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Abjection, Love Bonds, and the Queering of Race by Seulghee Lee

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Abjection, Love Bonds, and the Queering of Race by Seulghee Lee “Other Lovings”: Abjection, Love Bonds, and the Queering of Race By Seulghee Lee A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Abdul JanMohamed, Chair Professor Darieck Scott Professor Bryan Wagner Fall 2014 Abstract “Other Lovings”: Abjection, Love Bonds, and the Queering of Race by Seulghee Lee Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Abdul JanMohamed, Chair This dissertation discusses the intersection of racial abjection and love bonds in late 20th-century and 21st-century African-American and Asian-American literature and culture. The manuscript deploys affect studies and queer theory to discuss works by Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, David Henry Hwang, Adrian Tomine, and Gayl Jones, in addition to the cultural phenomena of “Linsanity” and “afro-pessimism.” Whereas most critical readings of failed love in minority literature have emphasized the tragic interpersonal consequences of internalized racism, this dissertation argues that these writers narrate love’s apparent failure in order to explore the positive content emergent in the felt rupture of breakups. Through readings of dissolved love relationships in these authors’ works, I inquire into love’s operation as an affect that always desires more and better sociality. The appearance of love’s failure is precisely what illuminates the ineluctably positive content of love, and I situate this content in the context of recent theoretical discussions of love as narcissistic, not-yet-here, oppressive, or antisocial. The project ultimately argues that blackness, yellowness, and queerness share a privileged access to and familiarity with love’s affective positivity. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction Love’s paradoxes, love’s positive content in/as racial abjection, love’s queer affect 1 Chapter 1 “Other lovings”: Zami’s generous narcissism 21 Chapter 2 “Exotic fagdom”: the Baraka of surplus love 37 Chapter 3 Non-differentiation and the lie of yellow melancholia 51 Chapter 4 Subjecthood’s Shortcomings: the love of the yellow object 75 Chapter 5 “Touch my life and theirs”: grace, utopia, and somatic wisdom in Corregidora 97 Epilogue The optimism in and of love; or, love in the time of “cruel optimism” 122 Bibliography 135 i Acknowledgements 1. Generative dislocations This dissertation was written in various beautiful locales in addition to my love- bound home bases of Oakland and Raleigh, including Berlin, Boston, Burlington (Vermont), Lake Tahoe, Monte Rio (California), New York, Rancho Mirage (California), Victoria (British Columbia), and Washington, D.C., as well as at Dartmouth College, Emory University, Humboldt University, New York University, and Princeton University. For funding my travels, I am grateful to the University of California Graduate Division, the Berkeley Chancellor’s Colloquium Professorship in English, the Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives program, and the American Studies department at Humboldt University. 2. Conditions of possibility (conditions of dispossessive love) Any account of my intellectual endeavors begins with David Lionel Smith, whose presence at Williams College was my condition of possibility for not only advanced study but a sustaining sense of vocational purpose. David remains my most important and impacting teacher and mentor. My other guiding lights at Williams, whose support propelled me to Berkeley, include Robin J. Hayes, Molly Magavern, Anita Sokolsky, and Christian Thorne. At Berkeley, such relentless support continued through the inimitable presence of Abdul JanMohamed, this project’s director, whose mentorship commenced from my first day at Berkeley to exceed, over these years, the bureaucratic bounds of academic work to include true intellectual camaraderie. Abdul has provided steadfast guidance, strength, and critique, but above all he has invaluably modeled a commitment to vocation in thought. Then there are the two other central teachers at Berkeley who round out my sterling dissertation committee. Darieck Scott and Bryan Wagner each provided encouragement, direction, and criticism through every stage of this project, as well as through my entire graduate career. While the work of each of my committee members has had immeasurable impact on my own, it is Darieck’s thought that is the immediate condition of possibility for this project. The guidance and support of Oliver Arnold, Mitch Breitwieser, Nadia Ellis, Cecil Giscombe, Steven Goldsmith, Lyn Hejinian, Georgina Kleege, and Josephine Moreno was no less significant through these years. So was the loving-kindness of Sandra M. Gilbert. Fred Moten’s immense generosity entered my intellectual life at exactly the right time, as it is known to do, and his voice was crucial toward the completion of this project, especially through a winter marked by the loss of two of our common heroes, José Esteban Muñoz (d. 2013) and Amiri Baraka (d. 2014), each of whom is discussed at length herein in conjunction with Fred’s work. Anne-Lise François was a special presence through my final years at Berkeley, and I am especially grateful for her including me in her powerful “Critical Divestment” seminar at ACLA 2014 and for her clutch and steady hand at commencement two months later. ii Colleagues at Berkeley and elsewhere, whose voices have helped guide this project, are friends I hope to keep for the long haul: Ted Alexander, Aimee Bahng, Rizvana Braxton, Jeehyun Choi, Allison Curseen, Chris Fan, James Ford, Erin Greer, Alvin Henry, Annie McClanahan, Michael McGee, Ismail Muhammad, Paul Nadal, Emily Perez, Keerthi Potluri, Khalil Sullivan, Erin Suzuki, and Benjamin Wiggins. I hope my encouragements have been half as significant to their trajectories as theirs have been to mine. Unforgotten are deep exchanges with Carmen Mitchell (d. 2010), whose incisive and gentle words walking home together from Darieck’s class revealed a loving wisdom now touching the ancestors. I have received overwhelming love from abiding friends. As I was growing up in North Carolina, it was Don Clarke-Pearson (d. 2003) who showed me to yoke individuated focus to the desire for rigorous sociality. For years of loving support and memories since then, I am infinitely grateful for Umar Ahmad, Zenas Bae, Daniel Benjamin, Robert Bland, Katharina Engler-Coldren, Liz Gleason, Monica Huerta, Lauren Kerwin McNamara, Tim McNamara, Goeun Lee, Manya Lempert, Brian Kehgeeng Ma, Peter Nilson, Jeanne Smith, Claire Marie Stancek, Jeremy Sweeney, Rasheed Tazudeen, Jan Voung, Malcolm White, and Irene Yoon. The good vibes of my neighbors in Oakland have been a steady source of surplus over the final years of this project: Aziza Singh Tamimi, Jonathan Tamimi, Austin Watroba, Kerry Stronach Watroba, and the newly arrived Grace Watroba! I owe extra-special thanks for the steadfast support provided by two brilliant friends from my graduate cohort, Rosa Martínez and Sunny Xiang, especially through our final semesters. I have had the incredible fortune over these years to find two lifetime teammates—my deepest interlocutors and closest friends—in Adam Ahmed and Spencer Engler-Coldren. This project simply could not have been completed without the love and fun of their thought and company. Adam’s luminous reverie has animated my thought in unexpected ways, and his mode of poetic being has been a bedrock of support over countless hours spent together wandering Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, not to mention unforgettable trips to Joshua Tree and New York. I am grateful for Adam’s ears, which listen truly, as we keep finding dances waiting for dancers. Occasional visits from Adam’s Boston crew, Paul Price and Patrick Chin, have been pure surplus. Spencer’s exuberant genius has marked a turning point in my life, and there is no turning back. Nor is there looking away: Spencer’s dissertation, Having Fun with Facts, must be considered the companion piece to this project. Perhaps nothing was as intellectually generative over these years as thinking through our terms—love and fun— side by side, sharing plenty of both along the way. In Spencer’s giving spirit I have found myself amidst a brimming sociality that provides both in overabundance. For their inclusion, energy, and care, I am grateful to Erika Buder, Maclay Coldren, Natalie Ferrall, Nick Ferrall, Chelsea Field, Ally Fleming, Kevin Hart, Rhonda Hart, Brad Hill, Meredith Hill, Joe Huebner, Jonathan Kerwin, Zach Leonardo, and Andy Rankin. I am also deeply grateful to Brooke and Rob Coldren for years of generous hospitality and fun conversation. As I was finding teammates, all along I have been receiving the grace of my original love-saturated team. There are lifelong family friends in North Carolina: the Huh, Kang, Kim, Kwon, and Minn families. Then there is the entire Choi clan, whose felt love is a given despite great physical distances, beginning from my grandfather, Jong Jin iii Choi, a continuing source of strength in Seoul, 88 years young. Traveling together in 2008, my grandfather vowed that his final travels to the United States would be my graduation from Berkeley, the promise of which has been a guiding force in finishing this project in a (somewhat) timely manner. This strength continues via the support of my aunts in the United States, Yumi Choi and Chanmi Kim, and then through my cousins: Melody Kim, Hyun-Ji Choi, Peter Won-Bin Choi, HyunSik Choi, Yun-Ji Mary Choi, and DongSik Choi. My aunt from the Lee side, Z. S. Song, has been, from the very beginning, only supportive. Of all my cousins, Kevin Kim merits special mention as a second big brother, always there. The penultimate word of gratitude is for my actual big brother, Nooree Lee, whose words of faith and confidence always bestow both to me in the most timely ways. The final word is for my parents, Namsoo Lee (d. 1995) and Namie Choi. Together they have given me opportunities I hope never to take for granted.
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