69. ☎️ conversations in the margins ☎️
thinking about antidotes to academic isolation
Hello, and happy Monday.
I have to say, it's really starting to feel like fall here. The trees are turning those beautiful hues of red and orange and it's finally cold enough for me to wear my wool coat. I've been enjoying my walks home through Cambridge. There are so many lovely houses with pumpkins still lining the porches.
One thing I was definitely not expecting when I moved here is all the turkeys that seem to reside in the area. Here's just one of about nine that I saw only last week:
Believe me when I say that they are absolutely MASSIVE.
✏️ Still processing.
From Monday through Friday, I try to keep a regular routine. Mornings are blocked off on my calendar as "writing" time, and the afternoons are meant for all other tasks relating to my work life: meetings, job & fellowship apps, reading scholarship, admin, etc. I usually relegate the afternoons where I am reading other scholarship to Thursdays and Fridays, when I feel more relaxed. Last week, however, I decided to begin my week with Nadia Kim's Imperial Citizens, because I was just too excited to wait.
More will be said on the content Kim's amazing work below. Here, I want to talk about what it felt like to start my week with reading scholarship.
So often when I write, I have feelings of loneliness. I've even written about them before. Most recently, I've felt like I'm writing into a void—that my words written on the page are merely in a plane of existence, taking up space, but not really connecting to anything. Perhaps this is due to my lack of scholarly interaction with others on campus. (Although campus is open and we are all wearing masks/being outdoors/trying our best, it feels like so much of the events and social aspects of academic life continues to be on pause.) I feel siloed in my little office. So, I guess in a way, reading was a way to think about my ideas alongside someone else.
My writing was really helped today by the act of reading someone else's ideas. It gave me something to springboard my own thinking off of.
I wrote that in my process journal Monday afternoon. And it was true—many of my annotations felt like I was having a conversation with the text. Even more, I started writing down phrases and commentary in my notebook. This is very rare for me—I only ever take notes when I'm writing a book review and want to remember certain points to bring up in my analysis. Funny enough, I had an itch for a pen as I was reading, and words soon came out like a faucet: terms that are helpful to my own study, reminders of things to look into one I went back into my own document, brainstorms to think through questions I've been having about my work, sentences to revise in my own work.
The act of reading another's work—of reading with love—was quite generative for me last week. It allowed me to turn on a faucet of ideas. And it allowed me to talk with someone else. To feel more in community with some of the folks I am writing to and for.
📚 Still reading.
Kim, Nadia Y. Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
I'm not one to regularly read sociological texts. I think the last work of sociology I read was Neda Maghbouleh's Limits of Whiteness. What drew me to this book initially was a Google Scholar search for "imperial citizens." I was interested in the term and wanted to take a look at how other scholars had conceived of and used it. This is how I came to Nadia Y. Kim, who wrote an entire book about this dynamic in the South Korean context.
Through observation and interviews both in Seoul and Los Angeles, Kim explores the ways in which South Korean communities encountered and understood "race"—and especially the way that race & racial hierarchy worked in the US—transnationally. That is, South Koreans interacted with race and the US racial hierarchy long before they migrated to the United States. Rather, US military presence and mass media contributed to a particular understanding of what it meant to be white and Black in America, and where they as immigrants may lie within this hierarchy. These conceptions, first formed in the homeland, then shaped the way that South Korean émigrés came to understand themselves once within the borders of the United States.
Kim takes on so many important concepts in this text: the paradox of US visibility in S. Korea and Korean invisibility in the United States, Korean migrants' self-positioning within the US racial hierarchy, complications of racial triangulation and the model minority. My main takeaway from the text, though, was the idea of transnational processes of racialization.
"Transnational" is a term that many of us use in the academy to describe the type of work that we do. Put very bluntly, transnational studies extend their questions beyond borders in order to look at the ways in which flows of people, capital, goods, and/or ideas contributes to historical dynamics. U.S. racial formation has broadly been studied as something that happens once people are within the country's borders.
Kim, on the other hand, shows how this process can also happen across borders. Koreans' understanding of race in the United States was informed far before they would immigrate there. Kim shows how (1) encounters with the U.S. through film & military occupation, and (2) Japan's occupation of Korea impacted migrants' understanding and navigation of U.S. racial dynamics. It was also through the former that Koreans began seeing U.S. anti-blackness through their perception of white and Black characters and soldiers. These immigrants had some conception of race in the U.S.—and therefore how they fit into it—before even stepping foot in the country's borders.
If you are particularly invested in hearing the voices of the subjects themselves, the interview transcriptions of the conversations between Kim and her interlocutors were fascinating.
🌀 Still consuming.
In the bookshop:
Currently Reading: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
On deck: Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
I am STILL thinking about the mini apple cider donut I got from Blackbird Doughnuts last week. So good! So cute! Do y'all have any Greater Boston area donut recs? Plz let me know!
Loved this take on mind mapping from Austin Kleon. It's definitely one of my favorite ways to brainstorm everything—from quarterly goals to book sections.
On prioritizing friendship over romantic relationships.
If you are interested in getting an MA and studying the Iranian diaspora at SF State, consider applying to the Azar Hatefi Graduate Student Fellowship in Iranian Diaspora Studies!
I've heard about an inner child before, but never an inner teenager. Some food for thought!
Saeed Jones is back with Werk-In-Progress and his very cute doggie Caesar!
📖 Book club corner.
For November's book club, we will be reading Hola Papi by John Paul Brammer! Thank you to everyone who voted, and feel free to purchase a copy of the book here! Details are below.
Here’s the event info:
Date & Time: Tuesday, November 30 @ 5PM PST/8PM EST
Registration Link!
Suggested Donation (for those able to donate): $3-10 through Paypal or Venmo (@idyalz)
🐶 A pup-date.
Mr. Higgins looked absolutely ECSTATIC the other day. Those ears are reaching for the sky!
As always, thanks so much for reading through, and I'll see you in the next one!
Warmly,
Ida