Rebellion

bulletin 2018

rebellion Society of Comparative Literature, A.A.H.K.U.S.U., Session 2017-2018

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Content P. 5 Preface

Prof. Nicole Huang

P. 8 Performing Contradictions Among Japanese Bad Girls

Dr. Yau Ching

P. 22 叛逆的可能與不可能：身體作為關鍵

P. 27 Shailja Patel and Rafeef Ziadah’s Performance Poetry and Activism: Theorising Praxis

駱頴佳

Dr. Lauren Clark

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P. 44 Comparative Literature Festival 2018: Exhibition: “Rebellion�

Society of Comparative Literature, A.A.H.K.U.S.U., Session 2017-2018

P. 49 Book Review: To Kill a Mockingbird

P. 56 Film Review: Soul Mate

Sarbjot Kaur

Harmony Yuen

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Preface Professor Nicole Huang Professor Nicole Huang received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Los

Angeles, and taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison for 17 years before joining the University of Hong Kong in 2017.

Trained as a literary scholar, she published widely on literary

and visual manifestations of human agencies through war and

political turmoil. In recent years, her research has focused on

visual and auditory culture of contemporary China. At HKU, Professor Huang teaches a range of courses in literature, film, media culture, and critical theory.

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It has been over a year since I formally joined the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. I have witnessed how the Society of Comparative Literature makes it active presence felt on this beautiful campus. Some of the most vocal members of the Society showed up in my first-year class required for majors last Spring; and I look forward to welcoming another group of talented first-year students to my class this coming Spring. The Society changes its leadership team each year, but the imperative to engage the most pressing issues facing all of us today and to engage each other as fellow sojourners persists.

After two decades working in the field of global higher education, I am struck year after year by the fact that we the professors continue to age but the students who sit in front of us always remain the same age, with the same level of energy, enthusiasm, and the resolution to forge forward.

“Rebellion” clearly belongs in the dictionary of the young people in the community of Comparative Literature. Like last year’s theme of “Gaze,” this year’s motif appears to be another timely intervention.

It is an age-old concept. The history of individual rebellion against established social, political, and cultural institutions is long, varied, and complex. The three authors who wrote for this issue each offers a take on the broad concept from his or her unique linguistic and cultural context. The essay on a Kenyan performance poet of Indian ancestry discusses poetry as a form of political activism. The piece on a female juvenile correctional facility in Japan connects girlhood with female sexuality and the politics of self-expression.

The issue also includes a brief theoretical meditation that pictures the human body as a key medium of rebellion. “Rebellion” takes on different shapes, sounds, colors, and shades. But there is one

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thing that connects all the essays together, that is, the insistence on the need to sharpen our analytical skills along with a sensitivity to different cultures and traditions. Comparative Literature as a discipline began as a rebellion and will continue to be renewed as we charge fresh energy and meanings into new and old concepts.

This issue of Bulletin then is evident of the Society’s continuing efforts at channeling youthful energy and enthusiasm into critical issues concerning all of us today. I urge you to read on.

Professor Nicole Huang Chairperson of the Department of Comparative Literature

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PERFORMING CONTRADICTIONS AMONG JAPANESE BAD GIRLS1 Dr. Yau Ching Dr. Yau Ching received her BA in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong, MA in Media Studies from The New School for Social Research, PhD in Media Arts from Royal Holloway College, University of London, and studied Studio Art at Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Having taught Cultural Studies at Lingnan University for nine years, she is currently Adjunct Professor at Chinese University and Honorary Professor at University of Hong Kong.

Her books include As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender In Mainland China and Hong Kong, Filming Margins: Tang Shu Shuen, a Forgotten Hong Kong Woman Director, Sexing Shadows: a study of representation of gender and sexuality in Hong Kong cinema, The Impossible Home, among others. She is also an independent film/videomaker who has made more than fourteen films and videos.

1 This is an excerpt from the following book chapter, particularly done for this purpose: Yau Ching, “Performing Contradictions, Performing Bad-Girlness in Japan.�

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In 2002 I was an artist-in-residence in Sapporo, Japan for three months. I used that opportunity to ask if it could be arranged for me to teach a series of media workshops in a female juvenile correctional facility there (which registers itself as a child welfare institute), and create artwork together with the girls there. This short essay is an excerpt of a longer paper which seeks to articulate some thoughts gathered from this experience.

Childhood as Trope When you display works that show children’s faces at exhibitions in Japan, 1. Please notify us in advance.

2. Use the expression “Work(s) produced in full cooperation with children” and never use the word “institution”...2 I hope to be able to help my mother, but I worry if I’ll be able to do that. I want to get over my emotional dependence and go out into society. Here at 16, I’m doing my best to make that happen.3 I hope to be self-reliant. I want to be able to stand my own feet, to find my own way and choose things by myself. That is the type of person I want to be.4 2 “Important Guidelines to be Observed,” handed to me at the reform facility in Japan regarding my right to exhibit works produced by the participants in the workshops.

3 From one of H’s video letters.

4 From one of C’s video letters.

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Although the age group of the girls in my workshops ranged between 14 and 18, the institute reminded me repetitively that I should address them as “children,” as seen in the instructions given to me, quoted above. However, most of the girls I have encountered in these situations display a greater maturity than many young women I have met outside these institutions in the same society. As seen in the second quote taken from one of H’s video letters, many of these young women in detention yearn to be independent, and to be seen as grown up, so that they could help and care for the people around them. While the girls resist their being confined in the institution of childhood (to justify their being under “care”), the use of these reform facilities to (re)establish childhood as a stable and “safe” institution in Japan could be seen as a way to tighten statist control over young bodies, denying them their own rights in defining their gender and sexuality and individualizing their process of growing up.5 In the overall paradigm of Euro-American modernity, current panics about youthful disruption are often mixed with nostalgia for the previous generations, so that “youth” is simultaneously a metaphor for renovation and progress on the one hand, and for turmoil and social crisis on the other. In the era of the globalizing first world that comes with a third world inside, widespread economic uncertainty, unemployment, and decreased public services have drastic ally affected minority communities, including children and teenagers. Norma Field (1995:51-71) argues that the cultural construction of childhood is rapidly disappearing in Japan, 5 See for example, Shaheen and Spence (2002) for using the argument of childhood as a site for “innocence, curiosity and energy” to advocate for parents “taking charge”, in the name of “protection”. Discussion on the ideological constuct of childhood in the Euro-American context could be found in Holland (2004), Jenkins (1998),among many. For moral panic towards the “youth crisis”, see Davis (1999) for example.

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due to the logic of ceaseless production that becomes endless hours of schooling and homework in the educational system. The emphasis on discipline and control in the workplace also translates into group bullying which further contributes to the school-refusal syndrome among teenagers. According to Field, it is the logic of global capitalism, mediated by the nation-state, implemented by the schools, articulated with certain historical values and practices, and legitimized by notions of traditional culture that propels the contemporary loss of childhood in Japan. He positions the work ethic and the need for social conformity programmed by the logic of global capitalism as the binary opposite of the creative, exploratory play associated with “modern childhood.” Kotani (2004: 38-9) criticized the impact of materialist capitalism on youth in his moment of nostalgia for the 60s generation who advocated for social change, and characterized the Japanese youth today as “passive politically and socially” and “bound by a sense of resignation” (38-9). However, what is “modern childhood” if not also a culturally and historically-specific construct which helps to regulate and perpetuate the supposed adult work ethic of the modern man, who earns and consumes in order to keep his child from laboring while simultaneously training her/him to become a dependent (“passive”) consumer? I have found that it is precisely in the teenagers’ “deviant” relationship to global capital and the ideological and legal operations of their nation-state that I’ve seen most spontaneous “play” at work, in ways that they have reworked the binary opposition of work versus play, challenged the necessity for egalitarian love in sex, and explored new forms of human bonding not defined by marriage and statist, reproductive-oriented sex.

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Growing up enmeshed in global capital, young people today nurture, internalize, and express an intimate relationship to material and consumer culture, forming an integral part of their identities that are constantly informed and produced by a nation’s capitalist development but yet might contradict and challenge the same nation’s self-image of moral acceptability. The overarching moral imperative of reading young people as inherently victims of material culture renders it impossible to register young women’s potentiality in using their bodies and their access to material culture to realize their subjectivity and reconstitute their sexualities through localizing and individualizing forces of global capital, which could also be read as forms of resistance against its homogenizing forces.

Embodying Popular Culture Forms of behavior associated with notions of deviance are often used to justify punishment by the shaming discourse and other forms of exclusion. When I asked the girls in Hokkaido if they liked to sing or dance, the girls all started to tease one girl H, whom I found out later had a reputation of wanting to dance all the time, despite the fact that, according to the head of the institute there, her previous school expelled her “because she danced too much.”

So one day I brought in H’s favorite CD, the very popular, all-girls performing group Morning Musume’s Shabon Dama and asked her to dance for the camera. The way that H dances contrasts sharply with the representation of the female body as marketed by the teen music industry. In the Shabon Dama music video, the girls from Morning Musume are dressed up in hyper-feminine clothes, as sexualized, desirable objects to be consumed, while at the same

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time, they slowly turn their bodies towards the audience in a rather aloof and detached manner, to convey a sense of inaccessibility, which of course further commodifies them as objects of desire. H knew this video by heart. Her own dance, in contrast, reconfigures the power dynamics of the song in such a way that her young gendered body manifests a forcefulness and a form of body heat that is rather out of control while at the same time quite autonomous and individualized. While the Morning Musume girls waver between being inaccessible and energetic, H fully inhabits the lyrics’ potential in being dominant and submissive at the same time, in knowing, announcing and in fact demanding her desire to be desired. This combination of out-of-controlness and autonomy constitutes a kind of teenage female sexuality that not only defies normative femininity but also contradicts––talks back to her gym uniform, one of the tools originally used to regulate and manage the teenage body within the educational and state apparatus (McVeigh 2000). The playing, performing, and body management seen in H’s dance could be seen as forms of resistance configured by teen culture of East Asia today against the omnipresent official gaze (seken), as more “active” versions of the seemingly more “passive” ones often noted by scholars (McVeigh 2000:43-4, 2002:185-202), including tobokeru (pretending not to know/feigning ignorance), “rudeness,” speaking without sounds, lack of motivation and/or simply absence. Seen in this light, is the active expression of the desire to be desired among young women in these societies an act to be punished after all, when these globalized capitalist societies advocate and welcome such positions in the form of material consumption but would criminalize other forms of expression?

You’re the one I love I’ve never been in doubt

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but I’m a girl, O girl he always controls my emotions I said I liked you from the bottom of my heart I’ll do everything for you Tell me if I was wrong ‘Cmon, c’mon, please I’m talking to you Cut off the power You know that I liked you and you asked me out, right?

You like me!!!

Yes, hold me tight. Hold me tight.6 In devising their own forms of resistance and inventing ways to express their subjectivity, the outcast girls with whom I worked use the rituals of singing and dancing, of consuming, internalizing, and/or transforming popular and material culture to manage a kind of playfulness and spontaneous expression to counterbalance the puritanical and capitalist work ethic that is imposed on them.

Reform facilities work them like crazy: one of my biggest problems in these workshops was to fight for time. The teachers/workers there constantly told me not to give them “too much homework” because their schedules were already totally packed everyday; they wouldn’t have more than ten minutes per day to do any sound or video recording. The kind of play that the girls invented by appropriating the language of pop and material culture could be seen as a kind of repetitive yet creative, consumerist but 6 Lyrics from “Shabon Dama (Soap Bubbles)” sung by Morning Musume.

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non-utilitarian, emotional and physical work they were performing on themselves and on others to internalize and negotiate with the logic of globalized nationalist capitalist economy, whose ideological structure the educational system and the juvenile justice system both serve as socializing agents to rationalize, normalize, and manage. In this light, bodily acts like compulsive dancing and singing could be seen as forms of resistance in which the girls work to transform themselves playfully into consummable objects in order to gain stronger consuming power in a hegemonic material economy.

Non-Normative Genders Given how the ideological forces of normative hetero-femininity and centralizing institutions of marriage have been directed to serve the intertwined statist, nationalist, and capitalist paradigm, it would be impossible for gendered subjects to embody, expose, challenge, and/or defy the capitalist nation-state without touching the socialization of femininity itself. Female offenders have been traditionally represented as either lacking in femininity (“masculine in appearance”) or having too much of it (“attention seeking or promiscuous”) (Worrall 1999: 38). In Hokkaido, when I asked the girls to give me a tour of the facility, they showed me the rooms where they were taught cooking, sweing, tea ceremony, and pottery, again mostly activities that seek to (re)socialize/heterosexualize them into modes of normative femininity. But when I told them on the first day I got there how I failed all my home economics subjects in high school, they were all jumping up and down, eager to tell me they also had the same experiences. In contrast to the ways the system sets out to demarcate the girls into a class of delinquents (supposedly distinct from a university professor like

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myself), I was constantly reminded in my experience that we shared very similarpositions of adolescents having to fight traumatic and at times impossible battles with social control, especially in the forms of genderization and normative sexualization.

One of the exercises in my workshops was to write a series of short video letters to themselves five years from now, describing their current selves to an imaginary future self. One 15-year old participant, C, recalled in her video letter how she wished she had “toughed it out” by not fighting with her previous teacher, partly resulting in her being incarcerated. In another video she made when I asked her to talk about anime and/or manga characters she liked, she said she liked Metal Gear Solid because there was this character “Snake” who was a good fighter: It’s exciting. Anyway, fighting in the game, killing people––but it isn’t killing; it’s about the fighting. I’d like to be strong. I don’t like being weak. I want to grow stronger and stronger, to become “cool girl” (flexing her arm muscles in front of her camera).

When asked whom she wanted to fight, C said “bad people.”

“Are they here in this facility?” I asked. C smiled and said she couldn’t say more. When the girls took pictures of each other in the workshop, they were all eager to show each other (and to me) how cute and yet also how tough they were, images of themselves that conform to and yet simultaneously upset stereotypes of feminine adolescence in Japan: the kawaii, happy, healthy but gentle and submissive young women often marketed by mainstream media.

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Representation of Self-Injury C shows her wounds on the wrists and tells the camera that this is how she has hurt herself; H also has a scar on her wrist; M shows “konjo-yaki” scar, a kind of injury made to prove one’s toughness, often under peer pressure like in gang situation. C says with a straight face, rolls up her sleeve, then puts her wrist in close-up to the camera: Look at this. (shows a scar on her wrist) Do you remember this? I made these marks (on arm) with the desk, etc. Many teachers told me not to hurt myself like that. But actually at first, I read a book called Life. Watching my blood running and enduring it, I thought “If I can do this, then I could endure a lot of things.” Now that I can’t cut my wrists here, I vomit instead. If I can’t do anything for myself, then I can’t endure anything.7 H said: I hope this scar will go away by the time I reach 22 (shows scar on wrist). Hopefully, I’ll be happy. I hope I’ll be able to remember to care for people, and live that way in society.8 Through a deliberate showing of these acts of self-injury that talks back both to the confessional television aesthetics and the dominant shaming discourse, these videos seek to upset conventions of normative femininity, adolescence, and social normalcy, seek to build a community of abject subjects, and in fact abjectify any viewers assumed normal or not, thus perhaps creating major discomfort in the viewer who assumes him/herself to be 7 from one of C’s video letters.

8 from one of H’s video letters.

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normal. The sense of normative fear and shame around women’s acts of self-injury echoes that of shame and caution conveyed by narratives of women who have had experiences of self-injury in the US (e.g. Hyman 1999): “Some women are too ashamed even to tell therapists that they repeatedly, secretly injure themselves at home and at work. Self-injury appears to be the most taboo subject to talk about, the last secret a woman is willing to disclose.” (23) “I think that would freak somebody out. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t tell people.” (29) In these narratives, the sense of shame and stigmatization seems to be related to a sense of shame and stigmatization that is normatively associated with sexual pleasure of women and/or children, and also the interconnectedness of pleasure and pain in sex (35-37): For other women who, like Jane, were sexually abused as children, sex itself can offer ways of being injured and self-injury can bring sexual pleasure. Because sexual abuse can arouse a child even while causing pain, sexual arousal and pain can become intertwined and remain so in adulthood.

Grounded in classical feminist ideals of egalitarian sex, Hyman implicitly positions these women as abject because these women, constructed by their childhood experiences of sexual abuse, seek out unequal power relations that bring them pain and also pleasure in their sexual experiences. This reading and contextualization of the narratives explains and reinforces the shame and stigmatization women living with self-injury experience.

Through the narratives of the girls in Japan, I have been exposed to a form of self-representation that suggests a rather

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different relationship to pain and injury, and to shame and sex, similar to forms of “performance of pain and injury” that Chris Berry (1999) has discussed in relation to the Taiwanese film Viva L’Amour. Berry relates this to a formation of subjectivity that “enables and demands a particular kind of spectatorial relationship” (1999:158) related to the Japanese affective term amae, close to “the desire to be indulged.” As Berry noted, amae is similar in structure to narcissism but amae is seen as a positive quality in Japan whereas narcissism is seen as negative and regressive in Freudian psychoanalysis. Drawing from these readings, could the videos made by the incarcerated girls in my workshops be seen in a way that viewers, instead of being normalized as in the context of religious confession or mainstream talk shows, are assumed participants in the collective wounding and indulgence of the abjectified self, so through the girls’ acts of self-disclosure and performance, the audience is also placed in the position of the abject, thus allowing a new interpersonal bridge between the abjectified subject and the social collectivity to be reconstituted?

Rather than putting herself in the position of the victim––a deviant self who has problems, who has been exploited, abused and needs to be healed, corrected or rescued - C offers a social critique of hetero-normativity in her society right after she shows you her marks of self-injury: “I can’t stand to see how men get close to women to talk to them; men touching women when they hand you things etc.” Self-injury in this case could be read as an affirmative act that enables the teenager to formulate a critical relationship to the society around and within her: “I can do this, then I could endure a lot of things.” “I cannot sit around doing nothing.” Making one’s body “malfunction” by throwing up or slitting one’s wrist, according to C, could be seen as a sign of showing one’s strength,

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being able to stay sensitive to the world around her, the proof of one’s being alive, to counterbalance the forces of complacency in the workaholic, capitalist, and material culture which put teen idols and teenagers to sleep constantly.

Conclusion Young women today often find themselves punished for acts and behaviors in which they seek to explore creative ways to perform their subjectivity in response to their societies, heavily guarded and wounded by glocalized capitalist, modernist, paternalistic, chauvinistic, and nationalist values. Through stigmatizing these young women’s behaviors, isolating them and further stigmatizing such isolation itself, the nation-state and its conspirators refuse to register and address the relations of these women’s behaviors to the shaming discourse and the always already woundedness and abjectness of the social collective selves. Through these possibilities of self-representation, disempowered subjects might be positioned to use media to simultaneously disclose, register, and problematize the sexualization, materialization, performativity and woundedness of the selves in glocalized societies which conspire to desex, dematerialize, and wound subjects while simultaneously requiring subjects to hide their wounds through stigmatizing the exposure of woundedness.

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Citations Berry, Chris (1999) “Where is the Love? The Paradox of Performing Loneliness in Ts’ai Ming-Liang’s Viva L’Amour,” Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros (eds.)

Sydney: Power Publications.

Davis, Ranette J. (1999) Youth Crisis: Growing Up in the High Risk Society.

Westport, CT: Praeger.

Field, Norma (1995) “The Child as Laborer and Consumer: The Disappearance of Childhood in Contemporary Japan,” Children and the Politics of Culture. Sharon Stephens ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Holland, Patricia (2004) Picturing Childhood: the Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery. London, New York: IB Tauris.

Hyman, Jane Wegscheider (1999) Women Living with Self-injury. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Jenkins, Henry (1998) The Children’s Culture Reader. New York: New York University Press.

Kotani, Satoshi (2004) “Why are Japanese youth so passive?” Japan’s Changing Generations: Are young people creating a new society?.

Gordon Mathews and Bruce White eds. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon.

McVeigh, Brian (2002) Japanese Higher Education as Myth. London and New York: Routledge.

McVeigh, Brian (2000) Wearing Ideology: State, Schooling and SelfPresentation in Japan. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

Shaheen, JoAnn C. and Spence, Carolyn Caselton (2002) Take Charge!

Advocating for Your Child’s Education. Albany, NY: Delmar Thomas Learning.

Worrall, Anne (1997) Punishment in the community: the future of criminal justice. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman.

Worrall, Anne (1999) “Troubled or Troublesome? Justice for Girls and Young Women.” Youth Justice: Contemporary Policy and Practice. Barry Goldson ed. Hants, UK: Ashgate.

Yau Ching (2008) “Performing Contradictions, Performing Bad-Girlness in Japan.” Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory. Kathy E. Ferguson and MoniqueMironesco (eds.)

Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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叛逆的可能與不可能：身體作為關 鍵 駱頴佳 Peter Lok (駱頴佳), lecturer at Department of Humanities and Creative Writing (Liberal and Cultural Studies Program), Hong Kong Baptist University. He received his Ph. D in Philosophy from Free University, Amsterdam and M. Phil in Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong. His Research Interests: Contemporary French Philosophy, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Continental Philosophy of Religion, Theory of Body and Affect. His publication : <<邊緣上的香港：國族論述中 的後/殖民想像 (香港： 印象文字，2016); <責任與困苦：論尼采與 列維納斯的身體倫理學>，收在黃國鉅 (編) 《尼采透視》(台北：五南 文化，2017)及 “Hong Kong as a ‘Bizarre National Redemptive Space’ for the New Chinese Middle Class: Lost in Hong Kong” in Social Transformations in Chinese Societies, Vol 13, No.2 ,2017.

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“ If resistance is to enact the very principles of democracy for which it struggles, then resistance has to be plural and it has to be embodied”1 Judith Butler 談論叛逆要從身體說起。 叛逆的起始點就是身體。尼采(Nietzsche)認為身體就是力的衝 動，唯有透過身體的力去不斷冲擊著各種支配人的道德及社會規範，我 們才能成為超人(Overman)，而非末人(the ultimate man)2，一個拒絕 痛苦，只追求退化生命的人。采尼視身體3為一種由各種力量(multiplicity of forces)組成的有機體(organism)。身體是不同力量的角力場， 而當中的力量角力既有化學性、生物性，亦有社會性與政治性。德勒茲 (Deleuze)指出，尼采視身體「是由多元的不可化簡的力構成的，因此它 是一種多元的現象，它的統一是多元現象的統一，是一種『支配的統一』 。在身體中，高等的支配力被稱為能動力(active force)，低等的被支配 力被稱為反動力(reactive force)。能動與反動正是表現力與力之間關 係的本原性質。」4對尼采而言，不是所有力也一樣，反動力就是一種被 支配的力量，它不會支配也不進取，最終未能令生命強大。因此，尼采要 求人要建立身體內「可塑性的能動力」(active plastic force)5，好超越克 服身體的反動力，並將之轉化為創造性的權力意志，有助人勇於面對痛 苦的生命，參與創造，並顛覆一切壓迫人的奴役法則，令自己真正成為 1 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 217.

2 尼采， 《查拉圖斯特拉如是說》，(上海：上海人民出版，2010)，頁12。

3 在尼采晚年一篇名為〈以身體作為准繩〉( “Am Leitfaden des Leibes”) 的文章裡，對身體的界定，有更 仔細的看法。當中尼采用Leib (身體)，而不是 Fleisch 或 Körper (肉體)，去描述身體，為要強調靈肉統一 的整體，而 Fleisch (肉體)則只有生理學的層次。當然，尼采用Leib，想更突出身體與理性/靈魂， 所構成的 對抗性張力，好取代栢拉圖至康德以來的「以理性/靈魂作為準繩」 的哲學，見馮學勤《從審美形而上學到美 學譜系學》，(杭州：浙江大學出版社，2011)，頁 180。 4 德勒茲， 《尼采與哲學》，(北京：社會科學文獻出版社，2008)，頁60。 5 德勒茲， 《尼采與哲學》，頁63。

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一個叛逆的主體。所以尼采蔑視那些蔑視身體的人，因否定身體的人就 是對生命創造價值的否定6，也象徵著向現實的妥協。德勒茲認為，尼采 根本視身體為聖哲，因為「身體的能動力把身體變為自我，並且把自我 界定為優越的和驚世駭俗的。」7當人要克服生命的痛苦與壓迫，就得靠 堅強的超人意志，而超人的叛逆意志不是衍生自抽象的精神，而是身體 激發出來的。 當代歐洲思想家亦看到了相類似的由身體而發的叛逆力量，並將 之結連於政治的實踐。意大利的理論家如內格里(Antonio Negri) 就認 為，唯有身體潛在的生機力(potenza)才能成為推動諸衆(multitude) 進行社會革命。這種「生機力」不是難以言狀或缺乏倫理內容，而是一 種史賓諾沙所謂的「愛的生機力」(the potenza of love)。內格里認為， 愛，這被史賓諾沙視為物質性及倫理性的欲望，一直在歷史上推動解放 的情感力量 8，但我們一直忽略了愛是一個政治的概念，且將之理解成 一種保守的、中產核心家庭的私人化的觀念，而遺忘了它的政治性及 公共性。內格里反而指出，猶大基督的傳統反而更早視愛為推動聚衆 的構成力量，藉愛構成各種人能持續合作的力量，而這種物質性的，肉 身性的力量也變成一種聚衆的共同政治規劃。因此，今天我們也需要 這種愛來構成一種新的彼此合作及共享的生活方式，來辨別出「共同」 9 (common)的問題處境及改革目標。 而美國的酷兒理論家巴特勒(Judith gButler)，進一步指出，哀慟 (mourning)是一種身體性的情感顛覆。她認為，為弱勢者在公衆地方聲 援，以至集體的哀慟(例如64集會)，是一種透過身體的姿態來展現一種 對抗/不畏強權的叛逆表現。對巴特勒來說，公開哀慟不是示弱或軟弱 6 尼采， 《查拉圖斯特拉如是說》，頁34。 7 德勒茲， 《尼采與哲學》，頁63。 8 Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2005) p. 351.

9 Antonio Negri, Empire and Beyond, p. 49.

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的表現，也不是今天有些人所說的「行禮如儀」，而是一種倫理性的身體 操演(a performative bodily act)。當諸衆在公共空間為他者的痛苦一 齊遊行、站立、默哀及頌唱的時候，又或者向著某些國家的暴力政權呼 叫示威時，也就是以身體的情感、聲氣、淚水或姿勢操演著有關權利、平 等、及自由等符號性的行動10。這種能產生倫理力量的身體生機力，或德 勒茲所謂的情動力(the affect)，不但容讓受苦者知道有人與他們同在， 也提醒公民要活出一種可活的生命(the liveable life)，因只有可哀慟的 生命(grievable life)才是可活。巴特勒進一步指出，集體哀慟，這種向壓 迫者說「不」的身體叛逆性操演，能為一班曾被視為「裸命」(barenlife)11 的人討回應有尊嚴，正是建立今天民主社會的必須條件。12 但可惜的是資本主義有各種规範及壓抑著身體潛能的機制 (dispositifs)。這機制是一組由各樣論述、法律、制度或空間形式構成的 對人的身體能產生支配性與規訓性果效的體系，它們消解了身體的造 反衝動力之餘，更「馴化」這些叛逆的身體力量來滿足資本主義運作的 勞動與消費力量，令我們根本反叛不來。 今天的新自由主義經濟，將社會徹底市場化之餘，亦得要規訓人 的身體成為不斷消費的消費者及不斷勞動的勞動者，好能配合資本的 高速擴張與發展。消費社會的最大威力，不只是來自廣告，還有它將我 們的日常生活，例如閒餘生活，轉化成滿足身體欲望的消費活動，而我 們不知不覺地在適應著這種生活之餘，也讓自己被規訓成為消費者13。 所以拉扎拉托(Lazzarato)指出，新自由主義經濟是一種主體性的經濟 10 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 48.

11 意大利思想家阿甘本(Giorgio Agamben)認為，現代主權國家精於生產「裸命」(bare life)，一種不潔 的，被國家法制取消了政冶/法權生命的人， 一種被政治共同體棄絶的生命，而這班只有「裸命」的人，猶 如古羅馬法中一些只可殺而沒有獻祭價值的(who may be killed and yet not sacrificed)的牲人(homo sacer ) 。Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer：Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 8.

12 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, pp. 218-9.

13 Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt, p. 12.

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(subjective economy)14，因為資本家建構了一個「世界」來規訓你的身 體與欲望，讓你即使沒有恆常參與消費活動，也日積月累地令你不自覺 地以消費者的角度詮釋世界，或將自己的欲望馴化為消費欲望。當然， 成為消費者也不足夠，資本主義社會也會將人規訓成欠債者。拉扎拉托 便指出，債已成為新自由主義的戰略中心，當中債權人，例如銀行藉著 債務的輸出(例如信用咭消費)，來規訓債仔的行為及生活方式，又或者 樓市/債券市場都鼓勵我們向銀行借錢買樓或債券生財，最終將債務個 體化(individuationaofadebt)。當人要還清債務(供樓或償還信用咭欠 款) 就會辛苦工作，甚至只想著「積極向上」來建立「功績」，但正如韓裔 德國哲學家韓炳哲(Byung Chul Han)指出，這種一味叫你積極向上的 「功績社會」，最終壓抑了我們的身體情感，並帶來集體的「倦怠」及憂 鬱15 。 試問在這種身體被高度馴化及壓迫的社會，我們倦怠的身體還可 會有真正的叛逆及反抗的動能？近年某些香港人被笑為「港豬」，即一種 只尋求安穩，逆來順受，任人魚肉，沒有反抗意識的順民。若從身體理論 的角度看，這就是一班身體生機力未被解放，或身體潛力被耗盡的人。 但我們要怎樣釋放這種生機力，並轉化成一種挑戰現實的叛逆力量，就 得時刻要善待，感應及修煉自己的身體，特別要擺脫資本主義與國家主 義的身體規訓，多與受苦的他者同行同哭，到了一某個時刻，身體的「生 機力」就會釋放出來。我們要緊記史賓諾沙的話： 「你永不清楚身體有多 大能力」，所以我們不應少看自己的身體，而叛逆的能與不能，身體永遠 是關鍵。

14 Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt, p. 37.

15 韓炳哲， 《倦怠社會》， （台北：大塊文化，2015），頁32-5。

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Shailja Patel and Rafeef Ziadah’s Performance Poetry and Activism: Theorising Praxis1 Dr. Lauren Clark Dr Lauren Rebecca Clark has been a Lecturer of Literature in universities in England, the Sultanate of Oman and Thailand before coming to China in 2016. She currently is a Lecturer on the English for Academic Purposes Programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Her research interests include Comparative Literature, French, Irish and Scottish studies, World Literature, social history, Sufi writings, cultural studies and lately, Arabic and Asian Literatures in translation.

She completed an MA in French and English Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland in 2008 and a Leverhulme Scholarship funded doctoral studies as part of an Irish Studies research project at the University of Sunderland, England in 2012. She has published in the fields of literary criticism and history. Her monograph, Consuming Irish Children: Advertising and the Art of Independence, 1860-1921 was published with Peter Lang academic press in 2017.

1 A previous version of this article was published as Clark, L., “Shailja Patel and Rafeef Ziadah’s Performance Poetry and Activism: Theorising Praxis” Academia, vols. 3 & 4, 22-30, 2018.

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Considering the postcolonial Indian novel in English, Arnab Chakladar argues that English Language Indian fiction is troubled by, “[t]he cultural capital that circulates around the figures of the internationally marketable writers” which “has a much higher exchange rate than that of the “home market” writers, and at the same time it is true of the divergent value ascribed to international awards.”2 Since Chakladar’s article was published some six years have passed, and two female performance poets have emerged from different continents to question the very applicability of a postcolonial critique to the praxis of performance poetry. These poets are Shailja Patel and Rafeef Ziadah. While the medium is different, many of the same binaries correspond from Chakladar’s original analysis today. There is indeed a bolstering of the capital of marketable performance poets to submerge local poets. An orientalist hangover from the literary theory wars of the 1980s has provoked the active enrichment of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural literary studies today. As a consequence, some argue that this results in a compensatory elevation of such “home market” writers. Out with the confines of binary paradigms however are exiled poets, writers and artists less readily identifiable by the demarcations of nationality and place. Recent critiques by Al Deek and emerging Displacement Studies programmes and non-profit organizations, suggest that exilic displacement can operate as a comparative critical prism.3 This is then used across cultures to facilitate understanding of the migratory aspect of writing as a “cultural capital.”

2 Arnab Chakladar, “Language, Nation and the Question of Indian Literature”, Postcolonial Text, (6:4), 2011.3.

3 Akram Al Deek, Writing Displacement: Home and Identity in Contemporary Post-Colonial English Fiction, Palgrave MacMillan: New York, 2016.

See for example the University of Plymouth’s displacement studies program and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Displacement Research & Action Network.

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For example, Kulbaga cites “the entanglement of neoliberalisms (values prioritizing market-based logics and solutions) and feminisms (values prioritizing gender equality and women’s rights)” as a key rhetorical feature of contemporary human rights discourse and business.4Her marketing and human rights based article addresses Shailja Patel’s poetry to offer insight into human rights discourses from the perspective of nonwestern migrants or, indeed, the horse’s mouth. Kulbaga begins with an analysis of how the women of the Maasai tribe were depicted as entrepreneurs and placed in Mama Hope’s marketing campaign to redress the exoticisation of the Maasai. According to Kulbaga, this tribe had fast been exhausted of autonomous signification in other forms of marketing and cultural studies. In the same way, the author argues that Patel’s audiences by extension must acknowledge the savage nature of empire through performance poetry and theatre before being presented with the “exotic” saris that she uses as tools at the end of her spoken word performances. Indeed, a comparison of Rafeef Ziadah and Shailja Patel’s work can illuminate these evolving junctures arrived at between performance poetry, politics and praxis in a past-the-postcolonial and postmodern world. Some critiques might hone in on a comparison between the languages each poet uses, their identities and genres they inhabit amidst empire. This is not the purpose of my paper. This paper concerns itself with an entirely innovative praxis amidst migration: that of performance poetry.

Shailja Patel is a Kenyan performance poet of Indian ancestry who has lived in the United Kingdom, United States and Kenya.

She coined the term “Migritude” to refer to “migrants with attitude” 4 Theresa A. Kulbaga, “Sarisuasion: migrant economies of care in Shaijla Patel’s Migritude”,

Prose Studies, 38:1, 2016, 74-92.

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and it alludes to Aimé Césaire’s famously coined term, “négritude.”

Her performance poetry and theatre act share the same name.

Migritude (2008) is composed around fragments of poetic performances each corresponding to a story about being a second-generation migrant in a postcolonial world and illustrated by opening and using a suitcase of saris that Patel’s mother gave her.5 As each sari is revealed on stage, Patel recites poetry and provides what Piccolo describes as “a meditation about processes of colonialism and post colonialism, especially as they unfolded in Kenya, her native land.”6 Rafeef Ziadah is both an academic and a poet. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow and specialist in comparative politics of the Middle East at the University of London, SOAS. She is also a Palestinian-Canadian performance poet who received acclaim for her activist, 8 track, spoken word album Hadeel (2009) which she produced with a grant from the Ontario Arts Council.7 In her performance poetry, she critiques racism and sexism and describes her Palestinian refugees’ experiences over a backdrop of bass lines, tabla and the sound of the Arabian oud. Ziadah’s poetry has been complimented for its “use of art as a political practice.”8 Theorising the body of Patel’s work as a “meditation” on post colonialism and Ziadah’s as a form of creative resistance provides acute literary analyses.

On the other hand, it overlooks comparative analysis of the praxis of performance poetry itself. This paper shall examine both poets in the context of comparative studies to argue that such 5 Shailja Patel, Migritude: An Epic Journey in Four Movements. Part 1; When Saris Speak– The Mother, Lieto Colle, Faloppio:2008.

6 P, Piccolo, “Introduction”, in Patel S., 2008, Migritude: An Epic Journey in Four Movements. Part 1; When Saris Speak – The Mother, Lieto Colle, Faloppio:2008. 111-17.

7 Rafeef, Ziadah, Hadeel, Toronto: Tabla Ensemble Studios, 2009.

8 Madalena Santos, “Beyond Negotiating Impossibilities: The Art of Palestinian Creative Resistance”, Platforum (12), 2011.58.

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activist content is not merely politicalized but a form of hermetic, if apolitical, artistic protest. It shall be argued that Ziadah and Patel’s enterprises are informed by migration, colonialism and politics. It shall be argued that Ziadah and Patel’s enterprises are informed by migration, colonialism and politics. At the same time this body of work offers up a reinterpretation of what the role of a performance poet consists of amidst migration. The sound bites, foreign languages and merging of spoken word poetry with theatre make Patel and Ziadah’s work an innovative merging of different genres. Further too, it shall be argued that both spoken word poets, in their self-professed capacities as migrants, utilize this status as a kind of totem to disperse and tour their poetry across all five continents.

What role does a performance poet fulfill amidst migration?

What is poetic activism?

Homi Bhabha’s concept of “nation and narration”9 is seldom aligned with newer forms of literature and merged genres, such as spoken word poetry and theatre that have appeared over the past decade in the academy. It is challenging to apply one such hypothesis to the writing of second or third generation migrant writers whose impetus barely relates to a constructed idea of “nation” or home for they feel out of place in both locales. Neither does can this be analyzed within the confines of a restrictive academy where migratory performance poetry occupies as marginalized a post as its purveyors.10 Anti-academic sentiment is palpable in the history of the spoken word form. It can be noted from the time 9

Homi Bhabha(Ed.), Narration and Nation, Routledge: London, 1990.

10 See for instance the academically acclaimed debut collection of José Torres-Tama’s 25 year legacy of work which was published only in 2014: José Torres-Tama, Immigrant Dreams & Alien Nightmares, Diálogos: New Orleans, 2014.

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of its inception during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s to present day critiques of spoken word in The Paris Review.

Literary critics and theory behemoths such as Harold Bloom have inveighed against slam performance poetry as “the death of art”.11 By contrast, performance poetry editions such as Eleveld’s The Spoken Word Revolution and Moore’s Listen Up! have responded aggressively to this elitist stance.12 If poetry is to be performed, they argue, it must fulfill a democratizing stance. By extension, much of the attraction that this genre brings lies in its honesty, spontaneity and sincerity.

When we consider the respective histories of Kenya and Palestine and their relationships with colonialism, it is curious to note that in modern art forms, the role of the storyteller has reemerged as a tactic to avoid cultural displacement. Major humanitarian organizations and research facilities are placing greater emphasis on maintaining the distinct cultural heritage of the oral tradition and oral histories of local people. The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage put oral history at the helm of a series of policies to maintain and research “intangible history” such as singing, story telling, local legends and unwritten history in many countries on the African continent. I would suggest that resurgence in these poets’ performance poetry has emerged as a contemporary means of safeguarding from cultural displacement. Perhaps it is for this reason that Patel chooses to give testimony to the Tanzanian Taraab singer Bi Kidude (Kiswahili for “Little Granny”), whose 11 As per an interview: Harold Bloom, The Paris Review, Spring 2000.

N.B. this is not to misappropriate “sound bites”, which will be discussed in relation to Ziadah later. Rather, I provide here an illustration of the mainstream critical reservations held about perfomance poetry as a valid art form.

12 Marc Eleveld, The Spoken Word Revolution, Sourcebooks Media Fusion: Illinois, 2005.

Jessica Care Moore, Listen Up!, Random House: NY, 1999.

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prophetic oral history she valorizes in spoken word: Woman who at ninety/ has walked more miles/than most of us have driven./ Claimed a lineage/ of music rooted/ in the lives of the powerless/ stories unfurled in the language of street and market/ poetry buried in the bodies of women.13 This language of the “street and market” is brought to the fore through oral history and its present day renditions in Patel’s spoken word praxis. Indeed, Palestine has had a very active recent history in documenting oral history. In the 1998 the University of Gaza founded its Oral History Centre to collect histories from those who were displaced during the Nabka period. Indeed, oral testimonies had been documented in the camps in Lebanon since the late 1970s by researchers such as Rosemary Sayigh to reveal the cultural value of this kind of spoken material.14 Considering the oral traditions that both Kenyan and Palestinian cultures have historically and recently embraced, one might argue that Patel and Ziadah’s performances are a harkening back to the roots of the art form itself.

Performance Poetry and Activism in Comparative studies In terms of comparative studies, Pascale Cassanova argues that inequalities and the subterfuge of repressed minority groups’ writings can account for a complex system of World Literatures as we acknowledge it today. This complexity is based upon the literary capital of certain historically renowned texts as they over-shadow 13 Shaila Patel, “Drum Rider: A Tribute to Bi Kidude”, Poetry, Journal of the African Literature Association, 3:2, 85.

14 See for example, Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries; A People’s History, Zed Books: London, 2009.

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those emerging authors from minority groups.15 Ziadah and Patel’s enterprises as performance poets amidst migration are thus part of a formative exchange between cultures in a world forum. In order to address both poets’ radical transformations of poetic performances, the role that a performance poet fulfills amidst migration should be analyzed. Secondly, how this informs a new genre of poetic activism that second and third generation artists have fulfilled is essential to consider.

Spoken word poetry is renowned for the intimacy it establishes between the performer-poet and their audience. Whether this is denigrated as “confessional” or complimented as “honest” is dependent upon the listener. Ultimately, the spoken-word audience is held as captive as a theatre audience is amidst performance.

What stimulates an audience amidst performance is drastically different to what keeps the reader of poetry turning the page however. There is a physical transaction in performance that goes beyond the notion of “poems primarily produced for consumption through silent, individual, readings-on-the page.”16 Shailja Patel’s Migritude is a four-part postcolonial performance poetry project, which was originally performed in 2004. Her collection assembles personal accounts of her migrant status coming to terms with the clutches that identity has upon those in between cultures. Of her own status as a third generation Indian-Kenyan she is unhesitatingly definitive: “I learn/ Like a stone in my gut/ That third-generation Asian Kenyan/ Will never/ Be Kenyan enough.”17 Patel describes the stories and histories of women who have been challenged with the notion of being migrants on the periphery of a nation state. The poet also expresses 15 Pascale Cassanova, (Debevoise trans.), The World Republic of Letters, Harvard University Press: California, 2007.

16 Maria Damon, “Was That ‘Different,’ ‘Dissident’ or ‘Dissonant’?: Poetry (n) the Public Spear: Slams, Open Readings, and Dissident Traditions.” in Charles Bernstein (Ed.), Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 332.

17 Shailja Patel, Migritude: An Epic Journey in Four Movements, Lieto Colle, Faloppio:2008. 38.

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how they are seemingly peripheral to received interpretations of colonial history. She has boldly likened the unfurling of saris in her work to the unfurling of the voices of women living in the “boot print of Empire.”18 This work has been translated into six languages and toured across the USA, Europe and Africa to reveal the discrimination that migrants face in empire and voices of the “unhomeliness of Asians, best couched in the Gujatari proverb: the night is short and our garments change.”19 The expulsion of Asians from Uganda under Idi Amin in 1972 is the historic starting point for this collection, framing Patel’s narratives of migrants in neighboring Kenya. At this time many migrants reevaluated their safety and status and fled Kenya for fear of suffering the same fate. It is also true of Patel’s personal plight as she was sent by her mother to the UK and USA as a young woman to receive education, an act that she resents as permitting colonially inherited notions of “acceptable femininity” but one which has nevertheless flavored her project. As Migritude Part I unfolds, we see Patel using a suitcase of saris that her mother gave her to illustrate tense mother/daughter relations, expectations and the physical covering and uncovering of aspects of femininity and migrant assimilation. In a brief extract from a San Francisco Bay Area KQED Arts documentary, the poet is shown preparing for a performance in San Francisco. During the performance segment she dons, dances and displays saris on stage to coincide with the performance of her poetry. It is clear from these scenes that not only is her performance poetry a literary medium but an artistic one involving aspects of dance and theatre. She narrates over 18 Emanuele Monegato, “Interview with Shailja Patel, On Migritude: Part I- When Saris SpeakThe Mother”, Other Modernites, Interviews, (2:10), 2009.236.

19 James Ocita, Diasporic Imaginaries: Memory and negotiation of belonging in East African and South Asian Indian Narratives, PhD thesis, Stellenbosch University,2013. 156.

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excerpts from her performance: “At the beginning of this process, the idea was just to find a way to use the saris so they didn’t sit in a suitcase.

“The only thing I ever heard was “you have to be careful in the sari because you are exposing the body. Don’t let the sari slip under the breast- that’s obscene.” And as part of that, what I had to do was to learn how to wear them and become comfortable performing in them and I came up against all my own fears, and resistances around perceptions of women in saris, my own fears about being immobilised or weak or exoticised when I was wearing a sari.” 20 This extract shows the evolution of Patel’s role as an award winning slam poet to a theatrical poet.21 She delivers a poetry and uses the saris together with dance and comedy to insist on its performance.

In light of Patel’s use of the sari, Priya Srinivasan, has examined the history Indian dancing as performance and a form of labour.

She cannily notes that for many scholars, Indian dancers “have become transnational labourers on a global stage where they are often “relegated to the aesthetic realm and deemed to have no sociopolitical relevance.” 22So not only in artistic performance but also in history, the impact of dance as a signifier of greater sociopolitical issues such as migration has been overlooked. The poet herself has stated that “[a]rt is a migrant: it travels from the vision of the artist to the eye, ear, mind and heart of the listener.”23 However, her role as a performer amidst migration has yet to 20 Transcribed from the documentary,“Shailja Patel”, KQED Spark, https://ww2.kqed.org/spark/ shailja-patel/, 2016, 5:32-6:04.

21 Patel was the winner of the 2001 Lamba Slam Championship & 2000 Santa Cruz Slam Championship.

22 Priya Srinivasan, Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labour, Temple UP: Philadelphia, 2011. 11.

23 Monegato, “Interview with Shailja Patel, On Migritude: Part I- When Saris Speak- The Mother.”

238.

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receive critical attention. The Migritude project has impressed academics “amazed at her ability to rework and expand this single project across such a variety of media and locations.”24 Yet, it is the very migratory nature of her work as it is staged and relocated across continents that make it emblematic of the very thesis it wishes to expound. The praxis of performance poetry has thus far been neglected in critiques of Patel’s work, which fail to consider her a new wave of performance poet amidst migration rather than the performer of an isolated collection of colonially critical poems. Migritude’s genre-hybridity has undoubtedly led to some confusion as to what to label it in the academy. Indeed, the scant critiques of Patel’s performance, that appear seem to criticize the very nature of her delivery as being too academic and thus incompatible with her choice of literary genre and performative medium. In an unpublished thesis, Liam McAlpine claims that the real life speaker of Patel’s poem “Eater of Death”, an Afghan woman whose family was killed by US airstrikes on Kabul in 2001, is done disservice by “the performance of this voice on stage [that] problematizes [her] feelings.”25 Hegelsson, in a complimentary review of Migritude, nevertheless remarks the “lyric [is] juxtaposed with [her] academic style of delivery.”26 Such discord between emotive performance, academic delivery and the lyric style unveils a highly problematic area in comparative studies where theory and praxis are concerned. Here we have a touring migratory poetry project declaimed for its delivery being “too academic” for the purposes it wishes to serve. Patel’s writing can be considered 24 Stefan Hegelsson, Review of Migritude, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, (48:3), 2012. 331-332.

25 Liam McAlpine,Spoken Word Poetry and the Academy: Sincerity, Intimacy and the Spoken/Written

Binary, Bachelor of Arts with Dpt. Hons in English Thesis, Weselyan University, 2007.63.

26 Hegelsson, Review of Migritude, 331.

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creative resistance or artistic protest in this regard. It is struggling to occupy an artistic space because of its multiple occupations of forms and locations in a quest for its survival. That Migritude should experience this mis-theorisation of praxis, considering its concern with migration is concerning and deeply ironic. There is an anthropologic theoretical scope here to liken the poet and migrant’s status to liminality here. However, this is out with the scope of this paper, which seeks to shed light on the problematic praxis of performance poetry amidst migration.

Rafeef Ziadah’s Migratory Poetic Activism Ziadah’s poetic activism and persistent artistic and academic commitment to the Palestinian cause she modestly terms “cultural work” in interviews has been her main focus since she was a university student.27 As a second generation Palestinian migrant who has never lived in her homeland, the poet is committed to capturing memories of Palestine in an artistic format so as her generation does not feel displaced by it. She was part of a wave of first generation Palestinians to have moved out from Lebanon to the United States. Ziadah argues that because she was not physically rooted in a refugee camp, as opposed to being in a liminal space, holding on to Palestinian culture was much harder.28 Indeed, the process of personal memory making is fundamental in Ziadah’s praxis while it also has the double bind of unveiling histories and discourses hidden from mainstream 27 Agata Patyna, Identity, cultural production and diaspora politics: An exploration of the work of second generation Palestinian artists in the UK, Migration Research Unit: UCL Working Papers, 2012/9, 2009.6.

28 Agata Patyna, Identity, cultural production and diaspora politics: An exploration of the work of second generation Palestinian artists in the UK.26.

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political and media discourses about Palestine. She delivers this from the perspective of an “Arab woman of colour [who] comes in all shades of anger.”29 This self-definition from the poet’s spoken word piece “Shades of Colour” is a both a form of poetic protest and a warning to whom the poem is dedicated: an Israeli soldier who kicked her in the stomach during a university direct action and stated that she “deserve[d] to be raped before [she] had [her] terrorist children!”30 The poet seems to reflect on traumatic and politicized incidents she experiences first-hand and sometimes imagines and then pens verse describing her responses to them in retrospect. On the surface of things, anger and high emotional stakes appear in tune with the “indignant” nature of most spoken word poetry. For Ziadah’s praxis though, this is far from typical.

Like Patel’s, Ziadah’s activism is not solely “political” but artistic but this is where the similarities in their practice end. Ziadah’s praxis negates a commonly applied theorization of the role of the performance poet in a manner quite unlike Patel’s. Despite being a fluent English speaker who has studied in Canada, Ziadah performs and writes mainly in her mother tongue, Arabic. Hadeel’s tracks can be found in translation and some of her most popular and famed performances are delivered in English. Her words are often read over a bass line or backing track that is punctuated by a variety of sounds both Arabian and military with blasts of gunfire and the warfare she describes.

Of the few poems that are available in English in her audio-only collection Hadeel, her piece “We Teach Life, Sir” makes a deliberate use of the English language, repetition and the praxis of poetic activism to reorient its performance for political-poetical 29 Rafeef, Ziadah,”Shades of Anger”, Hadeel, Toronto: Tabla Ensemble Studios, 2009.

30 Rafeef, Ziadah, introduction to “Shades of Anger”, Hadeel.

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output. This piece is based on an interview between the poet and an international news reporter. The reporter continually tries to skew and reorient the discussion in order to sensationalize reportage about Palestine. At one point the poet is asked if she thought that things would be easier if “you stopped teaching your children to hate.” This attempt to modify and politicize Ziadah’s account was in vain. In this short extract of the culmination of “We Teach Life Sir”, which she wrote about the interview, the poet’s praxis is startlingly innovative and defiant on a stylistic and performative level.

Today, my body was a TV’d massacre And let me just tell you; there’s nothing your UN resolutions have ever done about this.

And no sound-bite, no sound-bite I come up with, no matter how good my English gets, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite will bring them back to life.

No sound-bite will fix this.

We teach life, sir.

We teach life, sir.

We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.31 Ziadah reiterates this “sound-bite” she struggles to utter in English over and over, in the painfully uncompromising terms that her reporter demands. Her body, described as a “TV’d 31 Rafeef Ziadah, “We Teach Life Sir”, Hadeel, Toronto: Tabla Ensemble Studios, 2009.

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massacre”, likened to those of the Palestinian dead, is repeated to visually and aurally awaken an audience. As such, the audience can savour through multiple senses the mismatch and misrepresentation that mainstream journalism evokes. There is a clear disparity painted between watching televised news reports about Gaza and Ziadah’s repeated “sound-bites” which, like the stuttering of a traumatized person, serves no practical purpose to provide an accurate report. The information conveyed in such reports is partial. Ziadah on the other hand uses the soundbite as a refrain in a piece of performance poetry to provide artistic activist.

This poem is one of her most revered and celebrated works for its emotive nature. It also saw her chosen to represent Palestine at the South Bank center Poets Olympiad in 2012. In terms of praxis, her position as a second generation migrant attempting to recover a past in a process of media-induced de-politicization is revolutionary. In her soundbites, Ziadah appeals to a media illiterate generation fast becoming attuned to the repetition of sound- and image-scapes, which constitute reporting.

Ken Loach’s high praise of Ziadah as a performance poet is an appropriate final point for this paper. Loach states “Rafeef ’s poetry demands to be heard. She is powerful, emotional and political.

Please read her work and see her perform. You cannot then be indifferent to the Palestinian cause.”32 I would argue that similar high praise is also deserving of Shailja Patel’s work but not only for the work’s political aims. In seeing the performances of these activist poets one witnesses not only politicized output and bravery, but the overturning of performance poetry theory in praxis. Ziadah and Patel, amidst migration and displacement, seek out new forms of artistic expression in their performance poetry to overhaul the 32 Ken Loach on Rafeef Ziadah, http://www.rafeefziadah.net/.

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restrictive boundaries and binaries from which they have been geographically and artistically exiled.

Citations ------------ “Shailja Patel”, KQED Spark, https://ww2.kqed.org/spark shailja-patel/, 2016.

Bernstein, Charles (Ed.), Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Bhabha, Homi (Ed.), Narration and Nation, Routledge:London, 1990.

Bloom, Harold, “Interview with Harold Bloom”, The Paris Review, Spring 2000.

Care Moore, Jessica, Listen Up!, Random House: NY, 1999.

Cassanova, Pascale, (Debevoise trans.), The World Republic of Letters, Harvard University Press: California, 2007.

Chakladar, Arnab, “Language, Nation and the Question of Indian Literature”, Postcolonial Text, (6:4), 2011.

Eleveld, Marc, The Spoken Word Revolution, Sourcebooks Media Fusion: Illinois, 2005.

Foster, Christopher Ian, “Migrants with Attitude”: Shailja Patel and the Phenomenology of South Asian African Diasporas”, South Asian Review, 36:3, 2015, 109-122.

Hegelsson, Stefan, Review of Migritude, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48:3, 2012. 331-332.

Kulbaga, Theresa A., “Sarisuasion: migrant economies of care in Shaijla Patel’s Migritude”, Prose Studies, 38:1, 2016, 74-92.

McAlpine, Liam, Spoken Word Poetry and the Academy: Sincerity, Intimacy and the Spoken/Written Binary, Bachelor of Arts with Dpt. Hons in English Thesis, Weselyan University, 2007.

Monegato, Emanuele, “Interview with Shailja Patel, On Migritude: Part I- When Saris Speak- The Mother”, Other Modernities, Interviews, 2:10, 2009.

Ocita, James, Diasporic Imaginaries: Memory and negotiation of belonging in East African and South Asian Indian Narratives, PhD thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2013.

Patel, Shailja, Migritude: An Epic Journey in Four Movements. Part 1; When Saris Speak– The Mother, Lieto Colle, Faloppio: 2008.

-----------------, Poetry, Journal of the African Literature Association, 3:2, 84-96.

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Patyna, Agata, Identity, cultural production and diaspora politics: An exploration of the work of second generation Palestinian artists in the UK, Migration Research Unit: UCL Working Papers, 2012/9, 2009.

Santos, Madalena, “Beyond Negotiating Impossibilities: The Art of Palestinian Creative Resistance”, Platforum (12), 2011.

Sayigh, Rosemary, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries; A People’s History, Zed Books: London, 2009.

Srinivasan, Priya, Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labour, Temple UP: Philadelphia, 2011.

Torres-Tama, José, Immigrant Dreams & Alien Nightmares, Diálogos: New Orleans, 2014.

Ziadah, Rafeef, Hadeel, Toronto: Tabla Ensemble Studios, 2009.

Recent work by Dr. Lauren Clark:

Consuming Irish Children: Advertising and the Art of Independence 1860–1921, Peter Lang: Oxford, 2017 (9783034319898) As far as Irish history is concerned, consuming Irish children was not only a matter for Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Late nineteenth-century Ireland saw the emergence of a thriving home-grown advertising industry, and the Irish child played a pivotal role in developing a nascent consumer state from the 1860s until 1921. Through extensive analysis of advertising copy, historical materials, ephemera and literature, this study links the child-centred consumer culture of Victorian Ireland with its impact on the establishment of the independent state.

This form of «Celtic consumerism» was also evident in Scotland following the Gaelic Revival, positioning the child as the newest participant in a national process of consumption. Due to high child literacy rates, which outstripped those of mainland Britain, Ireland’s children were appealed to as literate consumers in advertising copy and were informed of the perils or benefits of consumer culture in late Victorian Irish literature. This book presents a fascinating picture of the role of the child in the Irish marketplace at the fin de siècle, as well as investigating simultaneous developments in the Irish education system and laws concerning the care and welfare of children.

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Comparative Literature Festival 2018: Exhibition: “Space and Rebellion” Society of Comparative Literature, A.A.H.K.U.S.U., Session 2017-2018 The Comparative Literature Festival is an annual academic event of the Society. This year, the theme of our Festival is “Rebellion” (叛逆). The word “rebellion” is usually associated with aggressivity, yet it can be seen in multi-layered complexity.

Through the Festival, we have explored the multiple layers of rebellion beyond its seemingly aggressive facet with different art forms, such as tattoo art as rebellion on the body and indie Cantopop music as rebellion in the popular music scene.

The exhibition, entitled “Space and Rebellion”, explores the relationship between rebellion and public spaces as we interviewed local graffiti group and LGBTQ+ activists Pride in Rainbow. While the canvas of graffiti is apparently in the public arena, graffiti artworks are often personal, individual messages.

How do artists negotiate the boundaries between public and private arenas?

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1. Introduction What comes to your mind when you see the word “Rebellion”?

A revolution fought with flesh and blood, a youngster wielding defiance, or a voice speaking up for the silenced? Rebellion is a force of resistance against the mainstream, its nature does not have to be aggressive or violent. In Comparative Literature Festival 2018, let us initiate an exploration on Rebellion stemmed from art and texts and to reflect upon the definitive features of being “Mainstream”.

The trailblazer in our series of activities is graffiti. After showcasing street art, a representation of rebellion in public spaces, as our starting point, we will gradually zoom into the New Wave Movement in the local film industry, the rising power of indie music, and the art of tattoos. Mainstream is not solidity, the high road may end up the primrose path. Let us rediscover the beauty in Rebellion.

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2. Why Graffiti Back in 2011, social media was yet to be popularized and there were significantly fewer platforms on which LGBTQ+ issues could be put on the table. It was also the year Pride In Rainbow (PIR) was established to bring the subject to light with the art of graffiti, with the two founding members producing anonymous creations which are representative of LGBTQ+ culture. The reason they chose graffiti is hugely related to the space-time they found themselves trapped in. “Denise Ho or Anthony Wong weren’t even out of the closet yet. It was a time when no celebrities had tried to publicly address or express their sexuality.” Many were content living in the vast echo chamber, unconsciously absorbing every piece of information they find similar to their values and isolating the voices that are other.

“The way street art conveys its meaning is very straightforward and direct whenever or wherever you see it.” Graffiti appears at everywhere in the city, making it impossible for people to ignore.

The art form is no longer a murmur received only by those who want to hear, but a loudspeaker that amplifies their voice. The city is used as a canvas to showcase ideas smothered by societal expectations.

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3. Graffiti as the Medium Even though graffiti is still an illegal activity in Hong Kong, its anonymous and unchecked nature made it possible. Street art such as this has already been acknowledged by most, but to utilize it effectively, the choice of paint and tools requires careful consideration. “Stencil is an obvious choice because the template can be reused, allowing us to propagate the message faster.”

Most of PIR’s works are created using stencils for the sake of time and convenience. Apart from that, they also use mass produced stickers to decorate the empty spaces they see. “I was inspired by Banksy, a graffiti artist I look up to, to adopt the use of stencil and devise my own way of making street art.”

Graffiti is not only about creating art, it is also a form of public writing. PIR’s major aim is to promote equal rights, but the team works on creating resonance, “so that everyone who see it will find something they identify with.” Therefore, they have been very selective in picking quotes to share. Instead of the well-known line “perhaps there is always love in such close friendships” from the song “Rolls-Royce”, they have decided on “never coming out and the world will remain unchanged” to convey their message. While their works are mostly associated with LGBTQ+ issues, viewers are given the freedom to explore how they connect to the piece.

It is the same with selecting “I hope someday you’ll join us” by John Lennon, with the hopes to evoke “a mutually shared feeling, the sense of reverberance towards something”. The graffitis also incorporate many symbols, such as the colours of the rainbow flag, the pink triangle, etc. to reclaim signs that were once used against the community.

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4. Death of Graffiti “Some topics our works touch on may be more politically sensitive, like the Umbrella Movement and Ai Weiwei. Those can be wiped out in no time.” Although the government has a certain set of procedures to clear illegal graffiti works, the criteria has more to do with political concerns. “There was a time when photographs of our works were published, but they still haven’t been removed by the government to this day. It proves that this is not an issue that they want to solve currently.” Plumbing advertisements are a form of graffiti as well. But those might not be wiped out as quickly due to their commercial nature. Rebellion in public space inevitably means facing obstruction.

But isn’t the oppression of graffiti works by the government a reflection of their tolerance towards a certain issue? To make art is to make a personal statement, but it inevitably arouses public voices. Public art forms which can raise awareness from the masses for discussion, be it praise or criticism, are much more precious than the existence of the art itself.

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Book Review: To Kill A Mockingbird Author: Harper Lee Publisher: J.B. Lippincott & Co. Year of publication: 1960

Sarbjot Kaur Publication Secretary of the Society of Comparative Literaure, A.A.H.K.U.S.U., Session 2017-2018. Currently a Bachelor of Arts Year 2 student.

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To Kill a Mockingbird, written by Harper Lee, is a novel published in 1960. It is considered to be a classic novel in modern American literature. Although the primary themes of the book are racial injustice and innocence, we can identify issues such as class, courage, gender roles, etc. The narrator of the story is Jean Louise Finch, known as Scout, whose father Atticus Finch struggles to prove Tom Robinson, a black man, innocent who was wrongly accused of rape.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, characters such as Scout Finch and Atticus Finch display acts of courage and resistance that challenges the societal norms in the society. Among the many themes in the book, I am going to focus on gender roles and racial injustice. Through these themes, we are able to see how the characters tackle the issues in the book and challenge the societal expectations.

Scout Finch can be seen as a covert rebel. One of the ways, that she shows her rebelliousness, is her preference in attire: Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire.

I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn’t supposed to be doing things that required pants.

(Lee 83) She wears “breeches”, despite the fact that Aunt Alexander insists Scout should learn to behave like a lady and to do so, she should dress like a lady as well. Wearing

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pants allowed Scout to move around more freely and do boyish things along with Jem, her brother, and Dill. While throughout the story, we see Aunt Alexandra reprimanding Scout to act more like a lady, we do not see the boys getting reprimanded to act more gentlemanly. According to Nurbudhiati, “occupying the middle space in between the binary gender conceptions as a tomboy, this regional code about proper southern lady totally challenges her ground as a part of community” (4). In the novel, we see her being reprimanded not only by her Aunt Alexandra, but other ladies in town. Moreover, other than not conforming to societal expectations and gender stereotypes by dressing in attires she prefers, she does so by throwing punches like boys do, climbing trees and swinging from tires.

It can be concluded that despite knowing that her tomboyish behaviour is considered to be inappropriate, she is adamant to not conform to restrictive gender roles.

Atticus Finch’s act of courage is a sure sign of showing resistance to conforming to society’s expectations. Atticus stood up against racism in Maycomb to defend Tom Robinson, a black man because he believes in moral integrity. He knows that others would disapprove his decision to defend Tom Robinson because he is a black man and that there is a slim chance that he’ll win the case. However, he believes Tom Robinson is innocent and based on that he goes through with defending Tom’s case. For him, it is not about winning or losing the case but to do what you know is right. As he puts it in the novel, real courage is “when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway, and you see it

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through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do” (Lee 115-116). The end result might not be in your favour, but you still go through with it, because it becomes a matter of your integrity and evidently keeping his integrity is important for Atticus. While Atticus believes in treating each and every individual with respect, other people in town are quick to categorize people into different groups either according to their rank or race.

Both Scout and Atticus Finch were firm enough in their beliefs and choices that in order to stay true their belief, they resisted conforming to societal norms and expectations.

Citations Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Random House, 2014.

Nurbudhiati, Yoan. “Rebellion against Authority as the Essence of Existentialism in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.” Vivid Journal of Language and

Literature, vol. 4, no. 2, 2016.

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Film Review: Soul Mate Director: Derek Tsang Starring: Zhou Dongyu Sandra Ma Year of release: 2016

Harmony Yuen Academic Secretary of the Society of Comparative Literaure, A.A.H.K.U.S.U., Session 2017-2018. Currently a Bachelor of Arts Year 2 student.

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The story of Soul Mate (2016) unfolds as the love triangle between Qiyue, Ansheng, and Jiaming is revealed. As the story goes on, the film is more than a mere narrative of teenage rebellion, but also a subversion of gender narratives in itself.

Through examining the narration and characterization in Soul Mate, this essay aims at exploring whether the film subverts to male gaze.

First of all, narration in the film is female-oriented.

As stated by Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, male characters have the power of controlling plot development as well as actively gazing women, and the camera is default as maleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes, giving the audience an omnipotent view equivalent to that of male characters (842). In other words, male is often not only the centre of narration but also the narrator himself. Such male-led film language gives way to power imbalance between the genders, causing the audience, including female viewers, eventually a part of male gaze. Nevertheless, Soul Mate subverts this convention using female-led narration. At the beginning, the story unfolds as Ansheng voice-overs the description of their childhood days.

Also, the part where Qiyue and Ansheng exchange letters is voice-overed in first-person narration alongside montages of what they are doing in life. Even when a third-person narrator takes over the story, it is still a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s voice. The lack of an omniscient male narrator in the film posits Qiyue and Ansheng in the place of a subject. Jiaming is given little dialogues and shots, and his actions are explained via indirect

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film language, such as a close-up to the jade pendant on Ansheng’s neck in the train departure scene to narrate their affair. Soul Mate showcases a sense of female subjectivity, narrating a story about women from the viewpoint of women.

From the narration, it can be seen that the film attempts to present the story through female lens, subverting against typical male gaze in cinema where both the camera and the audience are assumed to be male eyes.

Besides, the characterization of Qiyue and Ansheng reinforces female subjectivity. In literature and film, conventions are often used to represent women. They are generally accepted norms and stereotypes, shaping how we think about the characters. As Judith Butler puts it in Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, ‘performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is a essentialism of gender identity at all’ (528).

The characterization of female protagonists is complex in the film, especially when Qiyue and Ansheng are interpreted as two bodies sharing one soul. The changes in their appearance throughout the film, for example, convince the audience that they gradually become each other, like the graphics on its film poster. The hairstyle of Ansheng in earlier parts of the film is curly, short, and low-maintenance while that of Qiyue is straight and tidy; the colour palette of Ansheng’s clothes is brighter while that of Qiyue is duller. The distinction show that the former used to be a carefree girl, while the latter used to be conforming to social norms. Yet, later in the film

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when Ansheng gets into the workplace, as observed from the scene where she meets Jiaming at the restaurant, she wears a stylish hairstyle and dark-coloured office attire and uses a brand-name leather handbag. On the other hand, Qiyue has short hair and a plain wardrobe. The transformation of their appearance constructs complexity in them, showcasing the multiple dimensions and capability of change of women. To add on, the naming of the two characters supports this claim.

Qiyue means July, connoting the season of summer, an idyllic and vibrant time of the year. On the other hand, Ansheng means a stable life. Ironically, the two characters have in them a soul opposite to their names, leading to reciprocal ending for each of them ultimately. Names are merely labels created by society to identify people and, in the context of this film, their parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; expectations, inherently having no meaning in themselves.

The contrast between their names and their choices in real life resembles the divergence between societal expectations of female and female subjectivity, which does not fall into the said gender essentialism as pointed out by Butler. Female subjectivity is consciously highlighted by the director using complex characterization of the female protagonists.

To conclude, the narration and characterization in Soul Mate is a rebellion in contrast with cinematic representations involving male gaze. It is the sum of representations, on screen or as other forms, which bring forth feminist movements that eventually turn rebellion into revolutionary progress in society.

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Citations Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Film Theory and

Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4.

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Society of Comparative Literature, A.A.H.K.U.S.U., Session 2017-2018 Executive Committee Chairperson Lam Wing Anna Internal Vice Chairperson Chau Tsz Lam Jocelyn External Vice Chairperson Kaur Kawaljot General Secretary Or Wing Yin Christina Financial Secretary Singh Dasam Deep Academic Secretary Yuen Hey Wen Harmony Publication Secretary Sarbjot Kaur Publicity Secretary Chan Tiffany Student Representative Wong Wing Hei Hazel

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Acknowledgements Professor Nicole Huang Dr. Yau Ching 駱頴佳 Dr. Lauren Clark Sarbjot Kaur Harmony Yuen

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Rebellion - Bulletin 2018 Edit and Designs: Sarbjot Kaur Publisher: Society of Comparative Literature, A.A.H.K.U.S.U., Session 2017- 2018 Address: Room 2A01, Fong Shu Chuen Amenities Centre, the University of Hong Kong Email: scomplit@hku.hk; hkuscomplit@gmail.com Website: http://www.scomplit.hkusu.hku.hk Date of Issue: 31st October 2018 Pages: 62

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Society of Comparative Literature, A.A.H.K.U.S.U., Session 2017-2018 Address: Room 2A01, Fong Shu Chuen Amenities Centre, the University of Hong Kong Email: scomplit@hku.hk; hkuscomplit@gmail.com Website: www.scomplit.hkusu.hku.hk

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