not a white man? Cause I think white men, they get upset, they get nervous like a minority or another race get a little power, it makes them nervous cause they get scared that race going to do to them what they did to that race. They get nervous. So they start screaming “Reverse racism! This is reverse racism!” I’m like, wait a minute, ain’t reverse racism when a racist is nice to somebody else? That’s reverse racism. What you’re afraid of is called karma."



Out of Privileged Complacency

My gorgeous friend and white ally Tim Mansfield has written to me, in response to some of the differing views on the 'Left' (and Centre-Left) on the re-election of Obama as U.S. President.

"It's interesting to think of [these] two discourses as a polar-pair, I guess: 
A. Look how far everything's come! 
B. Look how much farther there is to go! 
– yet another pair which, when dancing together enliven, enrich and deepen each other but just get mutually annoying when placed in opposition."

A sense for me then, is that there are conditions in life in which we find it infinitely easier to create and circumnavigate communities of gratitude (often, these conditions are associated with material wealth, access, and privilege). There are other conditions, highly correlated with marginalisation, oppression, and systems that perpetuate large gaps between the Haves and HaveNots, which are not conducive to a path of individual psychological healing.

Part of a progressive politics then, means moving out of the extreme of a total commitment to a politics of Gratitude, moving away from the hypnotically alluring idea that the 'goal of life is to be Happy', and it means allowing ourselves to be contextually, relevantly animated by righteous anger. To collectively commit to creating, nurturing, and sustaining the conditons in which gratitude is no longer only contingent on forced, ritualised, utilitarian, authoritarian and individualistic endeavourings, but is something that is liberated as an inevitable consequence of a meditation on justice that has been properly and deservedly enacted.

So this is where I am at too, in consideration of Gratitude, as part of a dynamic cycle of social change. To be animated both by Gratitude ("look how far everything's come!") AND Righteous Anger ("look how much farther there is to go!")To let neither emotional state monopolise the experience of my political convictions. To be mired by neither extreme in their 'pathological' manifestations (anemia, in the first, and self-destructive, debilitating exhaustion in the second). 

BOTH are spiritual, working in tandem.
Another one of the Yin and Yang of progressive social change.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Coloured Paper

My original post on this is on the Melbourne Colouring Book



A few days ago, the Australian Government released
The White Paper : Australia in the Asian Century, which "sets out a strategic framework to guide Australia’s navigation of the Asian Century."


The official website says more:

"The scale and pace of Asia’s transformation is unprecedented and the implications for Australia are profound. Australia’s geographic proximity, depth of skills, stable institutions and forward-looking policy settings place it in a unique position to take advantage of the growing influence of the Asian region.

The Australian Government commissioned a White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century to consider the likely economic and strategic changes in the region and what more can be done to position Australia for the Asian Century"



An example of an action that the paper raises is around a long-term investment in "Asia literacy", including mandating that schools across Australia will teach at least one of four priority Asian languages (Mandarin, Hindi, Indonesian, and Japanese).

This, of course, has interesting implications for our national identity. Australia has, colloquially, tended to be referred to (by others, and also self-referentially), as a "Western country," despite being more accurately geographically situated as an island in the South Pacific (Northwest of Aotearoa New Zealand, and mostly actually Southeast of our closest continental neighbour: Asia)...

The word "Western" is very loaded, of course, and I interpret this to mean that Australia tends to trace its national heritage to European, U.S. American, and Anglicised continental roots, while paying lip service to our indigenous Aboriginal heritage. Another connotation of the word "Western," beyond cultural legacy, is of course the suggestion of Whiteness...

There is something quite powerful, as a statement, about nationally committing ourselves to being more geographically honest, in this regard, while also being most economically feasible as a long-term national and cultural investment in this sort of regionalism, in Asia...

A wonderful essay has been written in the Sydney Morning Herald which explores some of these implications...:


Australia's Asian-ness is barely visible
by Tim Soutphommasane




Now, I am no politician nor economist, but as a layperson, and as a citizen, I write this post as mere conjecture:
As a queer Asian-Australian man, the thought of an "Asian Century" intrigues me.

The phrase itself speaks to the part of me that is perhaps embarrassingly parochial... Since I was 3 years old, I have not lived in a country in which I was a citizen, nor, since my adult life, one in which I was part of a racial or ethnic majority... I am, of course, simultaneously critical of the ways that nationalist identities can and do reinforce certain forms of racial and cultural supremacy. Extreme nationalism to me has often been suggestive of violence, and at least in the context of the USA and Australia, a subtle and not-so-subtle White supremacy.





And then:
There is something in here, in the metaphor of the "White Paper" and the "Asian Century" which interests me, from a queer perspective.


First, to play with this:
What of a metaphor of Coloured Paper?
(as a metaphorical canvas upon which we could explore policy as well as culture?)

What of a Queer Asian Century?

What does multiculturalism look like, outside of a "Western" framework?
What room is there, given the explicit use of the term "Asian" (as opposed to, for example, "Eastern"), to raise issues not just of multiculturalism (such as Australia has done thus far), but also of multiracialism (e.g. in the case example of Singapore)...? What are the implications of including this explicit discourse of racegiven the racially-charged name of the "Asian Century"?
As Soutphommasane has written, where are all of the Asian people in this country already, in terms of being featured in positions of civil service?
What would it mean to inherit a British Parliamentary system, including a number of the cultural 'advancements' that we have made as a country for example around the decriminalisation of homosexuality, when we contrast this with other countries in Asia (or the Asia-Pacific region)?

What happens when a baton is passed, from an Anglo-normative government to a pluralistically Asian-normative government?
Is this actually going to happen?

And what will race look like in such a context?
What will racism look like in such a context?

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Paradoxes of Group Life...



Kenwyn K. Smith & David N. Berg's "Paradoxes of Group Life: Understanding Conflict, Paralysis, and Movement in Group Dynamics" just arrived in the mail a few days ago...

Just started reading it, and I am very pleased with their consideration of racial(ised) subjectivities and the diverse cultural lenses through which certain forms of group behaviour or 'governance' are constructed as normative.

Also really glad that in their intro, David Berg writes that his interest in paradox emerged through engaging with his Jewish heritage, and in particular, Talmudic exegesis (Rabbinical commentaries on the Torah).

He remarks, "The purpose of [the] arguments [that he had as a child with his father] were rooted in a tradition of Talmudic dispute... to explore an issue and generate some insight, not to defeat the other side. In the Talmud, there are a number of famous pairs - sages whose names, linked together, are a symbol of opposing views. One famous pair -Hillel and Shammai - dispute a number of legl matters throughout the Talmud. Those who have studied these judical texts know that when all the arguing is done, the legal rulings almost always follow Hillel's reasoning. The obvious question is: If the law is always according to Hillel, why have Shammai's arguments been studiously preserved for almost fifteen hundred years?

Perhaps this inclusion is meant to suggest that the other side is also inside the law somewhere and inside us always. The presence of both sides allows us to examine more fully, to understand the complexity of a situation without reducing it to a simple rule or adage. The fullness of our understanding - an understanding that carries with it the other side - enables us to empathize with, make a relationship with, and listen to the other side within us and within our social groups."

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Suffered Enough

Haven't you suffered enough?!
Breathe, dear friend,
comrade,
lover;
Enemy, even... breathe:
We can fight again tomorrow...

Our other work, all through this while,
when we have the space: to work on healing the rifts
inside our own hearts and minds.

Be kind, yes,
even to those who hurt us,
Not least, to ourselves...
We are all wounded soldier-prisoners of a war
that we have only inherited.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Crash

You will not find proof of God in a book,
no.
So Stop Looking
and there She is!
They are! in myriad Forms (all formless beauty,

integrated Ugliness,
fucking poseurs
more Authentically Me than I've ever been)

oh dear:
I'm a Theist in Atheist Buddhist garb,
perfectly loose clothing for meditation...
I am slumped over the wheel of civilisational carcrash
slow bleeding anomie from my forehead,
jaw crushed from too much proselytising
my mouth permanently shaped into an "Om"
or an "Oops"...

...Lord knows which!

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Angkor

Hundreds crowded the stoned ruins of Angkor
Every temple we cycled to,
packed with tourists and more tourists and more tourists still

grasping for a glimpse of some sacred history of Empire
a lost era
a faraway, distant... distant , lost memory...

A religious Empire slave-built,
Stone.

The Khmer Empire
Buddhist-Hindu, not quite one nor the other, nor did it really pretend to be, for it was and must have been, many many different things...



Someone European wanted to take a picture of me.

A Buddhist-Muslim prelude


The West imagines Islam.
Islam imagines the West.
We all live in the ghosts
of this delusional dream of
who we all are.

The West imagines Buddhism.
Buddhism imagines liberation from dualism.
We all live as ghosts
of what we have learned
from the soup of perspectives we swim in
And our mouths sing similar dreams.

How, as a Buddhist, do I imagine Islam?
How do Muslims imagine Buddhists?

Are these even meaningful questions outside of the context of what our languages tell us to perceive as the "Buddhist" and what "Islam" they are imagining, or as the "Muslim" and what "Buddhism" he or she is imagining?

To what extent are these perspectives that I am swimming in --> Islam = backward, violent, 'evil,' hate-filled
--> Buddhism = peaceful, non-violent, 'good,' meditative

actually limiting my ability to fully embrace
the true, lived reality of Muslims, Buddhists, and everyone else alike?


There is a weird 'privilege,' a sort of model-minority pressure, which comes from being perceived as 'safe' because I present myself as Buddhist in Melbourne. One of my best friends, who is Muslim, experiences a different pressure here: To downplay his Muslim background in the context of mainstream society for fear of subtle persecution...

I wonder of this, because we share in common humanity, both of us, in my humble perspective, fundamentally the same, because of our wish to end our common suffering, and to be of service to others.

Creative Impulse


I want to identify with the creative impulse
that lurks underneath our stubborn skins.
That swims
as cells through bloodied tunnels
engendering life
and living,
ongoing Living.

Some call this God,
some the pinnacle scientific moment,
some unifying principle,
some metaphysical constant,
some Highest-of-the-High,
some bitter theme made universal,
some Truth among Truths,
some in some Pantheon of Facets of the Ultimate...

Some say nothing at all.

Role Model

Role Model


When I grow up,
I want to be just like you, Role Model.
My fair friend, my older sibling.
My wiser self,
Me at my Best.
You are that version of Me,
you are that Role I could play,
that I am already playing, as You.


You have been delegated this Responsibility to Role Model my own higher potential, reflect what is possible for me, TO me.

When I grow up,
I already am You, already always Was You, already fullest, already fully on my way, already where I need to be, already fully that I am here,
here I am.

Already "having been" for some and
"may well become" for another.

Rape


Rape is the way the vulnerable are punished.
Rape is the way we are punished for being vulnerable.
Rape is the way we punish the vulnerable.
Rape is the way we are punishing of vulnerability.

We are scared of it,
so we try, violently, to destroy or take advantage of it
when we see it
in others.

Or in ourselves:
We punish ourselves,
this unbearabile, lonely fragility of Me,
I will outdo myself this time.

"We must be the change we want to see in the world."






How To Stop Raping the World

Don't do it.
Work through it.
Elicit help through practising restraint with others.
Do not press the button "Yes" to launch our bomb.
Take the finger off the trigger.
Put down the gun.
Take three deep breaths.
Loosen the jaw.
Take three more deep breaths.
Hold our chest with our arms.
Leak one, foolhardy tear.
Take more deep breaths.
Declare we will sleep on it.
Sleep on it.
Ask for forgiveness.

Repeat.

Maintain practice with lots of deep breathing.

'Role Pathologies' of Desire

'Role-Pathologies' of Desire...



...of Excess Desire

Pervert-Creep
constructed in 'masculine' form, 'overly' aggressive

Slut
constructed in 'feminine' form, 'overly' aggressive



...of Thwarted Desire

Loser

constructed in 'masculine' form, 'under-'aggressive

Prude
constructed in 'feminine' form, 'under'-aggressive




Just some thoughts...



Note:
I write of these not because I think that these roles (and their connotated behaviors) are pathological, but rather that the words themselves have often negative connotations in our culture, and so are in their normative construction pathological.What I'm interested is the shadow aspect in here around all these, for me, and the, I suppose 'libidinal' stuff I want to reclaim in my relationship to vulnerability and my work-in-the-world.

Poem for Today


A young woman was raped and murdered in my next-door neighbourhood.

I am reminded of my own mortality
and wondering how I might go about my life
not to further the conditions in which this is still plausible?

and to further more favourable conditions
that no more people are hurt, nor hurt nor harm one another


In me: This harmless hippie,
and also another, worried warrior.

A third, then: a coward, overwrought with fear
and then a fourth: a wandering mystic
looking for love
then slowly I am
the Beloved, who is always already loved
and then the Lover, graceful and faithful


I am a loner among extroverts
and a leader among few,
yet I have known my own power to hold a heart and break it
known in my own body my power to captivate a room and then steer it
a fever in me that leaks out sometimes in music
or rashes


I am a fish in a frigid ocean
frozen among dead gods and reptiles
I give birth to Me,
first mammal and
first-Held
eyes closed, dreaming justice
heart open, allowing truth


Who will I become?
Who will we all be?

What is my role in all this?

What is our role in all this?

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Are you Chinese?

Sometimes I’m resentful not because people are disrespecting my culture, but because I’m bitter about what I don’t know. This face and this name give rise to assumptions about access to culture I haven’t always had. At other times, I stubbornly refused to learn: speaking Chinese is only cool or impressive when you’re not Chinese. As a child I was dismissive – why bother when I already have the name and the face?
http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-208/feature-juliana-qian/
On Saturday, a postal worker, on seeing my face as I opened the door for him, started speaking to me in a Chinese dialect that I did not recognize. Maybe it was Hakka. He was an older man.
My confusion registered. He switched to English and asked "Are you Chinese?"
I paused, then said "Yes." I thought, oh god now he's going to try to figure out where I'm from.
He switched to Mandarin and asked "Do you speak Mandarin (Pu Tong Hua)?"
I paused, longer this time. Then said yes in Mandarin. I could feel my dread and shame building, anticipating a conversation happening in which my lack of fluency in Mandarin would be exposed, to my discredit. This lack of fluency would confirm me as Westernized, not to be trusted, not truly a Chinese ally in this predominantly white and black neighborhood. A Complete Disappointment.
We proceeded to have a conversation about my family name, and what Chinese character was represented by the Romanized version he saw on the mail addressed to me. My Mandarin was halting, but good enough for him to understand. I understood everything he said in Mandarin, but it took me a few moments every time he finished speaking to process what he had said and to compose my response in my head.
Eventually he realized that small talk was going to be difficult for me in Mandarin. We made our awkward goodbyes. He had me sign for a package, but I think he forgot to give me the rest of my mail. I didn't know how to ask for it in Mandarin, so I didn't say anything.





Wednesday, August 29, 2012

No Talk, No Action

"Do you think you can take over the universe and improve upon it?
The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
In the pursuit of learning,
every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day
something is dropped.
Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
Tao abides in non-action,
yet nothing is left undone."

- Tao Te Ching

All Talk, All Action

"One of the most important shifts required in [a] new way of viewing conversation is to re-evaluate our traditional view that talk and action are separate activities. We... [suggest] that we consider revising our traditional views of talk and action, seeing them as a single integrated whole rather than as separate activities. What if, when conversations are highly energized and relevant, you are already in the action phase? What if it's not talking and discovery followed by action planning and implementation in the linear way we in the West think about it?"


....


"Perhaps the whole process is part of a single action cycle - reflection/insight/harvesting/action planning/implementation/feedback - in which conversation is a lively core process every step of the way. We're discovering that when people care about the questions they are working on and when their conversations are truly alive, participants naturally want to organize themselves to do whatever has to done, discovering who cares about what and who will take accountability for next steps. Perhaps my eighty-four-year-old mom said it best when she shared a fundamental insight from her lifetime of organizational work... "You see," she mused, "conversation is action. You can think things and you can feel things but it doesn't become 'real' until you express it. Then it begins to germinate. Other people hear it, other people begin to feel it, you share ideas together - and if it's important enough, relevant action becomes just a natural thing that happens.'"

- Juanita Brown w/ David Isaacs,
from World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations that Matter, pg 37, 38

Saturday, August 18, 2012

How close can you get without having sex

Many straight American men acknowledge (and perhaps on some level problematize) the conflation of closeness/intimacy and sex when find themselves expressing feelings often constructed as "gay" towards other straight men that they want to be or are close with. These identity crises create tensions that are often released through irony and humor or violence. See terms like "bromance" and "bromosexual," and the plethora of internet clips or personal narratives of straight men (often younger, often comedians) dancing right up to, and sometimes tiptoe-ing across, with varying degrees of awkwardness, that line of sexual intimacy.

I found this scene from the movie Superbad of two straight male friends expressing their love for each other to balance tenderness and humor quite well. The top comment right now on youtube for this scene is "Bromance is the truest form of love!"



Speaking of "bromance," consider the incest taboo - a cultural norm whose existence and vehement enforcement suggests again an acknowledgment of the distinct possibility of a conceptual blurring of intimacy and sexual attraction. 

To be close, to know somebody as well as family members or best friends know each other - how is that possible without having sex? One common distinction between these relationships and sexual/romantic relationships is the perception of the speed at which they usually develop. A family's intimacy comes over time, is almost measured as a percentage of your entire lifetime. So too with best friends (with the possible exception of "my new best friend" - often an expression used to mark out a character or person as shallow or childish).

Yet, in a recent interview, David Jay, the founder of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), and subject of a new documentary, (A)sexual, says:
Yes, [I date] sort of. In the past I had a series of close relationships with women that weren’t sexual. And we didn't know exactly what that meant. A lot of times they also had boyfriends but they were much more emotionally intimate with me. And their boyfriends didn’t know what to do with that—they got really jealous. It was a mess. And it was a mess because there were no words for a really close friendship that didn’t involve sex or sexuality. There was no status for it.
Implicit in this narrative is that the friendships with these women developed along a timeline similar to dating, one that is generally faster than becoming family or best friends. There's something particularly unsettling about this when it happens between two straight men as well, as captured in a recent episode of Louie, reviewed here on Slate. That reviewer notes:
in order to dramatize the way straight white American men stupidly struggle with—and even refuse—a certain kind of intimacy, C.K. presents a scenario that reads as gay as possible. It keeps you guessing at what’s really going on, and wondering where the episode might be headed. 
I don't really have a conclusion for this post, but this topic is something that continues to interest me. Speaking of lacking conclusions, I'm reading Judtih Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure right now. Maybe I'll write about that next.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Tyrant

The Tyrant Father
Nothing is ever good enough for him.
Bully, big bully who
Makes ammo out of the innocuous...
Battles his Son
Acting out of his own woundedness
The ongoing war he must fight;
Those demons that just won't leave.

But Tyrant-as-Victim
is also too convenient a tale to tell
So much sympathy we can muster
"Everyone has a Story"
And so what? Tyrant may be forgiven, yet
Tyrant must still be held accountable for Tyranny

Even if this means: The Tyrant must lose his Son

Thursday, August 2, 2012

An Obsessional Yin-Yang Dialectic








An Obsessional Yin-Yang Dialectic




So, typically, the assumption is that

yin = shadow = female = feminine = black half of the symbol

and

yang = light = male = masculine = white half of the symbol







and that this symbol represents their primordial interplay, which gives rise to the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, water) and the ten-thousand things (all of manifest phenomena).




From wikipedia:

"In Daoist philosophy, dark and light () yin and yang, arrives in the dàodéjīng (道德經) at Chapter 42.[3] It becomes sensible from an initial quiescence or emptiness (wuji, sometimes symbolized by an empty circle), and continues moving until quiescence is reached again. For instance, dropping a stone in a calm pool of water will simultaneously raise waves and lower troughs between them, and this alternation of high and low points in the water will radiate outward until the movement dissipates and the pool is calm once more. Yin and yang thus are always opposite and equal qualities. Further, whenever one quality reaches its peak, it will naturally begin to transform into the opposite quality: for example, grain that reaches its full height in summer (fully yang) will produce seeds and die back in winter (fully yin) in an endless cycle."




Here, the concept of "Primordial Interplay":


Concretely:

Their co-arising





Subtly:

Their interdependent meaning...
Their co-creation / co-definition of one other

(giving rise to the elements and all phenomena)...




And even then... once more:

Their co-existence within each other
(the white dot within the black half, the black dot within the white half...)

Yang within Yin... Yin within Yang


Before the stone is dropped into the water, so that a distinction between waves and troughs is discerned, both waves and troughs are 'integrated' in the stillness of the water...

Already embedded within the constitution of the one is the very totality of its 'other.'
The names assigned to either 'wave' or 'trough' are arbitrary, and these forms themselves are constantly splitting and dissolving into their essential essencelessness.


Back to stillness.



What is the stone that is thrown?


When we are completely strong, we will find also our brokenness.
When we are completely thrown into our weakness, there we will find our greatest strength.
Hot enough, we sweat our own coolness...
And cold, we shiver up our own deepest heat.

Full of rage, we discover our love.
And full of loving intensity, we will find our lingering resentments.



To reach equilibrium, yes, but even that imposes arbitrary 'disorder' on a territory that can never be unbalanced. (neither balanced, nor unbalanced... the ephemeral Tao)


"The Way (Tao) that can be deviated from is not the True Way"
- ? Confucius ?



Here, my motivation:
An exploration of a dynamism that underlies and overlays all my movement and stasis...



Yin and Yang
Play and Justice
Love and Anger
Artist and Activist
Ultimate Truth and Relative Truth
Oxytocin-Serotonin and Dopamine-Noradrenaline


Wednesday, August 1, 2012

A Sketch of an Interview project

So.

It seems a lot of blog posts, in general, are monological: They involve the voice of one writer who paraphrases, or summarises things that they've read.
I'm interested in the sense of meaning-making that comes from dialogical accounts. Conversations that happen between people. "Interviews," would be one format, but the other is the sense of the voice of two or more people involved in generating topical ideas.

The proposal:
To dialogue with friends here in Australia about issues/topics we find interesting. Time limit our conversations to 45 minutes. Record the conversations. Transcribe the conversations. And then put them up online so that there is an availability of English-language primary documents from Australia on a variety of different ideas/discourses that are usually more North-American / European-dominated.

Some ideas of topics I'd like to cover:
Integral Theory
Gender/Sexuality
Race, Racism, and Whiteness
Aboriginal issues
Disability and Theology
Futures Studies
Environmental issues and Climate Change
Queer futures

I'd likely publish these dialogues on a separate site... Details to come!

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Say my name, say my name

Reading this post in PERIL, linked to on a previous post by shinenigan, got me thinking more about something that happened to me yesterday.

A friend (and colleague) and I were talking about the many situations in which schools will allow a student to informally change their name, without having to go through some process of filling out forms and getting approved by the school bureaucracy (or even more burdensome, having to go to court to get an order of name change).

This was in the context of making the case that if schools allowed students to easily change their names, they should not be singling out transgender or gender non-conforming students for especially burdensome name-change requirements when they requested to be called by their preferred name.

As some background, my colleague is White. We were talking with another attorney who was Chinese (like me). My colleague and I were quickly listing the contexts in which non-transgender students might ask for, and routinely get, an informal name change: in the case of a divorce, a student might change their last name to the custodial parent's; a student might prefer to use their middle name; a student might prefer to use an abbreviation of their full name (e.g., John instead of Jonathan, Nick instead of Nicholas). Then my colleague added that a student with a non-Anglo name might choose to take on an Anglo name.

This brought me up short. I was a little stunned, to be honest. I don't think that my colleague was intending to bring up the entire background of "othering," of Asian people feeling never quite at home in a country (indeed, because of colonization, a world) full of Anglo names. I wanted to say: let's be clear - informally taking on an Anglo name is not a preference, it is almost necessarily a (somewhat bitter) compromise. The deal is: I'll take on a less "foreign" sounding name, and you accept me as fully a member of this school community. Unfortunately, of course, since racism persists (yes! even among schoolchildren!), the deal is never made good on.

Anyway, that's sort of what was running through my head, but I didn't say anything at the time. Partly because I didn't feel that strongly about it right then (or am I numb to the pain of racism?), and partly because I didn't want to get into a whole discussion about it at the time (it was lunch!). Today, I decided to send an email to my friend about it. Here's what I wrote:

I just wanted to drop you a note about one of the examples you used when we were talking informally . . . about situations in which students get a school to acknowledge and respect a preferred name. You gave as one example that some students with non-Anglo names would adopt a name that's easier for people to say. I totally agree that this is a not uncommon practice, and that you are right that many teachers probably are almost even relieved to make the switch to the more Anglo name, but I wanted to let you know that it brought up the whole history of racism and xenophobia in this country for me.I didn't feel THAT strongly about it at the time (or I would have told you right away, of course!), but it did make me somewhat uneasy, and when I was thinking about this later, I thought I'd let you know. Part of me feels like, even though it's actually a great example of a common reason for students to use a preferred name over the name given at birth, that it risks bringing up that whole history for someone in the room. We were talking about it informally in a small circle of friends, so that was obviously less risky!However, I think that if we use this example in public (and I kind of want to at some point), we should acknowledge that part of what's going on there is a kind of compromise with a racist society, and that this is something people of color do all the time to have some safety or to not constantly be overtly "othered". I'm sure there's some less "heavy" way to acknowledge that, of course, and would love to get your ideas.I thought that you did a great job acknowledging a related issue with gender identity and medical intervention (that some trans people decide not to change their bodies in a particular socially-prescribed way, acknowledging that it's society that has a problem with their bodies, not them, and that all people deserve respect for their gender identity whatever medical intervention they have or have not had).

Friday, July 13, 2012

Some examples of Asian Third Wavery

This is an expansion, likely part of a series, of my previous post on "Third Wave Asian Poco Asian Politik"

Just wanted to share just a few examples of what I've been reading/exposing myself to in considering a 'third wave' sort of expression.





The excellent Asian-Australian blog Peril 



(in reference, mockingly, to way that of waves of Chinese and Japanese gold rush migration to Australia and the USA were seen as 'Yellow Peril')...


And a sample of some emblematically 'third wave'-type articles, by Eurasian Sensation:


And, just for a bit of historicism on the specificities of difference between Asians in Australia and Asians in the USA (where Asian-Americans start to become hegemonic, at least for me, in representations of diasporic Asian folks in the English-speaking world... to the extent that we ever get a chance at hegemony):




Here is an excellent article by queer Shanghainese-Melburnian Lia Incognita, also on the same blog:
with this gorgeous quote, "For me, it’s the hairstyle of Yellow Peril. It’s what Chinese people looked like when white Australians were still shit scared of us, before all that model minority crap which is intended to divide people of colour from each other."

Lia Incognita also has an incredible poem, "Typography"... you can listen to it on the link, or you can read it, at the bottom of their tumblr:

(a rendering of Lia Incognita by Aron Hemingway for the Melbourne Poetry Map.)





The Asian American blog, Angry Asian Man

is another excellent example of this 'straddling' of multiple loyalties; partially 2nd-wavey in formation (in its interest in representations of Asian Americans in mainstream white-dominated media), as well as with lots of 3rd-wavey zeal (sometimes ironic (re-)appropriations of Asiatic motifs in self-representation)








The excellent book, by gay Japanese American law professor Kenji Yoshino, called "Covering"




from his website review:
"Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life.

Against that conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. Though we have come to some consensus against penalizing people for differences based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, we still routinely deny equal treatment to people who refuse to downplay differences along these lines. Racial minorities are pressed to “act white” by changing their names, languages, or cultural practices. Women are told to “play like men” at work. Gays are asked not to engage in public displays of same-sex affection. The devout are instructed to minimize expressions of faith, and individuals with disabilities are urged to conceal the paraphernalia that permit them to function. In a wide-ranging analysis, Yoshino demonstrates that American civil rights law has generally ignored the threat posed by these covering demands. With passion and rigor, he shows that the work of civil rights will not be complete until it attends to the harms of coerced conformity."






More to come.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Third Wave Poco Asian Politik

from AngryAsianMan


A reflection on Waves.
I first learned of the metaphor of 'waves' of activist leanings from feminism. While arguably Eurocentric in its articulation, I still find it a helpful metaphor when considering some of the emergent sense of identity in being Asian in Australia.



Briefly, and from wikipedia:
1st Wave feminism
focuses on de jure inequalities (or sex/gender-based inequality enshrined in law)... The first of the most important struggles was/is of that to vote (to participate as full citizens in a nation).

"Women deserve the right to vote"

2nd Wave feminism
sees a slow shift to de facto inequalities (or sex/gender-based inequality enshrined in non-state-based institutional practices, as well as in socio-cultural norms). One of the major cultural issues I see at play here is, in particular, the importance of advocating for increased participation of women in historically demarcated 'male' or 'masculine' spheres of influence (e.g. 'public' spheres, managerial/government positions, etc.)

"Equal pay for Equal work!"
"Rights, not Roses!"
"The Personal is Political!"


3rd Wave feminism
sees yet another shifting disposition, into politicising the intersectionality of gender as one of and among many factors that constitute the lived material reality of women's lives. Thus a focus on pluralism, multiculturalism, inclusivity of sexual diverse, transnational discourse, migrant women's issues (as opposed, strictly, to woman-as-citizen) etc.
Here also: the 'reclamation' (or simple 'claiming') and radical valuation of positions historically constructed/demeaned as female/feminine: e.g. Slut-walks, 'lipstick feminism,' etc.

"The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house" (Audre Lorde)
"Stop slut shaming!"




Once again, I recognise that this is a very broad and sweeping brushstroke. I certainly do not mean to diminish the diversity and specificity of the actual histories and herstories of feminism(s) as it/they have unfolded til the present and hereafter.

My interest here is not in feminism per se,
but about the way that feminism, as a movement (or series of movements) has been historicised into 'waves'.
(i.e. my interest is not in history, but in historiography)


Can this metaphor of waves be helpful in considering the unfolding of postcolonial/diasporic Asian-ness (within Euro-/Anglo- American/Australian-dominant spaces)?



Here is a beginning stab at what this might mean:

1st Wave Poco Asian Politik
We see first the waves of migrants from Asian countries into European/White-dominated national settings, fighting around de jure inequalities... Most simply: To be regarded as naturalised citizens. Sometimes, historically, at least in the USA, as far as I know, this has taken on the fight by some ethnic migrants (particularly those of Indian and Japanese descent, as far as I am aware) to be regarded as "White" by the state (and thus be conferred citizenship).

"Let me be a citizen!"


2nd Wave Poco Asian Politik
We see new naturalised Asian citizens struggling around de facto inequalities, particularly pertaining to profession and cultural membership. These include being seen as individuals in highly individualistic cultures, politics of representation in historically white-dominant spaces. For some Asian men (certainly for myself), this can sometimes take on a body-politik of fashioning myself as passably 'masculine,' given Eurocentric body-/and behavioural norms.

"I speak English!"
"Asian men can be muscular / hot / athletic!"



3rd Wave Poco Asian Politik
Here, the issue of intersectionality... And also about the 'reclamation' (or simple 'claiming') and radical valuation of positions historically constructed as Asian/"Asiatic," particularly by those who experience the entitlements and privileges of citizenship.

"RESPECT: Take your shoes off when you come into my home"


Let's see how this one unfolds...

Acknowledging, for now, some of my limitations in this post:
Where women have been constructed as Euro-/White-/American women
and examples of Poco Asian Politik have been male...
No explicitly queer examples ------>        >:(

Wanting to expand and rectify in future posts.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Techno Narrative for Tuesday

As late afternoon light dwindles to make way for early evening dark,
grey skies; smoky, dusty dusk
I sit here with incandescent glow of my Apple iMac swindling me of my attention...

A re-join of Facebook as I end my fast... one of many, periodically
pendulum swinging between engagement with my virtual community commons
and solitude with my Amazon Kindle, without any further thoughts of
publishing my commentary in hopes of being Liked by those whose names I might forget
without the internet as my memory bank.

I google Google's commitment to Legalise Love worldwide, the behemoth's support of decriminalisation of homosexuality;
And I consider how much Singapore has changed since I grew up there...
Population almost doubled, new Mandarin-speaking Chinese migrants making the island republic their home
and labour laws still punishing the incumbent homosexual from ever allowing publicity of his or her
wish to be taken seriously...

Perhaps the internet changes this, perhaps this has already changed, significantly...
We hear of the collective intelligence, a global consciousness feeding into Wikis and Leaks of classified, prohibited Intelligence;
rendering translucent what may once have been inaccessibly opaque,
from governments and banks and corporatised bullies.

In the meantime, Time magazine says I am the Person of the Year, but I feel like a Fraud;
I flatten my buttocks imagining social change
and the seas still acidify from rising CO2 levels; I turn on my heater because it is a punishing Melbourne winter...
Coral reefs die
and Ice caps melt
and I pendulum swing from hope to despair and then back again
Still allowing myself the time to safely consider shifting meanings of Work and Love and Play and Justice

I think about money; I think about Chinese workers from elsewhere settling elsewhere picking up Else's language and speaking it fluently within half a generation
I am a descendant of Chinese migrants; several generations, several seas away.
I am melancholy about the meaning of a rising China (in deadlock)

I read Fridae.asia religiously because I bond my sexuality with my racialised global identity and allow this to speak through me in English, and I receive news of Others' journeys in turn, from such Enlightened forums arising out of primordial cyber-chaos.

Kate Bush sings out of Logitech speakers her 50 Words for Snow, and I am shivering under fleece, waiting for Friends to play on Channel 90 on the telly; my favourite show from the 90s...
Some vestige of a time I was ever-forgiving of the heteronormative, white liberal New York-centric medium that promised me American cool in exchange for my embeddedness in Southeast Asia...

Now I am rootless, yet nutrified by Global media as hydroponically grown Diasporic bean.
Who shall I become? I dissolve into these words and imagine myself thus gone,
even though I have yet, thus, to come.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Different Happinesses


Our standards of happiness shift as we age...

I remember, when I was younger, associating the term 'happiness' with excitement and adventure, while, as I've got older (and indeed, as my peer network has gotten older in turn), I am more likely to associate the term 'happiness' with peacefulness, contentment, and serenity...





So I may see a picture of this child, and project traits in them that are typically associated with older people: Maturity, wisdom... "old for their age"


Or:





I might see a picture of these older people and project traits in them, at least for this circumstance, that are typically associated with younger people: Feisty, playful, excitable... "young for their age"

Contingency and Essentiality

My reflections on this piece: 
"The Poetics of Subalternity"
by Michelle Cahill



"The essential argument of [Gayatri Chakravorty] Spivak['s piece, "Can the Subaltern Speak"] is that when the gendered subaltern performs an act of resistance without the infrastructure that would make us recognise resistance, her act goes unnoticed, it is not registered as a sovereign speech act. Or in other words, it is not that she cannot act or speak, it is that there is nobody listening. Subalternity provides us with a powerful metaphor then. It enables us to more fully acknowledge that it is the sovereign speech act, the endorsement, the registration of identity within speech that ultimately confers agency or subjectship."


Both ‘Contingency’ and ‘Essentiality’ are themselves contingent concepts.

To privilege contingency is to also forget its also metaphorical, amorphous nature... the term itself points to no-Thing in particular, and yet... After all... contingency is also the ‘nature’ of all phenomena. In other words, we could just as easily say that “the essence of all things is their inessence, their contingency”… Which is not, therefore, to suggest that there is NO essence, but rather that there is not one discrete thing that we will find anywhere..

For the subject who has political agency, it is powerful and important to stress Contingency, or relationality… We have seen all too often the pathologies of essentialism here, or self-reification, particularly for people with power. The emphasis on relationality here brings forth a potential for transformation of the self and its antecedent social structures, which can ripple out in the service of all of us.

However, this is only and especially relevant for the subject who not only HAS political agency, but who also is conscious of the agency she has.

For the person who is experiencing a vaulted sense of his own victimhood… The emphasis on relationality may not only be painful to hear (i.e. “You have no inherent self, your sense of your own victimhood is related to others keeping power, etc. etc.”), but it is also potentially cruel.

This is not to dispense with relational language entirely… It is simply that, it needs to be more strategically deployed: The victim in relation to those who can lend their support, rather than as determined exclusively and by definition in its relationality with the oppressor/perpetrator.


As Cahill writes, "Strategic essentialism can be a useful way for minority groups to utilise their common ground to achieve political goals."


Here, to add language which stresses an independence of selfhood (such as a sense of bounded self which can rely on other ‘selves’ for support) may be as helpful as relational language. 

“I am my own person!” 
“I am strong!” 
“I can do this!” 
“I believe in myself!”

In this integration of Contingency and Essentiality, my self-identity (in both the individual and collective self-sense) needs to be made coherent, on its own terms, while resisting both the monolith of a rigid, inflexible Guardedness, as well as another extreme of a forever deeply oppositional relationship to the Privileged Other.

Here: Self-Esteem...

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Act First...

A great blog post:
The "Do Something" Principle

The author describes that we typically imagine that, in order to begin with Action, we need to start with Inspiration, and then Motivation...:
Emotional Inspiration –> Motivation –> Desirable Action


However, he is proposing that it's actually more like a chain:
Inspiration –> Motivation –> Action –> Inspiration –> Motivation –> Action –> Etc.


In other words, one can BEGIN with Action, which can allow for the arising of Inspiration, then Motivation, and then FURTHER Action (which, in turn, generates further Inspiration, etc.)

In other words, we can "re-orient our mindset," beginning anywhere in this chain...:
Action –> Inspiration –> Motivation


This is an especially helpful reorientation if my tendency is toward Stuckness, or lethargy... I cannot claw around 'searching' for inspiration or motivation... Sometimes it really is just about just "Doing Something"... Getting off my bum, rather than hoping that inspiration will spontaneously kick in.

Particularly important if the other tendency is also to rest on my laurels and call that meditation...

Friday, June 8, 2012

Good Enough

"Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien."
"The Best is the enemy of the Good"
- Voltaire

Sometimes I get stuck in planning, lost in a tyranny of choices available to me. Barry Schwartz explains this well in his excellent book "The Paradox of Choice," where he looks at the phenomenon that, up to a certain point, an increase in available choice correlates with an increase in satisfaction around any decision we make around these choices (because we have a chance to consider the factor of 'quality').

However, after that, the increasing number of choices produces diminishing returns in terms of satisfaction around any decision we make. Every decision we make, when we have that many more choices, also leaves us with so many more burnt bridges; something which we experience as painful.

I am interested in moving away from the pursuit of the Best; the way this can sometimes immobilise me from making decisions about anything, such as finding a job, reading a book about any given topic, or indeed, being satisfied with a lover or a friend just the way they are. When I'm constantly nervous about the existence of the Better or the Best (which, sneakily, always seems to be other than who I already am or what I currently have), I start to ignore the implicit perfection of the Good.

The Perfection of the Good, which comes from being able to limit the scope of my desires (a classically Stoic move), which in turn, renders all that is Good in my life into the Perfect manifestations of my humble needs, sated.