The Wandering Scholar

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WS Small Book.1.indd 2 11/19/14 3:58 PM The Wandering Scholar

WS Small Book.1.indd 3 11/19/14 3:58 PM WS Small Book.1.indd 4 11/19/14 3:58 PM Katrien Jacobs

I left my home country Belgium when I was 22 and never returned. I have kept moving and meandering intellectually and can no longer imagine a different kind of life-style. I wrote a few books that are structured like journeys and walks. Walk- ing became an existential condition and I felt better if and when I could write up my ideas that way. I have had some bad luck with these books in how they were evaluated in academia. The message I received over and again is that they should be classified as my non-academic work. I am against the process of streamlining complex ideas and frustrated intellectual journeys into one type of prose. I cannot understand why the form is so stable and monotonous, that it does not have empathy with the wide range of experimental languages around us. It honestly makes me sad and so I invented a ghost-figure to deal with it. Her name is Sister Ping, she died of unfulfilled longing and became a ghost. I have written a film script about her and I am planning to make a movie about her. One of the sites that I imagined for her is located right at the edge of the

WS Small Book.1.indd 5 11/19/14 3:58 PM Chinese University of Hong Kong campus, on the way to the small Shek Nai Ping village where some old graveyards are located. It was a long-time wish of mine to walk there with a group of people, to pay tribute to the underworld through a ritual of burning. As Peter Chan explained it, it was not meant to be a destructive ritual, but a playful one through which we rethink a crisis of academic discourses which are our livelihood and our privilege.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 8 11/19/14 3:58 PM Ian Fong: A “Weak” Response to Academocracy

Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path. - Dante I am often criticized by peer reviewers that my writing meanders and is too frag- mented. It exists as a patchwork. The following is a peer review report on one of my papers: It is sprawling and rather all over the place. It doesn’t seem to have real thesis; the abstract is utterly unclear. It quotes massive amounts of text and sort of puts together lots of names and books … without making any clear point. It lacks fluency throughout and is stylistically, as well as conceptually, meandering. Essayistic perhaps, but slack. In fact, a piece … wouldn’t exactly be appropriate for an academic journal like ours …

WS Small Book.1.indd 9 11/19/14 3:58 PM Am I incapable of being a scholar? Barthes’ response to Raymond Picard’s critique in 1966 does serve as a support for my existing work.1 Barthes wrote Sur Ra- cine (On Racine) in 1963. It can be read as an example of French “new criticism.” Directly aiming at Sur Racine, Raymond Picard, the Chair of French Literature at the Sorbonne who in 1956 published, La Carrière de Jean Racine, in 1965 published a monograph called Nouvelle Critique ou nouvelle imposture (New Criticism or New Fraud?) which criticized “new criticism” as a “movement of fraud” (“intellectually empty, verbally sophisticated, morally dangerous”). (29) “It’s” to Barthes, “an ex- ecution” (La Croix). (30 & fn.) It is “a primitive rite of exclusion of a dangerous individual from an archaic community.” (30) Barthes in 1966 wrote Critique et vérité (Criticism and Truth) to respond. The orthodox requirements for “critical verisimilitude,” “objectivity,” “good taste,” “clarity” are the product of the ideology of bour- geois-oriented French criticism in Barthes’ time. In response to the usual comment, “Why not say things more simply?” (50) Barthes asks, “Is old criticism so sure that 1 For the background of Barthes-Picard literary debate which had “important educational, social and political implications” (10) in his time, see Philip Thody, “Foreword,” to Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, ed. and trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 7-13; and Keuneman, “Preface” to English-Language Edition of Criticism and Truth, 15-25.

WS Small Book.1.indd 10 11/19/14 3:58 PM it too does not have its own gratuitous floweriness?” To him, the language used by them is “clear only to the extent that it is generally accepted.” (50) We know that old criticism cannot write in any other way unless it begins to think in some other way. For to write is already to organize the world, it is already to think (to learn a language is to learn how one thinks in that language). It is thus useless (though critical verisimilitude persists in expecting it) to ask the Other to re-write himself if he has not decided to re-think himself. … Certainly the problem of the limits of his reception is a very serious one for a writer; but at least he chooses those limits, and if it happens that he accepts narrow limits, it is precisely because to write is not to enter into an easy relationship with an average of all possible readers, it is to enter into a difficult relationship with our own language: a writer has greater obligations towards a way of speaking which is truth for him than towards the critics of the Nation française or Le Monde. (50-1) If I am unwilling to re-think, to give myself up to an academocratic environment, do I need to re-write? “I am here defending the right to language…” (52) “How can I live my language as a simple attribute of my person?” (52) “The prohibition which

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WS Small Book.1.indd 13 11/19/14 3:58 PM you cast upon other forms of language [knowledge] is simply a way of excluding yourselves from literature [scholarship]…” (52) The “what-goes-without-saying”2 way of writing an academic paper should be demystified. I need to teach a lot in order to survive. My writing is frequently interrupted by teaching on a daily basis. Writing can only be done during breaks in which I do not need to fulfill any teaching obligations. My situation is similar to women’s writing, as described by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.3 Ab- sence of uninterrupted time for writing creates loosely knitted patchwork-like writing. Absence in French means both “lack of the person” and “distraction of the mind.”4 For the latter, absence nurtures an ability which concentration can- 2 See Roland Barthes, “Preface,” Mythologies, 11-12. 3 Woolf says, “ If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, - ‘women never have an half hour … that they can call their own’ - she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required.” See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Flamingo, 1994), 73. 4 Roland Barthes writes that in French the amphibologies are extremely (abnormally) numerous. “[I] n general, the context forces us to choose one of the two meanings and to forget the other. Each time he encounters one of these double words, R.B., on the contrary, insists on keeping both meanings,

WS Small Book.1.indd 14 11/19/14 3:58 PM not have.5 When writing is always distracted, there is a possibility of reading and writing otherwise. Absence, for the former, carries the meaning of poverty. Poverty may mean lack in some sense; but, to Hardt and Negri, it is more significant to read it as possibility.6 To them, thinking in terms of poverty has “the healthy effect of questioning traditional class designations and forcing us to investigate with fresh eyes how class composition has changed and look at people’s wide range of productive activities inside and outside wage relations.” (xi) Then, poverty has “the healthy effect” of exploring alternative ways of scholarship. There should always exist possibilities of knowledge which cannot be disciplinized, institutionalized or academocratized. Walter Benjamin writes,

as if one were winking at the other and as if the word’s meaning were in that wink …” See Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 72. 5 On the importance of distraction, see Walter Benjamin, “Theory of Distraction,”The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: Belknap Press, 2008), 56-7. To Benjamin, distraction, rather than concentration, is the best way to respond to modernity. 6 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2009), xi.

WS Small Book.1.indd 15 11/19/14 3:58 PM There are days when no one should rely unduly on his “competence.” [a significant attribute to a university of “excellence”] Strength lies in improvi- sation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed. 7 I cannot help asking if academocracy should be “struck left-handed” (revolution- ized?) in order to develop a more democratic academic way of writing? * Socrates acts as a model of wandering scholar for me to follow. The poster for the Wandering Scholars Symposium is taken from Raphael’s “The School of Ath- ens,” in which Plato and Aristotle take the center position. Socrates, their teacher, is marginalized. His friend from boyhood, Chaerephon, went to Delphi and asked whether there was anyone wiser than him. The priestess replied that there was no one. (19D-21A8) To prove the oracle’s answer was wrong, he wandered around and interviewed all kinds of people. In the end, he understood the truth is that real wisdom is the prop-

7 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London; New York: Verso, 2000), 49. 8 Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick (London: Penguin, 1969).

WS Small Book.1.indd 16 11/19/14 3:58 PM erty of God, and this oracle told us that human wisdom has little or no value. He realizes that ‘The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.’ In the end, Socrates was charged of corrupt- ing the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own creation, instead of the gods recognized by the state. He was sentenced to death. While the academia has to prove that one is capable enough for a tenure position, Socrates proved in a peripatetic way he was the most stupid/incapable one. Socrates spent his whole life wandering in poverty and tried to prove that he was not wise enough to be a teacher. He refused to be called teacher/professor. He talked to everyone to convey God’s message that the more we know, the more ignorant we are. On the contrary, Sophists aimed at producing cleverness and efficiency rather than wisdom and goodness; worse still, they charged fees for their services.9 Knowl- edge, to them, was functional. They are unable to hear the calling of knowledge and ridiculously are rich, powerful and institutional. Then, how can the contemporary scholars hear that calling? Can a scholar possessing excessive intellectual property and having a desire to excel still be able to hear? In OED, to profess means to de-

9 Hugh Tredennick, “Introduction,” to Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, 7.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 18 11/19/14 3:58 PM clare. To be a professor is to declare his commitment to knowledge. To profess is to receive the calling from God that I serve knowledge without compromise. Socrates’ service to God has reduced him to extreme poverty and exposed him to danger. He is not afraid of death. Socrates receives the gift from God. Death for knowledge is the only way to pay off such sacred debt and respond to the sacred calling. The sacred duty of philosophy lies in its commitment to death/life. To philosophize is to learn to die which is, at the same time, to learn to live. Simon Critchley says that to learn how to die is to refuse to be a slave, to live with constraints.10 “The unexam- ined life,” to Socrates, “is not worth living.” We need an examined, but not audited, life in order to learn how to die. An “excellent” university does not teach us to die, but to possess in an audited life. It turns itself into a slave. Learning from literature, the university should learn how to hear/overthrow itself, not to see/possess. Learn- ing from philosophy, the university has its duty to learn how to die, but not to survive. “The autonomy of reason gained by self-criticism” gains “the autonomy of the University” and its sacred duty which distinguishes the University from a research

10 Examined Life, directed by Astra Taylor (2008; New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2010), DVD. Simon Critchley appears in one of the two extra philosopher walks.

WS Small Book.1.indd 19 11/19/14 3:59 PM centre and a teaching college.11 And only the university can serve as the trustee of knowledge and can create this title independently. Socrates’ poverty in Hardt and Negri’s sense in their book Commonwealth is not a lack, but possibility. It allows him to explore possibilities of knowledge which cannot be institutionalized or academocratized, to explore alternative/wandering ways of scholarship. He is not a professor who can be tenured because he does not write and only teaches. He is a wandering professor who professes to knowledge. Plato is the tenured professor. Derrida sees a medieval image on a post card he bought at Oxford’s Bodleian Library: Socrates is writing in front of Plato with his back facing him. With his out- stretched finger, Plato looks like he is dictating Socrates.12 In the post card, Derrida sees “Plato getting an erection in Socrates’ back and see the insane hubris of his prick, an interminable, disproportionate erection … slowly sliding, still warm, under Socrate’s right leg …”, and steals Socrates’ chair and becomes the chair professor. Ridiculously, we depend on Plato to understand Socrates. 11 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 57. 12 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 9-10.

WS Small Book.1.indd 20 11/19/14 3:59 PM * The concept of wandering scholars should “wander” around. Such scholars wander in different ways. They work against the grain and, perhaps, against each other. They pursue a kind of scholarship which their contemporaries do not recognize. They are solitary scholars, or scholars gone astray. A wandering scholar, to me, may be in Socrates’ loneliness. They need “to escape the solitude of individualism.”13 Knowledge is the same as the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty. They are “the common wealth of the material world” shared by everyone. The notion of the common, to Hardt and Negri, “does not position humanity sep- arate from nature, as either its exploiter or its custodian, but focuses rather on the practices of interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world, promoting the beneficial and limiting the detrimental forms of the common.” Hence, Socrates does not receive money to teach; and he is not teaching, but sharing knowledge. I am looking for a wandering community to break all kinds of boundaries, to share knowledge, and to nurture love for wisdom or scholarship.

13 See Hart and Negri, Commonwealth, xii. To Hardt and Negri, the multitude is “a set of singulari- ties that poverty and love compose in the reproduction of the common.” (xii -xiii)

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WS Small Book.1.indd 22 11/19/14 3:59 PM Yeung Yang

I teach in a program that values purposeful reading. There is beauty in that purpose – as students walk the grain of the thinkers’ worlds in their poetry and clarity, their own ways of thinking becomes lucid to themselves. This is the beauty of human attention (Scarry). There is another kind of beauty that happens sometimes – the beauty of irrele- vance (Gaburo). When students make an effort to embrace the thinkers’ ideas, they penetrate into them in dimensions that are set up somewhere in their own past, made present. I had one student who found Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Con- tract structured like an orchestral score. Another student found Confucius thinking with the kind of principles a scientist would. I had these students in mind, and many other who remained silent but active (and wandering) in class, when I compiled the quotes for the intervention at the Wandering Scholars conference. With them, I meandered through the attentive listeners on the last day of the conference. Among the many things I have learnt

WS Small Book.1.indd 23 11/19/14 3:59 PM that day, I remembered one idea in particular – today, the job requirement of an academic is the ability to sit for a long time, which seems to me to be a symbolic as much as a literal requirement. My restlessness keeps me walking. Here is a list of books and writings that have inspired me. If I were to give them a provisional unity with a title, I would say, “In Praise of Divided Attention” (Cham- ber). I imagine them as flickering tags that register teachable moments that may arise any time, any place. John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (2007) Ross Chamber, Loiterature (1999) Joshua Cohen ed., The Review of Contemporary Fiction: The Failure Issue(2011) Kenneth Gaburo, The Beauty of Irrelevant Music (1976) W.J.T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig, Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (2013) Olaf Nicolai and Jan Wenzel, Four Times Through the Labyrinth (2012) Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts: A Life (2006) Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (1999)

WS Small Book.1.indd 24 11/19/14 3:59 PM Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks, Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (2007) 戴秀慧編：傳說我城 Our City Our Legends 103 (2012)

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WS Small Book.1.indd 26 11/19/14 3:59 PM Follow the invisible how about shadows line his hand draws why is it round? Hold everything dear where land makes a mark How was her morning here comes the drum See what he sees on the ground there A ripple is com- is no overview ing your way 吃一個茶果看, 茶葉正在打開喝一口海風 He needs to know now, or never you are listening. only honest and daring there, a pause writing would penetrate are we going to do it? the depths that enveloped and paralyzed me now

WS Small Book.1.indd 27 11/19/14 3:59 PM Jack Halberstam On Behalf of Failure

Since I published The Queer Art of Failure in 2011, a number of books on failure have appeared in the popular realm. Just a few weeks ago in the NYT Book Review, Scott Sandage, author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, reviewed two new books on failure: one, The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure and the Search for Mastery by Sarah Lewis, an art historian, who advocates for seeing failure as one of life’s “gifts” and another by Megan McArdle, a journalist forThe Economist who counsels us to see The Up Side of Down, as her title terms it. While Lewis writes a carefully considered treatise on death and incompleteness and analogizes failure to grief in its inevitability and its importance as an experience, McArdle offers up a self-help version of failure as something we do on the way to succeeding, leaving the whole binary logic of success/failure intact. Sandage marks the differences between the two books in his review and then sums up: “Whether one accepts Lewis’s idea that failure is a gift that keeps on giving or adopts McArdle’s advice that failing well is the best revenge depends, of course, on what you understand by “failure.” Neither book can answer that question for readers, and neither author really tries.” 28

WS Small Book.1.indd 28 11/19/14 3:59 PM Sandage is right to suggest that these books skirt the definition of failure but this is not their gravest shortcoming. In fact, there are many other subtleties that are lost on the way to mainstreaming failure. And so, here today, I want to argue “on behalf of failure” and on behalf very specifically of the queerness of failure, a topic that Sandage ignores completely (leaving my book out of the genealogy of books on failure) as do the authors he reviews. So, why would we want to argue that failure is queer? Why argue on behalf of failure? How might we make a case for failure that does not reinstate the zero-sum logics of success? What are the politics of failure and how might failure offer us a methodology for queer studies? Does failure offer an epistemological framework that allows for different distributions of merit, value and relevance? Should we, to quote Beckett, fail well and fail often and if so, how? Without proposing to answer all of these questions, I do want to take a stab at a few of them as a way of beginning a conversation here at Wandering Scholars about failure, its uses, its abuses, the angle it offers us on human action and inaction and the potential dangers of thinking with and through failure as they are unevenly distributed across populations. So, I will proceed by thinking about 2 performances related to failure and wandering and loss and queerness. As I said earlier, some of the recent books on failure make failure into a kind

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WS Small Book.1.indd 30 11/19/14 3:59 PM of universalized and existential category but they do not mark the ways in which certain groups are set up to fail. But queerness emerges out of failure, is born of failure if you like and can choose to embrace failure rather than hold it at bay. In this respect, the new politics of protest that we have been witnessing in the last few years makes common cause with the queer politics of failure by refusing to make demands, by making art rather than policy and by finding the purpose of activism to be togetherness rather than simply opposition. Art and activism among queer participatory artists take many different forms – for some the intervention is visual but for others, the intervention may take the form of speech, action or intervention. For example, artist Sharon Hayes variously interrupts the silent, random and anonymous vectors of the public sphere by deliv- ering speeches about love in public space or by positioning herself within the public sphere as a sign that demands to be read. Hayes’s performances and her aesthetic protests may use some of the same symbols and signs as a protest march but they are not congruent with it either in goals or in form. Less like an activist and more like a hustler, a billboard, a busker or a panhandler, Hayes forces herself upon passersby to give them her message and often to recruit them to give voice. In “In The Near Future,” Hayes invites people to come and witness her reenactment of moments of

WS Small Book.1.indd 31 11/19/14 3:59 PM protest from the past, like a 1968 Memphis Sanitation strike restaged in NYC at an ACT UP protest site, a restaged ERA rights march, or the revisiting of an anti-war protest. Hayes’ events were staged in four different cities where the audience was invited to witness her holding a protest sign in public space and to record and doc- ument the event. Presented as photographic slides installations within institutional spaces Hayes’ documentation of these protest-events are not “literal reenactments,” they function as citations of the past on behalf of a possible future, a notion that echoes Muñoz’s theory of queer utopia. For both Hayes and Muñoz, the future is something that queers cannot foreclose, must not abandon and that in fact presents a temporal orientation that enfolds the potentiality of queerness even as it awaits its arrival. Hayes’ events call for a new understanding of history and make connections between past and present eruptions of wild and inventive protest and allow those moments to talk to each other to produce a near future. She reminds us that politics is work between strangers and not just cooperation between familiars and directs our attention away from the charisma of visual spectacle and towards a more collaborative and generous act of listening. In a ferocious performance piece titled “Becoming an Image,” body artist Cassils pounds a huge mound of clay in the dark. The piece was commissioned for an event

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WS Small Book.1.indd 33 11/19/14 3:59 PM at the ONE Archive in Los Angeles, an archive of LGBT materials. Cassils, in his piece, wanted to draw attention to all that was missing from the archive. While it claims to be an LGBT archive, and while a trans man founded the archive, in fact, it turns out to be rich in materials on white gay men and low on everything else. Cassils’ performance comments upon the dis-appearance of bodies and lives and the unmaking of some worlds through the process of documenting others. The piece is experienced in the dark with only the soundtrack of Cassils’ monumental exertions filling the air and only the flash of an onsite photographer allows the audience to see, randomly, how Cassils’ performance destroys the clay and the clay destroys Cassils. In the process of becoming an image, both the subject and the object are un/becoming, shattering, destroyed and destroying. In The Undercommons, Moten and Hearny write: “Some people like to run things. Some things like to run. If they ask you, tell them we were flying.” This new language of fugitivity, flight, bliss, counter-cooperation, queer darkness, delight, offers us a vector of being that runs alongside or through failure and collapse. The economy may well be in crisis, capitalism may well be amassing new ways of feeding the rich, questions are everywhere and answers are in short supply, but, if they ask us, we should tell them we are flying.

WS Small Book.1.indd 34 11/19/14 3:59 PM Kal Ng: The Ronin Scholars

As Katrien Jacobs ponders the identity of the present day scholar by taking up the ritual of burning scholastic writings and research papers that took place in a field near the Chinese University, I as the videographer of the event, conjure up vivid im- ages from the films that concern Japanese Samurai strolling in the forest, seemingly aimless and serving no warlord, in search of the meaning of their profession as the era of Bushido is drawing to a close. In recent Japanese movies there are a few films that describe the plight of such characters, such as the Twilight Samuri series by Yoji Yamada. Even Hollywood has gotten interested in exploring the theme of conflict between the passing codes of the noble warriors and an emerging era irrevocably altered by new technologies and shifting societal structures (such as Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, Robert De Niro in Ronin and Keanu Reeves in the recent Ronin 47). In a way the stories of the outcast knight seems to be more popular as a subject in the West than the Samurai, where individualism still reigns supreme, as the name

WS Small Book.1.indd 35 11/19/14 3:59 PM for the master-less samurai, Ronin, takes on a cultural position in our collective imagination. Under the present cinematic gaze, it seems that only when the Samurai lose their secure livelihood provided by the master clan or a daimyo, that their lives become more interesting. Instead of the struggle within the institution, which will cost a lot of screen time describing the politics and plots within the that organiza- tion (such struggles are better reserved for TV series) the roving eyes of cinema are more interested in the individual against a landscape, perhaps because it is more photogenic and romantic. But what landscape? The idea of the wandering scholar implies a picturesque landscape for the scholar to stroll through leisurely, without danger and the fear of hunger. It is a garden of Eden transported into the modern day academic institutions where scholars are secured by their positions in the department of their specialised studies. Although there are negative connotations about the ivory towers that scholars live in, disre- garding the social reality around them, the ivory towers do provide a secure environment to allow the advancement of thoughts and ideas that may cause lasting changes within the greater society. So it is the wandering part that becomes important and the space with which this wandering takes place.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 38 11/19/14 3:59 PM If we imagine the wilderness that the Ronin is wandering into, it must be hostile and austere, filled with tragic possibilities, at the same time this wilderness is the wilderness that also tested Jesus Christ, with sensational temptations and lurking spiritual dangers. In a way if there is no testing ground of the wilderness, there will be no Jesus Christ. Until the sword is tested by hell fire it is only a decorative tool displayed above the mantle. Now this scenario may sounds like consolation to the scholars who are struggling to get a permanent position in their specialised area of research, however if ideas are not tested, one is better off as collector of stamps for their own private collection. The landscape of the Ronin is harsh, filled with mean spirits and celebrated fail- ures, yet it is still a more interesting path, one that calls attention to the storytellers of our time. It is a path of uncertainty and the unknown, and the samurai must hold fast to the sword he/she is carrying to weld off evil spirits and deceivers, it is the sword of truth, and until one sharpens it, it will have no use even in the secure house of the daimyo, because time is changing once again and there will be more Ronin scholars in the field than there are in the garden of Eden.

WS Small Book.1.indd 39 11/19/14 3:59 PM Clifton Evers: Becoming-tricycle

A few years ago I moved to Shanghai. It was quite a change for a surfer from Aus- tralia. I felt lost in this city of 23 million people – I still do. I knew there was a lot to learn from Shanghai and China but I didn’t know where to start. I needed someone or something to help me. Then I saw it pass by on the street- a tricycle (San Lun Che). I have since learned that tricycles are common on the streets of China’s cities. For street vendors the tricycle supports a more-than-human assemblage that allows informal urban street markets to happen, ambiances to emerge and livelihoods to be made. The presence of the tricycles and informal urban street markets are evidence of a thriving informal sector in China, despite official efforts to do away with them. However, becoming-tricycle has revealed to me how quotidian local knowledge and practices can act as a politics of redress - in cases like this global historical, social, economic, political and ecological forces can meet local instances of these same issues. For me, this informality operates on its own terms that include detours, derailments, hijackings, discoveries, and arbitrariness, which lead to a cutting up,

WS Small Book.1.indd 40 11/19/14 3:59 PM refusing, collaging, appropriating, and experimentations with regulations, bodies, space, materiality and subjectivity. In this paper I explore the process of ‘becoming-tricycle’ in relation to informal urban street markets in Shanghai. By being attentive to this process I have had the opportunity to register the force and energy of informality. Throughout this paper I ask: what does ‘becoming-tricycle’ do? How does this process make a difference and enable informal urban street markets and subsequently livelihoods? Is becoming-tricycle evidence of a Shanghai understanding of the city? Further more, in this paper I want to emphasize the role of the non-human (and not just the human) in all of this. My research involved calculated drifting and becoming-tricycle. This means the research involved a more-than-human reorienting of situations, arrangements, alli- ances, ‘ambiances’, conflicts, and events. I experienced riding the streets on a tricycle, an uncommon arrangement for a foreigner in China. The novelty of a foreigner with a tricycle means that I ‘rubbed along with’ the street traders in a different man- ner than if I had been walking. Becoming-tricycle was my research method and subsequently part of my own livelihood. By undertaking this becoming-tricycle the

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WS Small Book.1.indd 42 11/19/14 3:59 PM aim was to jolt into awareness collaborative and new understandings of informal urban street markets and bring forth previously unavailable analytical propositions and possibilities. I suggest a keener registering of the role of the non-human as agent provocateur – a distributed affectivity. The process of becoming-tricycle brings into relief for me how research is not simply willed by us humans but comes about equally through the ‘materialities of the world in which we are just a part’ (Dewsbury 2011, p. 152). *

So, let’s go for a ride. It’s early. Yu leads me out onto the street. My tricycle is loaded with his produce. My lungs burn as I suck in the thick pollution. This pollution has been changing my lung tissue since I arrived here. I wonder what it has done to Yu’s lungs? Yu is becoming-tricycle: arms, legs, flesh, metal, wind, jacket, wheels, grease, rubber, handlebars, metal, sounds of the bell, space, ropes, sensations, all work together. Following the collaborative work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychotherapist Felix Guattari (1987) I understand what is ahead of me as ‘body-as-assemblage’. Despite the heavy and large cargo, the assemblage ahead of me deftly negotiates relationships with traffic, pedestrians, city infrastructure, and other tricycles.. The assemblage acts in synchronicity. 43

WS Small Book.1.indd 43 11/19/14 3:59 PM When I ride the tricycle it is not yet an assemblage. I clumsily bump along. The tricycle wants to go faster than my ability to manage the complexity of what is happening. Brake. Go. Brake. Go. Brake. Go. Lurch. The tricycle and I haven’t yet ‘clicked’. What I am experiencing are the beginnings of a process of what Gisli Pálsson calls ‘enskilment’ (1994) – a situated, affective and contextual learning. Yu has already gone through this. Enskilment is where my senses and the more-than- human work to move beyond and undermine any subject-object nature-culture binary interpretation and experience of subjectivity. The enskilment is what nurtures becoming-tricycle. We arrive at Pengpu night market. Many tricycles converge and the market gets underway. An ambiance emerges – a commingling of sensations, sounds, smells, atmosphere, actions, space, architectures, and bodies. This ambiance is informality happening. Tricycles become stalls with a vast of array of counterfeit goods—DVDs, handbags, clothing and technologies—products that ignore intellectual property laws. Becoming-tricycle challenges international intellectual property regimes. Customers who normally would be excluded from the cultural capital economy of such goods get to take part.

WS Small Book.1.indd 44 11/19/14 3:59 PM One street trader has a tricycle with a machine built into it that crushes long shafts of sugarcane into a sweet drink—a sugar-cane-crushing-juicer-tricycle. Many street traders have a gas bottle under the tricycle tray and cook food in woks, all the while being surrounded by small plastic chairs: the tricycle as stove-restaurant. There is a tricycle-becoming-barber-shop and a tricycle-becoming-tailor-shop. Prosaic technologies are reimagined through becoming-tricycle. The informal urban street market assemblage achieves an equilibrium, yet it is always in a state of becoming – it is variable by the hour. The vendors provide a valuable service in that they provide convenient, afford- able and accessible goods and services for people. The street vendors view themselves as legitimate businesses. However, the authorities along with some people disagree. Some letters to and opinion pieces in the Shanghai Daily argue that the market has become too large and disruptive, for example interrupting the bus services (they have had to alter their route), creating noise and sanitation problems. The authorities arrive and start checking if the vendors in operation have ap- proved licences (of course, to be purchased from that same local government).

WS Small Book.1.indd 45 11/19/14 3:59 PM Another reason for the crackdown is the increasing commercialisation of the (Zhabei) district where the Pengpu Night Market is located. Large commercial shopping plazas are taking over. Becoming-tricycle problematizes this process by transgressing the boundaries between public and private space, for example en- abling the colonizing of private plazas. Provisional alternative territories emerge. These territories stake a claim … it’s a political move. Becoming-tricycle and Informal Urban Street Markets become a proverbial grain of sand that irritates government departments, urban planners, corporations, real estate developers, and the like as they try to fix, determine and claim territory and the meanings of the city. There is harassment of street vendors that includes evic- tions, confiscation of merchandise, as well as destruction of goods and tricycles. Sometimes such harassment is predicated on demands for fines, which can also function as bribes. I learn that formal and informal activities are not a binary but interwoven and tangled. The crackdown is particularly worrisome for Yu who doesn’t have a Shanghai hukou card—a place-specific urban residency card connected to a registration system. Yu and some other vendors are migrant workers (mingong or wailai wugong renyuan). There has been a rapid and massive rural to urban migration in China

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WS Small Book.1.indd 47 11/19/14 3:59 PM since the start of reforms and opening up policy in 1978. The regulation (block- age) to the flow of people occurs via the hukou. Without a hukou card the migrants have only limited access to employment and various social services, such as schools, health care, work, and insurance. Becoming-tricycle has low barriers to entry (cost and education) so Yu is able to generate a livelihood for himself without a hukou card. I learn that becoming-tricycle actually enables people to negotiate the regime of power that is the hukou – a system aimed at restricting population movement and settlement. I wonder just how important becoming-tricycle has been to this national-scale rural-to-urban migration? During the crackdowns some vendors hurriedly convert their tricycle to trans- port and move away, hoping to be ignored by the authorities. Without a hukou card they could be expelled from the city. Without a licence they could be fined or have to pay a bribe. They leave the market. It’s a strategy of cat and mouse. Informal urban street markets have assembled elsewhere. Becoming-tricycle means livelihoods can continue. Informality does not equal powerlessness. Becoming-tricycle is one way to ensure the public interest of the city is not left wholly in the hands of governmental bodies, the hegemonic political apparatus, private developers and institutional financiers.

WS Small Book.1.indd 48 11/19/14 3:59 PM References Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dewsbury, J.D. (2011). The Deleuze- Guattarian assemblage: Plastic habits. AREA 43(2), pp. 148-153. Pálsson, G. (1994). Enskilment at Sea. Man 29, pp. 901-927.

WS Small Book.1.indd 49 11/19/14 3:59 PM Andrew Irving: The Limits of Science

Here is a photograph I took on Nathan Road, in Kowloon, Hong Kong on May 27th 2014. I have an extremely simple question to ask about it. However it is a question that places us beyond the limits of human understanding and even science itself. The question is what are these people thinking? What, for example, is the man in the center thinking? What are his worries and what is the story of his life? Or alternatively, what memories of childhood does the woman on his left have? In fact, what is the content and character of the lives of any of the people in this photograph? As with any crowded city street, people may be engaged in diverse and even radically different forms of thought, emotion and imagery that encompasses the whole spectrum of social life from the trivial to the tragic. Out of the thousands and thousands of thoughts that are simultaneously held inside people’s heads on Hong Kong’s streets, it is likely that a sizeable proportion concern people’s on-going

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WS Small Book.1.indd 51 11/19/14 3:59 PM and everyday social relations, their current life issues and circumstances, and their observation of what’s going on around them. To this we must also add the kinds of imaginative reverie, half-formed day-dreams and inchoate streams of thought that mediate many different kinds of social activity during people’s waking, working and leisure hours. For not far underneath the surfaces of everyday sociality, nearly all that life offers can be found. As documented in Ethnography, Art and Death (Irving 2007), a person might also be walking around a city looking for a place to commit suicide or confronting the radical uncertainty and contingency of their own being after having just received a cancer or HIV diagnosis (Irving 2009, 2010, 2011). In such cases the person remains a social being and is required to act accordingly in a public space but the stream of their thoughts and their existential concerns are not necessarily obvious or made public to the wider world. Together this vast di- versity and multiplicity of thought, ranging from the trivial to the tragic, combines to produce the collective underlying thoughtscape of contemporary urban life (see here: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/2013/04/29/mrs-dalloway- in-new-york-documenting-how-people-talk-to-themselves-in-their-heads/)

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WS Small Book.1.indd 54 11/19/14 3:59 PM For Wandering Scholars three primary aims were identified: 1) To try to uncover something of the content and character of the lives of the people we pass everyday on Hong Kong’s streets, parks and busses. In urban contexts people are mostly presented to each other as strangers: what would it mean if we knew what was going on in people’s lives? 2) To present a piece of work based on original research carried out in the previous 24 hours. For often by the time a piece of research has been carried out, written up, submitted, revised and published, it might be three, five or more years before it is shared and disseminated. In the meantime social life and the world continues to change and the research becomes a distant memory. 3) To create a para-anthropological fieldwork site for interaction and expression through the juxtaposition of ethnography and performance. In other words, rather than the usual mode of extended, in depth ethnographic fieldwork, the preposition para, signifies,: ‘As a preposition, gr. para had the sense ‘by the side of, beside’ whence ‘alongside of, by, past, beyond’ etc. In composition it had the same senses with such cognate adverbial ones as ‘to one side, aside, amiss, faulty, irregular, disordered, improper,

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WS Small Book.1.indd 56 11/19/14 3:59 PM wrong’; also expressing subsidiary relation, alteration, perversion, simulation, etc.’ , (Oxford English Dictionary) To remain within the spirit of the 24 hour time constraint my collaborators, Kalia Wong, Yun Yang, Ximin Zhou and myself began with some blank pieces of paper and started to think about how to gain access to the underlying thoughtscape that exists beneath the surfaces of Hong Kong’s daily social life. We proceeded by identifying, and dividing consciousness, into four kinds of cog- nitive activity that are likely to be taking place on the streets: Worrying Storytelling Thinking Remembering There are clear social rules and boundaries that govern social interaction in public spaces, but these same rules also allow for certain interventions whereby it is possible to engage with a random stranger. One is by way of a question, for example asking someone for the time or for directions. Another is by means of an invitation

WS Small Book.1.indd 57 11/19/14 3:59 PM and we decided to use the normative schema of the invitation as an ethnographic tactic. Consequently we devised four signs, written in Chinese on one side and English on the other, that invited strangers to approach us and engage in a dialogue. Buying Worries: Tell me your worry and receive $5 Swapping Stories: Swap your story with mine in 5 minutes Thought Collection: What are you thinking in this moment Childhood Memory: Share a childhood memory with me Having anticipated that maybe very few people would stop, perhaps even no one, we were surprised at how soon and how regularly people would interrupt their lives to share their worries or stories or memories or thoughts, and were also surprised by the level of engagement. Even before we started, while still seated and deciding on the structure of the day, this man and his grandchild caught sight of one of the signs on the table, approached us and engaged in a conversation for 20 minutes. Some others soon approached. “All the world is not, of course, a stage but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify” Goffman declared (1959: 72). The people were thinking about

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WS Small Book.1.indd 59 11/19/14 3:59 PM the future of the economy, were worried that they might lose their job, were having health issues, and so the drama of the streets unfolds, giving weight to Heidegger’s argument that people’s interactions with, and understandings of, the world are never free floating insofar as they are always disclosed through a specific state of mind (1962). References Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Chicago: Anchor Books Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. Oxford Blackwell Irving, A. 2007 Ethnography, Art and Death” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute n.s.13(1), pages 185-208 ------2009 The Color of Pain. In Public Culture. 21: 2. 293-319. ------2010. Dangerous substances and visible evidence: Tears, blood, alcohol, pills. in Visual Studies 25(1): 24–35. ------2011. Strange Distance: Towards an Anthropology of Interior Dialogue. in Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Vol 25: 1

WS Small Book.1.indd 60 11/19/14 3:59 PM Swing Lam: Flâneur 11

11, or to be more accurate ‘Number 11’(11號), is a Cantonese slang phrase that means walking on two feet. Flâneur 11 is a combination of French and Cantonese slang for walking. In spring 2012, I quit my depressing job, and started an even more depressed life as an unemployed person. The idea of walking from one side of Hong Kong to other was provoked by this discouraging period of job searching. One day, after spending several days at home sending out cover letters without receiving any response, I felt like I was about to explode. I decided to leave my room and my comfort zone. I randomly picked a place on the other side of the city and decided to walk there on foot. The first walk was started from my own bed, located in my flat in Tseung Kwan O (the south eastern point of Hong Kong), to Yuen Long (the north western point of Hong Kong). It took 13 hours to complete the walk, with no planning, no maps, no schedule, but a destination, an emptied mind, a little digital camera, a piece of

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WS Small Book.1.indd 62 11/19/14 3:59 PM paper and a pen. I recorded my walk through photos and handwritten notes. The name of this random documentation is called Flâneur 11. Everybody has had the experience of clear-minded thinking during a shower, as there should be no disturbances at that moment. In the shower there are no TV shows, no computers or conversations. An empty wall and a shower gives you 20 minutes of time to tidy up your mind. However, when you are drenched in your deep thought, you will suddenly “jump out ” from your mind to get shampoo, soap, or observe your own body. Walking with no planning also does the same thing as showering: making 6-12 hours of emptied mind, with some urban observation thrown in. Eventually, I did 13 more walks in 9 cities in Asia, Europe and Americas, with different scenes and weather, but with the same mind-emptied experience. To criticize or define the reason for walking, people tried to observe my acts during walking, along with my education and career background. Travel, Urban observation, Environmental acts, acts of boredom, Lebensphilosophie are the key- words you may find in the critiques of Flâneur 11. In “Wandering scholar”, I have had a chance to try walking in a group. My route was set from Caldecott Road（郝德傑道), the boundary of Shatin (the southpoint of the district, sub-urban area) to CUHK (the north point of the district). Walking through the countryside and city,

WS Small Book.1.indd 63 11/19/14 3:59 PM the walking group talked a bit, discussed road design and urbanscape, and in Shatin town centre we walked through the network of footbridges, through the building’s platforms and shopping malls. We kept walking from the south to the north for 40 minutes without stepping on the ground, however, most of the time we kept silent. No matter how talkative the participants are, they are not able to talk for the entire 5 hours. We also can’t see every single thing during the walk no matter how obser- vant we are. In the end, the group of four walked at the same speed and kept almost silent while finishing the walk. What we have during the silence was an emptied mind, a pure self. This is the project Flâneur 11.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 65 11/19/14 3:59 PM TC Li and Vera Chiu: Graffiti as a Trail of Discovery

There is a saying amongst graffiti artists: “The city is a playground”. For the graffiti explorers, to discover the clues left by graffiti artists is an adven- ture. Graffiti brings us to places: alleyways, hills, sewage treatment plants...structures and borders that you never before thought of exploring. To discover graffiti is not a trip from A to B; there are obstacles, wrong turns and risk taking. There is no guarantee of a successful graffiti discovery, but there is always the fruitful outcome of knowing your city a little bit better. Our project is about the making of a documentary about Hong Kong graffiti. We see discussions of graffiti now and then, either in the news or as serious academic discussions, there is also analysis about graffiti in books and you can see pictures and photos that show the beauty of the art, but only in the video form can we show the art in action and how it interacts with our city.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 68 11/19/14 3:59 PM We don’t have to search our memories to be reminded of the white walls and tall lamp post that had been covered with calligraphy. There are still a lot of tagging, bombing and small pieces around town. We just have to open our eyes and look around. Graffiti is part of our urban landscape. TC Li: they are everywhere We made a short POV video to guide the audience through our journey of discov- ering Graffiti in Hong Kong. The music of the video comes from the independent local hip-hop band LMF; the song’s title is Crazy Children. It talks about a group of children who want to get away from the adults’ control and establish their own way of thinking. At the beginning of the video you see some mosaic paintings near Mong Kok East station, a sort of propaganda commissioned by the government. Contrary to this, in the lanes not far away from the station, graffiti artists find their playground and the pictures they have made are very different: vivid, colorful, artistic, and all of them express strong individual views.

WS Small Book.1.indd 69 11/19/14 3:59 PM It’s easy to find the graffiti if you are careful since the graffiti makers try their best to show the works everywhere: windows, trash cans, and the handrails on bridges, etc. Although graffiti is illegal and an underground activity, artists can also find their true audience in this way. Vera Chiu: a project from the past When I think of the word ‘to wander’, it revives my memories as a youngster. As a ‘Hong Konger’, I would like to accurately describe my wandering days as the ‘hea- ing’ days. ‘Hea’ in Cantonese defines a person who is relaxing and is not aiming at achieving anything at a particular moment. Dating back to my teenage years, it was trendy for magazines to spend issue after issue detailing Hip Hop culture: the ideals, the music, the art, and the clothes. I, as a teenager, would follow the tunes, the crafts, the fashion and everything offered by the media, because it was ‘so cool’. I started to take graffiti walks, trying to find the graffiti that so-and-so magazine listed. I went to areas that I hadn’t yet explored, starting from Sheung Wan to Kwun Tong, then back to more known areas, like Tsim Sha Tsui and Mong Kok. Each trip brought a little something in return: discovery of a graffiti piece, locating a new eatery or spotting an old corner shop. By ‘hea-ing around’ different districts, my city was unveiled to be right in front of me.

WS Small Book.1.indd 70 11/19/14 3:59 PM For me, graffiti is not simply a love for ‘pretty sketches’ on walls. It represents an ideal, and speaks for the city. I can always debate the good and bad aspects that graffiti brings to society or interview graffiti artists for their opinions, but that could never be better than seeing the art at its location or chasing their backs while the artists ‘write’. Personal interest plays a strong role in making this project happen. I wish to re- veal the different masks of this urban art and see how it settles into this ever-changing city that I belong to. Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4_WSWqiF2I&feature=youtu. be

WS Small Book.1.indd 71 11/19/14 3:59 PM James A. Steintrager: Ghosts of the Archive

A scholar is charged with copying a powerful sutra and to do so he seeks tran- quility in the countryside. Unfamiliar with the area and its denizens, he soon falls into a trap: his seductive neighbor is a member of a clan of ghosts seeking release from the underworld by gaining access to the very sutra in question. Such is the skeletal plot of King Hu’s 1979 film Legend of the Mountain, based like many of the director’s works on a strange tale by Pu Songling. The film poses in compressed, artistic form many of the questions that interest me about being a scholar today: the learned yet mechanical act of the scribe, which we might take as a parody of archival, historical research; the scholar’s desire, revealed in displaced, voluptuous, and spectral temptation; and the release of desire—or opening up to desire—caused by the scribe’s travel to the countryside, which we might construe as a wandering away from circumscribed institutional space and, perhaps more importantly, away from disciplinary hierarchies and oversight.

WS Small Book.1.indd 72 11/19/14 3:59 PM In this regard, the work and life of Michel Foucault provides us with some un- expected parallels. I am certainly not unaware of the ironies of asserting this, since Foucault’s project in many respects was to erase the notion of “work” as a coherent corpus tied to a singular, unifying author or “life” in favor of anonymous discourses and institutions. But if Foucault was the ultimate expression of scholarship as bury- ing oneself in the archive—of slipping into the anonymity of discourse as he pro- posed to do in his famous address on the author as historically circumscribed and institutionally constructed function—we can also read into his proposition a particularly scholarly desire for self-abnegation, so masterfully analyzed by Nietzsche as the cryptic expression of the priestly (read: academic) will-to-power. At the same time, Foucault asserted as a desideratum—as a doubtless utopian ideal that came into tragic conflict with reality—a beyond of desire that would be the pure, de-institutionalized, anti-subjective play of “bodies and pleasures.” As his biographer James Miller has intimated, it hardly seems that Foucault simply discovered the concept of “bodies and pleasures” as a sort of antidote to scholarly denial in the archives of sexuality but rather that it stemmed from his own wanderings away from the French educational system, from his experiences and experiments in San Francisco, Death Valley, and the like.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 74 11/19/14 3:59 PM If the comparisons that I have sketched out seem tenuous, impressionistic, and even far-fetched, this is in part my point. What I am after is a certain looseness, allusiveness, and playfulness that opens up ways of thinking. This includes thinking in and through archives. The institutions of learning and teaching, which I take to provide necessary frameworks for scholarship, can and usually do have the effect of rendering the scholar’s desire—the motivating, vital force most naively manifest in the graduate-school applicant, as long as she or he has not already been “pre-profes- sionalized”—invisible and scholarship itself, if not mechanical, obeisant to various norms, restrictions, and expectations. The professional academic may producesolid research, which is a term of praise frequently tantamount to an assertion that tedi- um is a mark of scholarly authenticity. But, like Hu’s scholar, such an academic is innocent, blind, and unable to think his own desire. At this point, the scholar in me is tempted to cite earlier and other instances of these hypotheses, rendering them into inert historical facts rather than living observations, safely historicized and distanced from the asserter. Some examples come to mind: Lacan’s cryptic, satirical lectures on scholarly mastery; Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of archival work and systematic analysis in favor of nomadol- ogies, lines of flight, and deterritorializations; Nieztsche’s praise of wandering and

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WS Small Book.1.indd 77 11/19/14 3:59 PM of Italy as an antidote to his self-diagnosed Teutonic stolidity; Socrates’ walk with Phaedrus to edge of the city, where the space of the political yields to the erotic; or Zhuangzi’s turtle, preferring to drag its tale in the mud rather than being exquisitely ornamented (a figure for the refusal of what we in the university would call “admin- istrative service”). When I travel to work in the Hong Kong Film Archive or to Paris to consult documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale, I evidently do so with scholarly purpose and, indeed, a certain degree of institutionally constructed seriousness. At the same time, there is a real scholarly benefit to stepping outside of and getting far away from my so-called home institution. I would extend this benefit to those moments irreducible to purposeful travel and that are much more in the nature of wandering: urban perambulations and countryside rambles. I am aware too that there is history and construction when we speak of flâneries or reveries. These very modes of wandering and of thus of injecting contingency into thought are inseparable from discourses of Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment, from literary canons of modernity and of nostalgia for the pre-modern. And yet, knowing this, I continue to think that my scholarship benefits at least as much from an aimless walk down a city street or a humid hike in some country park in the New Territories—in encounters

WS Small Book.1.indd 78 11/19/14 3:59 PM with passersby, with fallen flowers on the street, with insects and amphibians, with the specters of my own scholarly desire—than in any archival mapping. Not that archives and institutions should be put in absolute opposition to unstructured, unsys- tematic rambling; rather, we might further examine and pursue their permeability.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 80 11/19/14 3:59 PM Dredge Byung’chu Käng: Rimming the Pacific

Problem: Gay Asian male (GAM) bodies are devalued in Western gay cultures, especially in Anglophone areas such as the USA. Method: Cross the Pacific Ocean in a westward direction with your GAM body. Discussion: The Asian male body is considered abject in US American culture and other Euro-American contexts. Asian male bodies contradict the ideal image of the hypermasculine, homonormative gay white man. The mainstream gay idol- ization of the muscular gay white man renders the gay Asian male body abject: too small, too slim, too smooth (hairless): too feminine. In this sense, Asian men are feminized and relegated to the “bottom” position (Nguyễn 2014). GAM becomes a primary object of desire for those who want boyish, submissive, or exotic partners. However, in middle class gay Thai contexts, these same bodies become idealized. A new eroticization of the “white Asian” (light skinned Asians from a developed country) has taken hold. Gay Asian American men are often surprised by their positive appraisal in this context. GAM can take advantage of the situation, and thus some-

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WS Small Book.1.indd 82 11/19/14 3:59 PM times become “jetrosexual,” experiencing their newly reclaimed sexual selves by having sexual and romantic relations across the Pacific. GAMs frequently revisit or return-migrate to Asia to inhabit themselves as desirable sexual subjects. Through travel back to Asia, and in particular, locales such as Bangkok, GAM bodies become positively re-evaluated and lived. Travel can be a tactic of racialized sexuality. Here, I highlight the contrasts through two locales. Locus 1: In the US, it’s not polite to be openly racist. In practices such as hiring, discrim- ination is illegal, though still too common. However, one arena where the rules of color-blindness are suspended are online gay cruising sites and apps. Since these venues are designed for developing romantic relationships or having a quickie, posters are able to specify exactly what kind of partners they are looking for. Espe- cially on apps like grindr, where space is highly limited, profile text often becomes a list of exclusionary criteria, the most common ones based on race (e.g. “no blacks, no Asians”), gender presentation, (e.g. “no femmes,” “straight acting only”), phy- sique (e.g. “no fats,” “no skinny,” “not into short guys”), and age. These statements are often softened with a short concluding statement like “Sorry, just a preference.”

WS Small Book.1.indd 83 11/19/14 3:59 PM This discourse conceals the intimate linkages between personal desires and wider social processes. Locus 2: Poser Club in the Ortorkor area is closing and we are not ready to go home. So, about 3 AM, I enter Taek, an illegal after-hours gay club in the Rachada area of Bangkok that stays open until 9 AM. The waiter sees me and my gay daughters, half my age, and brings us a bottle labeled “yipun” (Japanese, as my Japanese daughter cannot speak Thai, it’s the simplest way for them to label a reserved bottle for him). We start to settle into the table and I recognize that the Thai guy at the table next to ours was also at Poser Club earlier in the night. He smiles widely, his braces gleam- ing in the flashing lights, illuminated like a mini disco ball. I beckon him to come over by extending my hand out palm down and repeatedly dipping my fingers. I greet him in Thai: “sawatdikhrap.” His name is Aon. When he asks where I am from, I say that I am Korean. He pulls out a small sheet of paper from his pant pocket and unfolds it. He stares down at the wrinkled page, about the size of a large index card, and emits a hesitant “anyeonghaseo” (a Korean greeting). I return the greeting and ask to see what the piece of paper is. It is a language guide

WS Small Book.1.indd 84 11/19/14 3:59 PM that lists a series of greetings and questions in Korean, written in Thai phonetics. Aon says that he carries this sheet around in case he runs into a Korean person. I ask if he has similar sheets for any other languages and he replies negatively. I ask him what his “spek” (type) is. Aon replies that he likes Asian men. Conclusion: Perhaps GAMs should invest in air travel industries. Citation: Nguyn Tan Hoang (2014) A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.

WS Small Book.1.indd 85 11/19/14 3:59 PM Fan Po Po: Wandering on the margin

One month after Wandering Scholars, it still lingers. There are three reasons for this: Firstly, I participated in a lot of academic conferences, but I never before openly discussed my so called ‘private life’ . Some participants came to me to express how unbelievable it had been for them to experience my openness. A speaker invited me to go to bed with him, but I unfortunately did not go because I was not feeling well that night. People added me as friend on Facebook, saying that they were inspired by me and had started to be interested in BDSM. I tried to help them connect with such groups in Hong Kong. Secondly, it is a great thing to combine an academic conference, art exhibition and a walking festival. The burning of papers at the end is so playful that I am still enjoying contemplating its meanings. Thirdly, the activity is held in Hong Kong. I have been to Hong Kong more than 10 times. Every time is rewarding, but boarder crossing as a 3-tier city ‘hukou’ hold-

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WS Small Book.1.indd 87 11/19/14 3:59 PM er and a Chinese passport owner is also grueling. As I belong to such a small city in China, I normally have to fly to Shenzhen and deal with the immigration there through a travel agency before I can line up for hours to enter Hong Kong. Or I have to fly to Hong Kong directly after handling the ‘group tour’ procedure in Beijing. This time I chose the latter for convenience, but I ended up waiting for 2 hours in Beijing Airport and paid as much as 200 RMB in service charges. I started to realize that I might be the only speaker at this conference who needs a visa to come to Hong Kong. As a Chinese passport holder, one needs to be superb in order to fulfill his dream to wander. I took part in an activity in Sweden this summer. I started to have a sinking feeling when the organizer asked me if I needed a visa for Sweden. First he wrote the invitation letter incorrectly, and then it didn’t reach me. There were no replies because of the long vacation. I could never make the organizer understand why the requirements for documents are so strict and the procedures so complicated. In fact, I also don’t understand why I am treated this way. I have Chinese friends on Facebook and weibo facing similar challenges. Whenever we encounter a similar situation, we make fun of each other, saying that we are with the 1.3 billion oppressed people in China. Later, I came to know a staff member working in the

WS Small Book.1.indd 88 11/19/14 3:59 PM Swedish Consulate. Because of her simple recommendation letter, the visa was done in 2 days instead of 14, and the seemingly ineligible information is ignored. I had mixed feelings after becoming part of a privileged class overnight. Maybe you don’t believe that, but I really felt guilty. I am now wandering in Miami and just ended a series of exhibitions and screenings. It is a city full of Cuban immigrants. There was a passionate Cuban audience member named Oscar who took me to dinners and to bars after the screening. He said he loved my film Mama Rainbow. The mother-(gay)child relationship made him envious as his mother could never accept him. I told Oscar that he should visit her in Cuba. We were sitting in a ‘Little Havana’ Restaurant and he stopped eating. ‘I haven’t returned to Cuba for 11 years’, he said, and started to tell his stories. He was exiled for political reasons, studied and worked in Ukraine, Italy and Spain, and later sneaked into the US in order to eventually gain a US passport due to the unbearable hardship he had experienced. He might be accused by the Cuban government if he returned right now, and it is even harder for his mom to get a US visa. The bigger problem though is his mom does not want to see him again. I say all this because some people are destined not to understand the difficulties of others regarding nationality, class and race. The same applies to gender, sexual

WS Small Book.1.indd 89 11/19/14 3:59 PM orientation and sexual identity. I cannot convince the strong/majority to understand the weak/minority, but can only align myself with them in silence. If I have the chance to wander, I have to wander on the margins; if I have to roam, let me roam among the grassroots!

30/6/2014 in Miami

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WS Small Book.1.indd 91 11/19/14 3:59 PM Fan Po Po Interviewed by Katrien Jacobs

KJ: I think you really identify with Wandering Scholars, so can you say something about what it means to you? PP: I think that I really identify myself with ‘wandering’, but sometimes I don’t know how to identity with’ scholars’. I don’t think I am a scholar. But I am a filmmaker and activist… the key point is wandering, because this is a part of my life, part of something I do all the time.

KJ: You explained in your talk that if you wander that also changes your notions of sexual identity and pleasure. For example, you say that when you travel around the world, you always discover something new. Do you think your sexual identity is influenced by wandering? PP: I started to think that I have the identity of gay man maybe since three years old, when I was watching TV as I lay against my mother’s chest. She was holding me, 92

WS Small Book.1.indd 92 11/19/14 3:59 PM and I was very excited about one of the guys on the TV. Until the age of 24, I was still thinking that I was a gay man, because it was very hard for me to find another identity, but just because you have a man’s body and you have sex with men, the society will automatically give you a label of ‘gay man’. Then I thought very deeply about my own sexual orientation and also started to have a lot of friends. You can say that I was wandering on different levels. I put different labels on myself also. I think maybe one day I will cover my body with all these labels.

KJ:. I just want to know, Fan Po Po, why you are so different from other people? You are more open and you are more playful. So what makes you different? Who influenced you? Your mother, your father, your friends? PP: It has more to do with experience rather than with my generation or with the layers of relationships. One teacher who influenced me a lot is Cui Zi’en. He is very very queer. He is the first openly gay man on TV in China. He has a position at the Beijing Film Academy but he is not allowed to teach because of his activism. But there is a positive side because he doesn’t need to teach and he still gets a good salary and so he can make his own films. He has all the time to visit different countries for conferences, for film screenings. And I think that he is a very sexual person himself. 9393

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WS Small Book.1.indd 94 11/19/14 3:59 PM He talks about sex all the time. In the beginning I was also quite shocked, because he can relate everything to sex. We have a lot of conversations outside of school, we eat, we play volleyball, we attend events together. We talk about theory, we gossip, talk about sex, so I think I was greatly influenced by him.

KJ: Do you feel any other connections with other people like that, which make you into this open, playful person? PP: If I have to mention another person, it will be my boyfriend. He is a very open minded person himself. At the beginning of our relationship, he said, ‘our relationship will be open.’

KJ: How long have you been together? PP: Seven years. KJ: That it is very long for a young guy like you. Can say more about it? PP: He is a Buddhist. There is stricture against sex as a Buddhist, but he said he could not do that. But I think it is also a kind of practice because Buddhism does 9595

WS Small Book.1.indd 95 11/19/14 3:59 PM not insist on one thing, on one person. I think there is some relationship between open relationships and Buddhism. I think it’s also a kind of meditation not to be jealous. I have a lot of friends. They try to be open but they fail. The point is they try to have an open relationship but they are so jealous. Jealousy is really something I am against. I am doing a meditation so I won’t be jealous, not to be jealous of my boyfriend, not to be jealous if he fucks somebody else, not to be jealous if there are friends who are more successful than me, not to be jealous about people who get rich. It is a part of the meditation.

KJ: But it’s your own meditation. Is it Buddhist or just your own meditation? PP: I think it’s my own meditation inspired by Buddhism.

KJ: Do you do it every day? Or is it something more abstract? PP: I don’t really spend time doing this. You can do it almost every minute, because you always have something, you always think somebody may steal something from you, somebody may do better than you. While you have this moment, while you

WS Small Book.1.indd 96 11/19/14 3:59 PM have this idea, think about this mediation.

KJ: It’s interesting because I think that jealousy can also give you a lot of energy. It can provoke you to do something. For instance, you can decide to breakup, if you have so much jealousy, you can say ‘I am breaking up because I need to change my life.’ I think it’s very crucial to think about jealousy. PP: In Chinese there are two different words, one is ‘ji du 嫉妒’, one is ‘xian mu 羨慕’. In reference to what I just said, ‘ji du’ may be a source of motivation, but ‘xian mu’ may make you admire a person and learn from them. But I do not see ‘ji du’ so positively. (editor’s note: both words literally translate as: envy)

KJ: So there are two types of jealousy. PP: Yes. If you can admire somebody, you will have energy to do better. But in my experience, when I am jealous about somebody… I have a lot of energy but it makes the whole thing suck.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 97 11/19/14 3:59 PM KJ: But people get so angry, not only because of sex but for something like success. So many people are angry because they cannot get a better deal from life, you know. So I think I admire your point of view, but it’s very difficult. PP: I think in Chinese society right now, jealousy is really happening too much. If I go to Hong Kong, I have to be careful, especially on this small island, everybody knows each other, the relationships, is so complicated.

KJ: You have also the ability to empathize with women and lesbians, to feel what they are feeling. That’s why I want to ask you about when you stated that you have a “vagina in your heart.” That’s big kind of statement for you to make. Can you explain what that means? PP: It’s a kind of a statement for the making of the documentary, the Vagina Mono- logues. I am close with the lesbian community leading to my identification with lesbians. I said I have a vagina because I can feel the oppression faced by women in society. The identity of having a vagina comes with prejudice and I can feel strongly about such an identity. When I say I have a vagina in my heart, I can feel what women can feel when they are discriminated against. I think this year I have made a lot 98

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WS Small Book.1.indd 99 11/19/14 3:59 PM of friends with bisexual women. At the beginning of this year, one of them did not have a place to stay, so she stayed with me for about a month. We cooked together, we went to screenings together. I was very close to her.

KJ: I know that also within the queer community, gay men and lesbians, they can sometimes be very unfriendly to each other. PP: Yes I know! What I do is to try to connect with two communities. Sometimes I take gay friends to lesbian friends, or I take lesbian friends and gay men to go swimming together. And one of my gay friends said it turns out that he loves so many lesbians. One person even said, it’s the first lesbian friend I have had in my life. I have a very interesting story to share because in Beijing, there are actually five gay clubs. But for lesbians clubs, there is only one, which only opens on Saturday. When it was Friday, I was with some lesbian friends. We said, ‘Where should we go?’ And we wanted to have a lesbian party and we said, ‘Let’s occupy the gay party.’ Several lesbian friends and I went to a very big club in Beijing and when we arrived, we found thousands of gay men but only five lesbians. Then we said, how can we -oc cupy this place? I had an idea, ‘If you girls take off your shirt, everyone in this place 100

WS Small Book.1.indd 100 11/19/14 3:59 PM will all look at you.’ We will occupy the place that way! Then they really took their shirts off, they really did that! They were dancing on the dance floor, but you know lots of the boys also took off their shirts and the light was very dark, so some of them did not realize who was who until some guys dancing with the lesbians said, ‘Wow, they have tits!’ The lesbian friend just told the guy who was dancing with her, ‘Can you just treat them as muscle?’ But the security eventually came, because it is illegal to do that. The security forced them to put on their shirts.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 102 11/19/14 3:59 PM Tobaron Waxman: The 71st FACE

I May 12, 3rd day in HK, Yarzeit of Tim Stuttgen (1974 – 2013) After dinner and drinks with Andrew and Katrien, they took me to a reservoir, and I went on alone for a long walk. I walked to the temple and peered inside. I spoke on the phone with a new friend who is mourning her sister. I watched local guys play soccer in front of the temple. There is a track alongside the reservoir with many joggers and dog walkers with beautiful, majestic dogs. There is some species of creature who honks, audible but not visible, living in the brush nearby. I listened and sang intervals with them. I walked the footbridge across the reservoir, singing a song I’m still trying to learn, from one end of the bridge to other. It’s a queer song by a Jewish composer, about aspiring toward an as yet unimaged body, a trans anthem which I translated into Yiddish. Candy Zogt (“Candy Says”) Lou Reed, 1968 (Yiddish translation Saul Noam Zaritt and Tobaron Waxman)

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WS Small Book.1.indd 104 11/19/14 4:00 PM (translation excerpt) Candy zogt khob shoyn faynt mine kerper Un als vos is in naytik in der veldt Candy zogt khvil vissen in gantzen vos redn zikh durkh Di andere Ikh vel kukn di bloyfegel flien Iber min aksl Ikh vel kukn vie zey geyn der by Efsher af der elter Un vos vil ikh zen Tzkenarois fun zikh aleyn

Candy Says Candy says I’ve come to hate my body and all that it requires in this world Candy says I’d like to know completely What others so discreetly talk about I’m gonna watch the blue birds fly over my shoulder I’m gonna watch them pass me by Maybe when I’m older What do you think I’d see If I could walk away from me

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WS Small Book.1.indd 105 11/19/14 4:00 PM Every step tonight I was somewhere between making a new relationship to the present, while still looking somehow for Tim. I managed to fit the song into the length of the bridge, but I still don’t have it yet. I kept exploring the reservoir, hopped the fence and went down to the water. I tried another song for Tim, a song by a be- loved Yiddish poet of great renown, about having no shame for things she achieved or didn’t, and living in the moment, with affection for friends, because tomorrow might be too late. Ver Ken es Tseyln (“Who can Count”) Beyle Schaechter-Gottesmann, circa 1985 Who can count the rosy goals The rainbows I never reached? Who can reckon my mistakes, The suns that faded away? Who can face the truth? One must be stronger than steel! Or a villain, or a wild man, Who thrusts a knife into himself. But I swear from this day forth To take courage from what I’ve done.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 106 11/19/14 4:00 PM The smallest victory greatly to mark With banner and parade. So don’t worry, dearest, don’t fret. Just accept a caress. And smile through the leaden clouds. For it could soon be too late.

(transliteration) Ver ken es tseyln di rozeve tsiln, Di regen-boygns kh’hob nisht dergreykht! Ver ken barekhenen vi shtark khob farrekhnt zikh, Di zunen vos zenen farbleykht! Nu ver ken es kuken dem emes in punim Shtarker fun ayzn mus men zayn Oder a gazln tsi epes a retseyekh, Vos er shtekht aleyn a messer zikh arayn. Nor ikh tu a neder: fun haynt on un vayter Zikh shtarken vos kh’hob ufgeton. Dem klenstn netsokhn vel ikh groys fartseykhnen Mit a parad un a fon.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 107 11/19/14 4:00 PM To es zikh nisht, lyube, un yade zikh nisht, tsertse, Loz dir nor gebn a glet; Un shmeykhl afir fun di blayene khmares Vayl se ken bald nokh vern tsu shpet.

Eventually I climbed out from the reservoir and stopped by the restaurant again, an attempt to replenish via my favourite thing: raw coconut juice. The restaurant owner invited me to talk with him, saying he doesn’t like to smoke alone. He lived in Toronto for some time. We talked about the different lives he’s led and his various marriages. We chatted for a long time, We talked about changes to Hong Kong ethos, about the “good old days”, before the locals had choices. We talked about the Hong Kong journalist who was assassinated for speaking critically of the government. He compared it to the scholars who are buried alive beneath the Great Wall of China, saying they are “repeating the same things that happened 1000 years ago. We try to forget but do not learn from our mistakes.” I told him that tonight was the anniversary of the death of my friend and asked if it was ok to pour one out. He explained to me that Chinese also have their own way to pour one out, in a circle. And then he told me an old friend of his had just passed away today, a friend he had known since childhood, “a homeboy,” he said. I told him about Tim, and all 108

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WS Small Book.1.indd 110 11/19/14 4:00 PM the wonderful things he had achieved, and how I can even trace my being in HK tonight to his influence and things Tim set in motion. I raised my glass and toasted: “to the homeboys”. II May 30, 21st day in HK, post performance The 71st FACE The challenge for me became an exercise in letting go of control of meaning, becoming intelligible, and allowing new meanings to arise from that. I focussed on the materiality of the piece, and on the piece as a 4 dimensional artwork, in which the sound objects are sculptural elements, just as body and hair and architecture are. I tried to allow the physical elements of the extreme heat, the acoustic qualities of the site, and general social reality of a fear of proximity to become physical material, and embrace factors that I cannot control. My research involves developing repertoire, researching locations and experi- menting with various juxtapositions of my identity with architectural sites. I use the building as an amplification system, vocals echoing and reflecting the resonances of architectural features and historical events. “Singing with architecture” has become a critical methodology for my performance practice. Shortly before arriving

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WS Small Book.1.indd 111 11/19/14 4:00 PM in Hong Kong, I was diagnosed with two destroyed discs in my lower back. This meant that the choreography I was intending to incorporate in the Cattle Depot was no longer possible. I had to find and invent a new performance based on conditions including pain, intelligibility, extreme heat, and no rehearsal. I hired a sound engineer to work with me in the space to find the sonic sweet spots of the old abbatoir. After the performance I showered and cleaned up, not knowing that the performance was being discussed in my absence. I’m grateful for the thoughtful time and energy that so many people brought to the table, and I regret not being able to reciprocate at the time. I was across the street, where I invited JackLamHo the sound engineer, my friend Teresa, (who is in mourning, who danced with me), and her partner Timothy, who is a sound artist, to join me while I cleaned up. I offered everyone a glass of prosecco and some sashimi, a toast to Teresa’s late sister, whose ashes had been spread at sea the day before, to our friendship, and to the ongoing support of each other’s work. When I returned to the Cattle Depot, senior Hong Kong artists Frog King Kwok and Sanmu Chan (who shouted at the photographers during my performance, requesting they not disturb the氣-場 (qi-chang), energetic field between the spectators and the performer) presented me with a tremendous

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WS Small Book.1.indd 112 11/19/14 4:00 PM gift of a beautiful roast duck, which I in turn requested be carved and shared with the conference attendees. Voice is a flickering, dynamic and unstable field. It betrays everything that’s tru- ly going on with you, turns you inside out. The 71st Face is a Queer approach to themes of physical transformation and travel, in liturgical chant and Yiddish “women’s songs” from Central Asia. A cappella is the voice at its most exposed, with no- where to rest or hide - thus full of conceptual and symbolic potential with a special political resonance for individuals marginalized by state or societal borders. This project developed my theory of transgender vocal production as a critical, embod- ied response to ideas of physical and national boundaries. Voice, as it relates to time and presence, is a performance technology which can stretch out a moment, while exposing the inside of your body, one is clothed and naked simultaneously. This parallels a Jewish way of talking about time as a container, thinking about the con- tinuous present and an experience of time that is not linear but is simultaneously forward-advancing. - to resist moments of before and after. Face conditions how we encounter each other. Facial features constitute an exteriority that we recognize (Levinas, rapport de face-a-face); in encountering a face with its facial features we see at once an infinity of possible combinations and a

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WS Small Book.1.indd 113 11/19/14 4:00 PM uniqueness. This is what moves us to sacred solidarity with the Ultimate Other, echoing ‘panim el panim’, from Moses’ intimate encounter with the god, the result of which is the inscription of the Tablets of the Law (Ex. 33:11). The commodification of the face by corporations and government surveillance is the justification given for why, since 9-11, it’s illegal to wear a mask in most public places in New York, Montreal, and many other public places. For years following 9-11, I was regularly mistaken as Muslim, and The 71st FACE is also inspired by these resonances. When I remove the signifier of the beard, I shift from category of ‘ambiguously raced Sem- ite’ to ‘ambiguously gendered white person.’ The spectators are witnessing the hair fall off my body as they watch themselves shift in what meaning they ascribe my appearance. In this encounter, we are indexing the experiences of the frames through which we apprehend (Butler, Frames of War) the figure of the Semite. I was trained in Rabbinics, Chassidic philosophy, and cantorial singing. I use motifs, and languages of Judaism, because they are mine to use. Though I’m not religious now, it still informs the reverence with which I encounter the world. I’m very rigorous in maintaining my Jewish literacy, that’s part of the integrity of the work. Migration, borders, racialization, Palestine, and the figure of the Semite are central to my critical thinking.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 114 11/19/14 4:00 PM The repertoire for The 71st FACE is all material from the Jewish Diaspora – some from Central Asia/Eastern Europe, some Yiddish, some secular and some liturgical chant – but all of it engages ideas of physical transformation predicating destiny in some way, via motifs of unrequited love, death and transformation. I’m singing in my parents’ first language: Yiddish. My interpretation of the songs engages Queer utopia in relation to Jewish metatextual concepts of destiny, longing and the messianic. Via these gestures and enactments of new worlds (José Muñoz, Cruising Uto- pia) in this project I’ve been thinking about what the messianic is, via the Derridean concept of the future to come, as unpredictable (le futur as opposed to l’avenir). My engagement with Yiddish is both contemporary and reverent – it’s about choosing to Return -- to Diaspora. Basically, Zionism bought and buys into the anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish men caricatured as weak, crouched over, paralyzed, et cetera, and Zionism would renew the Jew, or bring him back to Maccabean glory, which had been all but extinguished in centuries of exile. Along with many others of my generation, I consider that to be self-hating and a distortion of Jewish history. It’s also explicitly a male expression of nation. The hero/victim stuff, especially post-Holocaust, is usually portrayed as a heroic, athletic Zionist man versus a pale, intellectual, Diaspora Jew less-than-man. This paradigm has to be heteronormative,

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WS Small Book.1.indd 115 11/19/14 4:00 PM and also points out an erasure of the girls: the girl is replaced by the effeminacy of the ‘diaspora-boy,’ and for the ‘Israel –man,’ the feminine is The Land (Ha’aretz) itself. Fundamental to my obsession at this time is Diaspora and Place, as a dynamic tension, reflective of each other.One of the names of god in Judaism actually is ‘The Place’. In The 71st FACE, I want the artists I’m collaborating with and the viewers to experience their citizenship of ‘The Place’ as agents of possibility. Songs and translations/précis : Ver Ken Es Tseyln (“Who Can Count?”) - Performed after the shaving and make up Candy zogt( Candy Says) - Performed slow dancing with an audience member Yam Lid (“Sea Song”) (from Yehuda Ha Levi, c. 1190) translation précis: “I have forgotten all my loved ones, I have lost my old house, I have thrown myself into the sea: Take me…. and you, dearest East wind, drive my ship to the other shore. My heart, with eagle’s wings finds its way to itself. Carry a letter back to my loved ones to tell them of my good fortune.”

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WS Small Book.1.indd 116 11/19/14 4:00 PM - balanced on the edge of the trough which partitions the abattoir MIZMOR L’DOVID – (Psalm. 23) (Jewish Theological Seminary translation) - roll the length of the abattoir, then performed with abdomen engaged, neck extension and head dangling backwards into the trough

References: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, University of Washington Press, 1982. Lubavitcher Rebbe Rabbi, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, “Letter on Time”, 1947. Richard Rand, Futures: Of Jacques Derrida, Stanford University Press, 2001. Eli Valley, http://www.evcomics.com/2008/05/29/israel-man-and-diaspra-boy/. A.B.Yehoshua, http://www.haaretz.com/news/a-b-yehoshua-versus-diaspra- jews-1.187415 . Michael Gluzman, “Modernism and Exile: A View from the Margins”, The Poli-

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WS Small Book.1.indd 117 11/19/14 4:00 PM tics of Canonicity, Stanford University Press, 2003. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination, University of California Press, 2000. George Steiner, “Our Homeland, The Text”, Salmagundi 66 (1985): 4-25 Caryn Aviv and David Shneer (eds), New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora, New York University Press, 2005.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 119 11/19/14 4:00 PM Shaka McGlotten: Black Data, Obama’s Face and Black Opacities

Ima read.1 Obama was raised by white people, not drag queens, but he knows how to give face. But in the moments before a recent interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose, Obama’s sig- nature smile cracked, revealing instead an ugly mask. This mask held a tense set of ironies. The United States’ first black president defended the unprecedented expan- sion of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs to include the collection of the metadata of millions of Americans’ and global citizens’ telephone and email correspondence. He accused Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor turned whistleblower, of spying and called for his arrest, continuing a pattern of aggressively prosecuting leakers of governmental overreach.2 The racial melodrama

1 Zebra Katz, “Ima Read,” (Mad Decent, 2012), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a7toR0pm1g. Black queer rapper Zebra Katz explicitly links his song to the art of insult developed in the queer black and Latino Harlem ball scene, and popularized in Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning. 2 More accurately, the Obama administration has aggressively pursued unauthorized leakers. The

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WS Small Book.1.indd 120 11/19/14 4:00 PM is striking: a black man authorizes the capture and arrest of a young white man, who by revealing the spying program directly challenged the hegemony of U.S. imperial- ism, a project historically and presently tied to the control, domination, torture, and murder of brown and black people around the world.3 Obama’s grin is a failed mask, or the slippery gap that hosts the mask before its radiant, populist actualization: “Charlie, let me tell you . . . I want to assure all Americans . . .” In another era, and maybe still in this one, Obama’s grin might embody the racist fantasy that all black people are animated by an animalistic desire to please or reassure white people. But here the mask is a more familiar code, a politician’s lie—“don’t worry, everything’s fine, carry on.” Although brief, Obama’s administration itself, like others before it, leaks information to the media in order to influence public opinion. As has been widely reported, Obama’s administration has leveled charges against seven people, including recently convicted Army private Chelsea Manning, for leaking information to news media; all previous administrations totaled three such prosecutions. As a candidate, Obama had promised to protect leakers and whistleblowers. 3 A long list of historical examples come to mind, from the legal techniques employed to turn black people into chattel, to Jim Crow, COINTELPRO, the Wars on Drugs and Poverty, as well as extrajudi- cial murder. Terroristic “anti-terrorism” programs have a long history of field-testing within the United States and across the globe. The new drone wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen are only the most recent expressions of these policies. 121

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WS Small Book.1.indd 122 11/19/14 4:00 PM expression arrested my attention, an attention shared with other queers and people of color, one that is always attuned, through calibrated and diffused looks, specu- lations, and modes of attention, to “the evidence of felt intuition,”4 to the subtle or not-so-subtle gestures that indicate shared desire, or the threat of violence. My cyn- ical intuition—Ima read—collides with nostalgia for a scene of optimism. I cannot help but juxtapose this rictus grin with Shephard Fairey’s famous image of Obama looking into the distance. To this juxtaposition we can add a meme that emerged in the wake of the NSA scandal—Yes We Scan. For Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Levinas, faces condition our ethical encounters with one another. Agamben writes, “only where I find a face do I encounter an ex- triority and does an outside happen to me.”5 In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, 4 Phillip Brian Harper, “The Evidence of Felt Intuition: Minority Experience, Everyday Life, and Critical Speculative Knowledge,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, eds., E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson (Durham: Duke University Press), 106-123. 5 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 100; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). For related discussions, see Arun Saldanha, Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Mel Y. Chen, “Masked States and the ‘Screen’ Between Security and Disability,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, nos. 1-2 (2012): 76-96. 123

WS Small Book.1.indd 123 11/19/14 4:00 PM however, the face is something more ambivalent; it is operationalized as a regulating function whose origins lay in racism. “Faciality” determines what faces can be recognized or tolerated.6 The dozens, and black queer reading practices in particular, are uncanny inversions of faciality. Rather than serve to hierarchically order bodies into viscous clumps, dominating “by comparison to a model or a norm,”7 reading Obama’s face in this way might yield a comic finality—“you’re so ugly, even Hello Kitty says goodbye” or “your grin is such a lie that . . .” But Obama’s grimacing mask is not merely a sign to be decoded, a truth to be unveiled. A read is a punctum that is also always an invitation, a salvo in a call and response. Edward Snowden unmasked himself in part because he believed that by stepping out from the veil of anonymity, by revealing his identity and giving face, he might effect some degree of control vero the representation of his decision to confirm the unprecedented scale of the NSA’s programs,8 and to encourage others to come for- 6 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 8 Others, including news organizations like the Guardian and WikiLeaks, had already gleaned many insights and published information about these programs. As an insider, Snowden was uniquely positioned to confirm them. See Julian Assange, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, (New York: OR Books, 2012). 124

WS Small Book.1.indd 124 11/19/14 4:00 PM ward. In addition, and unsurprisingly, he believed that his anonymity might endan- ger him, making him vulnerable to the kidnapping, torture, and murder he knew the U.S. government was capable of. By coming forward/out, Snowden curiously mimicked some black and queer practices, which mix a performative hypervisibil- ity (an awareness of one’s difference and visibility) with invisibility or opacity (an indifference or even hostility to the norm or to being read properly). James Baldwin, riffing on Ralph Ellison, expressed it somewhat differently in a 1961 interview in which he linked black in/visibility to whiteness: “What white people see when they look at you is not visible. What they do see when they do look at you is what they have invested you with. What they have invested you with is all the agony, and pain, and the danger, and the passion, and the torment—you know, sin, death, and hell— of which everyone in this country is terrified.”9 Snowden had gone stealth for years, passing as a mild-mannered analyst, keeping his civil libertarian streak on the down low. Snowden appeared, carried it,10 and then vanished. As of this writing he has just been granted temporary asylum in 9 Fred L. Stanley and Louis H. Pratt, eds., Conversations with James Baldwin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 6. 10 To carry is to work it. See the explanation of Leo Gugu, artist, stylist, and performer, “Speaking With Distinction,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX3BrPe4dxc. 125

WS Small Book.1.indd 125 11/19/14 4:00 PM Russia, while the United States continues to bully other nations into denying him egress. Yet Snowden’s face (like that of recently convicted Army whistleblower Chel- sea Manning) now appears on the placards of thousands of protestors around the world. Their faces become screens and masks. Their visages stand in for or project a generalizable face—my face, your face, all of our faces. And increasingly, as at a recent protest in Germany, the faces of these figures are worn as masks, barring access to an individual or specific face, while calling into existence a shared or collective one.11 These faces/masks makes a dual demand: transparency from the government, opacity for the rest of us.

11 Mel Y. Chen, “Masked States and the ‘Screen’ Between Security and Disability.” p. 77. Chen’s discussion also underscores the relationship between masks and screens and “securitized, nondisabled whiteness,” a compelling reading I nonetheless do not pursue here.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 126 11/19/14 4:00 PM Peter Chan: The Burning Ritual

The Chinese traditional ritual paper offerings are objects made of paper, many of them handmade and one of a kind, which are offered to the beings residing beyond the world of the living: the gods, the ghosts and the ancestors. Nearly all these paper items are burned in order to reach their destination in the other world. This ritual has been central to Chinese culture for millennia, and as a public, visual display of spiritual belief it is still evident today in Hong Kong and China. (Janet Lee Scott, For Gods, ghosts and ancestors : the Chinese tradition of paper offerings 2007) In this performance, we will walk around the boundary of CUHK and perform our ritual there, so why do we burn or sacrifice academic paper?

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WS Small Book.1.indd 127 11/19/14 4:00 PM To pay tribute to the pioneers of CUHK or let them read your paper To spread your notions to the Chinese spirit world To take your knowledge out of the material world To embrace a new idea by destroying the old one To burn the polished, lifeless formatted academic paper and its dissemination To hopefully cease your hatred of the paper

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WS Small Book.1.indd 132 11/19/14 4:00 PM Katrien Jacobs: Afterword

And as we are preparing this publication at the end of October 2014, the political and intellectual cosmos of Hong Kong has burst open. An “umbrella movement” of pro-democracy mobs have halted cars and public transportation, occupied the streets and camped out for several weeks. This movement has impacted all sectors of education and including the Wandering Scholars team; everybody has soaked up the potential of a new civic society. The events also have led to violence between groups, emotional exhaustion and a crisis in our thoughts. There is a sense that all is happening elsewhere—those roaring streets where art genres spring up like weeds, nerdy, hospitable, walkable weeds—one can stroll on a highway connect- ing Admiralty to Wanchai, or one can lounge on the streets of a shopping district Causeway Bay, or one can help reclaim the ruffian districts of Mongkok. Scholastic youngsters “yellow ribbons” argue with seniors “blue ribbons” and events also turn ugly after protestors are attacked by hired gangs. Even days after such attacks people will travel to Mong Kok to just stand on occupied streets for small talk and quarrels.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 133 11/19/14 4:00 PM More than a hundred pro-umbrella academics have organized Mobile Democracy lectures for the street crowds, but as one of my colleagues stated: “Those people are not going to listen to your lecture.” People have also communicated excessively by scribbling messages and gluing them on streets, tiles, poles, barricades, tents, sign posts, surfaces and abandoned vehicles—the occupied zones are almost literally covered with tiny thoughts and papers. The Umbrella movement has been the best month of my life in Hong Kong as it has crystallized a scholarly crisis and introspection that is the topic of this project. I wish to thank all people who helped us realize Wandering Scholars as a prelude to the ongoing movement’s wild ideas and decomposing papers. All participants who attended the “Wandering Scholars” conference: Giorgio Biancorosso, Peter Chan, Lik Kwan Cheung, Peichi Chung, Clifton Evers, Jack Halberstam, Ian Fong, Andrew Irving, Yang Jing, Lucetta Kam, Shaka McGlotten, Dredge Kang, Fan Popo, T.C. Li, Swing Lam, Kal Ng, Nguyen Tan Hoang, James Steintrager, Denise Tang, Tong Sau Lin, Tobaron Waxman, Wong Wai Ching, Ka- Ming Wu, Rochelle Yang, Wai Yi Lai Monti, Yang Yeung and Yang Jing. Their work can be checked at www.wanderingscholar.com.hk

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WS Small Book.1.indd 134 11/19/14 4:00 PM My colleagues in the department of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese Uni- versity of Hong Kong. Our dedicated student helpers: Clover, Easy, Kalia, Yun, Leo, Rachel and Sharon. Lina Chan for coordinating the event, for warm enthusiasm and great care for details. The photographers and filmmakers for documenting the events: Liu Quan, Peter Chan, Swing, Yang Yeung, Kal Ng, Think Young, Tiecheng Li, Andrew Guthrie, and Rochelle Yang. Yang Jing and Kal Ng for designing The Wandering Scholar. Andrew Guthrie for proof reading the texts in this book. Thanks to the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Videotage for providing in-kind support and for helping promote the event. Thanks to Hong Kong Arts Development Council for providing support by means of a project grant.

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WS Small Book.1.indd 135 11/19/14 4:00 PM Essays contributed by:

Katrien Jacobs Ian Fong Yang Yeung Jack Halberstam Kal Ng Clifton Evers Andrew Irving Swing Lam James Steintrager Dredge Kang Fan Popo Tobaron Waxman Shaka McGlotten Peter Chan

WS Small Book.1.indd 136 11/19/14 4:00 PM Essays contributed by:

Katrien Jacobs Ian Fong Yang Yeung Jack Halberstam Kal Ng Clifton Evers Andrew Irving Swing Lam James Steintrager Dredge Kang Fan Popo Tobaron Waxman Shaka McGlotten Peter Chan

WS Small Book.1.indd 137 11/19/14 4:00 PM Hong Kong Arts Development Council fully supports freedom of artistic expression. The views and opinions expressed in this project do not represent the stand of the Council

WS Small Book.1.indd 138 11/19/14 4:00 PM The Wandering Scholar MA in Visual Culture Studies Department of Cultural and Religious Studies The Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong ©MA in Visual Culture Studies CUHK 2014 ISBN 978-988-13868-0-9 please visit our website http://www.wanderingscholars.com.hk

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