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 question of PTSD in Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans returning home has stirred increasing anxieties about the deep and tacit networking of trauma (and its unnerving sequelae) in the American cultural zeitgeist. Now, more than ever, the question of empire warrants a hermeneutic which can consider the locutions of trauma, its unspeakability, its repetitions, and the generation of fantasy. As the subject of contemporary psychoanalysis, fantasy is the site of the concealment of trauma. This is a study of the ways texts contact the networks of unresolved social and historical traumas using popular film and television as a venue of repression, representation, and the conduit and production of imperial desires and disciplines. Through close, psychoanalytic readings, Spider-man III and an episode of Sex in the City construct two alternate fantasies of a post-9/11 Manhattan, implicating a new psychoanalytic history of the city as a node of American empire. The investigation of texts, and the unconscious articulation of tropes of empire assembling after catastrophe, reveals a tortured history and a haunting of culture that implicity engages fields of discourse, manufactures the desire for empire and its reconstitution, and the intrapsychic reorganization of history.

During the redemocratization of the post-military regime of the late 70's to mid-80's in Brazil, the demands of women's liberation movements indicated a crisis of modernity that compelled the state to reorganize in a way that responded to mass violence and inequality, resulting in women's police stations. Because the faculties of the state are still patriarchal, the interactions between women in the stations are bound to the reproductions of difference that restrains full cultural citizenship. This paper discusses cultural citizenship in the terms of Miller's (2006) "the right to know and speak" determined by the contingencies of everyday practices that construct and relegate identities and representations into hierarchies of rights and privilege. It suggests that the interactions between women within the stations, through which the state performs, contest the cultural citizenship of women to whom multiple and variable identities have been ascribed. Although stations have increased the reporting of violent crimes committed against women, they do not address the pervasive normativity and naturalization of violence as a legitimate form of power in Brazil and the imperial field. Stations have primarily served to assuage rowdy feminists, simultaneously containing them in a web of unperturbed legal and social patriarchy. Thus, stations serve to address the crisis of modernity that women's liberation creates and not imperial gendered violence. The stations become sites in which female actors must work through their cultural citizenship within the imperial field that subordinates them.