Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

LO-B

Rachel and Juwon, can you tell us about “The Quick and the Dead”? How did that program series come about? What were your goals when it came to working on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha?

RV

“The Quick and the Dead” is a series we initiated at Wendy’s Subway in 2018. It is a year-long program that attends to the life, work, and legacy of a writer or artist who has passed. It is a way for us to engage in internal study, reflection, and programming, that thinks alongside that writer’s work and, specifically, considers how their practice has informed the research, writing, or art making of contemporary practitioners. We think of it as a space to organize generative discussions that are grounded in reading as a collective project—one that has the potential to work through questions of artistic and historical legacy, lineage, and transmission.

Previous iterations were devoted to Audre Lorde and, later, Alejandra Pizarnik. Our engagement with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha ultimately expanded beyond a single year. We began the first internal reading group on Dictee and related texts in 2021. As it happens, the elastic temporality of the pandemic allowed for our initial reading group to extend over the course of two years. In this way, we continued to come back to her work, and undertook planning for a series of four seminars, which took place in spring 2022. We also organized a series of programs that happened at partner venues: a screening at Spectacle Theater in collaboration with EAI, a marathon reading of Dictee at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a window display at Printed Matter.

JJ

The shape of the public programming came directly from our internal reading group. We identified key themes that we kept seeing arise in Cha’s work, and organized the seminars around those subjects, namely: history and migration, film studies, visual arts, language, translation, and the mother tongue. With the seminar series, our goal was to build community through collective study by encouraging active dialogue in person and online and fostering committed interest in Cha’s work. The facilitators and participants we brought into the space could speak not only to the legacy of Cha, but also to some of the questions that Cha grapples with in her work around language, colonial history, and across artistic disciplines—the contradictions and gaps that are still incredibly resonant today. A lot of these practitioners, some of whom are part of this roundtable, come from different backgrounds—the arts, literature, academia, organizing, etc.—so the series became a way for us to expand her legacy through such multiple frameworks. We also wanted to challenge or complicate some of the discourse around her work through this project. Ultimately, the program was a testament to how many of us have always been engaging with Cha, how we have always been reading with her individually and collectively, in or outside the classroom, and how her legacy isn’t lost, but continuously with us in various shapes and forms. There was also an element of speculation and of letting go of resolution that underwrote the entire project. We weren't interested in framing Cha as belonging to a certain movement or discerning exactly who she was or what her work is about, but rather attending to all of the different threads she was continuously exploring throughout her work.

LO-B

It sounds as though building community through collective study was a potent way to counteract the true crime obsession that you see all over the internet when it comes to Cha. Do you feel that your programming served as a corrective? Did it counteract the tragic circumstances that continue to mark her legacy?

RV

Our ambition to engage with her work deeply, and from a range of perspectives, also speaks to our attempt to address—and critically complicate—the ways her work has been claimed by certain discourses and disciplines and overlooked by others, and the ways her work resisted such categorizations. It was essential to us to preserve the multiplicity and interdisciplinarity of her work, rather than replicate the disciplinary silos that one often encounters in the literature on Cha. With that said, we also had to hold in tension the ways in which her death casts a long shadow over her life and work; and while the (auto)biographical is certainly always close at hand in her work, part of our project was also to critically examine how it has been deployed as a discursive or interpretive modality that more often than not forecloses the expansiveness of her artistic proposals, and is symptomatic of attempts to narrowly extract “meaning” back through that “narrative” closure. As Juwon was saying, we were interested instead in opening up some space for collective questioning and thinking outside of explanation and interpretation.

We were aware, of course, of how the program coincided with a number of different, contemporaneous revisitations of her Cha, from the extensive presentation of her work in the Whitney Biennial to Cathy Park Hong's chapter on Cha in Minor Feelings to new, widely circulated profiles in the press. The renewed critical/curatorial attention toward Cha experienced then is but one wave in the many returns to her work that have occurred over the years, but as Juwon mentioned, she has always been with us and for many, her work never fell out of view. So, to respond to your question, Lauren, I think the question of biography and the senselessness of her rape and murder certainly constituted part of what we had to move through in the program, and it felt important to hold that in tension with all the other questions that her work surfaces and to think about what it means to look at her work today.

SY

I wonder if I might jump in here to say, as Rachel suggested, that biography has often functioned to problematize the reception of work by female and otherwise minoritized authors. A colleague of mine mentioned that recently, as a result of the global pandemic and the noticeable rise of a violence against Asian American bodies, Cha’s work is being received through a discourse–framework–that is often attributed to the tradition of African-American literature and art. For instance, the politics of open caskets, of mourning, became further charged with renewed force during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, and then became the framework through which Cha’s work was received. Indeed, there was definitely a problematic degree of sensationalism in certain receptions. But there’s also this leaning on or appropriation of a politics of mourning that derives from a different tradition of authorship, which speaks to the particular value of Cha’s work in its contemporary reception at this historical conjuncture.

EK

Are you suggesting that the way Cha’s work is received in the vein of Black feminist scholarship is appropriate or is it inappropriate? What do you mean by appropriation? Who is appropriating?

SY

I don’t think of appropriation as necessarily a negative thing. I was trying to contextualize Rachel’s comment which spoke to the narrative around Cha’s rape and murder, a kind of narrative that has long been critiqued as sensational and problematic in terms of how the reader is lead to “enjoy” an author’s work and yes, the author’s death. To your question, I’m speaking to a tradition that is prominent in African American art that is being transposed onto Asian American art now, and the ways in which Cha is a figure of interest now. That isn't necessarily a negative transposition or projection, or appropriation, but rather one that allows for a different definition of authorship. For one, we could address how the recent reception is informed by how the struggle for Asian American rights was influenced by the struggle for Black rights and other struggles in terms of labor, etc. For example, right now at the Americas Society in New York there’s an exhibition, in collaboration with the Asia Art Archive, which frames the story of Asian diaspora within the legacy of Latin American state repression, as a story of Latin America. It’s precisely that global confluence of movements that have also changed the mourning politics around Cha's work.

EK

The history of the ways in which Asian American politics and African American politics have been discussed is something that is ever changing and evolving, and there are antagonisms as well as collaboration between those specific communities and histories. I would be hesitant to adopt a framework that affirms appropriation or consumption as a model of operation. I don’t know if that's what you're saying, though.

Rachel and Juwon, a genre that you surfaced for one of the series which was really fascinating  was biomythography. You took that concept directly from Audre Lorde to think about Cha, which I appreciated. In that seminar I was able to think about the ways in which Cha thought about herself, her mother, and the activist Yu Gwan-sun. I think there is a history that she’s pulling that is related to the US empire, and anti-colonial or decolonial movements in Korea. I am fascinated when the history Cha posits becomes not the history that we as readers become most interested in—perhaps for reasons that are convenient to the present, or perhaps because of a misreading that serves us in the present.

SY

I think you give us a good word—misreading—that will allow me to say what I was trying to get across more clearly. For better or worse, it seems that there have been a flurry of misreadings of Cha's work. I would argue, as some of the contributors to the present volume have, that perhaps Cha’s text actually opens up to misreading or creative reading. I’m trying to contextualize a specific moment in which Cha’s work seemed to explode onto the horizon with a particular kind of relevance. I think this series in particular added a sense of responsibility about such readership that I really appreciated.

DC

I think this exchange between Eunsong and Soyoung is so interesting. It reminds me of a  broader experience that I’ve noticed any time Cha’s work is discussed, whether it's official or sort of a casual, water cooler conversation, that is: every discussion of the work is preceded by a broader, meta-conversation around what frameworks, literary histories and lineages, lenses, discourses the participants will draw from. In other words, the parameters of the conversation have to be set ahead of time. I’m wondering, do we see this as perpetually being the fate of discourse around Cha’s work? Is there any kind of vision of a future or counterfactual world where this specific meta-conversation doesn’t have to happen in the first place? Is it always generative? Or has this fate of Cha’s work become limiting?

JGL

Dawn, your wonderful point brings to mind for me how so many of the narratives grappling with Cha’s work—including Eunsong’s piece as well as my piece, and others—track how the author’s individual relationship with Cha’s work has changed over time. Even when that specific aspect is not the focus of the piece, it’s nonetheless something that comes up and seems to be in constant flux. Regardless of where the author first encountered Cha, whether inside or outside of the classroom, they typically end up grappling with, as you’ve said Dawn, the different frameworks and discourses that have cohered around Cha.

I think now, especially given the explosion of public interest around Cha, how she’s been written about in public venues is also changing. A year or two ago I read an essay where the author noted that people love to talk about Cha as “under-recognized” or not written about, but she’s actually so written about, and so every time we get yet another essay about this “forgotten” writer. I wonder about the future and how people and students are now encountering Cha for the first time in different contexts than they used to. It used to be the case that people encountered her first as an adult, often in the college classroom, but I think increasingly people are encountering her outside the classroom setting, which complicates or even does away with the layers of academic frameworks we are used to thinking about as shaping the discourse around Cha. I think I might be one of the younger people on this call, and I first encountered Cha because she was in my high school library. I think that’s an experience that is becoming increasingly common. People’s first encounters with Cha have been changing. I mean, can you imagine even how many people learned of her work for the first time through the Whitney Biennial two years ago. She’s a public figure.

SY

I wonder if this is a good point to include a question that November had included as a possible prompt for our discussion. How did we first encounter Cha’s work?  I'd love to hear what others have to say.

IH

Jennifer, it’s wonderful that you encountered her early on, in your high school library. I came to Cha a bit later, in college through an independent study, although precisely how I encountered her feels unimportant. What does feel critical, is that I returned to her because others around me returned to her. When I first encountered Dictee, for example, I didn’t have a lens for how I wanted to engage with it, whether on Cha’s terms or on my own terms.

But it moved me that others were called to her. My friend Madeleine gifted me my first copy of Dictee, and Madeleine long has had a practice of building altars to the writers, artists, and political figures that she held dear. I remember her altar had images from Theresa’s videos, from Dictee. Recently, a poet-mentor of mine, Kimberly Alidio, shared her admiration for Cha’s ambition as a young artist, as someone who wanted to put herself out there and make things with her own hands. Poets like Kimberly—who work across sound, language, and visuality—have looked to Cha’s practice to inform their own, and as a poet, I can’t help but be called into this lineage.

We are so lucky for her work to circulate. I was just talking with Tomie Arai, who was part of Godzilla and active in Asian American arts and activism around the time that Cha was alive. She reminded me that part of the reason that we still know of Cha’s work is because right after her murder, her friends championed her work, staged readings, and therefore ensured that her work lived on. Even talking about that gives me chills because I think about the rhizomes of friendships and relationships that return Cha to us again and again, so we can make that return our own, and eventually pass it on to others. This is why the question of how I came to Cha’s work feels like a question about return.

SY

I also encountered Cha’s work in college, but in Korea. It was an interesting introduction for two reasons. First, because I was introduced to Cha as an American author. We were reading her alongside people like Toni Morrison. We were working towards an understanding of America and American literature through Cha’s work, especially Dictee. Second, being a college student to me meant participating in what is now perceived as one of the last hurrahs of the student movements Cha references, especially throughout Dictee.

EK

For me, encountering Dictee meant both having a view onto America and realizing a connection or, to use Irene’s term, a return to Korea. I felt an odd sense of familiarity when reading the moment in Dictee where Cha talks about the Gwangju massacre and then returning to the same streets. In that sense, there was a kind of collapse that occurred, of messages arriving from afar, as well as an awful redundancy. I think that was what always intrigued me about Cha: encountering over and over and over again.

I’ll just briefly mention that I was recommended the text in undergrad. I was having a conversation with a professor and I was off-handedly complaining about how all the conceptualists and avant-garde poets were white, which is still not much of a controversial statement. This professor insisted that I read Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I followed their directions, read Dictee, and I've been returning to it since. I think that this instance speaks to your meta-conversation question, Dawn. I do think that her life and death, the facts of her murder, the gender and racialized violence that was her death, this silence, have really been taken up, instrumentalized, and appropriated.

I do feel that I often overhear conversations that attempt to categorize Cha. At 31, what was she making that results in her being cited as an avant-garde, conceptualist poet? If that’s not the framework, where else can she be slotted in?

Yu Gwan-sun was murdered at 17 and Cha at 31. I think those two resonant tragedies track the ways in which the death and murder of young women is trans-Pacific, spanning Japanese empire and US imperialism. The question thus becomes, how can we think about those histories and connections in Cha’s work. But I don’t necessarily think that those are the conversations about the text prompts. Rather, most people seem more interested in talking about why she’s the one non-white avant-garde poet. Quite frankly, I find that conversation boring and always already racialized.

It’s like, are you only citing her because this is the convenient name to pull from? I don't know. I don’t know how else to think about that specific maneuver other than a kind of instrumentalization of her enforced silence. There are so many writers, Audre Lorde is a good example, who take up many different mediums, forms, and frameworks. They abandon some, and they return to some, as Irene was saying. But, in the absence of that, it’s pretty fascinating who Cha has become useful for.

SY

Regarding Eunsong's excellent point about the silence, I’d love to hear from Jennifer. Jennifer, you were talking about Cha’s use of language, its subversion, and how silence works in relation to it. And, not only within her published work but also, as you mentioned Rachel, within all of her work that is out of print.

JGL

Like Irene, I did not have a framework for understanding Cha’s work when I first encountered it. I was quite confused. I grew up in a family where my parents never spoke about Korean history. What I found in Cha’s work was not so much silence, but rather an invitation to think differently about one’s relationship to the English language and the possibilities for expression within the English language.

I studied literature in undergrad and I’d been interested in literature in high school as well. Yet, I felt that there was always a pressure, or demand, when we read writers of color, namely: that the English language is the medium by which writers of color become legible to us or through which we might connect with them. The English language is what humanized these writers. In Cha’s work, that is just not something that the English language was doing. Rather, the English language in it fails to connect. But that failure, to me, did not feel like a silence. It felt like an invitation to think about the ways in which we can connect in ways which are not mediated by the English language.

At the time, learning about Korean history as well as studying the Korean language became something that I found a lot of meaning in. Reading her work challenged me in that way as well. Before reading her work, I didn’t know about any of the student protests she speaks to. When I eventually moved to Korea, however, which was during the candlelight protests for the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, I was also attending a Korean high school for a year for complicated reasons that are addressed in my piece in the anthology. While I was studying there, I took a Korean history class for the first time. My Korean history teacher discussed democratization and Gwangju and 4.19 and so on as the history that preceded the now very globally visible candlelight protests. My relationship to Cha’s work as well as my relationship to Korean history very much shaped each other.

I think it was through those experiences that I began to feel that the silence that’s imposed upon her is distinctly Anglophone. As I began to read more in the realm of her reception, I started to feel that readers like me—often people who did not grow up in Korea and did not or had not known that history—were imposing a kind of silence onto her when, in fact, there was so much going on that she was articulating that is simply not legible within English or the kind of Western-centric history education that most of her Anglophone readers would have had.

SY

Excellent high school education! The fact that you learnt about Gwangju in Korean high school. That's amazing.

RV

I’ll just jump in and share that I remember first coming to her work through two encounters that, reflecting back, constructed very specific frameworks around her practice. In 2014, I attended an event that the Asian American Writers’ Workshop organized, which was titled “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant-garde of One.” Around the same time, I found her on the page in an anthology that Siglio Press published titled It Is Almost That, which compiled image-text works by women artists.

Thinking back to these encounters now, I’m struck by the two diverging ways of framing her work: the first accentuating her singularity—a singularity that frames her practice as somewhat solitary, peerless, and distinct in many regards, within the context of the so-called avant-garde and the conceptual and formal experimentation which with “it” is often associated (I read this “avant-garde of one” here in the context of who this term has primarily been used to designate: white male artists). On the other hand, the anthology—as important as it was for bringing many of the practices it includes into relation—could only inadequately hold space for her work, which so radically exceeds the page and the concern with “text and image” as neutral units for linguistic and formal experimentation, as such. What these two points of connection surface for me is the constant tension between the kind of exceptionalism and uniqueness (or conversely, the context they are ascribed) that produces the figure of the “author/artist” as such legible, and the ways in which artistic community—during their lifetime, or retroactively assigned—does or does not conscript the artist’s work to certain discourses of art and literary history. Cha’s work exceeds and undoes the boundaries these critical frameworks impose, calling for new ways of holding the nuance of such work. Re-encountering her again and again through The Quick and the Dead, through these discussions, I’m struck by how so many readers, recipients, and interlocutors of Cha’s heed this call by intuitively orienting themselves toward complexity, against (disciplinary) boundaries, and toward other readers who also ask: What kind of readings does her work call for? And what might a social body of readers of Cha explore together?

EK

I think that question gets at something that I so love and appreciate about She Follows No Progression, namely: that it allows us, its readers, to see and consider her writing and critical engagement with her writing side-by-side. I was telling Juwon the other day that perhaps a poem that traffics in abstraction and ambiguity is actually not the best reading of some of her writing.  This book, in contrast, allows us an engagement with Cha’s work, which constantly activates images and texts simultaneously, that is rhythmic and continuous.

There’s a line in Dictee where Cha says “The enemy becomes abstract. The relationship becomes abstract.” I think that she’s actually very carefully thinking about the thing that is called abstract or the thing that is made abstract.

Seeing her visual work, whether it’s film stills or another kind of performance, really prompted  me to think about the ways in which we can think of artists who are unfaithful to a medium.  Maybe that would be a different way to prompt conversations rather than saying, “This is a text that aestheticizes gaps or fragments.” I think that’s a limited reading of the text and a limited reading of the history that she’s engaging with, especially if we keep in mind that she was making films and writing in a time when the censorship laws in Korea were severe, and she was working around these laws. I was so thankful, Rachel and Juwon, for your vision that saw how readers could see her work and its critical reception together.

IH

I love the careful consideration of how abstraction has been (mis)applied to Theresa’s work. Eunsong’s observation about Theresa’s infidelity to mediums, and Jennifer’s interest in Theresa’s acts of articulation beyond the Anglophone humanistic tradition, actually prompt me to wonder: Does Theresa push us to reconsider abstraction in its entirety?

I think of Katherine McKittrick’s incredible essay “Mathematics Black Life,” in which she critiques the representational apparatus that renders Black captivity and anti-Black violence into “legible” images, stories, words, etc. In camaraderie with how McKittrick theorizes an anti-representational strategy for reading Black fugitivity under the obliterating conditions of the white gaze, I wonder if we can read Cha’s disloyalty to a single form, or her refusal of the Western canon, as an attempt to theorize the anti-representational, in order to trace the contours of exiled subjects surviving beyond the colonial archive.

Whether I’m confronted with Dictee or her taped performance Secret Spill, Theresa challenges me to consider abstraction not as a loss of materiality and specificity—as with the violence of the white (supremacist) avant-garde—but rather, abstraction as a movement between (im)materialities, as a slippage between utterance and silence, language and haptics, etc. After all, haunting is nothing more than a lively presence that the colonizer mistakes for an absence, a silence, terra nullius. Is it truly illegible, inarticulate, noise, static? Or is it simply the workings of the tuning apparatus? Sujin Lee’s installation Glossalia–which also references Theresa’s work—makes this point beautifully.

SY

Perhaps I’ll follow up to say that because my own work is primarily in film and media, I approach Cha visually. I want to learn from the poets in this room about your approaches. Eunsong, you mentioned the particular period in which Cha was working with film which I think dovetails nicely with Dawn’s earlier question about meta-frameworks. I think one of the most  interesting works Cha produced regarding film is an edited volume of film theory, Apparatus. It captured a particular moment where psychoanalytic film theory and Marxist cultural theories are being used to rethink what subject positions are and might be. It’s a heady, heady moment in film theory. And Cha is avant-garde in its reception.

Unfortunately, Apparatus is completely out of print. My own interest in it, and this goes to Dawn’s question, springs from the fact that it’s both an anthology of film theory and an artist book. It’s neither only a book of theory nor is it only an artist’s book. It’s thick and it’s dense, but it’s also art. It’s an artistic approach to what theory is, what theory can do.

For me, reading Apparatus has the potential to change our relationship not only to Cha’s writing, but also what we think of as “theory.” What was theory doing for Cha? What does it mean for an artist, a poet, or a filmmaker to use theory itself as a medium? I’m particularly interested in those questions.

Relatedly, what particularly interested me about Dictee—and Jennifer, your discussion deals with this directly—is the layering of English that we can encounter therein. I was particularly compelled by Cha’s use of grammar, especially in terms of editing. I wanted to trace continuities between the particular kind of experimentation in editing she’s doing in her film work and how she’s restructuring sentences, particularly when she deals with the physicality, the materiality, of what it means to learn how to speak. The term student had both a political and aesthetic dimension.

JGL

I really appreciate your bringing up Apparatus because when I was writing my undergrad senior thesis on Cha I ordered a copy off of eBay. It’s the only time I’ve negotiated an eBay item, I think I got a good deal. But when it arrived, kind of like when I first encountered Dictee, I again felt that I didn’t really know how to engage with the work. Just as I had begun to grasp even a small part of what Cha is doing with language in Dictee, I realized she is doing so much that I still don’t understand.

LO-B

Rachel, I’m curious about the out-of-print status of that book and her work in general. Readers can go to The Strand for example and probably find a copy of Dictee, as I did during the pandemic. Yet, I remember trying to get my hands on more around the same time and I couldn’t. Why is it so hard to find?

RV

There are several editions of Dictee: Tanam Press (1982), Third Woman Press (1994), and University of California Press (2001), which has gone into multiple printings. The book is not so difficult to come by, I think—earlier editions still circulate in second-hand stores or online, and the UC Press edition is in print. UC also recently published Exilee Temps Morts (in 2022).

The trajectory of Dictee is interesting, of course. Tanam Press was a project that really focused on artists’ books and writing, initiated by the artist Reese Williams—Cha’s classmate and friend in the MFA Program at UC Berkeley. She founded it after graduating and moving to New York, and it operated from 1979 to 1986. Cha contributed to the press by editing Apparatus in 1980, and earlier that year, the anthology of artists’ writings, Hotel, which also includes her work. An excerpt (“Clio History”) from Dictee was published posthumously the year after she died, in 1983, as a chapbook in a special issue of the periodical Wedge, which takes the form of a kind of folder/slipcase with various chapbooks/zines by artists/writers like Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana, or Phil Mariani. When Dictee fell out of print, it was reissued by Third Woman Press, which was such an important space for publishing women of color. From artist’s publishing to queer and feminist activist publishing, to university publishing, there is a line that also attests to the increasing institutionalization of her work and legacy—and indeed her archives are housed at the University of Berkeley / BAMPFA.

With books like Apparatus, or other Tanam Press titles, what we are confronted with is the relatively predictable life cycle of independent and artists’ publishing: small runs, limited distribution… Few Tanam Press books enjoyed second printings. The distribution and circulation of those books reflects the economic and labor conditions of small press publishing, which I’m sure many of us are familiar with. And while it’s surprising, perhaps, that Apparatus hasn’t been reissued, I think this also speaks to the specificity of the anthology’s intervention at the time of its publication. If you read it simply as an anthology (and Cha’s contribution to it only as an “editor”), then you could argue that the texts it includes are widely available online, or published elsewhere, and don’t need recirculation in this form. But of course this overlooks Cha’s artistic intervention within the book, which is rather quiet.

And then, is also the problem of the writing about her being out of print as well. The 1994 Third Woman Press collection of essays on Dictee, Writing Self, Writing Nation, edited by Norma Alarcón and Elaine H. Kim is famously unfindable (copies sell for thousands of dollars online). The same goes for The Dream of the Audience, the exhibition catalogue for the first major retrospective of Cha’s work at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2001.

IH

This is the case with her video works too—not so accessible outside of institutions like universities or museums, but somehow people get creative and find their way to her. For the anthology, I wrote about Secret Spill, which is one of her taped performances. I was lucky to see it back in 2021, when Lia Ouyang Rusli organized a screening out of a warehouse, followed by a talk with Sooyoung Moon and Katie Kirkland, both of whom greatly influenced my understanding of Theresa’s work. I find that Theresa inspires a good deal of ingenuity, craftiness, and DIY—young artists gather around her work and form desire paths to her practice. Some days, Theresa inspires me less because of her work and more because of the energy she has released, an energy that we all take our turn in receiving and re-releasing. Again, it’s all about the journey back to Theresa, the pilgrimage that we take at various points in our lives.

LO-B

Eunsong, I would love to hear you talk more about a question you posed earlier, who has Cha become useful for?

EK

Of course. While we were speaking I thought of this quote by Trinh Minh-ha from When the Moon Waxes Red. She says, “At times rejected by her own community, other times needfully retreat, she’s both useful and useless.” In other words, at what point is the artist claimed and at what point is she rejected?

With my essay,  I was thinking about how the category through which Cha was introduced to me—that is, avant-garde, or experimental—is a category that I think is always in need of more critical analysis and critical thinking. Rereading Dictee, I was thinking about how one of its most celebrated, “experimental” aspects are those that draw from Greek mythology, and particularly  notions of the muses. I set out to address the question, how does Cha move through the muses in the text?

One of my dissertation advisors, Page duBois, a classicist who works through feminism and psychoanalysis, wrote a book called Slaves and Other Objects. Therein, Page recounts the material history of how, in the US, the discipline of classics was founded by Confederate soldiers who advocated for the preservation of systems of chattel slavery by looking to Greece and Roman times. Their argument was, how the US can have democracy and chattel slavery—that democracy and chattel slavery are not contradictions. Indeed, they felt both systems speak to each other in necessary ways. After the Civil War, they went on to found classics departments at universities across the United States. One of the points that Page really nails is that classics—how it became studied, how it was formed, and the ideological function that it serves—has a material history, particularly in the United States, and perhaps we can see vestiges of this argument today. Whether we take up the prison industrial complex, or other forms of detention centers, for migrants in particular, I think you can see that the state does not think of democracy and chattel slavery as contradictory forces.

I think that Cha and the book are ripe for critical engagement that actually asks foundational questions about not just the politics she was interested in, but also the material history of what she was writing about and how she was navigating in a space of various literary and artistic circles. I think that's the kind of history that I would be interested in learning more about, rather than a celebration of the fragment in poetic form. I argue that Cha, perhaps unbeknownst to herself, connected to this history through the ways in which Greek and Roman history and mythology remains is located within a longer political history that often we discuss in Asian American studies. Do we think of Cha as someone who’s critical of the history of anti-Black violence, chattel slavery, and conversations around land? Do we think that those are present concerns? There’s a lot of scholarship (Lisa Lowe, Maru Karuka, Claire Jean Kim, Moon-Ho Jung, and so many others) that have shown that, actually, Asian American have been involved intimately throughout US history, sometimes as state collaborators, others as antagonists to the state, and more.

While I feel like I’m now maybe going a bit sideways, with my essay I just wanted to sort of take up the fact that her categorization as an experimental writer alongside the ways in which she experiments with the Greek and Roman mythical forms and to argue that maneuver has a material history. I think we should critically engage with the ideas that she is thinking about as a writer and an artist and as someone who’s interested in anti-colonial history in Korea.

LO-B

You have to write that. Or someone has to write it.

EK

I’m always like, someone should write this book. Juwon, would you like to write that book?

JJ

I want to respond to Eunsong’s points on the material history and conditions that structure the subjects of Cha’s work and the kinds of communities and social circles that enabled her to continue working and writing. Here, I’m reminded of Yves Tong Ngueyn and Teline Trần’s conversation in She Follows No Progression. Yves mentions how there is a lack of information or written history regarding the time that Cha spent in California as an undergraduate student, especially her relationship to the student organizing that was taking place during her time. They make clear that Cha was very much a part of these liberal institutions that enabled her education and consequently the intellectual legacy that Cha took part in. Perhaps that lens invites us to think about how she writes and where she writes from. I’m also interested in returning to Irene’s talk with Tomie Arai. I’d like to learn more about those communities that were critical to the  remembering of Cha and the ways that her communities wanted her to be remembered.

LO-B

Juwon, your essay in the book revolves around how Cha writes about herself. Can you talk about that a little here?

JJ

In Dictee, I was moved by how Cha writes through her mother’s memory as a thread that constellates the different chapters of the book. She takes up the story of her mother’s coming of age in exile during colonial Korea. Ultimately, I’m not sure if Cha was really concerned with writing about herself. Rather, the languages, histories, and figures that conditioned her life and existence in the States and uprooting from Korea. Her retelling of her mother’s memory reads as an attempt to retrace this path, to name the colonial trauma that has shaped her and her mother intimately. My text was an adoption of this method, a tracing of oneself through the lineage of another, specifically of my grandmother who grew up in the North before the Korean War. Remembrance is foremost embodied, often involuntary. I can only glimpse how Cha may have known this, in the ways that she attends to the anatomical details of speech, the experience of sitting in a cinema, the movement of a revolution.