Rob S E A N Wilson
University of California, Santa Cruz, Literature, Faculty Member
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Poetics & Poetry, Cultural Theory, Globalisms and liberalisms, Hemispheric American Studies, Aesthetics and Politics, Diaspora Studies, and 49 moreLiterature, Beat Generation, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Site-Specific Art, Media Studies, World Literatures, Cultural Studies, Continental Philosophy, Philosophy, Creative Writing, Pedagogy, Culture, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Sense of Place, Taiwan Studies, Space and Place, Critical Theory, Literary Theory, Maritime Human Factors, Arctic and Antarctic politics, science policy, geopolitics of the polar regions, international relations, Peter Sloterdijk, Bob Dylan, Film Studies, Globalization, World Literature, Asia Pacific & Oceania, Poetry & Poetics, Globalization & Localization, Ecology, Literary translation, Translation Studies, Orientalism, Postcolonial Studies, Religion, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pierre Hadot, Donna Haraway, Climate Change, Norman O Brown, Cultural Landscapes, Thomas Pynchon, Gilles Deleuze, Ecopoetics, Migration Theory, Anthropocene studies, Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, Place and Identity, and Mobility/Mobilities edit
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Rob Sean Wilson is a Western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where h... moreRob Sean Wilson is a Western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in English in 1976 and was the founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He has taught in the English Department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (which proved formative to his own development as scholar and poet of Asia/Pacific becoming) and at Korea University in Seoul as a Fulbright Professor and was twice a National Science Council visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. In 2001, he became a professor of transnational/ postcolonial literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In the summer of 2009, he team-taught a summer seminar (with Chadwick Allen) at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan on Pacific Cultural Production, counter-conversion, and the ecological framework of "Oceania." Advisory editor for boundary 2 and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journals among others, his earlier works include Waking In Seoul; American Sublime; Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production; Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary; Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and the New Pacific; and Reimagining the American Pacific: From 'South Pacific' to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. His study Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics appeared with Harvard University Press in 2009 and was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Publication. A collection of cultural criticism from Asia/Pacific (co-edited with Christopher Connery) The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization appeared with New Pacific Press/ North Atlantic Books in 2007; and Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists was published by New Pacific Press in 2010 & reprinted with Kindle Books in 2021. He more recently has a book-length poetry book forthcoming in a "Transpacific and Archepelagic Poetry & Poetics" series When the Nikita Moon Rose (Kaohsiung, Taiwan: National Sun Yat-sen Press, 2021) in English with Chinese translations by Tee Kim Tong, Melody Yunzi Lee, Chih-min Wang; as well as a collection of cultural and literary studies co-edited with Kim So-Young of Korea and Serena Chou of Taiwan called Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene (London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In terms of international academic service, he has been appointed to a two-year term to the Advisory Board for the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan; and to a two-year term on the Asia/Oceania Regional Faculty Advisory Group to generate "Global Engagements" now that UCSC has become a new member of the Asia Pacific Research Universities consortium comprised of leading universities from 19 economies of the Pacific Rim known worldwide for their academic and research excellence. He is also coediting the following two special issues of international journals: Rob Wilson, Chih-Ming Wang, and Roxann Prazniak, ed. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, “Arif Dirlik: The Radicalism of Possibility,”( London: Taylor & Francis,2021); and Rob Wilson, Christopher Leigh Connery, and Isaac Blacksin, ed. boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture, “Norman O. Brown: Into the Future," (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2022).
Selected Exhibitions
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674033436 edit
A reading of Bob Dylan's gnostic love-lyric, "Born in Time"
Research Interests:
“Worlding” as a critical practice in its crucial effect would enact openings of space, time, and consciousness to other values and multiple modes of being. Spatially, a worlded criticism seeks to embrace differing and often-still... more
“Worlding” as a critical practice in its crucial effect would enact openings of space, time, and consciousness to other values and multiple modes of being. Spatially, a worlded criticism seeks to embrace differing and often-still emergent connections to and articulations with region, place, area, and trans-regional forms, as I will further elaborate and illustrate. Temporally, worlding aims to link the present with past and future alternatives and emergences that are full of creative possibilities for transformation and rebuilding if not rebirth of self, community, and planet.
Why was this needed? Because the world being delivered by “globalization” has been described as a de-worlding process and an unmaking the world: In a special issue of Symploke on "Theorizing Asia."
Why was this needed? Because the world being delivered by “globalization” has been described as a de-worlding process and an unmaking the world: In a special issue of Symploke on "Theorizing Asia."
Research Interests:
Abstract Drawing upon his career as a poet and scholar who had taught for 24 years in the English Department and creative writing program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and for another 20 years in the Literature Department at the... more
Abstract Drawing upon his career as a poet and scholar who had taught for 24 years in the English Department and creative writing program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and for another 20 years in the Literature Department at the University of California in Santa Cruz (as well as visiting positions in South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong), the author defines, elaborates, and defends the writerly virtue of “doggedness” as a survival tactic of local-global endurance and literary recalcitrance. The author’s own career as a published writer is posited as a synecdoche for what Houston Wood calls “doing poetry in theory, and theory in poetry” and border-crossing networking and building up a transpacific writing community across Oceania and the Pacific Rim. Another factor of poetic survival amid the ethnic tensions of “local literature” becomes the act of securing allies in the right places, with gifts for circulation, mutual support, lines of creative flight, world-building, and networking.
Research Interests:
By a transfigurative recoding of selfhood and quasi-biblical analogizing of historical events across space and time, Bob Dylan enacted in his poetic name change from Zimmerman to Dylan (as he would writing across the larger body of his... more
By a transfigurative recoding of selfhood and quasi-biblical analogizing of historical events across space and time, Bob Dylan enacted in his poetic name change from Zimmerman to Dylan (as he would writing across the larger body of his song-poetry) what Norman O. Brown had embraced, in Love's Body and Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis if not throughout his works early and late, as tactics of “figural interpretation, [that] discovered world-historical significance in any [everyday trivial] event—an event which remains trivial for those who do not have eyes to see.” Transfiguration for Brown was not merely a figural, intertextual, or rhetorical shift of tropes, as will be elaborated; it also implies more strongly a biomorphic metamorphosis of self and world, soul and matter, bios and logos, via the morphological and linguistic transformation of terms and forms. Such metaphoric twists and troping turns of metamorphosis aim to remake the world into fluid, multiple forms of becoming befitting what a flourishing Romantic imagination longs for (via transubstantiation) and what Brown defines (and Dylan performs as) feats of transfigurative metamorphosis: “Metamorphosis, or transubstantiation.” “Transubstantiate my form, says Daphne [as muse to Apollo, archetypal Greco-Roman poet].” In this essay, Brown will play Daphne as provoking and inspiring in figures like Apollo what he terms the “be leafing” (believing) patterns in a world-transforming visionary poet like Bob Dylan.
Research Interests:
American Literature, Cultural Studies, American Studies, World Literatures, Globalization, and 12 morePoetry, Poetics, Visionary Literature, Religious Conversion, Imagination, Bob Dylan, Figurative language, Worlding, Songs, Comparative Study of World Religions, Norman O Brown, and Nobel Prize in Literature
The place-shattering practices, resource extractions, slow violence, and migratory displacements taking place under the reign of global capitalism go on distending the spatial and temporal sites, scales, and material resources of what we... more
The place-shattering practices, resource extractions, slow violence, and migratory displacements taking place under the reign of global capitalism go on distending the spatial and temporal sites, scales, and material resources of what we would recognize as dwelling-in-the-world. This telos of globalizing marketized values ends up deforming the moral cultural ethos it takes for such diverse practices to emerge and survive on what Waichee Dimock has described as a “weak planet” of declining democracies, runaway pandemics, unsustainable ecological systems, unstable weather, extreme events, and species extinctions. And yet, as this collection, Geospatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, aims to elaborate and exemplify diversely chapter by chapter, we would activate tactics of resilient “worlding” and “reworlding” from coastal California across the transpacific of Oceania to affiliated sites of survivance in Seoul, Taipei, Manila, Kyoto, Honolulu, Sao Paulo, Calcutta, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Santa Cruz, and elsewhere. This push towards “worlding Asia and Oceania” needs to imply not so much another Euro-derived theory universally applied as a worlding of Asia and Oceania as it means to activate and elaborate the diverse and situated practices of worlding in Asia and Oceania. This collection assumes, argues for, and will attempt to diversely substantiate the difference between the worlding of Asia (of here meaning tactics done to) versus a worlding in Asia (in here meaning tactics diversely enacted by peoples and values in place, situated, and acting on the world). This, broadly phrased, is what Kim So-Young in South Korea, Rob Sean Wilson in Northern California, and Serena Chou in Taiwan and Los Angeles will elaborate on and have collated diversely in our coedited multi-sited collection of cultural, literary, and environmental works appearing with Palgrave Macmillan Press in its timely and far-ranging Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies Series edited by Robert T. Tally Jr. from Texas State University in San Marcos.
Coedited by Serena Chou in Taiwan, Soyoung Kim in South Korea, & Rob Sean Wilson in USA. Works included by 張錦忠 Andy Wang, R. Zamora Linmark, Karen-Tei Yamashita, Fritzie de Mata, 洪泠泠凌, Craig Santos Perez, Pin-chia Feng, Hye-young Kim, Isaac Blacksin, Pei-chen Liao, John Parham, Danielle Crawford, William Major, and Ranjan Ghosh...
Coedited by Serena Chou in Taiwan, Soyoung Kim in South Korea, & Rob Sean Wilson in USA. Works included by 張錦忠 Andy Wang, R. Zamora Linmark, Karen-Tei Yamashita, Fritzie de Mata, 洪泠泠凌, Craig Santos Perez, Pin-chia Feng, Hye-young Kim, Isaac Blacksin, Pei-chen Liao, John Parham, Danielle Crawford, William Major, and Ranjan Ghosh...
Research Interests:
As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginary needs to be symbolically confronted and undone at national as well as global levels. As Americans and... more
As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginary needs to be symbolically confronted and undone at national as well as global levels. As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōe lamented, "To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there." However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublime as a trauma of geopolitical domination and racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (raptured by these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installing Patriot missiles as signs of their global supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinated by self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a 'post-nuclear' era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility: at once urging the globe towards annihilation and yet also towards transactional and dialogical unity at the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, with its "sublime Patriot" missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afghanistan to Nevada and North Korea.
Research Interests:
American Literature, Cultural Studies, American Studies, World Literatures, Comparative Literature, and 12 moreAesthetics, Technology, Globalization, Film Studies, Cold War, Japanese Cinema, Poetics, Asia Pacific Region, Japanese Literature and Culture, The Sublime, Kenzaburo Oe, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Chapter on long-standing Native Hawaiian struggles for land and place in a US state legal system of contract law that disallows claims from symbolic sources like stories, poems, and myths as inferior "language" games. These are the... more
Chapter on long-standing Native Hawaiian struggles for land and place in a US state legal system of contract law that disallows claims from symbolic sources like stories, poems, and myths as inferior "language" games. These are the language forms claiming the connection of the Hawaiian chiefs to the ocean of shark gods and the native agricultural land of taro.
Research Interests:
Introduction by Roxann Prazniak and Rob Wilson to the themes, works, and authors in this special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal on the life and works of Arif Dirlik and his generative and transformative power across borders... more
Introduction by Roxann Prazniak and Rob Wilson to the themes, works, and authors in this special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal on the life and works of Arif Dirlik and his generative and transformative power across borders of Global China, Oceania, Taiwan, and the postcolonial worlds that go on emerging and surviving the capitalist world order.
Research Interests:
This essay offers a personal, quasi-lyrical portrait of Arif Dirlik as an organic world-crossing Marxist intellectual whose mentorship and leadership proved crucial to a cross-disciplinary array of scholars and writers, including the... more
This essay offers a personal, quasi-lyrical portrait of Arif Dirlik as an organic world-crossing Marxist intellectual whose mentorship and leadership proved crucial to a cross-disciplinary array of scholars and writers, including the writer. A Benjaminian mode of "constellation" is activated to portray some of the historical contexts, outlets, sites, and works Dirlik was long connected to and helped to provoke into realization across his career.
Research Interests:
Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, World Literatures, Marxism, Pacific Island Studies, and 11 moreInner Asian Studies, Poetics, East Asian Studies, Taiwan Studies, Walter Benjamin, Asia Pacific Region, China, China studies, Critical and Cultural Theory, English and American Studies, and Critical Poetics
As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginary needs to be symbolically confronted and undone at national as well as global levels. As Americans and... more
As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginary needs to be symbolically confronted and undone at national as well as global levels. As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōe lamented, "To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there." However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublime as a trauma of geopolitical domination and racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (raptured by these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installing Patriot missiles as signs of their global supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinated by self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a 'post-nuclear' era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility: at once urging the globe towards annihilation and yet also towards transactional and dialogical unity at the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, with its "sublime Patriot" missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afganistan to Nevada and North Korea.
Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, American Studies, Film Studies, Japanese Language And Culture, Cold War and Culture, and 13 moreCold War, Poetics, East Asian Studies, Aesthetics and Ethics, Contemporary American Literature, The Sublime, Art and Aesthetics of the Cold War, Akira Kurosawa, J.G. Ballard, Kenzaburo Oe, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Asia/Pacific, and Theory of Sublime
Essay in a special issue of world-literary journal Wieloglos on "conversion" (Fall, 2021). Rob Sean Wilson "Transfiguration as World-Making Practice: Being Always Converting as Theo-poetics from Norman O. Brown to Bob Dylan" "... more
Essay in a special issue of world-literary journal Wieloglos on "conversion" (Fall, 2021). Rob Sean Wilson "Transfiguration as World-Making Practice: Being Always Converting as Theo-poetics from Norman O. Brown to Bob Dylan" "
ABSTRACT: By a transfigurative recoding of selfhood and a quasi-Biblical analogizing of historical events intertextually into figures across space and time, Bob Dylan has shaped his initial conversion as a poetic name-change from Zimmerman-to-Dylan (as he would later write more broadly across the larger body of his poetry). This theo-poetic transformation of identity into a more poetic and spiritual being is what Norman O. Brown had theorized, in Love’s Body and Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis if not throughout his works early and late, as the world-transforming tactic of “figural interpretation, [that] discovered world-historical significance in any [everyday trivial] event—an event which remains trivial for those who do not have eyes to see.” Transfiguration for Brown (as for the metaphor-rich Dylan) was not just a figural, inter-textual, or rhetorical shift of tropes, it also implies all the more so a biomorphic metamorphosis of self and world, soul and matter, bios and logos. This shift of self and world occurs via the morphological transformation of terms and forms in the event of metanoia. Such metaphoric twists and turns of apocalyptic metamorphosis aim to remake the world into more fluid, multiple forms of becoming and uplifting as befits what a flourishing imagination longs for (via transubstantiation) and what Brown defines (and Dylan performs as) so many feats of transfigurative metamorphosis: what Brown terms “Metamorphosis, or transubstantiation.” “Transubstantiate my form, says Daphne [as the muse to poet Apollo, archetypal Greco-Roman figure] through the incarnational claim, “be leaf” (belief).” In this essay, Brown will play the muse Daphne provoking and inspiring poet-figures like Apollo to embrace what he terms the process of “be leafing” (believing) patterns. Belief would take place relentlessly in a world-transforming poet like Bob Dylan, in many ways the most important poet of his world era.
ABSTRACT: By a transfigurative recoding of selfhood and a quasi-Biblical analogizing of historical events intertextually into figures across space and time, Bob Dylan has shaped his initial conversion as a poetic name-change from Zimmerman-to-Dylan (as he would later write more broadly across the larger body of his poetry). This theo-poetic transformation of identity into a more poetic and spiritual being is what Norman O. Brown had theorized, in Love’s Body and Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis if not throughout his works early and late, as the world-transforming tactic of “figural interpretation, [that] discovered world-historical significance in any [everyday trivial] event—an event which remains trivial for those who do not have eyes to see.” Transfiguration for Brown (as for the metaphor-rich Dylan) was not just a figural, inter-textual, or rhetorical shift of tropes, it also implies all the more so a biomorphic metamorphosis of self and world, soul and matter, bios and logos. This shift of self and world occurs via the morphological transformation of terms and forms in the event of metanoia. Such metaphoric twists and turns of apocalyptic metamorphosis aim to remake the world into more fluid, multiple forms of becoming and uplifting as befits what a flourishing imagination longs for (via transubstantiation) and what Brown defines (and Dylan performs as) so many feats of transfigurative metamorphosis: what Brown terms “Metamorphosis, or transubstantiation.” “Transubstantiate my form, says Daphne [as the muse to poet Apollo, archetypal Greco-Roman figure] through the incarnational claim, “be leaf” (belief).” In this essay, Brown will play the muse Daphne provoking and inspiring poet-figures like Apollo to embrace what he terms the process of “be leafing” (believing) patterns. Belief would take place relentlessly in a world-transforming poet like Bob Dylan, in many ways the most important poet of his world era.
Research Interests:
Religion, Comparative Religion, Cultural Studies, Sociology of Religion, American Studies, and 15 moreComparative Literature, Music, American Politics, Globalization, Popular Culture, Poetry, Poetics, Popular Culture and Religious Studies, Modern American Literature, Bob Dylan, Figurative language, Transfiguration, Conversion, Worlding, and Norman O Brown
The course will focus not only on dominant frameworks constructing world oceans under the reign of modernization and global capitalism, but all the more so upon emergent forms of oceanic region-making and island/archipelagic belonging in... more
The course will focus not only on dominant frameworks constructing world oceans under the reign of modernization and global capitalism, but all the more so upon emergent forms of oceanic region-making and island/archipelagic belonging in the Pacific, Caribbean, and other world oceans. These latter formations are generating alternative refigurations of peoples, places, history, creativity, and planetary belonging. We will theorize the rise of “oceanic” as well as island-based and “archipelagic” ways of enframing space, time, lands, cultures, bodies that are different from territorial, nation-bounded, or continental mappings.
We will discuss what this islands/oceans/ worlding nexus means in relation to the metaphors and master-narratives of global capitalism. Throughout, we will push towards not only theorizing but also creating tactics, terms, and tropes of an environmental eco-poetics: as we enter and try to survive the endangered geo-planetary period called the Anthropocene. We now confront a time of dry lightning, warming and rising oceans, extreme weather, precarious economy, and a global pandemic called COVID-19 that pushes us beyond given forms or tactics and (for example) to teach and study via Zoom.
The Pacific Ocean stands at the outset of global modernity as a Euro-American construction as a region of ideological investment, romantic fantasy, ethnographic investigation, and geopolitical interest. The Pacific reflects desires and goals erupting between Western powers and Asian and Pacific sites n uneven modes of colonial and postcolonial mediation across the modern global-capitalist era. But we will also study archipelagic Caribbean poetics, and get an entangled worlding sense not only of the “American Pacific” but of the German Atlantic as it reaches north to displace England and the US as maritime hegemons and south into the Mediterranean in its aspirations to become global empire. Samoa remains its Pacific expansion and dream, entangled yet decolonizing as is Hawai’i as US settler state. Expressive constructions-- from poems and stories to theoretical and historical essays—will help us to construct, critique, and comprehend oceanic, archipelagic, and insular world regions from the Mediterranean and Atlantic Caribbean to the Pacific-becoming-Oceania as we push toward an “archipelagic” approach to islands-oceans as interlinked formations that is reshaping American studies. Our goal is to produce a more historicized, multiple, and critically informed grasp of oceanic modes of belonging to region, ecology, and planet: what has been called more “creative cartographic mappings” of spatial and temporal belonging to this planet.
We will discuss what this islands/oceans/ worlding nexus means in relation to the metaphors and master-narratives of global capitalism. Throughout, we will push towards not only theorizing but also creating tactics, terms, and tropes of an environmental eco-poetics: as we enter and try to survive the endangered geo-planetary period called the Anthropocene. We now confront a time of dry lightning, warming and rising oceans, extreme weather, precarious economy, and a global pandemic called COVID-19 that pushes us beyond given forms or tactics and (for example) to teach and study via Zoom.
The Pacific Ocean stands at the outset of global modernity as a Euro-American construction as a region of ideological investment, romantic fantasy, ethnographic investigation, and geopolitical interest. The Pacific reflects desires and goals erupting between Western powers and Asian and Pacific sites n uneven modes of colonial and postcolonial mediation across the modern global-capitalist era. But we will also study archipelagic Caribbean poetics, and get an entangled worlding sense not only of the “American Pacific” but of the German Atlantic as it reaches north to displace England and the US as maritime hegemons and south into the Mediterranean in its aspirations to become global empire. Samoa remains its Pacific expansion and dream, entangled yet decolonizing as is Hawai’i as US settler state. Expressive constructions-- from poems and stories to theoretical and historical essays—will help us to construct, critique, and comprehend oceanic, archipelagic, and insular world regions from the Mediterranean and Atlantic Caribbean to the Pacific-becoming-Oceania as we push toward an “archipelagic” approach to islands-oceans as interlinked formations that is reshaping American studies. Our goal is to produce a more historicized, multiple, and critically informed grasp of oceanic modes of belonging to region, ecology, and planet: what has been called more “creative cartographic mappings” of spatial and temporal belonging to this planet.
Research Interests:
Abstract: The Pacific Ocean as site of global-capitalist dynamism remains riddled with antagonisms of political, territorial, and commercial conflict any contemporary version of the “Pacific Rim” needs to conjure with and contest. In an... more
Abstract: The Pacific Ocean as site of global-capitalist dynamism remains riddled with antagonisms of political, territorial, and commercial conflict any contemporary version of the “Pacific Rim” needs to conjure with and contest. In an environmental sense all the more so, we can all but forget this Pacific Ocean while most citizens are dwelling in an urban life-world that depends for its material well-being on, from, and across this ocean. As in long-standing Romantic affects, this ocean becomes troped as alien presence of elemental sublimity, at once a threat and source of curative powers, as in deep-sea microbes that eat up the potent greenhouse gas, methane. This ocean of alien obliviousness can also flip into site of waste and remainder, from oil spills to radioactive contaminants, as the waters become filled with the heaviness of our military history and technological blunder. From the Bikini atoll atomic testing to the latest nuclear disaster in Fukushima Japan in 2011, humans of late-capitalist modernity threaten not just the water and air of locality but the Pacific as planetary bioregion. The tsunami reminded Pacific dwellers from Sendai in coastal Eastern Japan to Santa Cruz in Northern California that the Pacific Rim is not just a discourse, it is also an unstable, interconnected, and geologically interactive bioregion. Figurations of oceanic interconnection could thus move us towards a vision of “Becoming Oceania,” here projected in this essay as a site of transpacific, cross-border, and transnational solidarity. The forging of a transpacific ecopoetics (in Pacific-based writers like Epeli Hau’ofa, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Craig Santos-Perez, Juliana Spahr, as well as the earlier American writer Jack Kerouac) can push urban-ocean citizens towards figurations and affects of a “Pacific becoming Oceania” connected to planetary belonging, ecological confederation, peace, and trans-racial solidarity.
Research Interests:
American Literature, Cultural Studies, Asian Studies, American Studies, Globalization, and 15 morePacific Island Studies, Geopolitics, Poetry, Poetics, China, Beat Generation, Global Leadership, Oceania (Anthropology), Maritime and Oceanic History, Nazi Germany, Germany, Jack Kerouac, Worlding, Geospatial Analysis, and Asia Pacific Studies
Rob Wilson, “Statement of Poetics,” Jack London Is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry, ed. Susan M. Schultz (Kane’ohe, Hawai’i: Tinfish Press, 2013), pp. 235-226): "...This latter-day motto of diasporic affirmation and “cutting”... more
Rob Wilson, “Statement of Poetics,” Jack London Is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry, ed. Susan M. Schultz (Kane’ohe, Hawai’i: Tinfish Press, 2013), pp. 235-226): "...This latter-day motto of diasporic affirmation and “cutting” across borders towards renewal could apply to the cultural poesis of outgoing and incoming writers to Hawai’i as well: from the first bi-cultural Hawaiian convert Henry Opukahai'a and colonial mariner John Ledyard to the postmodern experimentalists Juliana Spahr and Susan Schultz et al writing Hawai’i across discrepantly situated eras. Being marked as a “haole” (white stranger) in this Native Hawaiian site, from the time of British, Russian, French, and (all the more so in colonizing terms) American contact, became (no less so now as well) a global-local problematic of not-fully-belonging to the language, the place, the history, the blood lines, the very culture of un-settled nationhood and/or statehood. But indigeneity, amid all the historical ironies and entangled contradictions, had always to be respected as original ground."
Research Interests:
In effect, we need another, bigger, and better way of framing this shared oceanic horizon; that is to say, another way of converting the Pacific Rim into a shared if wary figure of geo-poetic and ecological interest, as I will go on to... more
In effect, we need another, bigger, and better way of framing this shared oceanic horizon; that is to say, another way of converting the Pacific Rim into a shared if wary figure of geo-poetic and ecological interest, as I will go on to evoke through a conjuration of experimental poets and writers whose work enacts forces of “becoming oceanic” and formally as well as in content suggests a different mode of belonging to region and globe than the post-Hegelian will-to-dominion. For, in an environmental sense as well, we can all but forget the ocean while dwelling in an urban life-world (in huge, consumption-rich cities like Shanghai, Honolulu, Kaohsiung, and San Francisco, or Berlin and London in the Northern Atlantic for that matter) that depends for its very modern well-being on, from, and across the ocean. This ocean commons so-called, if figured as a vital biospheric element necessary to sustaining life and planetary health, could help build up tactics and affects of ecological solidarity and modes of co-dwelling. To do so, the ocean would have to be framed in terms that can inspire an imagination of co-belonging, mutual interest, and care. The Pacific Ocean could come to signify a bioregional site of coalitional promise as much as a geopolitical danger zone of peril: and, as I will aim to show, the forging and worlding of an ocean-based ecopoetics can help in this regard to reconfigure city, region, ocean, river, and planet into figurative unity.
Research Interests:
“Critique and Cosmos: After Masao Miyoshi” would activate some of the energies, tactics, critical forces, geopolitics, comparative poetics, and visions Masao Miyoshi (1928-2009) carried out in his work from the 1970s into the present... more
“Critique and Cosmos: After Masao Miyoshi” would activate some of the energies, tactics, critical forces, geopolitics, comparative poetics, and visions Masao Miyoshi (1928-2009) carried out in his work from the 1970s into the present millennium: coming to terms with aftering this impact in temporal, border-crossing, translational, field-reframing, and revisionary senses. The eleven essays and one review in this special issue do not come to terms with Miyoshi’s works in any memorial, critical, or honorific sense, although they can do that as in the differently framed field-surveying essays in solidarity within and beyond Japan studies by Harry Harootunian, Reginald Jackson, and Mary Layoun as well as the review essays on photography and essay by Keijiro Suga and George Solt. Instead, these works would activate, amplify, and renew some of the antagonistic energies and critical visions that Miyoshi embodied and distributed as life-force across various domains, fields, studies, and sites of intervention from Asian to Asian American studies (as here reframed by Stefan Tanaka and Chih-ming Wang) and beyond. Other essays move into the redefining impact of China across the twentieth century (Arif Dirlik) and its attempted geopolitical production and management of Tibet (Tsering Wangmo); and into anthropogenic energies and planetary possibilities of the Anthropocene in differing cultural studies works by Christine L. Marran on “The Planetary” as critical ethos and Rob Wilson on the Korean film Snowpiercer as ecocidal embodiment of killer capitalism.
Research Interests:
With its class-warfare ridden train driving headlong through a frozen earth of climate-change apocalypse and immanent planetary disaster, the globally distributed Korean film Snowpiercer in particular haunts the contemporary moment of... more
With its class-warfare ridden train driving headlong through a frozen earth of climate-change apocalypse and immanent planetary disaster, the globally distributed Korean film Snowpiercer in particular haunts the contemporary moment of consumer pluralism (on sites like Facebook or Amazon) and techno-optimism (in Silicon Valley if not Wall Street) as some doomsday allegory of killer capitalism. Visually striking and thematically reductive, this darkness-laden movie is set not just on the Pacific Rim or along the DMZ-divided Korean peninsula (as were Bong’s earlier, place-based movies), but along some lunar-like edge of doom with remnants of humanity cast between survival and biosphere extinction. The appropriate framework for this film is the ecoscape and telos of the capitalist-driven Anthropocene, I will argue, hence this is a work figuring forth the dynamics, perils, and affects of what cultural critic Margaret Ronda has called an “anthropogenic poetics” (called here anthropoetics), as this analysis will elaborate.
Research Interests:
"Thinking Literature Across Continents" (Duke UP, 2016) by J. Hillis Miller & Ranjan Ghosh generates a critical Forum in *New Global Studies* with essays on "More than Global"; contributors include: Rob Wilson (University of California at... more
"Thinking Literature Across Continents" (Duke UP, 2016) by J. Hillis Miller & Ranjan Ghosh generates a critical Forum in *New Global Studies* with essays on "More than Global"; contributors include: Rob Wilson (University of California at Santa Cruz), Ming Xie (University of Toronto), Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College), Frank Schulze-Engler (Frankfurt University) and Sandeep Bannerjee (McGill University). Published online on April 6, 2019.
Thinking Literature Across Continents (Duke UP, 2016) activates a mode of collaborative thinking and (as Heidegger punned poetically) thanking “the world” we inhabit across entangled yet discrepant theorizations of the USA and India, Europe and Asia, inside and outside, between and across the theory-rich Yale and UC Irvine of J. Hillis Miller to the more situational and worldly—in Edward Said’s committed sense of this pedagogical ethos-- English Department of India’s University of North Bengal that prolific transcultural and trans-lingual scholar Ranjan Ghosh calls home. Facing the entangled fates and criss-crossed contexts of a liberal humanist globalization under attack in this our era of the “world-wide web,” these two Socratic theorists of learned disciplinary immersion and Anglo-global facility begin to wonder what exactly is this “so-called world literature” paradigm, as Miller slyly puts the term under global-local contestation (or erasure) from the prefacing outset (xii). By questioning the “world” of world literature, the two all the more so will go to question in this back-and-forth study what is the “global” or the “globalization” telos that it can now presume to map, track, frame, market, and discipline the world as such into its totality of totalities.
Thinking Literature Across Continents (Duke UP, 2016) activates a mode of collaborative thinking and (as Heidegger punned poetically) thanking “the world” we inhabit across entangled yet discrepant theorizations of the USA and India, Europe and Asia, inside and outside, between and across the theory-rich Yale and UC Irvine of J. Hillis Miller to the more situational and worldly—in Edward Said’s committed sense of this pedagogical ethos-- English Department of India’s University of North Bengal that prolific transcultural and trans-lingual scholar Ranjan Ghosh calls home. Facing the entangled fates and criss-crossed contexts of a liberal humanist globalization under attack in this our era of the “world-wide web,” these two Socratic theorists of learned disciplinary immersion and Anglo-global facility begin to wonder what exactly is this “so-called world literature” paradigm, as Miller slyly puts the term under global-local contestation (or erasure) from the prefacing outset (xii). By questioning the “world” of world literature, the two all the more so will go to question in this back-and-forth study what is the “global” or the “globalization” telos that it can now presume to map, track, frame, market, and discipline the world as such into its totality of totalities.
Research Interests:
American Literature, Cultural Studies, Asian Studies, American Studies, World Literatures, and 10 moreComparative Literature, Southeast Asian Studies, Translation Studies, Globalization, Pacific Island Studies, Postcolonial Studies, World History, East Asian Studies, World Englishes, and Postcolonial Theory
"Amid atrophied hopes for a literature effectively ‘revolutionary’ in a precarious time of post-Occupy, authoritarian revanchism, the far-flung ills and blockages of Late Capitalism, and what she tracks as returns of “stubborn... more
"Amid atrophied hopes for a literature effectively ‘revolutionary’ in a precarious time of post-Occupy, authoritarian revanchism, the far-flung ills and blockages of Late Capitalism, and what she tracks as returns of “stubborn nationalism,” Juliana Spahr stakes her claim for U.S. poetry with a bleakly Adorno-esque refusal she aims to conjure into new millennial credibility: “’this is not a time for political works of art.’” The three postwar U.S. literary movements she tracks in Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment – turn-of-the-new-century alter Englishes, avant-garde modernism, and movement literatures of resistance since the mid-1960s-- will offer an emplotted “slide from [Audré] Lorde to Adorno”. This means the shift from claims of poetic activism in writing as such, back to negation, irony, or qualification of such immediate claims for transformative resistance. All this movement is figured under the pervasiveness of capitalist structures and presumes what Spahr calls literature’s semi-autonomous or “half-in and half-out relationship with capitalism” and so many varied refusals of “complicit nationalism”. To phrase this in the book’s overall analytical trajectory, Spahr tracks how “movement literature with its ties to militant resistance [across the late 60s and early 70s] morphed into multicultural literature” across later decades that instead seek to represent national inclusion and canonical assimilation of diversity.
"Juliana Spahr’s Auto-ethnography in the U.S. Poetic Undercommons”
(boundary2 online, March 13, 2019: http://www.boundary2.org/2019/03/rob-wilson-stubborn-resistance-juliana-spahrs-auto-ethnography-in-the-u-s-poetic-undercommons/)
"Juliana Spahr’s Auto-ethnography in the U.S. Poetic Undercommons”
(boundary2 online, March 13, 2019: http://www.boundary2.org/2019/03/rob-wilson-stubborn-resistance-juliana-spahrs-auto-ethnography-in-the-u-s-poetic-undercommons/)
Research Interests:
Critical Theory, American Literature, Cultural Studies, Social Movements, American Studies, and 12 moreWorld Literatures, Comparative Literature, Indigenous Studies, Globalization, Pacific Island Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Poetry, Poetics, Resistance (Social), Postcolonial Theory, Cultural power and resistance, and Hawaiian Studies
"Critique and Cosmos: After Masao Miyoshi"--Rob Wilson and Paul A. Bové, issue editors: boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. This special issue aims to activate the energies, tactics, critical forces, and... more
"Critique and Cosmos: After Masao Miyoshi"--Rob Wilson and Paul A. Bové, issue editors: boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. This special issue aims to activate the energies, tactics, critical forces, and comparative poetics Masao Miyoshi (1928–2009) carried out in his work from the 1970s on: coming to terms with his concept of aftering (the act of prolonging and transforming impacts across cultural, political, and disciplinary borders) and its temporal, border-crossing, translational, field-reframing, and revisionary effects. Contributors do not assess his scholarship and photography in any memorial, critical, or honorific sense. Instead, they seek to release and renew the critical visions that he distributed across various fields, studies, and sites of intervention, from Asian to Asian American studies and beyond. Each takes seriously the mandate inside Miyoshi’s work that cultural criticism envision its work broadly and courageously. Essays address the state of Japan studies; China's role in twentieth-century geopolitics, particularly involving Tibet; the critical ethos of "the planetary" in the Anthropocene; and the Korean film Snowpiercer as an embodiment of killer capitalism.
Contributors Arif Dirlik, Harry Harootunian, Reginald Jackson, Mary Layoun, Christine L. Marran, George Solt, Keijiro Suga, Stefan Tanaka, Chih-ming Wang, Tsering Wangmo, Rob Wilson
Rob Wilson is Professor of Literature, Creative Writing, and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of numerous books, including Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond, also published by Duke University Press. Paul A. Bové is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and editor of boundary 2.
May, 2019. 230 pages, 7 illustrations
Volume 46, issue 3
paper, 978-1-4780-0519-3 $12.00 (Duke University Press).
Contributors Arif Dirlik, Harry Harootunian, Reginald Jackson, Mary Layoun, Christine L. Marran, George Solt, Keijiro Suga, Stefan Tanaka, Chih-ming Wang, Tsering Wangmo, Rob Wilson
Rob Wilson is Professor of Literature, Creative Writing, and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of numerous books, including Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond, also published by Duke University Press. Paul A. Bové is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and editor of boundary 2.
May, 2019. 230 pages, 7 illustrations
Volume 46, issue 3
paper, 978-1-4780-0519-3 $12.00 (Duke University Press).
Research Interests:
"Coming to Worlding Terms with “Trans”: Methodologies in Chadwick Allen’s Trans-Indigenous" by Rob Wilson (pp. 87-95) in conjunction with reviews of Chadwick Allen's book by Hsinya Huang and Alice Te Punga Somerville. "Comparative... more
"Coming to Worlding Terms with “Trans”: Methodologies in Chadwick Allen’s Trans-Indigenous" by Rob Wilson (pp. 87-95) in conjunction with reviews of Chadwick Allen's book by Hsinya Huang and Alice Te Punga Somerville.
"Comparative literature as a disciplinary frame comes down from the proto-global modernizing times of Goethe, Matthew Arnold, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and Marx with embedded center-and-periphery dynamics as well as Euro-American assumptions and predispositions that go on structuring ‘comparison’ as such into an implicit hierarchy as to what counts (gets translated, published, circulated, read, compared) as ‘world literature’ in shape, value, more, audience, and impact. This consecrated inequity can still remain the case these days of turbo- (often English-centered) globalization when interpreting and translating minor or (all the more so) Indigenous literatures as core or reclaimed ‘center’ for activating comparison across borders, cultures, sites, and areas. It is this dissatisfaction with structured hierarchy that might lead scholars to reach for a more fluid term of relationality that can cut across these older canonical divides, nation-centric patterns, and enduring post-Cold War areas of study. Such an affirmative turn to mobility, unsettling, and multiplicity is taking place in the emergent frameworks that now activate the transitive prefix trans, as variously seen in the rise of “transpacific” to overcome Asia and Pacific segregations; or “trans-Taiwan” at Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal, as in Chih-Ming Wang’s Transpacific Articulations: Student Migrations and the Remaking of Asian America (2013); in the framework of Trans-Americanicity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniaity, and the Culture of Greater Mexico (2012) as used in the border-crossing Americas work of José David Saldivar; or in the “transatlantic” patterns reformulated in Paul Gilroy and Paul Giles et al; and, all the more provocatively, as seen in the emergent and lesser-known reorientation around “trans-Indigenous” to be discussed here."
"Comparative literature as a disciplinary frame comes down from the proto-global modernizing times of Goethe, Matthew Arnold, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and Marx with embedded center-and-periphery dynamics as well as Euro-American assumptions and predispositions that go on structuring ‘comparison’ as such into an implicit hierarchy as to what counts (gets translated, published, circulated, read, compared) as ‘world literature’ in shape, value, more, audience, and impact. This consecrated inequity can still remain the case these days of turbo- (often English-centered) globalization when interpreting and translating minor or (all the more so) Indigenous literatures as core or reclaimed ‘center’ for activating comparison across borders, cultures, sites, and areas. It is this dissatisfaction with structured hierarchy that might lead scholars to reach for a more fluid term of relationality that can cut across these older canonical divides, nation-centric patterns, and enduring post-Cold War areas of study. Such an affirmative turn to mobility, unsettling, and multiplicity is taking place in the emergent frameworks that now activate the transitive prefix trans, as variously seen in the rise of “transpacific” to overcome Asia and Pacific segregations; or “trans-Taiwan” at Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal, as in Chih-Ming Wang’s Transpacific Articulations: Student Migrations and the Remaking of Asian America (2013); in the framework of Trans-Americanicity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniaity, and the Culture of Greater Mexico (2012) as used in the border-crossing Americas work of José David Saldivar; or in the “transatlantic” patterns reformulated in Paul Gilroy and Paul Giles et al; and, all the more provocatively, as seen in the emergent and lesser-known reorientation around “trans-Indigenous” to be discussed here."
Research Interests:
"Snowpiercer as Anthropoetics: Killer Capitalism, the Anthropocene, Korean Global Film." Essay by Rob Wilson translated by Mijojo Hwang into Korean as chapter in Kim Soyoung, ed., Korean Cinema Encounters the World: Genre and New Media... more
"Snowpiercer as Anthropoetics: Killer Capitalism, the Anthropocene, Korean Global Film." Essay by Rob Wilson translated by Mijojo Hwang into Korean as chapter in Kim Soyoung, ed., Korean Cinema Encounters the World: Genre and New Media in the "History of Korean Cinema Compendium" series (Seoul, South Korea: XYZ Press, 2018), pages 35-61
Research Interests:
Poetry (translated into Chinese): "When the Nikita Moon Rose" (serial poem) and "Seven Tourist Sonnets" translated into Chinese by Andy Chih-Ming Wang and Melody Li, along with introductory essay and afterword by Tee Kim Tong and Andy... more
Poetry (translated into Chinese): "When the Nikita Moon Rose" (serial poem) and "Seven Tourist Sonnets" translated into Chinese by Andy Chih-Ming Wang and Melody Li, along with introductory essay and afterword by Tee Kim Tong and Andy Chih-Ming Wang, ChaoFoon Literary Journal (Malaysia), #505 (2012): pp. 42-83.
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"My Hawaii Nei" poem by Rob Wilson
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The worlding and de-worlding practices of global capitalism are intimately connected across spatial and temporal scales such that ‘inter-Asia’ is not that far from other connected sites of planetary transformation (such as Oceania) within... more
The worlding and de-worlding practices of global capitalism are intimately connected across spatial and temporal scales such that ‘inter-Asia’ is not that far from other connected sites of planetary transformation (such as Oceania) within and against the Anthropocene. If the global is not the world, ‘worlding’ is not or should not be equated to globalization as it sometimes is. But how can creative and research workers in literature, urban, or cultural studies actualize a better or different world of alter-temporalities or emergent spatialities “in the era of globalization” to invoke The Worlding Project that helped open the gap between ‘globalization’ and ‘worlding’ as different horizons of possibility? This is to say, worlding is not just a gesture or tactic in the given world but helps to create a world, to world the world in an active gerundive sense that is not just beholden to capitalist temporality nor the grid of Mercatorian space. “Worlding Asia/Oceania” would open up different ways of being with others and being in the world, to other worlds, opening life to what have been called other “lived local temporalities” and ways of dwelling or “being with” above or below the nation-state, reified regionality, or the world system. Worlding, in this situated multicultural, ethnographic, and oceanic sense, can become what has been termed an “art of being global” that takes place without losing cultural-political differences that matter, that can have a worldly impact, in effect, activating world-making tactics within and against “planetary capitalism.” Other forms of multi-species reworlding are also taking place under the trans-human and ocean-entangled sign of “sympoiesis.” Drawing upon current research from literary, cultural, urban and ecological studies, this talk will conjure concepts, tactics, and warning signs of what “worlding” is, can, or should be inside the Anthropocene.
Research Interests:
“Vexed by animosities of post-Cold War history and emerging forms of global antagonism and military crisis, the South China Sea has become “Asia’s Roiling Sea": “The sea is not only an important trade route but is also rich in oil,... more
“Vexed by animosities of post-Cold War history and emerging forms of global antagonism and military crisis, the South China Sea has become “Asia’s Roiling Sea": “The sea is not only an important trade route but is also rich in oil, natural gas, fishing and mineral resources. Nations are fighting over islands and even specks of rocks to stake their claims.” Pacific Rim sites, islands, and their modern nation-coded coasts and borders-- from China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines-- are getting caught up in those “heavy waters” of military surveillance, resource extraction, and industrial waste, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey shrewdly calls them. Such everyday conflicts can challenge the very telos of trans-oceanic globalization that (since the late 1970s) presumes “a [Pacific] Rim that is an imagining of transnational capital, [as] a co-prosperity sphere.” But the Pacific Ocean remains un-amenable to such territorial demarcations of national, contractual, or marine sovereignty. From the Bikini atoll atomic testing during the Cold War era down to the latest nuclear disaster in Fukushima Japan, citizens of late-capitalist modernity threaten not just the water, ground, and air of local dwelling but the interconnected Pacific as a planetary bioregion. This latest tsunami traumatically reminds Pacific Ocean dwellers from Sendai in coastal Eastern Japan to Santa Cruz along the Northern California coast that the Pacific Rim is not just discourse or trope, it is also a geologically interactive bioregion.”
Research Interests:
It is in this political-ethical sense of lived culture that co-editors Christopher Connery and I had deployed “worlding” to enact a stipulated cultural-political-creative ethos or tactic of situated opposition to the telos of... more
It is in this political-ethical sense of lived culture that co-editors Christopher Connery and I had deployed “worlding” to enact a stipulated cultural-political-creative ethos or tactic of situated opposition to the telos of globalization, in our co-edited collection The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. Worlding is not so much a theme or subject as it is a tactic or a practice or projection of world-making, projecting forth, and life-world becoming and building-up to use a Goethe-like word for cultural formation. “Worlding” (as I phrased it in the “Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic” to Worlding Project) means at once a mode of “building up a life-world palpably disclosing its lived-in modalities, boundaries, tactics, and historical processes” of survival and emergence. Worlding stands for a range of alter-globalization and situated localization practices being projected forward out into and across the everyday world that is riddled and driven by mandates of capitalist dynamism and globalization. Worlding-as-projection is still shadowed by residual forces and forms of 'deworlding,' as well as stands opposed to those called (by Tsing and Haraway et al) 'reworlding': that is to say, energies and practices of going and coming, breaking down and building up life-worlds. The former process (deworlding) suggests enduring impacts of empire, colonialism, and turbo-capitalism upon other life-worlds and threatened ways of being. In one compressed verb 'worlding' means building-up the life-world that is, actively worlding it. Or, playing off from post-Heidegger or postcolonial definitions of worlding, we would offer this summarizing definition: "WORLDING (v) - a historical process of taking care, setting limits, entering into, & making world-horizons come near & become local, situated, in/formed, cared for; instantiated as an uneven/incomplete material-cultural process of world-making and world-becoming."
Research Interests:
Critical Theory, American Literature, Cultural Studies, Asian Studies, American Studies, and 15 moreWorld Literatures, Comparative Literature, Globalization, Popular Culture, Literary Criticism, Cultural Theory, World History, Poetics, Urban Studies, Post-Colonialism, Ecology, Localization, World Englishes, World Literature, and Worlding
Research Interests:
Creative Writing, Critical Theory, History, Cultural Studies, Asian Studies, and 14 moreAmerican Studies, Gender Studies, Philosophy, Art History, Globalization, Pacific Island Studies, Literature, Space and Place, Asia Pacific Region, Contemporary Poetry, Visual Arts, Postmodern Literary Theory and Popular Culture, Oceans, and Philosophy and Sociology of Human/animal Relations
Taking its initial motivation from the Sermon on the Mount and latter-days writers as diverse in vision as Jack Kerouac, Mother Angelica, Gilles Deleuze, and Maxine Hong Kingston, Beatitude stands for the self-convicted state of high-holy... more
Taking its initial motivation from the Sermon on the Mount and latter-days writers as diverse in vision as Jack Kerouac, Mother Angelica, Gilles Deleuze, and Maxine Hong Kingston, Beatitude stands for the self-convicted state of high-holy vision in which the lowly becomes exalted and can activate the deepest forces and ideals and principles of poetic polity. These states are forces of "beatitude" and high-holyness still crucial to the poetics and politics of the post-Beat writer: forces of election and chosen vocation that Emerson and others, from Jesus to Spinoza and Blake, had endorsed as active joy and the felt good news of blessedness inter-animating the self to others and the world to life-renewal. This collage-like work of sources, influences, rebirths, and deaths, comprises an inter-linked glossary for what Beatitude (Beat/Attitude) means and has meant, and shows how “the vocation to beatitude” still moves as a force of empowerment across time and space, activating some kind of influx from the Holy Spirit or from the Over-soul or individual Godhead that allows one to write, to think, to act, to love, to renew the world each day, to make it new, to hitch the self into the drafts of breath and wind and spirit.
Research Interests:
In conversion, broadly speaking of it as a transfigurative poetics, one encounters a life-force of amplified being like the New Haven ship coming into harbor for Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia or his meeting the “praying families” of New England, or... more
In conversion, broadly speaking of it as a transfigurative poetics, one encounters a life-force of amplified being like the New Haven ship coming into harbor for Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia or his meeting the “praying families” of New England, or Dylan’s seeking out the folk-mentorship of Woody Guthrie reborn in a New Jersey sickbed, or Allen Ginsberg meeting Kerouac and Snyder on the Beat roads of San Francisco and writing Howl. Conversion means a turning with and as some force of newness: it affirms, plugs into, and enacts energies of becoming, eruptive ideas, recomposition, and a creativity (or beatitude) latent or damaged in the self. “He [becomes] a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” reverberates the staggering present-tense claim for conversion, down through centuries of repetition, for the incoming-power of the inaugurating/ reborn subject (“new creature”) of early Christian modernity. A haunting version of such life-change and caritas is New England Puritanism offspring Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s opening of [Saint Rose’s] Free Home for Incurable Cancer on the Lower East Side, after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1891, and her founding of a Dominican order as Mother Mary Alphonsa. As Sam Cooke affirmed, in the aftermath of Dylan, “A Change Gonna Come.”
Yet a ‘conversion experience’ is by no means a fixed or unidirectional process of self-formation expressing a will to fixed belief. It records, more commonly, an unstable process of subjective-becoming and semiotic recoding that takes place between troubled poles of de-nativization and re-nativization, belief and rejection, birth and rebirth, as an “encounter” with events and forces circulating through discourse and signs crossing from the colonial regime/ ecumene down to our own postcolonial regime/ secular ecumene of multiplicity and neo-liberal suspicion.
Yet a ‘conversion experience’ is by no means a fixed or unidirectional process of self-formation expressing a will to fixed belief. It records, more commonly, an unstable process of subjective-becoming and semiotic recoding that takes place between troubled poles of de-nativization and re-nativization, belief and rejection, birth and rebirth, as an “encounter” with events and forces circulating through discourse and signs crossing from the colonial regime/ ecumene down to our own postcolonial regime/ secular ecumene of multiplicity and neo-liberal suspicion.
Research Interests:
American Literature, Religion, Cultural Studies, Asian Studies, American Studies, and 15 moreWorld Literatures, Comparative Literature, English Literature, Globalization, Pacific Island Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Poetics, Religious Conversion, Beat Studies, Bob Dylan, Contemporary Poetry, Postmodern Theology, Conversion, and Anthropology of Religion
In conversion, broadly speaking of it as a transfigurative poetics, one encounters a life-force of amplified being like the New Haven ship coming into harbor for Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia or his meeting the “praying families” of New England, or... more
In conversion, broadly speaking of it as a transfigurative poetics, one encounters a life-force of amplified being like the New Haven ship coming into harbor for Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia or his meeting the “praying families” of New England, or Dylan’s seeking out the folk-mentorship of Woody Guthrie reborn in a New Jersey sickbed, or Allen Ginsberg meeting Kerouac and Snyder on the Beat roads of San Francisco and writing Howl. Conversion means a turning with and as some force of newness: it affirms, plugs into, and enacts energies of becoming, eruptive ideas, recomposition, and a creativity (or beatitude) latent or damaged in the self. “He [becomes] a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” reverberates the staggering present-tense claim for conversion, down through centuries of repetition, for the incoming-power of the inaugurating/ reborn subject (“new creature”) of early Christian modernity. A haunting version of such life-change and caritas is New England Puritanism offspring Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s opening of [Saint Rose’s] Free Home for Incurable Cancer on the Lower East Side, after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1891, and her founding of a Dominican order as Mother Mary Alphonsa. As Sam Cooke affirmed, in the aftermath of Dylan, “A Change Gonna Come.”
Yet a ‘conversion experience’ is by no means a fixed or unidirectional process of self-formation expressing a will to fixed belief. It records, more commonly, an unstable process of subjective-becoming and semiotic recoding that takes place between troubled poles of de-nativization and re-nativization, belief and rejection, birth and rebirth, as an “encounter” with events and forces circulating through discourse and signs crossing from the colonial regime/ ecumene down to our own postcolonial regime/ secular ecumene of multiplicity and neo-liberal suspicion.
Yet a ‘conversion experience’ is by no means a fixed or unidirectional process of self-formation expressing a will to fixed belief. It records, more commonly, an unstable process of subjective-becoming and semiotic recoding that takes place between troubled poles of de-nativization and re-nativization, belief and rejection, birth and rebirth, as an “encounter” with events and forces circulating through discourse and signs crossing from the colonial regime/ ecumene down to our own postcolonial regime/ secular ecumene of multiplicity and neo-liberal suspicion.
Research Interests:
American Literature, Cultural Studies, American Studies, Comparative Literature, Globalization, and 12 morePacific Island Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Poetics, Beat Studies, World Literature, Bob Dylan, Contemporary Poetry, World Religions, Hawaiian Studies, Transnational American Studies, and Hawaiian culture
Research Interests:
Tracing ideas of the sublime in American literature from Puritan writings to the postmodern epoch, Rob Wilson demonstrates that the North American landscape has been the ground for political as well as aesthetic transport. He takes a... more
Tracing ideas of the sublime in American literature from Puritan writings to the postmodern epoch, Rob Wilson demonstrates that the North American landscape has been the ground for political as well as aesthetic transport. He takes a distinctly historical approach and explores the ways in which experiences of the American landscape instill desire for other kinds of materialized vastness: self-expansion, national expansion, capitalist postmodernity, and American political power. As Wallace Stevens put it, the American will takes “dominion everywhere.”
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All of American literature, from a certain Pacific Islander point of view, so to speak, can be said to begin with Hawaii’s Story By Hawaii’s Queen, a memoir written (from late 1896 through 1897) by the deposed Hawaiian monarch. Published... more
All of American literature, from a certain Pacific Islander point of view, so to speak, can be said to begin with Hawaii’s Story By Hawaii’s Queen, a memoir written (from late 1896 through 1897) by the deposed Hawaiian monarch. Published in Boston in 1898 amid the imperial scramble of the “Mana Nui” (great powers), the memoir contests the overthrow of a legitimately constituted sovereign nation by an array of white-settler forces (mostly Americans from New England and California) in 1893 and activates the power of culture and poetry to circulate as counter-memory. Part testimony, photograph, anecdote, diary, newspaper item, and treaty, narrative and lyric commingle in Hawaii’s Story into a Christian-Hawaiian appeal for justice, sentimental empathy, and international recognition from an American government which, during the McKinley administration, was engaged in extra-territorial expansion into Asia and the Pacific Ocean as well as the Caribbean.
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Turning and turning in the widening slime, the cyborg cannot tell the television set from the ideological-state-apparatus. Objects fall into mute commodification, becoming profane-illumination or junk food, acid trips into the loco-local... more
Turning and turning in the widening slime, the cyborg cannot tell the television set from the ideological-state-apparatus. Objects fall into mute commodification, becoming profane-illumination or junk food, acid trips into the loco-local where the Suzy Wong Hotel falls back into the transnational critiques of Ackbar Abbas. More ‘social text’ is loosed upon the world. Cyber-space euphoria leaks forward, the business news turns into morning ceremonies of Friction-Free Capitalism generated from a designer sneaker in Seattle or café in Seoul.
When Brigadier General Thomas Farrell groped to describe (in an official government report) the subjective effect of the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, at 5:29:50 A.M. on July 16, 1945, he found himself, like many a... more
When Brigadier General Thomas Farrell groped to describe (in an official government report) the subjective effect of the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, at 5:29:50 A.M. on July 16, 1945, he found himself, like many a would-be writer of the sublime before him, at a loss for adequate terms and tropes – stupefied, dwarfed, reaching for hyperbolic endterms like “doomsday” and “blasphemous” and resorting to spaced-out adjectives such as “tremendous” or “awesome” that 19thcentury Americans had reserved for more manageable spectacles of God's grandeur such as Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. Though a military man and no poet, as Farrell registered this history-shattering event in words, he struggled to command some rhetoric of ultimacy before nuclear “effects [that] could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying”:No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description....
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American Literature, Sociology, Cultural Studies, American Studies, Technology, and 15 moreGlobalization, Violence, Poetry, Sustainable Development, Social Justice, Ecology, Postmodernism, Conflict Resolution, Contemporary Literature, Environmental Sustainability, Nuclear Energy, War, Peace, Nuclear Disarmament, and Prospects
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... was toppled and dis-placed by American residents cultivating sugar plantations, Calvinism ... olds - who initiates acts of imperial violence and commercial rapacity against the Pacific ... and polities, overrepresented by outside... more
... was toppled and dis-placed by American residents cultivating sugar plantations, Calvinism ... olds - who initiates acts of imperial violence and commercial rapacity against the Pacific ... and polities, overrepresented by outside powers, glibly encoded with (white/native/multicultural ...
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Rich, colorful, painstakingly detailed, Dying in a Strange Land tells the Oyama family saga, as routed and rooted across the Pacific from Japan to Hawai’i and the continental USA in California and New York. It is also a novel of modern... more
Rich, colorful, painstakingly detailed, Dying in a Strange Land tells the Oyama family saga, as routed and rooted across the Pacific from Japan to Hawai’i and the continental USA in California and New York. It is also a novel of modern Hawai’i’s history showing the rise of the Japanese immigrants from hard-knock plantations into social power via labor unions, the ILWA, the Democratic party-machine and ethnic-labor coalitions against the quasi-colonialism and white hegemony of past regimes. But, at the core, this is a novel of artistic self-formation showing how long-time San Francisco resident Milton Murayama made himself into a postwar novelist capable of remembering and shaping all this diasporic Japanese/Hawaiian family material into historical fiction and ‘local literature’ at its polylingual and postcolonial best. Postcolonial readers in Asia-Pacific areas may already know and love Murayama’s Oyama family saga*the family’s emigration from farming regions in Japan, its struggles with poverty and freedom on the prewar plantations of Maui, class and ethnic tensions in the racial hierarchies of Hawai’i, the traumas and divisions of the World War II years, the rise to middle-class success of the local Japanese in the postwar democratization of Hawai’i, its diaspora to the mainland US, the generational struggles to endure and survive as a unity of clashing figures. All of this has been touched upon in Murayama’s plantation-saga trilogy of All I Asking for Is My Body (1975), Five Years on a Rock (1994) and Plantation Boy (1998). Extending the voices and values of the seven siblings and eccentric parents of this scrappy and memorable family, Dying in a Strange Land adds to this Oyama family struggle a novel of artistic self-formation, showing how Milton Murayama* alias Morris Kiyo Oyama*was able to become, against all social odds in the postwar period of Civil Rights struggles and wars in Asia, a writer of ethnic integrity, postcolonial polyphony, historical sway, racial tensions, and global/local vision. This fourth novel is a narrative remapping of the
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... succession. In the first of many non‐serviams, Masao Miyoshi refused to kiss the ring of Henry James, as it were, suggesting his life‐long refusal of auteur‐worship, canonical veneration, genuflecting to critical powers‐that‐be. ...
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This essay offers a critical genealogy of US imperial dynamics in the Pacific in the context of examining the discursive tactics of APEC and the emerging hegemony of transnational capital in the region. Moving from Honolulu to Taipei and... more
This essay offers a critical genealogy of US imperial dynamics in the Pacific in the context of examining the discursive tactics of APEC and the emerging hegemony of transnational capital in the region. Moving from Honolulu to Taipei and Canberra in focus, it tracks the ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
he Emersonian strategy of the American literary intellectual may be so ingrained, so deeply organic to his or her sense of social self-positioning, that Ross Posnock, in "Assessing the Oppositional: Contemporary Intellectual... more
he Emersonian strategy of the American literary intellectual may be so ingrained, so deeply organic to his or her sense of social self-positioning, that Ross Posnock, in "Assessing the Oppositional: Contemporary Intellectual Strategies," can now accuse Jim Merod of an "Emersonianism" so unacknowledged that the latter need not even mention the Concord idealist in refiguring more responsible "forms and affiliations of radical dissent." For whatever the impact of Foucault or Gramsci on American reassessments of the humanist intellectual, as in Paul Bove's portrayal of reader-response as the site of interpellation into middle-class acquiescence, the tropes and terms of Emerson as "representative
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... market policies, frame cultural hegemony, and handle the drastic social con-sequences of global ... Pacific" dynamics, like Taiwan and Hawai'i, regional forms are reconfiguring into counter ... Key collections of... more
... market policies, frame cultural hegemony, and handle the drastic social con-sequences of global ... Pacific" dynamics, like Taiwan and Hawai'i, regional forms are reconfiguring into counter ... Key collections of Hawaiian cultural activism and land struggle, edited by Dana Naone Hall ...
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... of Capital] to metamorphose" tra-ditions and messages against the reign of economic performativity.23 This sublime dynamism of Capital, for Lyotard, enacts a ... know from the real romanticism of Nietzsche, can will any-thing,... more
... of Capital] to metamorphose" tra-ditions and messages against the reign of economic performativity.23 This sublime dynamism of Capital, for Lyotard, enacts a ... know from the real romanticism of Nietzsche, can will any-thing, except no longer will, in 'weak nihilism': the power ...
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... Books reviewed: Nagisa Oshima, Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. ... (Male/female gender dynamics-for example, Emily Dickinson's fragmentary textual cor-pus as... more
... Books reviewed: Nagisa Oshima, Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. ... (Male/female gender dynamics-for example, Emily Dickinson's fragmentary textual cor-pus as reconstituted by Higginson-like male editors for ...
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... "We must get the [postcolonial] context right first ... Wilson and Dirlik / Introduction 11 ... Our critical contention is that the complex networks and maps of knowledge/power disseminated... more
... "We must get the [postcolonial] context right first ... Wilson and Dirlik / Introduction 11 ... Our critical contention is that the complex networks and maps of knowledge/power disseminated across this contemporary Asia/Pacific re-gion need not belong exclusively to the circulations of ...
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1. "Panic theory" sites afflicting the language games of normative science are articulated in Arthur Kroker, "The Games of Foucault," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11 (1987): 1-10; no less... more
1. "Panic theory" sites afflicting the language games of normative science are articulated in Arthur Kroker, "The Games of Foucault," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11 (1987): 1-10; no less trenchantly, deconstructive readings of "Japan" perme-ate the special issue ...
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... whole round world, and going out to the whole world, / To India and China ... still attaches high importance to APEC's neoliberalist concept of open regionalism, especially since ... See Infantile Capitalism and Japan's... more
... whole round world, and going out to the whole world, / To India and China ... still attaches high importance to APEC's neoliberalist concept of open regionalism, especially since ... See Infantile Capitalism and Japan's Postmodernism, South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988): 62934. ...
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Inherent Vice continues Thomas Pynchon's interrogation into California as American edge-site perpetually situated on the brink of catastrophe, metamorphosis, or redemption. In his latest novel, Pynchon labors in the time-honored... more
Inherent Vice continues Thomas Pynchon's interrogation into California as American edge-site perpetually situated on the brink of catastrophe, metamorphosis, or redemption. In his latest novel, Pynchon labors in the time-honored generic trenches of American “hardboiled fiction” to elaborate the transformative energies of what California still stands for as worlding edge-space, as a temporal promise of social transformation and popular-cultural redemption not quite over. In bleaker plot strands, we witness an American vernacular revolution of pop-carnivalesque energies being infiltrated and hollowed out, as if the utopic energies of the 1960s were foreclosed at birth by the security apparatus of police forces, land development, and the global totality of capital as situated on the Pacific Rim.
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... His upbeat liberalism knows no end, sees no limit, never learns to shut up, get scaled back, calm down, or (as the Eagles wisely put it ... on his Apple laptop sailing through, pumping up, and proclaiming this new world order of... more
... His upbeat liberalism knows no end, sees no limit, never learns to shut up, get scaled back, calm down, or (as the Eagles wisely put it ... on his Apple laptop sailing through, pumping up, and proclaiming this new world order of globalization as just right for our cyber-space world.11 ...
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What other writer [than Mark Twain] at this early date better glimpsed the role of America in Asia and in the Pacific, ocean of the future?A. Grove Day, ''Innocent Abroad in Hawaii: Mark Twain'' California... more
What other writer [than Mark Twain] at this early date better glimpsed the role of America in Asia and in the Pacific, ocean of the future?A. Grove Day, ''Innocent Abroad in Hawaii: Mark Twain'' California materialized into a coastal center of capi- ... American Literature, ...
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As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginaryneeds to be symbolically confronted and undoneat national as well as global levels.As Americans and as... more
As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginaryneeds to be symbolically confronted and undoneat national as well as global levels.As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōelamented, “To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there.” However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublimeas a trauma of geopolitical dominationand racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (rapturedby these technological forces of sublimity as ma...
Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, American Studies, Film Studies, Japanese Language And Culture, Cold War and Culture, and 13 moreCold War, Poetics, East Asian Studies, Aesthetics and Ethics, Contemporary American Literature, The Sublime, Art and Aesthetics of the Cold War, Akira Kurosawa, J G Ballard, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Asia Pacific, Southeast Asian English, and Theory of Sublime
Imagination thus becomes a way of keeping the soul alive in this late-capitalist world of de-sacralization, banality, ruination, acid rain, dust. For creative imagination can help to transfigure ordinary reality, and work to shape,... more
Imagination thus becomes a way of keeping the soul alive in this late-capitalist world of de-sacralization, banality, ruination, acid rain, dust. For creative imagination can help to transfigure ordinary reality, and work to shape, express, alter, bring into language and being different modes of world-making and amplified identity, reworlding time and space and selfhood. For, as Nobel-Prize winner Bob Dylan confessed to a Rolling Stone interviewer about his longevity as a song-maker and ever-writing poet always reinventing himself from small-town Robert Zimmerman into big-time shape-shifter Bob Dylan, “Transfiguration is what allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it. That’s how I can still do what I do and write the songs I sing and just keep on moving.” As a genre of writing that activates imagination and language against terror and destruction, poetry (along with cultural studies across Oceania) has served me since my days as founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review journal at UC Berkeley in the 1970s to my recent transpacific dual-language poetry collection When the Nikita Moon Rose, as a way of searching for a path to enhanced beatitude and life-force, as if writing activated traces of the sacred and awakened magical energies or echoes of a mantra, “walking at night between the two deserts/ singing” as W. S. Merwin put this conjunction of outer and inner in a poem called “Air.”
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... Mocking this "profane illu-mination" amid the lucre, sin, and slime of New Jersey streets, Tony taunts back, "Why didn't you say anything ... Rock, my brothers and sisters Plymouth Rock landed on us!"i7... more
... Mocking this "profane illu-mination" amid the lucre, sin, and slime of New Jersey streets, Tony taunts back, "Why didn't you say anything ... Rock, my brothers and sisters Plymouth Rock landed on us!"i7 Later, in the Holy City of Mecca or while praying on Mount Arafat, Malcolm X ...
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Page 1. Book Reviews Legendary Hawai'i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism. By Cris tina Bacchilega. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 230, preface, introduction, notes, works... more
Page 1. Book Reviews Legendary Hawai'i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism. By Cris tina Bacchilega. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 230, preface, introduction, notes, works cited, index, ac knowledgments.) ...
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Research Interests:
Critical Theory, American Literature, Cultural Studies, Asian Studies, American Studies, and 15 moreWorld Literatures, Comparative Literature, Globalization, Popular Culture, Literary Criticism, Cultural Theory, World History, Poetics, Urban Studies, Ecology, Localization, World Englishes, World Literature, Worlding, and Post Colonialism
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... One of the film's producers assured skeptics from Hawaii that the goal of everyone in the project is to tell an epic story and hopefully capture it from a historically correct viewpoint (San Jose Mercury News, June 28,... more
... One of the film's producers assured skeptics from Hawaii that the goal of everyone in the project is to tell an epic story and hopefully capture it from a historically correct viewpoint (San Jose Mercury News, June 28, 2002: A2). ... Page 7. 59 Reframing Global/Local Poetics in ...
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Research Interests:
The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street Madison, Wisconsin 53715 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright© 1991 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 54321 Printed in... more
The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street Madison, Wisconsin 53715 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright© 1991 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 54321 Printed in the United States of America ...
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© 1995 by Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper * Except for essays by William A. Callahan and Steve Olive, "Chemical Weapons Discourse in the 'South... more
© 1995 by Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper * Except for essays by William A. Callahan and Steve Olive, "Chemical Weapons Discourse in the 'South Pacific,'" Chris Bongie, "The Last Frontier: Memories of the ...
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There is a famous dialectical analysis of the American "lech for transcendence" by Kenneth Burke called "I, Eye, Ay--Concerning Emerson's Early Essay on 'Nature' and the Machinery of... more
There is a famous dialectical analysis of the American "lech for transcendence" by Kenneth Burke called "I, Eye, Ay--Concerning Emerson's Early Essay on 'Nature' and the Machinery of Transcendence." Burke's impacted pun of a title suggests the way sublime-hungry ...
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ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706 12 Hid's Copse Road Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England... more
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706 12 Hid's Copse Road Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England Copyright© 1999 by Rowman & Littlefield ...
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... We have to ask why, still, in such a global-ized framework, have these ... re-mained so trenchantly localist, so haunted by the national imaginary of trauma and division ... a matter of poor distribution; clumsy English translation;... more
... We have to ask why, still, in such a global-ized framework, have these ... re-mained so trenchantly localist, so haunted by the national imaginary of trauma and division ... a matter of poor distribution; clumsy English translation; excess melo-drama; narrative simplicity; unconscious ...
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Abstract This special issue aims to formulate a 'worlded' version of American Studies to deal with emergent complexities of Asia/Pacific as well as NorthSouth trans-Americas flows and imbalances characterizing... more
Abstract This special issue aims to formulate a 'worlded' version of American Studies to deal with emergent complexities of Asia/Pacific as well as NorthSouth trans-Americas flows and imbalances characterizing today's empire of neo-liberal globalization. Scholars of this ...
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Research Interests:
The words and works of William Shakespeare have divided Americans along the lines of race, language, partisan politics, and social class since the founding of the American experiment – a division that continues to the present day. When... more
The words and works of William Shakespeare have divided Americans along the lines of race, language, partisan politics, and social class since the founding of the American experiment – a division that continues to the present day. When Shakespeare is performed within the United States, ghosts haunt each production – the ghosts of the African slave, the indigenous American, the European colonist, and the countless immigrants who built a country with their blood, sweat, and toil and
died on American soil. Whether attended to or not, the presence or absence of Black, White, or Indigenous bodies in American Shakespearean casting, the inclusion or exclusion of languages other than English in the dialogue spoken, and the new forms of signification that have emerged from Shakespeare’s plays through restagings at various (and, frequently, critical) moments in American history, place Shakespeare firmly at the crossroads of race, language, and American empire. This dissertation
examines the audience reception of multilingual/multiracial adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth in the United States, from the colonial period to the present, with three intentions: (1) to increase understanding around the ways Shakespeare’s plays have been translated, adapted, or appropriated to address the topics of race, language, and American imperialism; (2) to unpack some of the practical strategies used by theatrical practitioners when staging Shakespeare’s plays to create a dialogue with American audience members around some of the most fraught subjects in our current political moment; (3) to gather and analyze audience reception data on how multilingual/multiracial Shakespearean adaptations are being received by a diverse sample of American audience members from around the United States and how those adaptations affect audience perception of Shakespeare’s plays.
died on American soil. Whether attended to or not, the presence or absence of Black, White, or Indigenous bodies in American Shakespearean casting, the inclusion or exclusion of languages other than English in the dialogue spoken, and the new forms of signification that have emerged from Shakespeare’s plays through restagings at various (and, frequently, critical) moments in American history, place Shakespeare firmly at the crossroads of race, language, and American empire. This dissertation
examines the audience reception of multilingual/multiracial adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth in the United States, from the colonial period to the present, with three intentions: (1) to increase understanding around the ways Shakespeare’s plays have been translated, adapted, or appropriated to address the topics of race, language, and American imperialism; (2) to unpack some of the practical strategies used by theatrical practitioners when staging Shakespeare’s plays to create a dialogue with American audience members around some of the most fraught subjects in our current political moment; (3) to gather and analyze audience reception data on how multilingual/multiracial Shakespearean adaptations are being received by a diverse sample of American audience members from around the United States and how those adaptations affect audience perception of Shakespeare’s plays.
Research Interests:
“It's a long way from Hibbing to Stockholm but any such 'identity" as life-quest can be prefigured & transfigured & thus remade through trope, labor, and grace: “Transfiguration is what allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly... more
“It's a long way from Hibbing to Stockholm but any such 'identity" as life-quest can be prefigured & transfigured & thus remade through trope, labor, and grace: “Transfiguration is what allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it. That's how I can still do what I do and write the songs I sing and just keep on moving."
-- Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman]
Course Description: Rather than offering an impossible album-by-album survey of Bob Dylan’s life and works from his first work to his recent songs over the course of his 60 years performing (Bob Dylan born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota), this course will provide an intensive focus on ten important works that help to track Dylan’s evolution as a poet and song writer working in recurring genres (such as protest songs, muse love songs, , blues and gospel genres, Jeremaic critical vision, love lyrics). Each week one song will form the basis of a reading both in textual detail and social scope: heard and discussed as connected to readings from Dylan himself as well as from important critics, writers, and cultural historians (like Sean Wilentz, Timothy Hampton, Richard F. Thomas,, Anne Waldman et al). The goal is to offer a way into grasping Dylan’s “world” as a timely.ever-mutating, and influental poet in tactic and vision, discussing his modes of writing, song genres, political-cultural aims, and his overall transfigurative and redemptive imagination, and so on.
The course approach aims to show that, by concentrating on hearing and discussing these ten important works from the whole body of Dylan’s work, we should become better able to read such works backward (into the whole inter-textual archive of Dylan works and the past forms he draws upon and transforms), outward (into the modern times of the present) and forward (into the prophecy of the future and tactics of self-transformation and social redemption Dylan offers). This will allow us to achieve insight into the recurring poetic and song genres Dylan uses, the “prophetic” vision and critiques of America he offers in the transnational era, the themes and problems his work has used and transformed, and his metamorphosis as a poet of tropological power and cultural-political importance from the 1960s until receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
To give a sense of Dylan’s times and works as well as writing, we will read his trope-laden autobiography, Chronicles: Vol. 1. This will help us approach his vision of America and cultural-political tactics, or his poetics. To give a sense of his ties to the leftist cultural populist front as well as to the Beat literary movement, we will read Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America. Timothy Hampton’s Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work will provide insights into Dylan’s prosody and world-literary influenced poetics. Richard F. Thomas’s Why Bob Dylan Matters offers a quasi-canonical reading of Dylan linking him intertextually to an array of classical sources from Roman and Greek literature and showing how Dylan’s tactics of “love and theft” enriches the texts he often collages and (like a postmodernist magpie) riffs on in his own multiple voices. Rob Sean Wilson’s Beat Attitudes (to be provided as a free PDF) offers a collage of sources and influences that open up the force-field of Beat and America transendental sources that Dylan relentlessly draws upon to achieve his own poetic greatness in multiple voices not just his. We will also see Martin Scorsese’s voice-rich documentary No Direction Home and the Dylan-persona movie on the downfall of the American empire, Masked and Anonymous when relevant. We will in effect make links to a range of Dylan works primary and secondary through these assigned readings, which you need to keep up with.
All of the written lyrics for the assigned 10 songs can be found on Bob Dylan’s official site with Columbia Records: https://bobdylan.com/songs/. By searching around on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, you can also access recordings of each of these 10 songs on the web, both from the original Dylan album and in various live performances, unless you prefer to purchase each one of the 10 songs we will study. The instructor will also provide links to the relevant songs for each week on his Spotify site, and also aim to provide relevant YouTube links via weekly Canvas messages to the class.
Required Texts: We will use each of the following required texts.(These books can be purchased from UCSC Bay Tree Bookstore on campus and/or online as well as from online sites from Amazon to Powell Books et al: these five books have also been placed on reserve at McHenry Library on campus.):
1) Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. One (Simon & Schuster).
2) Timothy Hampton, Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work (Zone Books).
3) Richard F. Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters (Harper Collins).
4) Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America (Anchor).
5) Rob Sean Wilson, Beat Attitudes (New Pacific Press). To be provided as free PDF.
*****
Some Suggested Background Readings:
Robert Shelton, No Direction Home; The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (Da Capo Press).
Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man 3: The Art of Bob Dylan (Continuum).
Michael Gray, ed. The Bob Dylan Encylopedia (Continuum).
Kevin Dettmar, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (Cambridge UP).
Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Ecco Press).
Jonathan Cott, ed., Bob Dylan Interviews (Wenner Books).
*********
-- Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman]
Course Description: Rather than offering an impossible album-by-album survey of Bob Dylan’s life and works from his first work to his recent songs over the course of his 60 years performing (Bob Dylan born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota), this course will provide an intensive focus on ten important works that help to track Dylan’s evolution as a poet and song writer working in recurring genres (such as protest songs, muse love songs, , blues and gospel genres, Jeremaic critical vision, love lyrics). Each week one song will form the basis of a reading both in textual detail and social scope: heard and discussed as connected to readings from Dylan himself as well as from important critics, writers, and cultural historians (like Sean Wilentz, Timothy Hampton, Richard F. Thomas,, Anne Waldman et al). The goal is to offer a way into grasping Dylan’s “world” as a timely.ever-mutating, and influental poet in tactic and vision, discussing his modes of writing, song genres, political-cultural aims, and his overall transfigurative and redemptive imagination, and so on.
The course approach aims to show that, by concentrating on hearing and discussing these ten important works from the whole body of Dylan’s work, we should become better able to read such works backward (into the whole inter-textual archive of Dylan works and the past forms he draws upon and transforms), outward (into the modern times of the present) and forward (into the prophecy of the future and tactics of self-transformation and social redemption Dylan offers). This will allow us to achieve insight into the recurring poetic and song genres Dylan uses, the “prophetic” vision and critiques of America he offers in the transnational era, the themes and problems his work has used and transformed, and his metamorphosis as a poet of tropological power and cultural-political importance from the 1960s until receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
To give a sense of Dylan’s times and works as well as writing, we will read his trope-laden autobiography, Chronicles: Vol. 1. This will help us approach his vision of America and cultural-political tactics, or his poetics. To give a sense of his ties to the leftist cultural populist front as well as to the Beat literary movement, we will read Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America. Timothy Hampton’s Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work will provide insights into Dylan’s prosody and world-literary influenced poetics. Richard F. Thomas’s Why Bob Dylan Matters offers a quasi-canonical reading of Dylan linking him intertextually to an array of classical sources from Roman and Greek literature and showing how Dylan’s tactics of “love and theft” enriches the texts he often collages and (like a postmodernist magpie) riffs on in his own multiple voices. Rob Sean Wilson’s Beat Attitudes (to be provided as a free PDF) offers a collage of sources and influences that open up the force-field of Beat and America transendental sources that Dylan relentlessly draws upon to achieve his own poetic greatness in multiple voices not just his. We will also see Martin Scorsese’s voice-rich documentary No Direction Home and the Dylan-persona movie on the downfall of the American empire, Masked and Anonymous when relevant. We will in effect make links to a range of Dylan works primary and secondary through these assigned readings, which you need to keep up with.
All of the written lyrics for the assigned 10 songs can be found on Bob Dylan’s official site with Columbia Records: https://bobdylan.com/songs/. By searching around on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, you can also access recordings of each of these 10 songs on the web, both from the original Dylan album and in various live performances, unless you prefer to purchase each one of the 10 songs we will study. The instructor will also provide links to the relevant songs for each week on his Spotify site, and also aim to provide relevant YouTube links via weekly Canvas messages to the class.
Required Texts: We will use each of the following required texts.(These books can be purchased from UCSC Bay Tree Bookstore on campus and/or online as well as from online sites from Amazon to Powell Books et al: these five books have also been placed on reserve at McHenry Library on campus.):
1) Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. One (Simon & Schuster).
2) Timothy Hampton, Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work (Zone Books).
3) Richard F. Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters (Harper Collins).
4) Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America (Anchor).
5) Rob Sean Wilson, Beat Attitudes (New Pacific Press). To be provided as free PDF.
*****
Some Suggested Background Readings:
Robert Shelton, No Direction Home; The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (Da Capo Press).
Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man 3: The Art of Bob Dylan (Continuum).
Michael Gray, ed. The Bob Dylan Encylopedia (Continuum).
Kevin Dettmar, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (Cambridge UP).
Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Ecco Press).
Jonathan Cott, ed., Bob Dylan Interviews (Wenner Books).
*********
Research Interests:
Pastoral is one of the oldest, most traditional forms or genres of Western literature as transmitted from Western sources of cultural belief like Theocritus, Hesiod, and Virgil, not to mention the mythopoetic shepherd-tropes of King David... more
Pastoral is one of the oldest, most traditional forms or genres of Western literature as transmitted from Western sources of cultural belief like Theocritus, Hesiod, and Virgil, not to mention the mythopoetic shepherd-tropes of King David and Jesus, and as translated into their own social circumstances by writers from Shakespeare, Raleigh, and Marlowe to Thoreau, Mary Austin, Gary Snyder, Rebecca Solnit et al. As a genre and mode of perception, pastoral has also proved amenable to change, critique, and renewal, as what Lawrence Buell calls “the settler’s pastoral” (as in works like The Tempest or Marvell’s “Bermudas”) flips over into the postcolonial feedback of “the indigene’s pastoral” in works like Aime Césaire’s Une Tempete or Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or Ihimaera’s Whale Rider.
Comprising what Raymond Williams tracks in The Country and the City as a “[world capitalist] structure of feeling,” pastoral allows us to grasp shifting dialectical relations between city wealth and rural labor, urban splendor and hinterland resource, and (at a more imperial-global level), the inter-relation between first world and third and fourth world peripherilization. If the basic ethos of pastoral literature concerns the tensions/ironies between a rural way of living, close to the mandates of nature, and an urban way of living close to the progressive imperatives of civilization, such stable frameworks (as in Richard Brautigan’s mock-agrarian Trout Fishing in America) are wobbling and deforming locally and globally. Pastoral, in this reconfigured world frame, has increasingly become a way to deal with theorizing more “ecocritical” perspectives upon city/ country/ world relations, such that the “back country,” “watersheds” and “ocean commons” are figured in as a necessary part of this “post-pastoral” urban/ rural/ world-space relations.
Comprising what Raymond Williams tracks in The Country and the City as a “[world capitalist] structure of feeling,” pastoral allows us to grasp shifting dialectical relations between city wealth and rural labor, urban splendor and hinterland resource, and (at a more imperial-global level), the inter-relation between first world and third and fourth world peripherilization. If the basic ethos of pastoral literature concerns the tensions/ironies between a rural way of living, close to the mandates of nature, and an urban way of living close to the progressive imperatives of civilization, such stable frameworks (as in Richard Brautigan’s mock-agrarian Trout Fishing in America) are wobbling and deforming locally and globally. Pastoral, in this reconfigured world frame, has increasingly become a way to deal with theorizing more “ecocritical” perspectives upon city/ country/ world relations, such that the “back country,” “watersheds” and “ocean commons” are figured in as a necessary part of this “post-pastoral” urban/ rural/ world-space relations.
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"Rather than offering a complete album-by-album survey of Bob Dylan’s life and work from his first work to his most recent works (as I have tried to do in the past), this senior seminar will attempt to do a more intensive focus on ten... more
"Rather than offering a complete album-by-album survey of Bob Dylan’s life and work from his first work to his most recent works (as I have tried to do in the past), this senior seminar will attempt to do a more intensive focus on ten important works that help to track Dylan’s evolution as a poet working in certain recurring genres (such as protest song, Jeremaic vision, blues or love lyric etc.). Each week one song will form the basis of a reading both in textual detail and in visionary scope, as connected to readings from Dylan himself as well as some important critics and writers (like Eric Lott, Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg) and cultural historians (like Sean Wilentz and Camille Paglia). The goal is to offer a way into Dylan’s whole “world” as poet in tactic and vision, his modes of writing, genres, political-cultural aims, imagination and so on.
This will allow us to achieve insight into the recurring poetic and song genres Dylan uses, the “prophetic” vision and critiques of America he offers in transnational era, the themes and problems his work has evoked and transformed, and his metamorphosis as a poet of tropological power and cultural-political importance from the 1960s until, rather amazingly, his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
To give us a better sense of Dylan’s times and works as well as modes of writing, we will also read his autobiography, Chronicles: Vol. 1. This will help us approach his vision of America and cultural-political tactics, or, simply put, his poetics. To give a sense of his ties to the leftist cultural populist front as well as to the Beat literary movement, we will read Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America. Various readings from Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader will help us to contextualize each song as well as Dylan’s evolution as a poet and musician over the various decades, from the 1960s to the present. We will also see Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home and the Dylan-persona movie Masked and Anonymous when relevant, and make links to a range of Dylan works primary and secondary through the assigned readings."
This will allow us to achieve insight into the recurring poetic and song genres Dylan uses, the “prophetic” vision and critiques of America he offers in transnational era, the themes and problems his work has evoked and transformed, and his metamorphosis as a poet of tropological power and cultural-political importance from the 1960s until, rather amazingly, his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
To give us a better sense of Dylan’s times and works as well as modes of writing, we will also read his autobiography, Chronicles: Vol. 1. This will help us approach his vision of America and cultural-political tactics, or, simply put, his poetics. To give a sense of his ties to the leftist cultural populist front as well as to the Beat literary movement, we will read Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America. Various readings from Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader will help us to contextualize each song as well as Dylan’s evolution as a poet and musician over the various decades, from the 1960s to the present. We will also see Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home and the Dylan-persona movie Masked and Anonymous when relevant, and make links to a range of Dylan works primary and secondary through the assigned readings."
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"This course deals with some reigning models of global/local dialectics, interpreting and situating selected films as examples and challenges to these dominant theoretical frameworks and as sites where the global/local poetics of cultural... more
"This course deals with some reigning models of global/local dialectics, interpreting and situating selected films as examples and challenges to these dominant theoretical frameworks and as sites where the global/local poetics of cultural identity comes into the language of social struggle. As a way to critically frame these global/local considerations in national contexts where globalization is all too often conflated with neo-liberal Americanization, we will deal with space-time reorganization, filmic tactics of representation, and the cultural-political imaginary of geopolitical location in crucial sites in Asia Pacific, especially global cities in the postcolonial Asia/Pacific Rim and Basin sites from Auckland, to Hong Kong, Seoul, Mexico City, and Los Angeles and its catastrophic global ecology; Crucial, finally, to tracing emerging frameworks will be a more planetary“ anthropoetics” befitting Asia-Pacific films and Oceania in the Anthropocene."
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This course (in the UC Santa Cruz Literature Department) studies San Francisco as a literary-cultural image, ecological watershed, and geopolitical region of global/local/national power in selected literature, film, and essays from Gold... more
This course (in the UC Santa Cruz Literature Department) studies San Francisco as a literary-cultural image, ecological watershed, and geopolitical region of global/local/national power in selected literature, film, and essays from Gold Rush myths to the Beat-generated SF Renaissance down to postmodern culture and Silicon Valley. The focus will be on San Francisco not only as space of material accumulation and social formation as a wealth-making “contado,” but also as a zone of visionary imagination, speculative poetics, community invention, class division, and experimental emergence—what we will elaborate as the making of (“dharma-bum quest for”) literary and social “beatitude.” We will study San Francisco as globalizing city and literary-region that extends its periphery as “contado” into the Sierras, the Big Sur, the East and South Bay, as well as outward across the Pacific to sites in Asia and Latin America.
This course by no means provides a linear history of San Francisco, but it will serve as an example-rich study of the tropes, myths, narratives, visions, ethnic communities, and multiple life-styles that this “left-coast city on the far-out edge of the world” has generated from 1850 to the present: representing San Francisco as a space of cultural re-invention, political provocation, and identity-transformation; San Francisco as a material and visionary "edge" where myths of Europe, Asia, and the Americas meet Asia/Pacific and Latin American forces and forge creative energies, literatures, and tactics of renewal and rebirth; San Francisco as a beginning, contact zone, and promise to remake the city, nation, and world.
This course by no means provides a linear history of San Francisco, but it will serve as an example-rich study of the tropes, myths, narratives, visions, ethnic communities, and multiple life-styles that this “left-coast city on the far-out edge of the world” has generated from 1850 to the present: representing San Francisco as a space of cultural re-invention, political provocation, and identity-transformation; San Francisco as a material and visionary "edge" where myths of Europe, Asia, and the Americas meet Asia/Pacific and Latin American forces and forge creative energies, literatures, and tactics of renewal and rebirth; San Francisco as a beginning, contact zone, and promise to remake the city, nation, and world.
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http://www.english.hku.hk/courses/WorldingPacificHKU2011.htm In studying various spatial, temporal, and world-making practices, we will examine the rise of the Pacific Rim as regional idea and fantasy formation: its historical... more
http://www.english.hku.hk/courses/WorldingPacificHKU2011.htm
In studying various spatial, temporal, and world-making practices, we will examine the rise of the Pacific Rim as regional idea and fantasy formation: its historical background, ideological assumptions, and cultural-political manifestations, from the 1970s to the present. Expressive constructions (from works of critical theory to poems, memoirs, novels, and travelogues) will help us to construct, grasp, and critique the Pacific Rim as world region.
This workshop thus examines spatial, temporal, and worlding practices generated around the geo-material reality and shifting figurations of the Pacific Rim as an imagined transnational community: tracking its historical emergence, ideological assumptions, and cultural manifestations. "Other Asias" and "Oceania" will be discussed as "worlding" challenges to the ascendancy of the Pacific Rim as geoimaginary norm. Moving beyond its perilous geographical materiality as geo-tectonic plate and tsunami site, "Pacific Rim" serves to link transnationalizing economies of globalization from Australasia, north to Japan and China, around the Pacific Basin to the coasts of North and South America. All the more so tied to inter-Asia and trans-Pacific flows, sites of concentrated globalization like Hong Kong, Honolulu, and San Francisco become Rim sites expressing these altered transpacific flows and contradictory tensions of cross-border globalization.
In studying various spatial, temporal, and world-making practices, we will examine the rise of the Pacific Rim as regional idea and fantasy formation: its historical background, ideological assumptions, and cultural-political manifestations, from the 1970s to the present. Expressive constructions (from works of critical theory to poems, memoirs, novels, and travelogues) will help us to construct, grasp, and critique the Pacific Rim as world region.
This workshop thus examines spatial, temporal, and worlding practices generated around the geo-material reality and shifting figurations of the Pacific Rim as an imagined transnational community: tracking its historical emergence, ideological assumptions, and cultural manifestations. "Other Asias" and "Oceania" will be discussed as "worlding" challenges to the ascendancy of the Pacific Rim as geoimaginary norm. Moving beyond its perilous geographical materiality as geo-tectonic plate and tsunami site, "Pacific Rim" serves to link transnationalizing economies of globalization from Australasia, north to Japan and China, around the Pacific Basin to the coasts of North and South America. All the more so tied to inter-Asia and trans-Pacific flows, sites of concentrated globalization like Hong Kong, Honolulu, and San Francisco become Rim sites expressing these altered transpacific flows and contradictory tensions of cross-border globalization.
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"While Bob Dylan’s works have been discussed and taught in various approaches from those that stress his musicology to others that stress his protest politics, this course will focus primarily on the poetry and poetics of Dylan’s... more
"While Bob Dylan’s works have been discussed and taught in various approaches from those that stress his musicology to others that stress his protest politics, this course will focus primarily on the poetry and poetics of Dylan’s by-now-substantial canon of works, early, middle, and late. We will do so in a way or reading and interpreting that stresses not only the poetic syntax, various lyric genres, surrealist imagery, and narrative tactics used as well as the more socially expansive dynamics of how he forged his prophetic/visionary imagination."
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http://boundary2.org/2014/11/06/becoming-oceania-emergent-ecopoetics-in-a-planetary-pacific-by-rob-wilson/ The ocean of global-capitalist dynamism remains riddled with antagonisms of political, territorial, and commercial conflict any... more
http://boundary2.org/2014/11/06/becoming-oceania-emergent-ecopoetics-in-a-planetary-pacific-by-rob-wilson/
The ocean of global-capitalist dynamism remains riddled with antagonisms of political, territorial, and commercial conflict any version of the “Pacific Rim” needs to conjure. In an environmental sense as well, we all but forget the ocean while dwelling in an urban life-world that depends for its material well-being on, from, and across the ocean. As in long-standing Romantic tropes, the ocean becomes alien presence of elemental sublimity, at once threat and source of curative powers, as in deep-sea microbes that eat up the potent greenhouse gas, methane. This ocean of alien obliviousness can flip into site of waste and remainder, from oil spills to radioactive contaminants, as the waters become filled with the heaviness of our military history and technological blunder. From the Bikini atoll atomic testing to the latest nuclear disaster in Fukushima Japan, we threaten not just the water and air of locality but the Pacific as planetary bioregion. The tsunami reminded Pacific dwellers from Sendai in coastal Eastern Japan to Santa Cruz in Northern California that the Pacific Rim is not just discourse or trope, it is also a geologically interactive bioregion. Figurations of oceanic interconnection could move us towards a vision of “Becoming “Oceania” projected as a site of transpacific and transnational solidarity. Transpacific ecopoetics (in writers like Epeli Hau’ofa, Juliana Spahr, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Craig Santos-Perez) can push towards figurations of a Pacific connected to planetary belonging, ecological confederation, and trans-racial solidarity.
The ocean of global-capitalist dynamism remains riddled with antagonisms of political, territorial, and commercial conflict any version of the “Pacific Rim” needs to conjure. In an environmental sense as well, we all but forget the ocean while dwelling in an urban life-world that depends for its material well-being on, from, and across the ocean. As in long-standing Romantic tropes, the ocean becomes alien presence of elemental sublimity, at once threat and source of curative powers, as in deep-sea microbes that eat up the potent greenhouse gas, methane. This ocean of alien obliviousness can flip into site of waste and remainder, from oil spills to radioactive contaminants, as the waters become filled with the heaviness of our military history and technological blunder. From the Bikini atoll atomic testing to the latest nuclear disaster in Fukushima Japan, we threaten not just the water and air of locality but the Pacific as planetary bioregion. The tsunami reminded Pacific dwellers from Sendai in coastal Eastern Japan to Santa Cruz in Northern California that the Pacific Rim is not just discourse or trope, it is also a geologically interactive bioregion. Figurations of oceanic interconnection could move us towards a vision of “Becoming “Oceania” projected as a site of transpacific and transnational solidarity. Transpacific ecopoetics (in writers like Epeli Hau’ofa, Juliana Spahr, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Craig Santos-Perez) can push towards figurations of a Pacific connected to planetary belonging, ecological confederation, and trans-racial solidarity.
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Talk at Cultural Studies Center Twentieth Anniversary, October 21, 2008: Worlding along lines of collective assemblage remained mysteriously gerundive, a world-forming verb more than a pregiven noun, suggesting various actions or tactics... more
Talk at Cultural Studies Center Twentieth Anniversary, October 21, 2008: Worlding along lines of collective assemblage remained mysteriously gerundive, a world-forming verb more than a pregiven noun, suggesting various actions or tactics aimed to counter ‘globality achieved.’ Worlding remained under-specified and a bit untranslated (not just Nancy’s word “mondialisation” though close as meaning “world-forming” [117], nor that most Germanically freighted noun-become-verb “welten.” But worlding was materialized and troped in strange new ways to keep it multiple and emergent, a not fully identified critical object; meaning a projection of body, community, and place aiming to keep open the present for the future.
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Displaced and nomadic at the core, minority literature is a mongrel mixture of roots and wings traced across huge and multilingual spaces, as I will discuss, like the trans-Pacific. Jessica Hagedorn: “I’m not interested in just writing... more
Displaced and nomadic at the core, minority literature is a mongrel mixture of roots and wings traced across huge and multilingual spaces, as I will discuss, like the trans-Pacific. Jessica Hagedorn: “I’m not interested in just writing ‘an American novel.’... Though I’ve been living in America for 30 years now, my roots remain elsewhere... back there [in the Philippines]." More so than British English today, “American English” is a global language, a globalizing language expanding the territory of global capital and of Americanization, to be sure, but also being “deterritorialized” at multiple points, which is to say it is worked over and transformed daily by minor expression, “necessarily worked upon by all the minorities of the world.” American English is becoming Konglish and Singlish and Ebonics and Hawaiian Creole English, amplifying its variations and mongrel mixtures at the transnational and local interface. In this process, minority literature may best articulate this “borderlands” interface, forging this language where the past and the future mix and form something new.
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Rob Wilson: Interview with Galway Kinnell, American poet, on the comparative state of writing in Hawaii, USA, and the world: "To have friends who are poets is a great pleasure. It's also very useful. You can get help, criticism. It's... more
Rob Wilson: Interview with Galway Kinnell, American poet, on the comparative state of writing in Hawaii, USA, and the world: "To have friends who are poets is a great pleasure. It's also very useful. You can get help, criticism. It's easy to find a literary community almost anywhere, these days. When Louis Simpson was here, we two had a little literary community at least during the last month that he was here. There are people who live here with whom I can talk about literature. Rob Wilson is one. I haven't really felt deprived in that way. I have a correspondence with writers, and there have also been visiting writers have come for three or four days. I saw William Stafford and josef Brodsky more continuously during their visits here than ever before...."
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"Orientation and Asian Literature: An Interview with Rob Wilson [by C. Derick Varn]." Chinese translation. Review of English and American Literature [ROC English and American Literatue Association]. Vol. 28 (Summer, 2016): 135-144.
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“When asked what motivated him to pursue a career in academia and what influenced his interest in literature, Rob Wilson says, “from early high school I felt I had an aptitude for poetry and understanding how poetic language, poetic form,... more
“When asked what motivated him to pursue a career in academia and what influenced his interest in literature, Rob Wilson says, “from early high school I felt I had an aptitude for poetry and understanding how poetic language, poetic form, and poets worked...and when I got interested in something— like poets such as Dylan Thomas or Bob Dylan or Wallace Stevens—if I didn’t understand something, I wanted to find out more about it so I would read critical approaches to them or biographies... I spent time in the library, so I was definitely interested in it and I felt I had an aptitude—like I get it, you know?” After completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Connecticut, Wilson attended Boston University for a short time before being admitted to UC Berkeley as an out of state student in English. It was at UC Berkeley that he made the acquaintance of inspirational teachers who acknowledged his interests and encouraged him to pursue a PhD. Of his time at Berkeley, Wilson says, “I saw a profession that really looked like I could do this, I want to do this...I got in to UC Berkeley and so I stuck with it...and it was a place I could channel philosophical theological interests through literature—so it kind of answered some inner needs, and if I got a job I would have something pragmatic to make a living by.”
Rob Wilson did get a job teaching literature and writing, from composition to creative writing, and for some years taught at the University of Hawaii. Wilson did get a job, and for some years taught at the University of Hawaii. It was at his daughter’s graduation from UCSC that Wilson made connections with faculty from the literature department. In 2000, he began teaching at UCSC. It was his move back to California that reignited his interest in Beat literature, an interest he feels may not have been explored had he remained in Hawaii. Of his transition back to California and his years of being here since spring of 2001, Wilson says, “All of this interest in Beat and San Francisco I wouldn’t have developed in Hawaii. I mean, I taught Dharma Bums over and over among other stuff, but I just had to be here to reconnect to San Francisco and the West Coast and the Beat tradition as it built up here and got transformed—and I kind of stay in touch with Bay Area writers. So it’s opened up my world in terms of what I had ties to in the 1970s, but then I took it to a higher level.” “
Rob Wilson did get a job teaching literature and writing, from composition to creative writing, and for some years taught at the University of Hawaii. Wilson did get a job, and for some years taught at the University of Hawaii. It was at his daughter’s graduation from UCSC that Wilson made connections with faculty from the literature department. In 2000, he began teaching at UCSC. It was his move back to California that reignited his interest in Beat literature, an interest he feels may not have been explored had he remained in Hawaii. Of his transition back to California and his years of being here since spring of 2001, Wilson says, “All of this interest in Beat and San Francisco I wouldn’t have developed in Hawaii. I mean, I taught Dharma Bums over and over among other stuff, but I just had to be here to reconnect to San Francisco and the West Coast and the Beat tradition as it built up here and got transformed—and I kind of stay in touch with Bay Area writers. So it’s opened up my world in terms of what I had ties to in the 1970s, but then I took it to a higher level.” “
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American Literature, Religion, Cultural History, American Studies, Comparative Literature, and 8 moreGlobalization, Literature, Critical Pedagogy, Poetry, Beat Studies, Borderlands Studies, Cultural Studies and Literatures, and Multilingual Studies, Identity Studies, Border identities, hybridity, multilingualism, poetry, bilingual poetry, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, globalization studies, third culture kids
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American poetry is theorized and remains at once over-inflated (the sublime) and patronized (the irrelevant) as a contemporary language-genre. Poetry is both levelled into journalese or historical artifact and exalted into a tropological... more
American poetry is theorized and remains at once over-inflated (the sublime) and patronized (the irrelevant) as a contemporary language-genre. Poetry is both levelled into journalese or historical artifact and exalted into a tropological enclave of political
imagining and witness or the severest ideological de-creation...Imaginary audiences would bridge the traumatic kernels of social space: the model here is Whitman identifying with and speaking as the country in the act of symbolic construction. Small coalitions, resistant regions, local collectives do emerge: against the impossible unity or will to globalization of 'en masse.'
imagining and witness or the severest ideological de-creation...Imaginary audiences would bridge the traumatic kernels of social space: the model here is Whitman identifying with and speaking as the country in the act of symbolic construction. Small coalitions, resistant regions, local collectives do emerge: against the impossible unity or will to globalization of 'en masse.'
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"Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the center toward X."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.
Once there were ‘neighborhoods,’ like Kaimuki.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.
Once there were ‘neighborhoods,’ like Kaimuki.
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"As the Day" (Korea-based poem)
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Includes documents, letters, and poetics statements on the founding of the Berkeley Poetry Revew in 1974 as well as poems by Rob Sean Wilson, including "Because the Snow Which Falls" (including a Chinese translation by Tee Kim Tong) and... more
Includes documents, letters, and poetics statements on the founding of the Berkeley Poetry Revew in 1974 as well as poems by Rob Sean Wilson, including "Because the Snow Which Falls" (including a Chinese translation by Tee Kim Tong) and ""Naugatuck River Flow" & poems by Robert Hass, John Ashbery, Linda Norton, Aaron Shurin, Charles Bernstein, Angel Dominguez et al: https://www.scribd.com/document/321341859/Berkeley-Poetry-Review-43
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These are sections of serial poem that deals with the islands of Hawai'i, 158 days by sailing ship from New Haven where the ABCFM (American missionaries) set sail for purposes of Christian conversion, and, in their wake, helped to drag... more
These are sections of serial poem that deals with the islands of Hawai'i, 158 days by sailing ship from New Haven where the ABCFM (American missionaries) set sail for purposes of Christian conversion, and, in their wake, helped to drag the indgenous belief systems and ecology into the industrial-capitalist transformations we now call the Anthropocene. It takes off from the Sandwich Islands memoir of the leading missionary figure, Hiram Bingham, and crosses the language back from the colonial era and forward into postmodern settler contexts: it is called "Islands, 158 Days from New Haven."
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http://www.bekapital.com/#!Holy-Red-River-Flow/c1ze1/55b697510cf228fd5eba25c0 [writing on, and within, this world capitalist river-- "red"] ...Red river gushing up gull-like at the Pacific estuary sails away incarnadine flows to... more
http://www.bekapital.com/#!Holy-Red-River-Flow/c1ze1/55b697510cf228fd5eba25c0
[writing on, and within, this world capitalist river-- "red"]
...Red river gushing up gull-like at the Pacific estuary sails away incarnadine
flows to the red skies over China, holy red river flow in me
postindustrial rust heaps flow red to shore-lines of Nanjing, Connecticut
over the red scare of Virgil speaking to Dante across the sin river
but Jesus speaks sutras
beaten down in red signs
Writing down years writing down the red fear
by the Naugatuck River greeny flow of the heart attack
machines years and years, your red banner flow
homeland is waning astray, what flow of worker blood
do you wanhope hope to charge by the Chase Brass & Copper mills
gone mill miming channel to express the deeper red river flow
to China, Wyoming, and Bangladesh...
[writing on, and within, this world capitalist river-- "red"]
...Red river gushing up gull-like at the Pacific estuary sails away incarnadine
flows to the red skies over China, holy red river flow in me
postindustrial rust heaps flow red to shore-lines of Nanjing, Connecticut
over the red scare of Virgil speaking to Dante across the sin river
but Jesus speaks sutras
beaten down in red signs
Writing down years writing down the red fear
by the Naugatuck River greeny flow of the heart attack
machines years and years, your red banner flow
homeland is waning astray, what flow of worker blood
do you wanhope hope to charge by the Chase Brass & Copper mills
gone mill miming channel to express the deeper red river flow
to China, Wyoming, and Bangladesh...
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By Rob Wilson, “expert in enterprise workflow conversions.” Can the corporate highway be replaced by a rainbow, say, or just downsized? In charge of workflow automation in Silicon Valley Rob works in fidelity investments and relays... more
By Rob Wilson, “expert in enterprise workflow conversions.”
Can the corporate highway be replaced by a rainbow, say, or just
downsized? In charge of workflow automation in Silicon Valley
Rob works in fidelity investments and
relays the unique challenge associated with
down-sizing conversions across the campus....
Can the corporate highway be replaced by a rainbow, say, or just
downsized? In charge of workflow automation in Silicon Valley
Rob works in fidelity investments and
relays the unique challenge associated with
down-sizing conversions across the campus....
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Four or five city firework displays are shooting off across Anaheim heavens Fourth of July offering as if Our Lady of Guadalupe writhes from red fumes and blue smoke of I-5, Bless You Bless You Orange County bless you for your... more
Four or five city firework displays are shooting off
across Anaheim heavens Fourth of July offering as
if Our Lady of Guadalupe writhes from red fumes
and blue smoke of I-5, Bless You Bless You
Orange County bless you for your patriotism
your neoliberal prayers, which rise again like
exploding shopping malls desert heats blown tires...
across Anaheim heavens Fourth of July offering as
if Our Lady of Guadalupe writhes from red fumes
and blue smoke of I-5, Bless You Bless You
Orange County bless you for your patriotism
your neoliberal prayers, which rise again like
exploding shopping malls desert heats blown tires...
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For a month now over the city by the pyramid banks/ Your hand in mine we walk out into the renovated Fillmore./ But do not sing those thin blue songs tonight by the taco counter;/ The ravens of the soul stand ever-watch on the Turk street... more
For a month now over the city by the pyramid banks/
Your hand in mine we walk out into the renovated Fillmore./
But do not sing those thin blue songs tonight by the taco counter;/ The ravens of the soul stand ever-watch on the Turk street corner/ Without reason or time they come and ask for more pimp flesh,/ Never ask the same way, just freak out sorry soul into sad-sack/ Refrains, amid an elite army of thousands marching by the Peace Pagoda....
Your hand in mine we walk out into the renovated Fillmore./
But do not sing those thin blue songs tonight by the taco counter;/ The ravens of the soul stand ever-watch on the Turk street corner/ Without reason or time they come and ask for more pimp flesh,/ Never ask the same way, just freak out sorry soul into sad-sack/ Refrains, amid an elite army of thousands marching by the Peace Pagoda....
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Those condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting/ dank corners of Powell with wooly dogs, scrawled pleas, begging bowls/ crying Mercy, Compassion, Spare Change to cosmopolis flow/ over which the Nordstrom tower hangs its 200 garden... more
Those condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting/
dank corners of Powell with wooly dogs, scrawled pleas, begging bowls/ crying Mercy, Compassion, Spare Change to cosmopolis flow/ over which the Nordstrom tower hangs its 200 garden of wears...
dank corners of Powell with wooly dogs, scrawled pleas, begging bowls/ crying Mercy, Compassion, Spare Change to cosmopolis flow/ over which the Nordstrom tower hangs its 200 garden of wears...
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poetry...american culture...cold war ideology...love and death...beatitude quest (with thanks to Jake J. Thomas for designing it, to David Watson for believing in me as a poet-scholar, to Jack Kerouac, Joan Baez, Gerard Manley Hopkins,... more
poetry...american culture...cold war ideology...love and death...beatitude quest (with thanks to Jake J. Thomas for designing it, to David Watson for believing in me as a poet-scholar, to Jack Kerouac, Joan Baez, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Susan Schultz, Juliana Spahr, St. Francis of Asissi, Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers, the American jukebox, AM radio, & Saint Thomas Grammar School et al for inspiring it)...
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Poetics and San Francisco
The city called Balzac fumed in a small space:/ "I took the window which dominates Paris, which I mean to dominate." ...
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Creative Writing, Critical Theory, American Literature, History, Cultural Studies, and 13 moreGender Studies, Philosophy, Art History, Literature, Coffee, Urban Studies, Contemporary Poetry, Visual Arts, Social and Cultural Capital, Honoré de Balzac, Contemporary American Poetry, Paris, and Philosophy and Sociology of Human/animal Relations
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Essay on Norman Hindley's poetry, :CONFESSIONS FROM MOLOKAI: THE MALE IMAGINATION in NORMAN HINDLEY'S WINTER EEL" by Rob Wilson, pp. 80-94.
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“Poetry [as in these spirit-laden multi-lingual works by Steven Edwin Winduo from Papua New Guinea and Richard Hamasaki alias Red Flea from Hawai’i et al] now thrives and functions as an important genre in the emergence of the... more
“Poetry [as in these spirit-laden multi-lingual works by Steven Edwin Winduo from Papua New Guinea and Richard Hamasaki alias Red Flea from Hawai’i et al] now thrives and functions as an important genre in the emergence of the postcolonial Pacific in all its multilingual expressiveness; as such, all three of these works function to carry the multi-sited emergence of cultural poetics forward into the global/local future across a rearticulated Oceania.”
Research Interests:
Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, Pacific Island Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Poetry, and 6 moreAsia Pacific Region, Contemporary Poetry, Pidgin and Creole Languages, Postcolonial theory (Cultural Theory), Multilingual Studies, Identity Studies, Border identities, hybridity, multilingualism, poetry, bilingual poetry, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, globalization studies, third culture kids, and Oceania
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http://www.nbol-19.org/view_doc.php?index=69 "This is a book about becoming. With the kind of courage that can only be nurtured by extensive scholarship, Rob Wilson challenges one of the most profound intellectual questions in human... more
http://www.nbol-19.org/view_doc.php?index=69
"This is a book about becoming. With the kind of courage that can only be nurtured by extensive scholarship, Rob Wilson challenges one of the most profound intellectual questions in human behavior. He takes on the exploration of life-altering change. In particular he focuses on religious conversion and amplifies such facets of change as deconversion, counter- conversion and rebirth, in short the converging, diverging and cross-cutting processes of becoming..."
"This is a book about becoming. With the kind of courage that can only be nurtured by extensive scholarship, Rob Wilson challenges one of the most profound intellectual questions in human behavior. He takes on the exploration of life-altering change. In particular he focuses on religious conversion and amplifies such facets of change as deconversion, counter- conversion and rebirth, in short the converging, diverging and cross-cutting processes of becoming..."