Enough fiction; back to the theory.

Today I read the introduction to David L. Eng's Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, a text that, I think, will prove incredibly useful in my future work.

Eng's purpose is to make use of psychoanalytic theory in the study of Asian American male subjectivity. This is completely new terrain for me as a student of theory. I had, until today, written off psychoanalytic theory as something inherently homophobic, sexist and racist, and therefore not terribly useful to narratives of transcontinental migration, diasporic nostalgia, and subject-formation of American queers of color.

David Eng is a very convincing writer, one completely invested in the resurrection of psychoanalysis in studies of intersecting and mutually constitutive notions of race and sexuality--moving away from strict sociological study to a more thorough inquiry into the effects of institutional racism and emasculation on the Asian American male psyche.

In his reading of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, Eng argues that Gallimard's inability to see Song as a man works as a revisionist example of Freud's notion of fetishism:

In his 1927 essay 'Fetishism,' Freud states that the man, traumatized by the sight of female difference--of castration--creates a fetish--a surrogate penis--and projects it onto the female body in the guise of a substitute object: a plait of hair, an undergarment, a shoe. From a slightly different perspective, fetishism describes a psychic process whereby the man attempts to obviate the trauma of sexual difference by seeing at the site of the female body a penis that is not there to see.

A psychoanalytic reading of M. Butterfly would seem, then, to insist upon an analysis of the drama through the logic of fetishism. While Gallimard's misrecognition of Song's anatomy indicates the white diplomat's abiding psychic investment in the protocols of the fetish, Hwang's drama also resists, reverses, and ultimately revises Freud's traditional paradigm by opening it upon a social terrain marked not by singular difference but by multiple differences. That is, rather than seeing at the site of the female body a penis that is not there to see, Gallimard refuses to see at the site of the Asian male body, a penis that is there to see. The white diplomat's 'racial castration' of Song thus suggests that the trauma being negotiated in this particular scenario is not just sexual but racial difference. As such, Gallimard's psychic reworking of fetishism challenges our conventional interpretation of the Freudian model by delineating a crossing of race with what is traditionally seen only as a paradigm of (hetero)sexual difference.

Through this racial castration, Gallimard need not see Song as anything other than a woman. Through this distinct refashioning of fetishism, Oriental 'could never be completely a man.' And through this elaborate exercise of mental gymnastics Gallimard can strive to maintain the tenuous boundaries of his own assaulted white male (hetero)sexuality. Hence, in Gallimard's orientalist world fetishism cannot be understood as a scandalous perversion of the social order. Indeed, fetishism is naturalized, functioning as a normative psychic mechanism by means of which a ubiquitous sexualized and racialized vision of the feminized Asian American male emerges and takes hold.

The Namesake

Mira Nair's adaptation of The Namesake does exactly what I think cinematic adaptations of literature should do--it uses Jhumpa Lahiri's novel as a starting point, then asserts its own artistry by reimagining the characters from an alternate perspective, one that is no longer literary but inherently cinematic. Whereas Lahiri's focus is Gogol, the first-generation Indian-American son, Nair (and scriptwriter Sooni Taraporevala) intelligently shift the focus to Ashima and Ashoke, the Bengali parents (achingly well played by Tabu and Irrfan Khan).

As such, Nair's film works as a wonderful complement to Lahiri's novel. I can't imagine one without the other.

Did i mention Tabu and Irrfan Khan?

Writer to watch

Dinaw Mengestu's debut novel The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears marks the emergence of a vital new voice in what I will precariously call "immigrant fiction." Mengestu, a recent graduate of Columbia's MFA fiction program, writes prose that is at once urgent and reflective, beautifully and painfully exploring issues of migration, race, love, and the American Dream.

In the following passage, Sepha Stephanos, a shop-owner from Ethiopia, travels to visit his only relative in America--an uncle to whom he rarely speaks:

There are twenty-eight floors to the building, and of those twenty-eight floors, at least twenty-six are occupied exclusively by other Ethiopians who, like my uncle, moved here sometime after the revolution and found to their surprise that they would never leave. Within this building there is an entire world made up of old lives and relationships transported perfectly intact from Ethiopia...Living here is as close to living back home as one can get, which is precisely why I moved out after two years and precisely why my uncle has never left. Hardly a word of English is spoken inside of these doors. The hallways on every floor smell of wat, coffee and incense. The older women still travel from apartment to apartment dressed in slippers and white blankets that they keep wrapped around their heads, just as if they were still walking through the crowded streets of Addis. The children keep only the friendships sanctioned by their parents.

...Sometimes I think of my decision to leave this building as an escape, while at other times it seems more like an abandonment. I try not to take the thought too seriously, but when every eye you catch seems to hold an accusation or question behind it, a decision has to be made. Either I left to create a new life of my own, one free from the restraints and limits of culture, or I turned my back on everything I was and that had made me.


Comments?

Tabu, actress extraordinaire

Tabu has the stuff of screen legend. She is absolutely radiant in Mira Nair's adaptation of The Namesake.

Here is a fabulous interview from rediff.

The photo is a still from Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool, an adaptation of Macbeth, with Irrfan Khan and Tabu in the lead roles. Highly recommended.

More to come on The Namesake.

Controversy, come my way...

Of late, I have been questioned about my use of the word queer, most notably in a paper titled 'Bollywood Screen Queens: Indian Popular Cinema's Construction of Queer Diasporas.' While I could ramble on about the appropriation of derogatory language for the sake of empowerment, I choose instead to offer what I consider to be a brilliant working defintion of queer, at least, in regard to my usage of the word.

In a recent interview, my friend, Liz Tymus, defined queer as follows:

“Queer is a socio-political/personal identification. It’s a commitment to nonconformity to heteronormative society. In short, to identify as queer is a rejection of social binaries, ‘straight-gay,’ ‘male-female,’ ‘man-woman,’ ‘prude-promiscuous,’—queer identity explodes the assumption of ‘one or other,’ but rather sees folks as numerous and infinite.”
(Madison Post, February 21, 2007)

Also, UC Berkeley's Gender Equity Resource Center offers a set of basic defintions to words often associated with the queer community.

Please make note, I do not claim that these definitions are fixed or universal. They do, however, provide an accessible point of departure for ongoing conversation(s) about the limitations of linguistic identification.

Shakespeare Wallah

Highly interesting article from the BBC, about an all-Indian touring company of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6453489.stm

What inspres me...

New art my by bestie, imin yeh.