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Selected Essays from the Worlding Project

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Selected Essays from the Worlding Project t The WORLDING Project Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalizationt Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery editors new pacific press Santa Cruz, California North Atlantic Books • Berkeley, California 2007 Copyright © 2007 by Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books. Published by: New Pacific Press North Atlantic Books 204 Locust Street P.O. Box 12327 Santa Cruz, CA 95060 Berkeley, CA 94712 Cover photo by Drayton Hamilton Book design by Stephen Pollard Set in Chaparral Pro Printed in the United States of America The Worlding Project is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and crosscultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature. New Pacific Press was established in 2003 as a “Hey, we’ll at least break even” alternative to the commercial, homogeneous publications that currently dominate the publishing industry. New Pacific Press does not believe that it necessarily serves the public interest to operate a not-for-profit enterprise, but rather that there is both value and viability in publishing small, innovative, educational and culturally significant works that the mainstream may consider small potatoes. Our planned publications will be primarily sociopolitical, economic, cultural studies; they will be scholarly, personal, poetic, mixed-media presentations that reflect the multiplicity of cultural work being done in the greater Bay Area and throughout the Pacific Rim(s). North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, call 800-337-2665 or visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com. Substantial discounts on bulk quantities are available to corporations, professional associations, and other organizations. For details and discount information, contact our special sales department. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The worlding project: doing cultural studies in the era of globalization / Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery, eds. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-55643-680-2 1. Globalization. 2. Culture and globalization. 3. Politics and culture. 4. Internationalism. I. Wilson, Rob, 1947–º II. Connery, Christopher Leigh. JZ1318.W693 2007 303.48’2—dc22 2007009627 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Contents Acknowledgments v Preface viii David Watson Introduction: Worlded Pedagogy in Santa Cruz 1 Christopher Leigh Connery 1 Indigenous Articulations 13 James Clifford 2 Learning from Bruce Lee: Pedagogy and Political Correctness in Martial Arts Cinema 39 Meaghan Morris 3 Deprovincializing the Middle Ages 61 Sharon Kinoshita 4 The World Sixties 77 Christopher Leigh Connery 5 Taiwan as Club 51: On the Culture of US Imperialism 109 Kuan-Hsing Chen 6 “But I Did Not Shoot the Deputy”: Dubbing the Yankee Frontier 133 Louis Chude-Sokei 7 Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the Spectacle of Empire: Global/Local Rumblings Inside the Pax Americana 171 Rob Wilson 8 Re-territorializing Asia Pacific: The Post–September 11 Logic of Hegemony 187 David Palumbo-Liu 9 White Surfer Dude 205 Rob Wilson Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic 209 Rob Wilson Contributors 224 Index 227 Acknowledgments The Worlding Project, as vision and text, has been more than four years in the making, so there are many guiding lights and helping hands to acknowledge here and give thanks to at the outset of our publication with New Pacific Press. Foremost among these comrades in arts, politics, and letters has been David S. Watson, prescient owner/visionary leader of Literary Guillotine Bookstore in downtown Santa Cruz, California, and director of New Pacific Press, which has now formed a global-local alliance with North Atlantic Books, based in Berkeley. Scrappy, mongrel, and mul- tiple, this nexus is our own City Lights Bookstore and more. A place-based vision of collective intervention as wrought into a “minor” mode of shared consciousness and critical-creative synergy, New Pacific Press and its “worlding” series came into being out of an uncanny conjunction of local, regional, and global forces as reflecting this singular place of “holy crossings,” dissent, borderlands becoming, and left-coast experimentalism: Santa Cruz, California. Patiently and with enduring literary-material insight over these years and diverse contexts, David Watson has nurtured, challenged, and prodded “the seed” of this project into realized being from our first backyard discussions in his Santa Cruz home in 2001 as the mass media fogs lifted a bit, globaloney spread, and the wars and demos raged on near and far. A ground-breaking conference in April 21, 2001, on “Worldings: World Literatures, Field Imaginaries” drew upon the resources and helpful sup- port of the Humanities Division of the University of California Santa Cruz and its visionary Dean of Humanities Wlad Godzich, as well as an array of colleagues from the editorial collective of boundary 2 and west- coast Asia/Pacific allies like Colleen Lye, Carla Freccero, Susan Gillman, Kirsten Gruesz, David Palumbo-Liu et al., who gave talks on these issues, provoking the “worldings” project forward from its incipient formations in the World Literature and Cultural Studies program at the University, as well as the Center for Cultural Studies which housed and co-supported it (Gail Hershatter and Chris Connery, co-directors). The history of this v consciousness/project is in many ways still carried on in the tactics and dreams of this specific collection, as Chris Connery outlines in his in- troduction to this multi-sited yet situated work of pedagogy called The Worlding Project. We thank Stephanie Casher and Shann Ritchie for their help and care in getting all this rolling, and Masao Miyoshi for always be- ing there with photographs, theory, jeremiads, in-your-face hope. David Watson also brought into the editorial mix our UCSC graduate student copyeditors and comrades in cultural studies, left-coast politics, and poetics: Raissa Burns, Sean Connelly, Sean Fox, and John Flynn-York all deserve our enduring thanks and gratitude for their painstaking work on shaping these essays into pungent and integral coherence as a book. Johanna Isaacson and Andy Wang offered hope, help, and insight, as did Linda X in the bookstore. In the final stages, Stephen Pollard served as the master book designer who gave the text its material realization via, among other things, integrating the keen Korean-based photography of Drayton Hamilton and Gary Pak with the jazz-like array of digitalized icons chosen by the filmic imagination and web uncanniness of Jin Jirn. As Helene Moglen put it when Bodies in the Making came out, all authors should be this lucky. All of these agents and allies deserve our praise and thanks, as do each of the six other contributors to this Worlding Project collection of cultural criticism. Their work has crossed oceans and contexts and endured more than four years of copyediting and re-theorizing to get into this collective form, which has become (so we would hope) greater than the sum of its parts as an intervention into the “worlds” of humanities, pedagogy, and social studies. We the co-editors, Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery, hope that all these kindred spirits will be proud of this project as representing one shared intervention into the banal deadliness of neo-liberal global- ization and its discursive regimes of space, time, identity-making, and transnationalized cultural studies. We hope it projects a world of newness forward, and will thus come out of our past and future via activating tac- tics and prodding hope. vi Some of these Worlding Project chapters have appeared in prior essay versions, even as each work has been reshaped, amplified, and updated for use here: a much shorter version of Christopher Leigh Connery’s essay on the “global Sixties” appeared in Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism (Greece); Meaghan Morris’s essay on “martial arts pedagogy” appeared in a Routledge collection which she acknowledges in her essay; James Clif- ford’s chapter on indigenous articulations appeared in The Contemporary Pacific; Kuan-Hsing Chen’s essay on Club 51 appeared in a much-truncated version in New Left Review; Rob Wilson’s essay on Gladiator appeared in its pre-9/11 form in The European Journal of American Studies, and his es- say-poem on the “white surfer dude” appeared in a differently configured version in the journal of experimental poetics, Chain, co-edited by Juliana Spahr and Jena Osman in Honolulu and Philadelphia. We thank these journals and presses for their permission to reuse. vii Preface David Watson The Worlding Project and New Pacific Press were conceived simultaneously as a new vision of what the New York Intellectuals once called the “bloody crossroads between art and politics.” The public intellectuals of that time were struggling to align avant-garde modernisms with socialist politics. The cultural critics involved in this collection are working with post- colonial theories and trans-nationalisms in the age of globalization. New Pacific has been publishing these cultural critics from the academy, striving to give their work a more public and immediate, topical voice. The Worlding Project has struggled into existence over the past five years, through multiple edits and across the continents, to present this new vision: a creative and critical blend of art and politics that suggests a whole new way to globalize. Rather than globalization, it is what we call worlding.
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