the blurriness of tourism (JFK art)

At JFK, a series of holographic light boxes I passed on the way out of the international flight from Korea almost perfectly captures the way I understand tourism and the way it reproduces the meaning of places.

First, the medium, the light. Like so many signs I saw in Asia, the quality of fluorescent and the way it sheds the cool blue beams of white that never flickers or tries something as silly as get sentimental. It's the light in the 24-hour Chinese restaurant, the light above the pumps at the gas station, the light at the airport whenever, wherever, always.

I stopped and took pictures because I was struck by the movement as well; instead of saying one thing, as I passed it, the images said at least two or three, if not more, things.

A South Asian woman and a white tourist, both in front of the shimmering Taj Mahal; the way they cannot fully co-exist in the same picture, reflecting the improbability of their taking a journey together or even a picture together. When I completely see the Indian woman in the orange sari, the white tourist is nearly invisible. When I see the white woman in the blue dress, the orange sari is just a streak of orange smoke, like powder smeared across that part of the image.

And then, their expressions, their individuality. The Indian woman does not smile; she is solemn in front of the building; her sense of gravity at having her picture taken, or just the custom of not breaking out into a cheshire cat grin in front of a lens. The white woman who smiles gamely, widely; this is her moment, it feels more 'precious,' like, "Here I am in front of the Taj, who would've thought?"

Both could be tourists, both could have traveled to that spot. But for the viewer, there are so many assumptions about who belongs more, who looks more awkward or strange or comfortable in the frame, or how the place changes with each in the picture. One, with the Indian woman, could be timeless, it could be taken at any time, say. But once the white woman enters the picture, we can date it; this is the age of travel, or at least of colonialism; someone has arrived here just to see the Taj.

And what's to say of the persistent and faceless photographer in the middle, who shows up dark and clear in both of the pictures I took? He's there, behind both of the woman, leaning in for the perfect shot. He's in the middle because, without him, in a sense, there would be neither image, either the Indian woman or the white woman standing in front of the Taj.

I love the blur, the way the images refuse to stay still, to reveal only one reality, one experience. How it catches me, to say, Look, time, place; it moves, you moved it.

allegories giving way: Dongducheon, South Korea

Dongducheon's Camp Casey, from a trip with KEEP in 2002.

Under the gaze of Marxist political economy, some places are almost purely allegorical.

South Korean military camptowns, the settlements that were first built around the imperial Japanese military occupying Korea and then occupied and expanded by the US military, might be one such political allegory of a place.

Ostensibly, the camptown is a type of border zone that serves as a buffer between military and civilian life. It hosts a familiar theatre of unequal exchanges between a foreign military and a native economy constructed around their consumptive desires. From a feminist perspective, the camptowns are a non-stop carnival of horrors where patriarchy, nationalism, and militarism cavort together in the commodification of female (and sometimes male) bodies. Whether they have arrived voluntarily or have been trafficked from the countryside or abroad, these women inevitably begin from a position of debt bondage, and many surmount the initial debt only to begin paying their way through their gendered responsibilities, as daughters, as sisters, as mothers, for someone else's education and upbringing. Generally, military camptowns seem to be the perfect narrative vehicle for demonstrating how brute military power (primitive accumulation) safeguards the interests of capital and imperialist designs.

Sometimes, however, it is precisely this allegorical vision that smooths over the social and political complexities and dynamics that would offer some way out of this dead end, for the people who are the most affected. If a place becomes so allegorical as to become an abstract abomination, it is tempting to propose projects of erasure to ease the nationalist sense of outrage and shame. At the national scale, calling for the withdrawal of foreign bases is definitely one kind of solution - a polemically clear rallying point that identifies occupation as toxic, as crippling, as the root rotting at the core of the dead city, the city as one endless crime scene.

But people live here. The horror of the abstraction does not mitigate the facts, the routines, and the quotidian desires that stir upon waking, to open shops, sell cigarettes, food, booze, phone calls, games, clothes, to US soldiers. People live here. For some Amerasian children, this is the only place they can live, rejected by a general cultural climate of xenophobia around such human reminders of occupation or that other nationalist trope, the 'bad women,' the 'fallen women.'

Women and child in Dongducheon.
Image from Katherine Moon's book Sex Among Allies.

Maybe this is what this project at the New Museum is about: Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision. It excites me because the process of research and exploration seems to ask questions more than propose plans, and most of all, the artists and residents, in dialogue, highlight the importance of space, of bodies, of walking. It pokes at buildings, it doesn't let the haunted houses just be, or the fields remain blank, or the cemetery remain untended. It fights impending bulldozers with grief, and seeds. I am going to check it out this Thursday and see how the luminous text translates into form, into an experience for museumgoers like me.

Detail from Discoplan, by artist Sangdon Kim, Insa Art Space,
in which residents propel seeds over the barbed wire at Camp Nimble.

"Who said that?" reflections on the defensive list-serve

Where the borders between the academic and the activist, between one nation and another, between legal advocacy and social justice, gets tested: The list-serve, or to be precise, the Vietnam Studies list-serve, where a friend of mine posted a call for anyone in the Seattle area to respond to this news about the newly signed Memorandum of Understanding between the governments of Vietnam and the United States, based on this article: Thousands of Vietnamese living illegally in the U.S. face deportation.

Security guarding Northwest Detention Center; Tacoma, Washington (outside of Seattle). From blog: Sewell's Sticks.

The list-serve's vague moniker reminds me, again, that Area Studies, including Asian Studies, is in an interesting conundrum (2)-- not only because the debate about its originating drive in Cold War intelligence-gathering is still relevant (and tired), but even more so to anyone who tries to find any kind of 'community' within it, since the containment of so many lands and peoples into a single moniker "Asia" appears more and more archaic, especially in a region where so much transnational migration is unraveling national constructions and cultural hybridity has been the norm for thousands of years. Nevertheless, it seems we continue to roam these old imperial mansions, trying to find interesting people to talk to amidst all the antiques.

But I still didn't expect this territorial backlash -- The first person to respond to my friend's call for action, asked: "Who are you anyway?" He justified his query by stating that because of gmail, yahoo, and other freeware domains, he didn't know my friend from a 'random tourist hanging out at a internet cafe in Hanoi.' Then he concluded: In any case, the Vietnamese being deported are reported to be criminals. And then he signed off.

In his reply, I saw some very familiar boundaries erected, the first around ethnicity (since he seemed to assume that my friend was NOT Vietnamese by her last name and therefore was uneasy with her claim to advocacy), and secondly, around legality, distinguishing between good and bad Vietnamese-Americans, or, essentially, between the human and the sub-human. Underneath it all, his questioning seemed to imply that her "call to action" was not representative of the requests that an academic list-serve normally hosted.

Of course I jumped into the fray, as did my friend. In prefacing my response, I felt compelled to invest myself with some authority, so I threw in my institutional affiliations along with my stint at the ACLU Immigrant Rights Project, where I learned, really fast, about the limitations of the legal system. My friend, meanwhile, explained why her entire name, first and last, made her sound like a Plymouth Rock American, due to her parents' changing their Vietnamese surname to something that would not draw racism. It upset me, as always, to see people forced to show evidence of ethnic belonging in order to be allowed to speak, just as my friend was tired of it, like showing a scar, flashing a hand sign- I'm one of you. But I am also sure it was eye-opening for everyone reading - first, to see the total absence of a Vietnamese identity in this person's name, only to have it revealed that the project of erasure had not even worked: this person was not only ethnically Vietnamese, but also fighting for Vietnamese immigrants - but based on a broader anti-racism platform. Huh? Vietnam Studies meets Asian-American political activism.

Many, many threads later, this is what happened, after three Asian-American graduate students and at least four white male professors hacked away at various mythologies:

1. we complicated the definition of criminality, noting that 'deportable crimes' for immigrants has been broadly expanded by immigration acts passed in the Clinton years (1996) to a broad array of non-violent crimes and immigration 'offenses.'
2. we traced the link between the prison industrial complex and the increase in detainees - as well as the impetus for deportation in that this strategy has been, in a way, TOO effective, with some jails and local prison systems bulging with more prisoners and detainees than they can handle
3. we emphasized the often unjust and inhumane treatment of detainees, Vietnamese and otherwise, and the poor access to legal justice accorded to people in any form of incarceration.

In the process of talking about the legalized detention/deportation system, it became a clear point of consensus that the aforesaid legal system was likely not going to be of much help to any Vietnamese immigrant slated for deportation. So on top of all the localized legal advocacy responses, anyone who cared about mass deportation would really have to work on a more systemic level to radically change the incarceration and detention system as a whole. At least, some of us drew those conclusions.

To me, it is telling that both myself and my friend wanted to make sure to broaden the scope of the discussion to other histories of racialized incarceration and detention (she invoked Japanese internment, I spoke of South Asians being racially targetted by the US Patriot Act), while some white male scholars questioned these gestures of solidarity as 'inaccurate' - for example, questioning whether a race analysis was 'useful' here or not. It was also interesting that many of these professors' claims of authority on the topic were as court-appointed experts in Vietnamese deportation trials.

Reflecting on this now, this distinction becomes apparent: while my friend and I were speaking from an embodied experience of being racially targetted, from a consciousness of Asian-American political solidarity with other racially-targetted groups, and from working in community-based organizations, the white scholars were invoking objective national histories in which their work, and not their lives, drew circles around and around Vietnam as a fascinating fetish-object. It appeared as if their disciplinary affiliation as Vietnam scholars gave them entry to limited justice-oriented activities based on universal human rights platforms. Not a bad strategy, in the end, to have a white university professor testify at your deportation hearing, and I am glad that these professors did take on the legal bureaucracy (in the process realizing, when they would otherwise have little contact with the justice system- hey, this doesn't work!)

But I think my friend and I saw the paths leading from the problem on a much broader scale of resistance- about building community capacity through popular education, about challenging the very right of police to even conduct raids or the INS to bureaucratically shred up families. And we were refusing the claustrophobia of 'Vietnam' as a particular or exceptional casebook of knowledge, and saying, "Hey, this really looks familiar, doesn't it?" So while all of the people writing seemed to be saying the same things (i.e. honey, this mass deportation thing seems a bit fishy)-- we weren't.

Thinking about it, it also seemed that list-serves can become deterritorialized and somewhat level battlegrounds, courtrooms, and classrooms in debates about categories of knowledge, identities, realities. Would we be so bold in the physical classroom or courtroom? Would we stand up to the didactic man at the lectern? I'd like to think I would.

But meanwhile, the list-serve seems to assist in a certain form of boundary-breaking (once you get past the moderator, that is): If you can write, you get the floor. And all that people can throw back at you, although it doesn't stick, is: your funny name, your dubious qualifications. But as an electronic commons, where sending an email on a list-serve lands something in everyone's backyard-inbox, where there is a certain amount of goodwill intention based on the assumption that a post is of interest to the entire collective, where all conversations are public to all participants and must be performed according to a certain standard of civility, different rules apply than in the real classroom or courtroom - and no one is coerced, in the end, into believing or agreeing. Embodied experience matters, but the familiar rhythms of acquiescence can be unsettled. Who would have thought?

(2) Area Studies article: "The territoriality of knowledge and the history of area studies." David Ludden, University of Pennsylvania, December 1997.

doubletakes: some snapshots of empire

Children in Japan, welcoming Taft. Source: H. F. Woods Camps Trust

They are ostensibly pictures of celebration, or at least of manufactured celebration in the spirit of hosting dignitaries. The requisite row of children, waving flags at a strange-looking man.

Apparently, more than 1000 of these were sitting in a photo album in the long-deceased photographer's family home in the Adirondacks.

Taft arrives, Bacolod, Philippines. Source: H. F. Woods Camps Trust

Today's NY Times article about this discovery classified this finding in the realm of art, mostly noting the remarkable and pleasing objects produced in a medium relatively new at the time, snapshot photography.

Why am I surprised? How many Americans have heard about the 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement, after all?

In these photos, taken on a 3-month trip documenting then-Secretary of War (great title) William Howard Taft's trip from San Francisco to Honolulu, Japan, Philippines, and China, everything is so ordinary, unremarkable, and unposed. As the article notes, it's a trove of snapshots -- moments unplanned and seemingly incidental-- and so, men gambling on ships, people waving from docks, street scenes of Shanghai.

And yet it is during this time that Japan and the US, through Count Katsura and Secretary of War Taft, agree on this: Japan takes Korea, if the US gets to keep the Philippines, an agreement which became formalized in the Treaty of Portsmouth later that year.

I'm still a bit speechless that the exhibit showcasing these photos makes this event a matter of OHIOAN PRIDE. The article does finally get beyond the gushing family members to quote one professor of history, who notes that this is a pivotal diplomatic moment for two budding empires, as they agree mutually on their respective 'spheres of influence.'

I love these euphemisms. 'Sphere of influence' sounds like a gently irrigated crop circle. And framing the agreement as 'diplomacy' erases all the resistance and violence that came before and after. The article is a great example of how to naturalize the violence of colonialism with a gaze that only sees the literal subject matter of the shots. A lot of time spent pondering President Roosevelt's nubile 21-year old daughter, for example.

Then, there is the language of the actual agreement: For Japan, colonial exploitation of Korea is a matter of 'general peace in the extreme East' in exchange for recognition that the US would be a 'strong and friendly nation' governing the Philippines. Meanwhile, the tutorial for teachers based on this new exhibit calls it a significant moment in the 'transformation of the United States into a world power.' Ah yes, you mean going from crude gunboat diplomacy to the wonderful and exclusive new club of international law.

What's really perfect about the pictures is that they also are among the first touristic photos shot with the hand-held Kodak- in a sense, the first touristic snapshots. The word connotes spontaneity and some promise of authenticity- this really happened, this was not a set-up. Yet coupled with the context of tourism, the snapshot is also a lens back to the photographer, the document showing his or her valuation of what was worthy of being captured, and all the things they did not or could not see.

Moro Women, Philippines. Source: H. F. Woods Camps Trust

Moro Warrior, Philippines. Source: H. F. Woods Camps Trust

So it kind of stopped my heart to see these shots of the Moro people in the Philippines album (above), who, according to the article, are demonstrating their 'prowess with spears' for Taft's party. How ironic. How heart-rending, especially after just leaving the Philippines and learning more about the Moro peoples' long struggle for independence and autonomy, their patchwork incorporation into the US-occupied and now authoritarian Philippine state. How many other photographers followed, to Zamboanga, to Jolo, all over Mindanao (and who is photographing what is taking place there with the Philippine and US military now)?

But I call these pictures perfect because it becomes so transparent: how tourism and colonial conquest go hand in hand, but in a sleight-of-hand way; where one type of border crossing (tourism) covers up the other, even though both are happening simultaneously. The violence in the gaze is unremarked upon, and gets to go wandering around with a point-and-click camera. The natives are keepsake images, everything else is ripe for the picking.

For me, it is also telling that after that agreement is made, main attraction Taft goes home but Alice Roosevelt goes to Korea (as the need for diplomats has obviously become moot). There she and an American minister are apparently the first foreigners to be entertained by the emperor of Korea and the ladies of the court (more euphemisms). So the rulers of Korea are essentially meeting Americans precisely after their sovereignty has been signed away --

Behind the scenes, oh behind the scenes, is this familiar argument for empire through colonial conquest, Social Darwinism and development. Asian lands were "rich in possibilities, but unfruitful through the incapacity of negligence," inhabited as they were by the "incompetent races" (words of influential US naval officer Alfred Mahan).

The timing of this article is funny, since I had been thinking 1. that it would be good to go back to this moment to launch this blog, as a way of historicizing how the US, Korea, and the Philippines overlap in time and space, and 2. wondering how to introduce the agreement. Then this January 1st 'discovery' of snapshots comes along. All in all, Taft-Katsura feels like the historical equivalent of two ships passing in the night, when two sets of spoils change hands - and while this did not mark the beginning of liberation movements in either country, by any means, the agreement itself is radically interpreted by Korean movement activists as evidence of the US reneging on agreements and NOT in fact acting as savior of the Korean peoples. It was one of those revelatory 'aha's' in my study of modern Korean-US relations for the KEEP program that still, to this day, feels like a secret. And the article keeps it that way.

I don't mean to remain at the political response level of 'indignation' and 'shock' alone. I hope to get on to all those other feelings, the other readings of the moment and these photographs. But I had to honor my own doubletake at all the erasures within this article.