palimpsest, read

The issue of language-cum-ethnicity as embedded in the entire fabric of cross-ethnic representation must also be discerned in the context of ethnic studies in North America, where, in many cases, the investigation of ethnicity is no longer entirely or at all grounded in language pedagogy. To give the most obvious example, Asian American studies is conducted by and large in English, the medium in which Asian American authos compose their primary texts. Unlike the case of Asian studies, in which epistemic authority is still by and large disembodied in the sense that it is based on the academic, disciplinary incorporation, by specialists who may not themselves be Asian, of the languages and cultures of peoples who are "over there" on the other side of the world, in Asian American studies, epistemic authority is frequently and implicitly located in the bodies of the ethnics themselves. Hence the imagistic, self-referential turn and the confessional mode of representation are, arguable, deemed much more essential practices in the latter field. As Tomo Hattori has observed: "Asian American literature is still understood, for the most part, as literature written by Asian Americans." Because many of them no longer have the claim to ethnic authority through the possession of ethnic languages, Asian Americans are perhaps the paradigmatic case of a coercive mimeticism that physically keeps them in their place--that keeps them, in Balibar's terms, in their genealogy and, I would add, in their genre of speaking/writing as nothing but generic Asian Americans. The visible, genetic signs of "ethnic difference" on their bodies--an accident of birth--become, in this light, the referential limits embedded in their otherwise proliferating discourse. (The generative logic of Foucault's repressive hypothesis, as discussed in the introduction, is fully at work here.) Without the authentication (however unsatisfactory) of the ethnic language, these bodies bearing the signs of otherness are adrift in a society that will only recognize their existence through the strategy of continual, systematic marginalization, through "the interpretive will to insert the qualities of the author's physical, racial body into the corups of his textual output" (218). (Rey Chow, "Keeping Them in Their Place: Coercive Mimeticism and Cross-Ethnic Representation," The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism)

palimpsest: n. writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased
These are some words that cross my mind, words that make an impression on my thoughts as I read. Unlike some people with amazing abilities of recall, I have a harder time remembering what I read. My memories are vague. Like the older writings on a palimpsest, they have been written over, erased partially. And yet, their meanings and ideas can remain, creating texture to the new words that I read.
		4.11.2006
[12:12 PM]		The issue of language-cum-ethnicity as embedded in the entire fabric of cross-ethnic representation must also be discerned in the context of ethnic studies in North America, where, in many cases, the investigation of ethnicity is no longer entirely or at all grounded in language pedagogy. To give the most obvious example, Asian American studies is conducted by and large in English, the medium in which Asian American authos compose their primary texts. Unlike the case of Asian studies, in which epistemic authority is still by and large disembodied in the sense that it is based on the academic, disciplinary incorporation, by specialists who may not themselves be Asian, of the languages and cultures of peoples who are "over there" on the other side of the world, in Asian American studies, epistemic authority is frequently and implicitly located in the bodies of the ethnics themselves. Hence the imagistic, self-referential turn and the confessional mode of representation are, arguable, deemed much more essential practices in the latter field. As Tomo Hattori has observed: "Asian American literature is still understood, for the most part, as literature written by Asian Americans." Because many of them no longer have the claim to ethnic authority through the possession of ethnic languages, Asian Americans are perhaps the paradigmatic case of a coercive mimeticism that physically keeps them in their place--that keeps them, in Balibar's terms, in their genealogy and, I would add, in their genre of speaking/writing as nothing but generic Asian Americans. The visible, genetic signs of "ethnic difference" on their bodies--an accident of birth--become, in this light, the referential limits embedded in their otherwise proliferating discourse. (The generative logic of Foucault's repressive hypothesis, as discussed in the introduction, is fully at work here.) Without the authentication (however unsatisfactory) of the ethnic language, these bodies bearing the signs of otherness are adrift in a society that will only recognize their existence through the strategy of continual, systematic marginalization, through "the interpretive will to insert the qualities of the author's physical, racial body into the corups of his textual output" (218). (Rey Chow, "Keeping Them in Their Place: Coercive Mimeticism and Cross-Ethnic Representation," The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism)
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