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.

In this paper I argue that the Classics field regulates the production of knowledge based on paradigms of scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is accomplished by defining the practice of scholarship and accepting or rejecting the work of scholars in accordance with these paradigms. I will use the fierce debate provoked by the publication of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization to demonstrate this process. Bernal’s argument is that Egyptian and Phoenician colonization and influence shaped Ancient Greek culture. Critics of Bernal’s work conflate him with the Afrocentrist movement, a reaction to Eurocentrism and racism in scholarship, which advocates the study of history from an African perspective. Classics’ visceral response to Bernal and Afrocentrism speaks to what is at stake in the debate: our understanding of the origins of western civilization. To document the themes which have characterized this debate I examined the scholarly writing involved. Bernal and the Afrocentrists challenge the current paradigms of scholarship: the ideas of objectivity and proof and the Eurocentrism inherent in the Classics field. Classicists tie the issue of race to the issue of objectivity, which complicates the debate. Their fundamental paradigmatic difference causes classicists to attempt to exclude Bernal and the Afrocentrists from knowledge production and declare their scholarship invalid.

Through the medium of dance, this performance analyzes the imperial field as a problem of embodiment. The imperial field in this context is viewed as the multiple sites that are contained within an imposed unity of an empire. The consensus of this analysis is that it is not an empire's totality but its ability to manipulate, mobilize and embody its multiple forms that ultimately construct new power relations. The process is never total, but it is necessarily left open in order to allow for negotiation. Creating power structures within an imperial field often hinges on the appropriation of ideologies onto bodies, both individual and collective and the construction of these bodies as such. Through dance, the articulations of these appropriations can be performed. If we visualize the Imperial Field as being on one plane and dance on another, this project intersects these two planes and forms an analysis from the point of crossing. By developing a theory about dance as it relates to the imperial field, the movements between the different sites or constructed bodies of the performance articulate the flow of the imperial field and its reconstitution across different conceptual bodies.

Within empires, the highest levels of power—the three branches in the case of the U.S. government—struggle with each other over whose organizing principle will dominate. Once a victor comes to the fore, certain areas do not conform and become the excess. These excess spaces mark the intersection of several spheres of influence, leading to ambiguous power arrangements and feuds. Guantanamo Bay is a paradigm example of such excess. The executive and judicial branches conflict over who can lay claim to the base and its detainees in the hopes of absorbing the space and augmenting their respective influence. Presidential actions and rhetoric 2001-2004 and the Supreme Court decision in Rasul v. Bush (2004) indicate that both branches’ tool of choice was the detainees’ personhood, meaning their claim to rights before the law. Each branch defined the prisoners’ humanity in terms most useful for expanding its scope. The executive tried to dehumanize them and eliminate their standing; the judiciary countered by extending statutory habeas corpus and legal personhood to the detainees. Rasul v. Bush serves as the flashpoint for understanding how the agents within an empire’s highest tiers exploit excess spaces to expand their role in organizing the empire.

The United Nations holds the unique position in the international community of being the global authority on state norms and standards while daily finding these norms contested by the member states and bodies within its structure. This paper argues that the United Nations is an arena where imperial fields converge and clash, creating dissonances in the work of the UN while simultaneously promoting global cooperation. I understand imperial fields to be multiple loci of power inherent in the very UN structure, manifested in the 192 member states and the multiple bodies and commissions that contribute to the overall decentralized UN organization. In order to prove that the UN is fragmented and incoherent rather than a central, cohesive institution, I focus on the UN Security Council (UNSC) as a microcosm of the tensions inherent in the larger UN system. I propose that the tensions and struggles created by the imperial fields in the Security Council influence (sometimes detrimentally) the decision making abilities of the member states. I study the circumstances of UNSC involvement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. and examine the influence of the imperial fields within the Council clash with the power of regional organizations. I hope to speak to the larger idea of UN efficacy in a constantly shifting world and whether it is able to uphold the ideals of peace and security, human rights, and sustainable development.