FINAL DISS FRONT and INTRO (1 of 6)

Conceiving difference through alternative reading strategies: Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Post-Civil Rights US minority texts A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Susan Shin Hee Park IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Cesare Casarino JULY 2009 © Susan Shin Hee Park, 2009 i Acknowledgements Many thanks to the wonderful members of my committee, Robin Brown, Josephine Lee, and John Mowitt, for their greatly appreciated assistance and support. A special thanks to my advisor Cesare Casarino, to whom I will always be intellectually indebted, for sharing his valuable insights, efforts and time. Also, tremendous thanks to Jeff Buss, Moon Ja Park, John Wood, Grant Kien and Aaron Sterling for sustaining me with emotional nourishment throughout my student tenure. Finally, thanks to the UMN Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and to the Graduate School for providing the resources for this dissertation. ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Moon Ja Park, and to my daughter, Bo Bae Valerie Park Buss. iii Abstract This dissertation aims at engineering a dialogue between Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jacques Derrida’s conceptions of difference and expressions of difference in Post- Civil Rights US minority texts. I assemble these divergent manifestations of difference under the united cause of resisting a “master” discourse of difference which harnesses difference as the rationale of Modern racism. I begin by introducing the problematic of an established narrative that maintains difference in negative relation to “sameness.” This narrative subordinates difference vis-à-vis an imagined white universal subjectivity, evacuating the singular, a-relational difference inherent to the particular. The four chapters of my dissertation argue for a reclaiming of positive, non-dialectical difference by proposing alternative reading strategies. I synthesize Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of “becoming-minority,” “deterritorialization” and “collective enunciation of minor literature,” Deleuze’s writing on the “suspension of judgment,” and a Deleuzian understanding of Spinoza’s Ethics with Derrida’s conceptions of “becoming friendship,” “becoming literary,” “différance,” “interval of undecidability,” and “lovence.” The texts used to bear out these articulations of difference include artworks by Kara Walker and Faith Ringgold, the legal storytelling of Derrick Bell, the album liner notes of John Coltrane and the fiction of Maxine Hong Kingston. This dialogue on difference, between philosophy and cultural texts, produces ways of imagining subjectivities that resist the conception of subjectivity associated with such figures as Aristotle, Descartes and Hegel. These figures are among the “masters” whose discourse of difference I challenge through the uprising of Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida in conjunction with differential writing produced by US minorities. iv Table of Contents List of figures ........................................................................................v Introduction The master’s discourse of difference.........................................1 Chapter 1 “Difference as such” and difference as other: the artwork of Kara Walker and Faith Ringgold:............................................13 Chapter 2 Deferral of decision and suspension of judgment in the legal storytelling of Derrick Bell .....................................................66 Chapter 3 A virtuosic encounter between Spinoza’s Amor Dei intellectualis and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme ............107 Chapter 4 Seizures of flight: becoming and unbecoming in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book .........164 Conclusion.........................................................................................221 Bibliography......................................................................................225 v List of Figures Figure Page 1-1 An Abbreviated Emancipation (detail), Kara Walker, 2002, Cut paper and adhesive on wall, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor .....................................................................................18 1-2 An Abbreviated Emancipation (detail), Kara Walker, 2002, Cut paper and adhesive on wall, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor .....................................................................................24 1-3 An Abbreviated Emancipation (detail), Kara Walker, 2002, Cut paper and adhesive on wall, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor .....................................................................................27 1-4 Olympia, Edouard Manet, 1863, Oil on Canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris ......................................................................................................33 1-5 Odalisque with a slave, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1840, Oil on canvas mounted on panel, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge .........................................................................34 1-6 Venus with a Mirror, Titian, 1555, Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC .........................................................................38 1-7 Picasso’s studio, Faith Ringgold, 1991, Acrylic on canvas, painted and tie-dyed fabric, ACA Galleries, New York ...................................43 vi 1-8 Las Meninas, Diego Velásquez, 1656, Oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid .......................................................................................49 1-9 Las Meninas (after Velazquez), Pablo Picasso, 1957, Oil on canvas, Museu Picasso, Barcelona .......................................................50 1-10 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Pablo Picasso, 1907, Oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York ........................................51 1-11 A Family Portrait, Faith Ringgold, 1997, Acrylic on canvas; painted and pieced border, private collection........................................52 2-1 We Came to America, Faith Ringgold, 1997, Acrylic on canvas, painted and tie-dyed fabric, Collection of Ms. Linda Lee Alter, Philadelphia.................................................................................66 2-2 We Came to America, Faith Ringgold, 1998, Print, ACA Galleries, New York ..............................................................................................66 3-1 Holy Ghost Horn, artist and date unknown, print, Saint John Coltrane Church, San Francisco............................................................110 3-2 Image reproduced from Spinoza’s Ethics, Trans. G.H.R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print. ....................................116 1 Introduction The master’s discourse of difference The words of radical black lesbian writer Audre Lorde strike a chord with this dissertation in her essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”: Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic…Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being…(Lorde, 1984, 111-112). The now popular adage “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” questions the efficacy of making recourse to theories of resistance that are themselves imbricated within dominant structures of knowledge and are, therefore, produced within the circuits of power that those theories attempt to challenge.i Lorde calls for an uncompromising stance that spurs radical feminists of color to “stand alone against” white capitalist patriarchy and the “house” that it built. Simultaneously, she enjoins her reader to collaborate with those others excluded from the master’s house so that “those of us who have been forced in the crucibles of difference… learn to make 2 common cause.” Lorde recognizes that difference is polygenetic and multiply situated. Moreover, differential consciousness reorganizes elements of difference beyond structures of dominance that function only through stringent categorizations of race, sex, gender, class, age, etc. To Lorde, racial hegemony is the massive, white plantation house characterized through its monolithic homogeneity. Its relentless whiteness welcomes heterogeneity only insofar as it can be exploited for sparking creativity and providing labor. Difference, in contrast, is a site of affirmation through the production of cultural work and through the radical politicization of identity. Difference erodes the master’s house; or at the very least, it attempts to build new dwellings without resorting to the master’s blueprint. Lorde’s insights into the invisible structure of racism embedded in US consciousness is at first glance at odds with a conception of racial difference which has been historically employed for both oppressive and for liberatory ends, and which still persists today. The myth that racial difference can be situated through a dialectic, personified if you will by the trope of master and servant, conceptually shapes the practice of racism in the US. Slavery, disenfranchisement, quotas against

Load more