summer reading notes 6: tuck and yang

Eve Tuck: Associate Prof of Critical Race & Indigenous Studies at UToronto & works on education; indigenous Alaskan

K. Wayne Yang: Associate Prof, UC San Diego Ethnic studies, focuses on community/place and 'ghetto colonialism'. 

Link to the paper: here.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang, 'Decolonisation is not a metaphor', Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, 1:1 (2012), pp. 1-40.

• Hegemony of settler-colonial framework
• Superficial adoption of 'decolonise' into education and humanities - it is not interchangeable with any other social justice ideal
• Erasure of indigenous people and history
• "When metaphor enters decolonisation, it kills the very possibility of decolonisation; it recenters whiteness, it recenters theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future." (3)
• "Solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict." (3)
• 2 main forms of colonialism: external (exogenous/exploitation) = the extraction of resources to feed First World; internal = within 'domestic' borders of imperial nation - control, policing, "both structural and interpersonal" (5)
• Settler colonialism is both: total appropriation
• Within settler colonisation, the most important thing is land
• Involves disappearing indigenous and use of slavery (people without land whose bodies/selves are property, who can exploit the land)
• Settlers are not immigrants: they become the law, but immigrants adapt/assimilate
• "Each of the features of settler colonialism in the US context -- empire, settlement, and internal colony -- make it a site of contradictory decolonial desires." (8)
• "Decolonisation as a metaphor allows people to equivocate" these (8)
• Settler moves to innocence -- avoiding culpability
• Eg claiming to have Native ancestry: misunderstanding of Native racialisation as subtractive, disappearing with each generation from 'authenticity'
• "An anti-colonial critique is not the same as a decolonising framework: anticolonial critique often celebrates empowered postcolonial subjects who seize denied privileges from the metropole. This anti-to-post-colonial project doesn't strive to undo colonialism but rather to remake it and subvert it." (19)
• Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Liberation found in the mind of the oppressed -- unlike Fanon, not specifically situated in colonial framework
• "Fanon positions decolonisation as chaotic, an unclean break from a colonial condition that is already over-determined by the violence of the coloniser and unresolved in its possible futures." (20)
• Decolonisation "is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of 'helping' the at-risk and suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. (...) Decolonisation specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life" (21) ie material demands
• Curriculum reform is more like settler harm reduction/white harm reduction -- only a stopgap
• Us-based calls for redistribution of wealth ignores the wealth/land originally belonged to Natives and isn't for giving away
• eg Occupy movement
• Settler moves to innocence = reconciliation ≠ decolonisation = guiding towards unsettling innocence
• Incommensurability: we don't need to answer to/satisfy settlers. This is about Indigenous futures. 

update to blog format

by the way, to the handful of people who apparently still view my posts, I have updated my about page to be the following: 

this blog was never a way for me to vocalise fully-formed ideas and much more of a journal. but as of recent months/years, it has become much more of a place for me to write stuff down without losing it (i especially plan to continue to use it as a place to write down notes from readings i do outside of curricular frameworks). 

summer reading notes 5: edX japanese books 3/3 + degrowth

Module 3 - the Tale of Genji (c11)

• Written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu and has appeared in every book format and reading experience available
• Texts handwritten / copied until C17
• Oldest surviving text is C12 (~100 years after Mursaki finished all 54 chapters) - elaborate calligraphy and art
• Alternating text-image, symbiotic
• Next oldest is c13: only 1 chapter - each chapter bound individually and kept in special cabinets
• 6x6 inches when closed
• Section binding (testuyoso) with string - easy to take apart and redo
• Separate allowed easy lending/exchange/copy
• Led to earliest examples of book cover design
• Mulberry paper, decorated
• Suhama (stylised sandbar) - yellow pigment
• Suminagashi (flowing ink) - patterns of ink, marble-like
• These pertain to chapter 12 set in Suma by the sea, sense of temporality (nostalgia), Buddhist idea of life as fleeting, incense smoke in temple = paperscape (worlds beneath script)
• Calligraphy also affective
• Intimate reading experience - immersive

Genji albums: individual leaves and paintings and excerpts from novel

• Popular in early modern period
• Lavish - for elite women as part of wedding trousseau
• Oldest from 1510: 1 painting and text per chapter
• By Tosa Mitsunobu, famous court artist and 6 prominent calligraphers
• Warrior family in Western Japan interested in literature
• Includes a post-C17 frontispiece painting showing lady M at the temple where she wrote the book, beginning in the back of a sutra with chapters 12-13 & inspired by the moon: welcomes reader into the tale
• Using shikishi (colored papers/poem sheets) - square shape: 5 colors alternating in strict order
• Resemble imported Chinese paper - C16 saw juxtapositions of CN/JP aesthetics
• Aesthetics/form help convey atmosphere of scene
• The album does not replace the novel - for readers already familiar
• Leaves can be removed and pasted onto new formats, hanging scrolls, screens, new albums etc
• Actually remounted in 1998 into 'accordion' style

First printed edition: c17

• Previous printed works focused on Buddhism
• Absence of true commercial publishing industry before 1600
• Also issues with aesthetics of Genji calligraphy - difficult to translate into print
• 1619 saw attempts to mimick brush writing in movable type - but woodblock printing was more practical and could include pictures
• First woodblock Genji: 'Illustrated tale of Genji' (Eiri Genji Monogatari), 1650 Kyoto
• Illustrations by Yamamoto Shunsho, 222 images that established seminal new iconography
• Included commentaries, genealogy, poetry index, and sequel by another author -- comprehensive
• Print allowed different versions of Genji to be introduced to much wider readership
• Center of publishing world shifted to Edo and prospered in C18 - audience: townspeople and samurai

Inaka Genji (A Fraudulent Murasaki's Rustic Genji) - bestselling in c19, by Ryutei Tanehiko

• Borrows structure, characters, and some lines to create new work, set in C15 Ashikaga shogunate
• Draws on vernacular: ancient warrior tales, contemporary kabuki and joruri puppet theatre
• Gory violence, twists
• 76 volumes - serialised over 13 years (1829-42), until censored and Tanehiko died
• Wasn't intended to be so long, but was very popular
• Images by famous artist Utagawa Unisada 
• Colorful
• Karazuri (empty printing) - giving it an invisible texture that mimicks luxurious textile volumes owned by elite
• Includes brown specks - mimicking gold decoration on paper
• Imagining Edo-period woman author: Ofuji
• Purple on her robe ('murasaki') links her to Murasaki - she is the fraudulent version of her real counterpart
• Volumes are paired: 2 per chapter, 上 and 下, visually complementary on covers
• Chapters 18-19 (4 vols) roughly correspond to original chapters 12-13 written first by Lady M: covers are connected
• Motifs relating to season of chapters' publication - plum tree
• Book bound using 'pouch binding' (fukurotoji) technique
• Book format: gokan (combined booklets)
• Booklets (maki/kan) bound together into 1 volume
• Booklets = 5 folded pouches, 10 pages - standard size for books until 1807, known as kibyoshi 'yellow-backs''
• Gokan = 2 kibyoshi, double
• Development of book formats
• Mikaeshi/mikaeshi-e: frontispiece (inner front cover) with bibliographic information, in a playful way
• Introduction for each chapter in the voice of Tanehiko
• Kuchi-e: frontispiece illustration, separated from text by frame (offset)
• In the story proper, the text is crammed/wrapped around the illustrations, blank spaces 
• Chapter 1 of Inaka Genji takes us through a building, much like 'tale of the rat'
• Narrative's forward propelling resembles handscroll 'unrolling' experience
• Sometimes illustrations play with handscroll, injecting it into the story
• Aware of own status as a book - meta
• Eg 'folding' a page in illustration
• Addresses the reader
• Theatre stage-like compositions: 3 dimensionality/trompe l'oeil
• Character illustrations sometimes reference contemporary actors' ukiyo-e prints
• Characters names indicated with medallion logo: visual symbols that exist outside narrative world (extra-diegetic)
• Also small symbols to guide reader for text 
• Interactions between images: telescope --> looing into the telescope represented by circle
• New visual devices to play with perspective
• Maximum potential for storytelling

------ 

Tyberg, Jamie, 'Unlearning: From Degrowth to Decolonisation', Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office (May 2020): http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/degrowthfinal.pdf

• AOC's Green New Deal not entirely convincing: IPCC (2018) says we must radically transform to avoid climate catastrophe
• Must start in the US: biggest consumer, least green
• Need to remove military, police, and stop US imperialism
• "A materialist approach, in the tradition of Epicurus and Marx, would interrogate the contradictions of infinite consumption of energy on a planet with finite resources" (4) 
• Degrowth resists idea of 'infinite growth'
• Degrowth is designed for arrivants and settlers (as opposed to indigenous)
• Degrowth started as social critique, now a "fully - fledged alternative to it" (4)
• Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies calling for new ideas of society and new formulations of hte future
• The end goal of degrowht (as a process of unlearning) as decolonisation
• Sylvia Wynter: "nomadic or sedentary indigenous traditionally stateless societies" (Q5) like Masai, San, Pygmy as examples
• Rejecting Western ideas of care work as gendered: "care is fundamental in supporting the mental, physical, and relational integrity of each and every human being and our ecosystems" (5-6)
• Care-based economy
• Autonomy vs. independence: A. as inherently collective (including collective restraint)
• "argues against technological solutions to the crisis" (6)
• Sufficiency: satisfy all human needs; redistribute surplus energy for community benefit
• Need to unlearn individualism
• Degrowth as new epistemology - rewriting our current institutionalised knowledge
• Degrowth = care + autonomy + sufficiency
• Mutual aid responses to Covid is good but inherently short-term (unsustainable)
• Red Deal proposed by The Red Nation - 10 point program
• Degrowth is "a set of practices".

summer reading notes 4 - edX japanese books 2

Module 2 introduction

• Scroll format for illustrated narratives
• Cinematic - temporal component which can be controlled by both reader (unrolling) and artist (pacing of narrative)
• Including 'different time same scene' (iji dozu) where 2 different moments are shown side by side
• Ko-e (short story small scrolls)
• Tale of the Rat (Nezumi soshi) and Chrysanthemum Spirit (Kiku no sei monogatari)
• Usually 15cm high (half size of standard scroll)
• Text-image-text-image: condensed impact
• Emerged in C14 but peaked C15-16
• Illustrates a short story from a collection - anticipating a modern viewing/reading experience as individual engagement
• Single protagonist, plot-driven, epiphanic ending
• Didactic - for young readers as hobby
• Lent out and exchanged among peers

Tale of the Rat (C16) - 3 paintings

• Unroll so you only see 1 portion at a time - shoulder-width, held in hands
• Fluid text - easy to read (kana and kanji)
• Overlaps with painting section at the start - dreamlike introduction
• Opens with gate illustration: beckons reader into another world
• Poor household: no roof, dilapidated
• Daughter of nun wants/needs to be married - makes a wish
• Painting supplements text: extra information
• Woman pounding cloth - allusion to noh theatre motif of woman beckoning for lost husband, full of longing = indicates theme
• Sleeping dog = peaceful household
• Straw mat = presages new visitor
• Architecture plays important framing role for characters, themes, setting
• Proscenium: stage set for story
• Young courtier appears in front of daughter
• Autumn scene: poetic
• Section 2: Courtier continues visits, enriches household and provides luxurious objects, food, repairs
• Frontal view of architecture = stability of household
• Section 3: sequence showing revelation of cat eating rat, to the sadness of the women who feel that it is Karma/destiny
• Temporal rhythm: slow/poetic intro --> dramatic ending, then moment of reflection (Buddhist: becoming aware of illusory nature of world)
• Final scene's architecture is intimate, allowing visceral engagement

Comparing ko-e

• Rat: text/image divided page by page, with professional art
• Chrysanthemum: looser, calligraphy and art more fluid, uses juxtaposition of image/text
• Both about women's encounters with non-human men - both didactic
• Chrysanthemum is about imperial ideology and importance of perpetuating aristocratic lineage

The Chrysanthemum Spirit

• Woman becomes lovers with spirit of the chrysanthemum but he is plucked for the emperor
• Dies giving birth to their child, but daughter becomes consort to emperor and has prosperous children
• In painting, flowers in garden are diverse and large, swaying
• All important for evoking in poetry - primer for flowers for youths
• No buildings - relationships told/visualised interpersonally
• Metamorphosis of chrysanthemum spirit is evident visually to the reader, though the character does not know 
• Birthing scene unusual as it actually shows baby emerging from her robe - more explicit, hints at didactic nature of scroll
• Ends on a note of regeneration - descendants, perpetuation of imperial line/lineage in general.

summer reading notes 3 - edX class on japanese books 1

'Japanese books: from manuscript to print' - Melissa McCormick, Harvard 

Module 1 - Intro

• Books interred inside the Buddhist sculpture of Prince Shotoku (Shotoku Shaishi, figure from C7 Japan)
• Portrays him at age 2, when he stands up and pays homage to Budha, manifesting a relic (eyeball of Buddha) in hands
• Sacred biography - miraculous events through his life = mythical presence
• Thought to be a reincarnation of Buddha - very popular sculpture motif in C13
• This sculpture - can be dated to 1292 by objects inside
• Oldest of its kind
• Much detail to make him childlike
• Eyes are reflective - catch the light Gell - Art & Agency
• = also an icon / iconic presence
• Body would have glowed - pale/white with blue/green head
• Now candle smoke darkens him afterlife of the object
• Lotus seed in his hand - 'relic'
• Sculpture split in half (wari hagi) to fit objects inside the cavity
• Common practice among E-Asian Buddhist sculptures
• This reminds me of a Buddhist statue that had internal 'organs' inside made of silk -- don't remember where I encountered it anymore!!! A temple in Japan maybe?? 

How the sculpture came to Boston

• Purchased in 1930s by Ellery Sedgwick (editor of Atlantic magazine)
• Sedgwick encountered it in a temple in 1930, came back looking for it in 1936 and hired a dealer to find it But how lol... sounds violent
• Came to MFA Boston and curator found objects inside, 1937

Objects inside

• Some in linen bags - but don't know how they might have all fit
• 5 miniature sculptures, 1 shrine sculpture, 1 set of relic beads inside a scroll, then put in a bag and placed in belly
• Aizen - religious king who burns passions/repels Mongol invaders - in chest (heart)
• Important to monk Eizon (c13) who helped propagate the Shotoku cult
• Pamphlets folded creased, unsure where in the body they were
• Separate fragments of paper including ordination slips, depicting Chinese and Sanskrit characters
• Slips given to people ordained as lay monks/nuns, who commit to following the Buddhist way
• Highly personal - one is inscribed on the back with a personal vow
• People wanted something of themselves inside the sculpture, carried through into future lives
• Text as sacred, words sacred in themselves
• Prints of Buddha: from Ippen (an itinerant monk who travelled across Japan and made Buddhism accessible)
• Kamakura period (1185-1333): widespread interest in Shotoku

The scroll (kansusou)

• Unrolled from right to left
• Sheets of paper glued together - made of mulbery fibres (kozo), very soft, absorbant, light, thin
• Writing bleeds through so you could annotate on the back and see this from the front -- unique to scroll
• 'Shinnyokan': Contemplation of Suchness
• Kanji and katakana
• Personal copy - includes pronounciation notes for kanji
• End of scroll has: date (1282), no mounting material (very informal)
• No cover, unlike other highly sacred texts/scrolls (sutras)
• Including migaeshi-e: picture appended to start of sutra

The pasted page (detchoso)

• Small books made of dry, crispy paper: paper is ganpi fibre mixed with other materials like clay and vegetable fibres
• Binding: folded paper glued together into pages
• Writing on this object is 'kana': syllabic alphabet, phonetic, vernacular
• Very personal
• Range of formality in objects - some more like sutras, more ordered, with silk binding
• Well-used: everyday devotion

Lotus Sutra

• Hanging scroll from Heian period (794-1186): Lotus Sutra fragment cut out of scroll and mounted vertically
• Patterned/ornamented paper: making surface sacred
• Contains paintings in margins
• Lotus Sutra text demands worship/veneration: rewards if you practice, punishment if not

Pocket binding

• Papers folded and sewn at open edge, creating 'pockets' out of each page
• Simple binding using twisted paper as 'string' = 'monk's binding'
• Pockets prevented ink bleeds from showing due to double layer
• Could also hide/contain extra sheets of paper

Accordion style book

• Paper folded into multiple sections - small and compact
• The book in the Shotoku sculpture was given to Library of Congress so looking at a similar one: an accordion Lotus Sutra remounted as 8 scrolls: lavish, elaborate
• Woodblock printed in China (1160) then imported to Japan - Pan-Asian bookmaking tradition
• Includes illustration of Hell, where you would go if you disobeyed Sutra: transformed into animals, beaten
• Accordion creases can still be seen - damage, helped by new scroll format
• Only Buddhist books were woodblock printed in Japan until C17

End of module 1

theory / praxis / 'kindness worker'

There's a lot of discourse on 'echo chambers' being the death of political conversation but I really do think that echo chambers can do a lot of harm on Twitter. I started following MLs because they had a lot of really valuable leftist perspectives, and the more of them I followed the more it appeared that they were the ONLY leftists with the ONLY "correct" perspective, which is especially mindboggling when you think about their philosophy itself, which is very much centered around combating US imperialism and warmongering with China (a good thing to resist obviously) by dying on the hill of the nation-state (perplexing???)

I think I give way too much equal benefit of the doubt to people. Some ML will tweet something while on the toilet and I'll spend hours using my full brain power to try and understand their perspective. Because I haven't read a lot of theory at all when it comes to socialism/communism I want to stay really open minded and understand why people think the way they do, but I think I spend too much time trying to decode ML ideas - like, way more time than actually doing anything useful. They have such a strong us-or-them ideology that you can get really easily sucked in. 

I did the LeftValues quiz and my results were: 

Revolutionary 70.6% - 29.4% Reform 

Scientific 47.1% - 52.9% Utopian (I'm neutral on this as I don't really know anything about dialectics)

Central 45.0% - 55.0% Decentral (I also have no idea, I've never really thought about this)

Internationalist 62.5% - 37.5% National (I'm surprised this isn't more skewed towards internationalism considering the MLs really didn't like it when I said borderless solidarity struggles were more interesting than uncritical jingoism and licking repressive state boot for free online) 

Party 46.2% - 53.8% Union (Yeah I also am pretty neutral on this - I'm definitely very ambivalent about the idea of a 'vanguard party') 

Production 23.6% - 76.4% Ecological

Conservative 27.9% - 72.1% Progressive

And it said I was into Council Communism and Eco-Marxism; it also said I was 0% Marxist-Leninist

The rapid way that you get sucked into this kind of stuff was demonstrated when I told people I was 0% ML and it made me interested in reading Lenin in order to understand why the quiz thought I disagreed with him; people were all like "ML is what tankies call themselves, they are Stalinists" and i was like wow so there are communists who aren't tankies??? Where have they been?? Why did I get stuck with the tankies????? and I'm glad that when I was 16 and angsty about my identity, wanting to reconnect with my Chinese roots, confused by the sinophobic media, I wasn't on Twitter because I would definitely have just become a tankie instead of letting myself do the soul-searching and introspection by myself, and through Sine Theta, in a space not dominated by other people's writings, so that I could come to independent conclusions (especially through my own first-person observations) about anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, police and prison abolition, border abolition. I told someone that I don't really know what kind of "-ist" I am, but I know that I want a world governed by kindness and compassion, where we all take care of each other by providing everything people need for free and allowing communities to thrive. 

I think it's important for everyone to come to an anti-capitalist perspective on their own and THEN to go and read theory / think about different schools of thought when it comes to how to combat capitalism/implement socialism. It means that you're secure in yourself and your thinking and don't get swayed easily by mob mentality/peer pressure/tribalism. I know that my convictions are right when it comes to these fundamentals. 

Anyway, so I'm still reading a lot of different stuff and trying to just inhale information. 

I'm not not open to MLs (for now, as I'm asking a ton of questions to someone who is an ML and has offered to have a discussion) but I'm just thoroughly confused by this investment in nationalism. I'm also thinking about the inherent privilege of diaspora and being overseas - the second you leave the country and are economically tied to things abroad you have divorced yourself from the reality of China! Even migrants who smuggle themselves into the UK to pick cockles in the sea are using that money to build empty mansions back in Fujian. Diaspora MLs will get super excited about the prospect of moving "back" to China via getting a job or doing a degree, both of which would put them in the 1% of China -- they speak English, they have all of this prestige from being overseas. They obviously won't see the harsh, unequal reality of China. If there are 60 million people in China who live on less than 1000RMB per month, how can China still be this Marxist utopia that needs total defense online?? 1000RMB means nothing to any normal middle-class family. How can such inequality be allowed in a state that still gets defended as a bastion of socialism? Why the binary thinking that if you think a single critical thought about the PRC, you're evil and a reactionary or a 'fake leftist'? 

I read Vijay Prashad's interview with Qiao Collective today and on this, he says that Marxism/dialectics isn't about binaries and either/or. He says it doesn't matter whether China is communist or capitalist (which I think it does, because MLs spend so much energy upholding China's so-called communism to the point where they'll either deny the existence of the Uyghur camps or even celebrate them as successful counterterrorism measures which is... baffling) but that it's important that China adapted to modern industry in order to develop the nation and better serve the people. But this is confusing to me, because it's precisely the 'people' that were sacrificed in order to make China rich - the peasants who precariously migrated to the South to work in factories without the ability to chagne their residencies for better treatment, who got AIDS because they had to sell their blood to survive. Clearly the PRC is not going to suddenly stop all this in 2025 and confiscate all of Jack Ma's wealth and then redistribute it to these guys. It feels like the judgement of who/what is "real left" and who/what is "fake left" who manipulate leftist language/vocabulary for reactionist intentions -- never mind what those intentions actually are, I almost never see any kind of evidence/analysis of what makes some leftists fake and others real, lke the CCP, which is apparently truly communist even though its actions are all capitalist??? 

So yeah I have a lot of thinking and reading to do but I'm glad that talking to different people has allowed me to get away from this dangerous tankie path, and that my common sense has led me to fundamentally question the ML tendency to jingoism. Knowing that other leftists exist has really helped lol.

summer reading notes 2 - quick list

jotting down some stuff i hope to read in july (in order): 

tina campt

'the intimacies of 4 continents' by lisa lowe

'decolonisation is not a metaphor' by tuck and yang

thomas sankara

saidiya hartman

the 'asian diasporic visual cultures and histories' journal

lenin (apparently i'm 0% marxist leninist)

ho chi minh