Center for Ideas & Society Resident Fellows

“Data Migration” traces the emergence of a global environmental and climatological outlook through the often-forgotten work of both data gatherers in colonial Africa and data compilers in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. The project attempts to uncover the scientific contributions of both African and European lay observers, who recorded and relayed climatological data from African colonies to the metropole. In Europe, clearing houses like the Deutsche Seewarte (the German Marine Observatory) in Hamburg assembled, sorted, and prepared the incoming data for publication. “Data Migration” will pay particular attention to the methods and ways in which individuals and institutions transformed the often place-specific and sometimes even qualitative information from the colonies into streamlined and quantitative data, portrayed in neat tables and smooth world maps. This process of standardization, the project argues, tended to obscure the local specificities of climatological conditions and their circumstances of recording, but also contributed to a nascent vision of an interconnected planet, characterized by a singular world or global climate.

The history of logistics is said to begin in the 1960s with the shipping container. But contemporary logistics, which moves goods, people, and information from point to point efficiently to maximize profit, has a history as old as capitalism itself. And, because corporate growth is the horizon of its every operation, the logistical mindset imbues quotidian life with a transactional, competitive, and security-minded disposition that erodes alternative ways of being in the world. This book project, Logistical Life, blends literary, cultural studies, Black studies and visual studies with the history of science, technology, and economics, to tell a new story about the long rise of logistics, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Even before the pandemic, logistics and its iconic form, the supply chain, had changed everyday life, as at-home delivery, cheap travel, on-demand digital services, and instant global communication became ordinary expectations. The term itself saturated our consciousnesses: “It’s logistics,” we’d say, when organizing domestic projects, family gatherings, and other mundane business. The corporate bywords of logistics, “agility,” “leanness,” “resilience,” and “flow,” became ideals of personal development and individual economic security in uncertain times. The pandemic has heightened the critical stakes of logistics, as current delays in vaccine rollouts and racial and class inequity in “essential” logistical work reshape our cultural discourses in ways unstudied by management, economics, and sociology scholars. Logistical Life offers a comprehensive critical reading of logistics’ tightened grip on everyday life in globalized culture.

Reparative Horizons: On Korean American Activisms is an interdisciplinary study of activisms as remembered and practiced by multigenerational Korean American activists between 1970 and the present. Written in a multi-genre format that combines academic prose with creative non-fiction, Reparative Horizons centers 32 oral histories conducted with Korean American feminist, queer, trans and gender nonconforming activists. Mobilizing the reparative as a primary concept— or the transformative processes through which activists reckon with interpersonal and structural violence by repairing and regenerating beyond survival— this project pieces together the critical contributions made by Korean Americans to antiracist feminist movements in the United States. Currently, no monograph in Ethnic Studies,American Studies, or Gender and Sexuality Studies examines the hard-fought lessons and quotidian theorizations of Korean American activists. I aim to remedy this gap by foregrounding how a feminist study of Korean American activisms opens up new intellectual terrain in Asian American studies and women of color feminist scholarship in at least two ways. First, existing Asian American scholarship silos Korean American activisms to ethnic-specific issues, or defines Korean American activism as a derivative of South Korea’s democracy movement. Reparative Horizons departs from these trajectories by situating Korean American activists at the heart of four leftist movement histories: the anti-domestic violence, demilitarization, immigrant justice, and disability justice movements. Second, Reparative Horizons builds on existing studies of activism within women of color feminist scholarship, which broadly conceives of healing as reparative practices of health and wellbeing that exist relationally to, or outside of, activist labor. In contrast, I reconceptualize the reparative as a structural theorization of activism itself, examining the multitude of ways through which Korean Americans foreground multi-scalar repair—a working process that sutures the interpersonal to the systemic—as the central principle of their activist labor.

Thug Life argues for a more global consideration of terrorism’s origins. While the explosion of the Victorian anarchist’s bomb was long regarded as the inaugural event of modern terrorism, recently scholars have turned their focus away from technology to ideology, particularly the concepts of popular sovereignty and nationalism emergent in the eighteenth century. Thug Life posits, however, that terrorism—or, more precisely, the discourse over what constitutes illegitimate political violence—cannot be properly understood without acknowledging the nation-state’s historical correlative, modern imperialism. The colony was one of the crucial spaces where the line between civil society and a state of emergency was legally and culturally judged. My project addresses an array of responses to repressive state-violence and counter- violence in Britain’s internal and external empires— Thomas Moore’s orientalist parsing of Irish insurrectionist rhetoric; Edmund Burke’s intertwined inveighings against Jacobinism and colonial cronyism; Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s advocacy of violent anticolonial protest and Aryan polar fantasies—while considering how literature negotiated the tenuous line between the colony as legal exception and the colony as a potentially recouperable site to be someday incorporated into modern civil society.

The Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, an autobiographical adventure tale authored by one of pre-modern Asia’s most ambitious travelers—a turn of the 5th century CE Chinese Buddhist monk named Faxian—is one of the earliest and most detailed accounts of Central and South Asia’s pre-Islamic Buddhist societies and one of the few surviving accounts of life along the Silk Road. Adopting an inter-Asian frame aimed at historicizing, and thus displacing Europe as the source of modernity in Asia, this project analyzes the translations of the The Record over time to show how Orientalist scholarship was re-purposed at the frontiers of the Western episteme, setting the ragged edges of empire, nationalist movement, socialist experiments, and the bloody displacement of refugee communities into radical different times and horizons of expectation.

Historians and social scientists have dedicated generations studying the spiritual countercultures of the United States, from 19th century utopian communities, to the hippies of the 1960s, the new religious movements of the 1980s, the New Age movement of the 1990s, modern yoga, and contemporary transformational festivals in the United States. Erudite scholars like Catherine Albanese (2008) and Courtney Bender (2010), and before them Jon Butler (1990) have argued convincingly that metaphysical religion, an unchurched American spiritual counterculture, has been integral to the American religious landscape since the nation’s founding. However, although the majority of scholars acknowledge the fact that the spiritual counterculture is comprised of affluent whites, amazingly few have investigated why this is the case, repeatedly and pointedly, throughout American history. This demographic fact may have been less obvious in the 19th century, but today, when the contemporary United States has become highly diversified, the whiteness and wealth of the spiritual counterculture is glaring. It is clear that there is a ‘whites only’ sign hung somewhere at the entrance, but no one seems to know where or why.

How do prison contemplative programs of yoga and meditation fit into conversations around mass incarceration? Is their logic compatible with political strategies that seek to dismantle mass incarceration? Or do they instead work to reinforce more conservative logics that depoliticize mass incarceration and sustain the status quo? The yogic, meditative traditions of South Asia are sometimes said to produce pacifying and politically neutering effects: their emphases on acceptance, non-judgment, non-reaction and the focus on the individual self are thought to isolate both the causes and effects of structurally-determined political outcomes, rather than attempt to change systemic social injustice. As a result, critics suggest such programs may depoliticize mass incarceration and sustain the neoliberal status quo, managing the incarcerated without challenging the fundamental validity of mass incarceration, serving to make it palatable and emphasizing individual responsibility over structural injustice. The imperative to improve life for the incarcerated may distract from an unjust system made more habitable, and its victims more compliant, producing accommodationist and depoliticizing attitudes among both its target population as well as the general public. However, many scholars also insist that yogic/meditative teachings can also be interpreted to generate attention to oppression and social injustice, and resistance to the status quo. My project asks: Are these practices being taught in incarceration facilities in ways that pacify, depoliticize or reinforce compliance with the logic of mass incarceration? Or do they offer relief from suffering while also drawing attention to systematic injustice?

With the support of this fellowship, I will be able to complete my monograph, Innovating Stalemate: The Militarized Technogeometries of Korean American Literature. My book will be the first of its kind to analyze how Korean American literatures repurpose the technologies and vocabularies associated with war in order to imagine less violent outcomes, on the one hand, and to combat the erasures of the defenseless and the expendable, on the other. This language of warfare—or as I call it, militarized technogeometries—is deeply embedded in the writings of Korean American writers. Thus, this kind of literary aesthetic is conditioned by Korea’s longer history as a site of conquest and violence. At the same time, these writers employ such the coded language of war to reconsider what must be given attention, who must be represented, and how survival can still be achieved (and imagined) despite the war machine’s drive to instrumentalize technology and innovation for the production of death. My proposed monograph will further elucidate the complexity of Korean American war representations, appealing to a broad range of humanities scholars, including: Asian American literary scholars; humanist scholars in History, English, Ethnic Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, and Comparative Literature; and the general public, especially in light of national discourses promoting a broader understanding of our cultural histories.

The proposal is focused on the emerging interdisciplinary field of sound studies that reaches into fields of sonic knowledge and practice that cuts across different disciplines, methods and objects including new forms of technologically mediated listening and new processes for manipulating, transforming and working with sound. It develops research in three different areas: (1) a theoretical investigation on the rich and growing scholarly literature of sound studies as an academic field in the humanities and socials sciences defined by combination of object and approach; (2) a comparative and practical study of the material production and consumption of sound, noise and silence in three specific sonic environments defined from a global perspective; (3) a sound and visual art-installation engaging the concepts and objects of the research in a critical reflection on the diversity of contemporary sound practices and creativity. The proposal aims also to develop a broad knowledge on sonic imaginations as an interdisciplinary meeting point of different disciplines and benefiting UCR departments and areas of study such as music, philosophy, media and cultural studies, technology studies, ethnomusicology and popular music studies, creative writing, anthropology and sociology. It also seeks to provide support to the cluster hire initiative “Global Arts” that is part of the Global Studies program and is recruiting a faculty on Global Sound Composition.

This book-length project examines the central roles played by Pre-Columbian indigenous archaeological sites, and especially their representations, in the construction (or imagination) of a unified sense of cultural identity in the Americas. Since their so called “discovery” by European explorers in the early moments of colonization, the large scale ruins, environments, and structures of the hemisphere’s pre-contact cultures have served as sources of fascination in Western society. Between the 1870s and 1960s—a watermark period in Euro-American efforts to consolidate a modern, industrial definition of the Americas—the pre-contact sites emerged as important symbols in the effort to unify the hemisphere’s geography, ideology, history, and image. Equally important, the monuments also became touchstones in counter discourses of indigenous self-determination, sovereignty, and survivance. Indigenous peoples across the continents reclaimed the sites and their representations as material evidence in demands for land and political authority, and as potent metaphors for the articulation of cultural legacy and legitimacy. Resistance to the appropriation of the sites enacted by Western art and archaeology became a means for asserting power and affirming indigenous culture. In this way, the imagery of ancient sites the locus for contemporary battles of politics and representation. This project offers the first in-depth, hemispheric study of the intersection between artistic and archaeological representation, and its attendant cultural politics, in the Americas during these pivotal years.