While weblogs act in many ways as liberatory spaces for self-regulating and self-organizing social formations, power structures are reproduced in their levels of accessibility: the Internet’s universal democratic features derive from and coincide with imperial prescriptions of ‘universal’ ‘democratic’ norms. In this ‘ethblographic’ study, I evaluate the conditions of possibility that blogs enable as virtual tools for identity construction and creative self-expression within hegemonic fields of domination. This paper argues that blog projects are not totalizing: the constructions that emerge are often fragmented, contradictory and incoherent, reflecting their subjection to imperial demands and controls. Concurrently, blog users are redefining the Internet’s alternative and subversive potentials in their appropriation and co-creation of cyber spaces. The blog entries of Salam Pax reveal many of the tensions and inconsistencies of imperial subjectivity as it is constructed, reconstructed, constituted and reconstituted through the Internet. The ways in which he engages with these dominating forces speak to the power of virtual domains to act as sites for cultural reclamation and negotiation of ulterior identities in excess of imperial norms. In exploring these tensions through my own navigation through the blogosphere, I gain insight into the online processes and practices that facilitate and disavow access and influence. Further, I posit that online identities resonate beyond the scope of the form itself, creating significant implications for offline understandings and mediations of self and subjectivity.

 This paper examines the geoeconomic discourses surrounding the development of the North Korean Kaesong Industrial Complex, a free economic zone six miles north of the Demilitarized Zone that separates the Koreas. In particular, I examine the way academic literature, media and governmental reports frame Kaesong as a modality where the two Koreas can meet in preparation for eventual reunification. These discourses promote a performative, imaginary geography replete with an active negotiation of border articulation envisioned through an economic flatness and promoted by trade. Instead, as governmental reports from both sides of the Pacific tacitly accept the longevity of the North Korean regime, as well as recognize the political and economic costs of what Korean reunification would entail, a push by the Korean governments has been made for maintaining the geopolitical status quo on the peninsula. This is done by putting development within Kaesong under terms of a détente, sustained by the legacies of imperial geographies, and through which all state motives and discourses for development in Kaesong should be reexamined. I find that my framing captures the real considerations of regional and foreign powers, multinational corporations and the geostrategic interests of North and South Korea, but are otherwise absent. By augmenting the dominant discourse, my paper points towards unseen ramifications of the contemporaneous transformation of the two Koreas, which had been formerly caught in Cold War geopolitical scripts, but have become self-motivated geoeconomic actors utilizing these scripts to negotiate the terms of their own development logics within neoliberal governance strategies.

When speaking of race, the task put to Asian American poets is not to make readers comprehend that they are different, but rather how. The question of how racial difference can be understood is really a question of literary form, and one which Asian American poets take up with great frequency. But when reading Asian American poets, the institutional tendency has been to interpret them in terms of literary criticism’s more material interventions, i.e. readings which focus on existent racial conflict, class conflict, or gendered conflict. Within the field of literary studies, the partitioning of institutionalized reading practices generally occurs along racial lines, with formalist analysis being used to understand white writers and cultural criticism being reserved for racialized writers; I argue that this limits the recognition of the racialized writer’s transformative possibilities by ignoring the specifically literary freedom to imagine otherwise. I do not contend that literary form is the transcendent means to enter a universal space, but rather that form is deeply enmeshed within material systems and yet provides the means of altering their parameters. With these methodological considerations in mind, I have refocused on the poetry of Arthur Sze, because speaking about criticism is empty without offering an interpretation. There I have found that his formal decisions allow us to conceive of the possibility of a universality of difference, rather than one which homogenizes toward unification.

The 1994 Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas has been marked as a watershed for resistance to neoliberalism. I argue that it offers something more substantial—I will address the Zapatista uprising as a revolution of democratic relations. As an event, the EZLN’s armed uprising aimed to both create and maintain a distinctive space, a civil forum in which alternative modes of political emancipation might be brought into existence. The EZLN leadership has affirmed that, in contrast to an orthodox revolution which would take over state institutions, it is carrying out “a revolution that will make the revolution possible,” establishing a vantage point from which to critique the existing Mexican nation. In one interview, Subcomandante Marcos articulated the goal of the uprising to be a “sort of democratic space for the resolution of confrontation between diverse political proposals.” The Zapatistas’ counterhegemonic assertion of indigenous agency brought hegemonic Mexican nationalist logic to a crisis and affected, in Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, a “functional change in a sign system” used to understand marginal identities. Broadly, I examine how the uprising operated to counterpose political relations that modify the form of the nation-state. I show the extent to which the EZLN disrupted the stability of the Mexican state’s project of self- legitimation. When the indigenous struggle of resistance was reinvented by the EZLN as the struggle for autonomy, the fact of indigenous difference became central to the new nation-building goals of the movement. As the EZLN first reclaimed, reanimated, and generalized the symbol of the Indian drawn from nationalist discourse, state officials interpreted the movement as a profound threat to the ruling party’s long-standing claim to power. A proposal of alternative emancipation changes popular understandings of existing political relations and allows for the unimagined to be made real.