3The Ripple Imagery as a Decolonial Self
Exploring Multiplicity in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée
(Brena) Yu-Chen Tai
María Lugones’s decolonial feminism is characterized by a methodology of multiplicity that emphasizes the irreducibility of the histories, epistemologies, memories, and cosmologies of the colonized in their contact with colonial power. Lugones argues that coloniality names not only the “classification of people in terms of the coloniality of power and gender, but also the process of active reduction of people, the dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the process of subjectification, the attempt to turn the colonized into less than human beings” (TDF 745). To address the dehumanization that occurs within the subjectivity of the colonized under coloniality, Lugones calls for “decolonizing ourselves.”1 However, because the construction of the modern subject is problematic for Lugones, the project of decolonizing ourselves does not aim to render the self into the rational, unified individual that is the subject of colonial modernity. Whereas the mechanisms of categorization, reduction, and dehumanization buttress coloniality, recognizing, maintaining, and creating multiplicity in us and in others are crucial steps toward the project of decolonizing ourselves.
In Lugones’s decolonial feminist thought, the irreducible multiplicity in the subjectivity of the colonized shows that the coloniality of gender is never a successful enterprise. As Lugones contends, “Without the tense multiplicity we only see either the coloniality of gender as accomplishment, or a freezing of memory, an ossified understanding of self in relation from a precolonial sense of the social” (DF 84). The coloniality of gender is not an accomplished product because resisting forces exist simultaneously with oppressing forces, as in Lugones’s visual expression of “resisting ← → oppressing” (TSC 223). Resistance disrupts the fantasy of coloniality as accomplishment by undermining oppressive forces. Alternatives always exist in the borders of oppressive spatiality because we are ontologically multiple.2 In Lugones’s words, “You are concrete. Your spatiality, constructed as an intersection following the designs of power, isn’t. This discrepancy already tells you that you are more than one” (IP 10). The spatiality drawn by those in power is only one possibility for our concrete bodies to inhabit. In addition to excavating the multiple spatialities in which we reside, Lugones’s vision of decolonizing ourselves requires us to learn about each other “to encompass in our imagination the multiplicity of the powerfully oppressive constructions of the social and of the infrapolitically resistant collectives” (DF 71). The decolonial possibility therefore lies in the praxis of transformation at both individual and collective levels. The colonized self becomes a decolonial self by recognizing and insisting on one’s own multiplicity and that of others when trespassing the spatiality of oppression. Decolonial selves thereby invent a liberatory and coalitional spatiality from the bottom up.
To illuminate the contours of the decolonial self that emerges from Lugones’s theory of multiplicity, this chapter turns to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s experimental autobiography, Dictée, for inspiration. Dictée can be read as a decolonial feminist text in which a decolonial self who is both multiplicitous and coalitional is created. Whereas Lugones mostly conceives of the multiple selves of the oppressed-resistant subject as occurring in one body (Ortega 2001), this chapter seeks to expand Lugones’s theory of multiplicity by showing that the multiplicity of a decolonial self also exists across different bodies, separated by culture and time. As a means to elaborating Lugones’s vision of “decolonizing ourselves” through Cha’s Dictée, this chapter proposes a ripple imagery as a metaphor to conceptualize a self that is simultaneously connected to and separated from other people. The ripple imagery will help us envision the construction of a decolonial self that can maintain multiplicity both within a body and across bodies in the process of remembering resistance to oppressive powers at different temporal and spatial moments.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was a diasporic Korean American writer and performer. Her autobiography, Dictée, is an anomaly within Asian American literary criticism and cultural studies due to its distinctive narrative style and structure as well as its lack of a central narrating voice. This text cannot be easily categorized into any specific literary or artistic genre because it uses a variety of representational forms including prose, poetry, letters, and photos. Moreover, Dictée consists of Chinese calligraphic characters, clinical diagrams, and multiple seemingly discrete narratives, such as stories about the Japanese colonization of Korea, Asian American diasporic experiences, and several known and unknown women’s stories across time and space. Cha thwarts readers’ desires for a transparent, unified story because her book offers no clear storyline to weave the visual and written elements of the text into a linear and developmental narrative. It is therefore difficult to pinpoint what Dictée is with certainty. It could be a collection of some marginalized histories of women fighters against the matrix of colonial power; an Asian American woman’s diasporic story; a narrative about mother-daughter relations; a story of a colonized woman’s struggle to come to voice; and so on.
Besides its nonlinear structure and ambiguous storyline, Dictée causes even more confusion for readers due to its diverse narrative voices. Even though the University of California Press labeled Dictée an autobiography, its autobiographical elements are debatable.3 Cha’s Dictée poses a challenge to the liberal notion of the self that is fully enclosed and autonomous; the dominant presumption of unity in subject formation is undermined and the boundaries between speaking subjects are interrogated by mixing the pronouns of “I,” “we,” “she,” and “you.” Multiplying the voice of the narrating self and making these voices ambiguous, Cha renders the formation of a unified identity, and thus an “autobiography,” unattainable. As Shelly Sunn Wong argues, Dictée refuses “the dominant culture’s demand to represent (and, by implication, to establish a formal identity with), and thereby legitimate, an ideology of cultural assimilation” (1994, 45). Similarly, Hyo Kim points out that Dictée is a “critique of this very desire to name, anchor and fix the identity of a subject according to an arbitrarily constructed criterion” (2008, 470).
Cha refuses to delineate a unified identity for the subject in Dictée in order to explore the multiplicity of both oppressors and the oppressed, which reveals Cha’s decolonial feminist politics. Dictée can be read as a decolonial feminist text because it not only exposes the active reduction of the colonized under the matrix of coloniality but also gives accounts of multiple women’s practices of resistance across time and space. The self delineated in Dictée is not a unified self, but a decolonial self who insists on the stickiness of multiplicity without collapsing differences into a hybrid and without seeing multiplicity as self-fragmentation. This self therefore enacts Lugones’s emphasis on “maintaining multiplicity at the point of reduction—not in maintaining a hybrid ‘product,’ which hides the colonial difference—in the tense workings of more than one logic, not to be synthesized but transcended” (TDF 755). According to Lugones, if we collapse the differences produced by colonial power into a hybrid, or worse, a unity, we will fail to discern the fractured point between oppressing and resisting forces, which will lead us to believe that the differences embodied by the colonized are consistent with dominant power rather than a contestation against it.
Both Cha and Lugones highlight, in different ways, the irreducibility of differences in the construction of a decolonial self, but they also do not foreclose the possibility of a coalitional self formed by multiple decolonial selves whose differences are likewise not collapsible or synthesizable. I suggest that two levels of a decolonial self can be discerned in Dictée. On the one hand, Cha emphasizes a decolonial self at an individual level whose multiplicity resides in one body within the liminal space between oppressing and resisting forces. On the other hand, Cha draws a contour of a coalitional decolonial self, the autobiographical “I” of Dictée, whose multiplicity is located across bodies. The coalitional decolonial self situates itself across several women’s lives that collectively resist a shared colonial logic characterized by dichotomies, categories, and domination. Fusion, Lugones tells us, is “a resistance to multiple oppressions” (RM 77). In recognizing our resistance to multiple oppressions, we can also “appreciate the ways in which others have conceived, given cultural form to, theorized, expressed, embodied, their resistance to multiple oppressions” (77). Fusion is not an abstract concept but it is a series of lived possibilities that can unfold an alternative future if we are able to share resistant tactics against multiple oppressions with each other. The logic of fusion is what makes the individual and collective dimensions of a decolonial self interconnected.
Cha’s refusal to delineate a unified subject can be contextualized within Lugones’s criticisms of the modern subject that follows the logic of purity and fragmentation. Lugones contends that the modern subject as a unified self is only a fictitious construct because, in reality, each person is multiple in nature (SAS 57); even the modern subject is multiple. She argues that a unified self is conceivable only through a split-separation imagination that “generates the fictional construction of a vantage point from which unified wholes, totalities, can be captured … The series of fictions hides the training of the multiple into unity as well as the survival of the multiple” (PIS 128). A unified self is possible only from a particular vantage point reserved for those in power. What appears unified is produced through active reduction of multiplicity; unification is not originally given.
Lugones’s revelation of the active construction of the modern subject also hints at the production of hierarchical difference. As Lugones argues:
To the extent that he is fictional, the tainting is fictional: seeing us as tainted depends on a need for purity that requires that we become “parts,” “addenda” of the bodies of modern subjects—Christian white bourgeois men—and make their purity possible. We become sides of fictitious dichotomies. To the extent that we are ambiguous—non-dichotomous—we threaten the fiction and can be rendered unfit only by decrying ambiguity as nonexistent—that is, by halving us, splitting us. Thus, we exist only as incomplete, unfit beings, and they exist as complete only to the extent that what we are, and what is absolutely necessary for them, is declared worthless. (PIS 131)
The difference produced by split-separation is hierarchical in the sense that only one difference is important, namely, the dominant difference. In the passage above, the dominant difference is the difference embodied by the modern subject who claims to be unified in an illusory whole while hiding his difference as neutrality. In contrast, subordinate differences are viewed as fragmented parts that make the dominant difference complete. From the perspective of the modern subject, those differences viewed as deviation from the dominant difference have neither value nor wholeness; they are only supplementary and subordinate to the dominant difference. Those ambiguous differences suffer violent dichotomization and categorization in order to serve the dominant difference that clings to purity and that assumes the possibility of fragmentation. Those differences that fail to make the dominant difference complete or that threaten the wholeness of it are viewed as anomalies in need of forgetting, suppression, or erasure.
In Dictée, Cha uses the production of whiteness as a symbol of the active reduction of multiplicity under colonial powers. In the following poetic passage from the book, we can see that the assumption of whiteness follows the logic of purity, demands transparency and control, and asserts itself as the dominant, yet neutral, difference:
Ever since the whiteness.
It retains itself, white,
unsurpassing, absent of hue, absolute, utmost
pure, unattainably pure.
If within its white shadow-shroud, all stain should
vanish, all past all memory of having been cast,
left, through the absolution and power of
these words.
Covering. Draping. Clothing. Sheathe. Shroud.
Superimpose. Overlay. Screen.
Conceal. Ambush.
Disguise. Cache. Mask. Veil.
Obscure. Cloud. Shade. Eclipse. Covert. (2001, 132)
Cha’s words highlight that whiteness is never self-evident. It retains itself as absolutely pure only through various mechanisms that actively hide the multiplicity that constitutes whiteness itself. Whiteness is never pure but a mixture of multiple hues. In order to expose that multiplicity within whiteness, Cha uses a series of verbs that allude to hiding something from being discovered, such as shroud, conceal, obscure, and eclipse. Through these words, Cha exposes the various acts that are actually operative but downplayed in the construction of unquestionable whiteness. Only when “all stain” and “all past all memory” are suppressed or cast out can whiteness appear to be pure. But as Cha notices, pure whiteness is “unattainable”; it is only imaginable from a vantage point that conceals its own production.
In the context of the Japanese colonization of Korea represented in Dictée, anyone who embodies the differences that cannot make the dominant difference of the colonizers complete or that threaten its legitimacy will be eliminated in order to maintain colonial power. Cha features a photo taken from a distance that depicts oppressors who are about to execute three blindfolded people in white who are tied up in a cross-shape posture (2001, 39). In this image, Cha exposes the interrelations between coloniality, dehumanization, and violence in the subjection and subjectification of the colonized. Although Cha does not specify the context of the photo, it is likely a photo taken during the Japanese colonization of Korea because the photo is included at the end of a section on the story of female Korean nationalist Yu Guan Soon, who lived from 1903 to 1920 (lunar calendar). The photo shows the power of coloniality at work: colonizers subjugate the colonized to manifest their colonial power. The impaired mobility of those facing execution is indicated in the photograph by their bound bodies. The anonymous figures of the colonized were not allowed to look back at their colonizers during the execution, so they were blindfolded. This photo refers to the anonymity of causalities under the matrix of colonial power. I use the term anonymity to highlight that those in power do not distinguish the individuality of those who transgress the norms but only view them as homogenous faceless agitators who threaten to challenge the status quo. Their anonymity results from the active dehumanization and reduction of the colonized through the deprivation of their individuality and identity. Once the colonized are stripped of individuality, their bodies become exchangeable.4
The notion of exchangeability is articulated more explicitly in the section where Cha offers an account of Yu Guan Soon’s life. Yu Guan Soon, who was a daughter of patriot parents, organized the Korean people to protest Japanese colonization in 1919. Cha sees Yu Guan Soon as “Child revolutionary child patriot woman soldier deliverer of nation” (2001, 37). When Yu Guan Soon was arrested as a leader of the revolution at the young age of seventeen, she was stabbed in the chest and tortured to death by Japanese oppressors. Cha evaluates her life in the following way: “Actions prescribed separate her path from the others. The identity of such a path is exchangeable with any other heroine in history, their names, dates, actions which require not definition in their devotion to generosity and self-sacrifice” (30). In the contact zone between colonizers and the colonized, the bodies of the colonized are ready to be killed and stripped of their individuality whenever they trespass the colonial spatiality from the bird’s eye view perspective of the colonizers. The bodies to be killed mark the physical limit of oppressive spatiality wherein the life and movement of the colonized is permitted. Anyone who challenges colonial rules will be punished or eliminated because their rebelliousness exposes the boundary of the spatiality of oppression delineated by colonial powers.
In the case of the Japanese colonization of Korea, crushing those who transgress colonial spatiality to maintain authority is imperative because Japanese occupation also results from Japanese infringement of an agreement between the two countries. In Dictée, Cha includes a document titled “Petition from the Koreans of Hawaii to President Roosevelt” written on July 12, 1905.5 The document tells that the object of the Japan-Korea Protectorate Treaty between Japan and Korea was to “preserve the independence of Korea and Japan and to protect Eastern Asia from Russia’s aggression” (2001, 34). However, rather than preserving the independence of Korea during the time when Korea allowed Japan to use its territory as a military base to resist Russia, Japan expanded its imperialism and broke the promise by “forcibly obtaining all the special privileges and concessions” from the Korean government (35). The annexation of Korea by Japan between 1910 and 1945 can be viewed as a violation of Korea’s sovereign body by Japanese imperial power (Choi 1993). Facing the uprising of Korean nationalists, Japanese colonizers attempted to erase the colonized who rebelliously transgressed the border of colonial power. The oppressive act reveals the colonizers’ deep fears that their authority will be undermined if they remember their previous encroachment on Korean sovereign territory.
Interestingly, although execution is about reduction, the multiplicity of both the colonizers and the colonized is emphasized in the very act of killing. The multiplicity of the colonizers is revealed through their insecurity about not being what they think they are when seen from the eyes of the colonized. In other words, from the perspective of Japanese colonizers, they view themselves as rightful rule-enforcers. But in the eyes of colonized Koreans, Japanese colonizers are lawbreakers and exploiters. The intense threat Japanese colonizers face from Korean nationalists results from the colonizers’ refusal to see themselves in dual ways, as both law enforcers and law violators. Japanese colonizers represented in Dictée stick to the logic of purity to maintain illusory unified selves in the act of killing. Japanese colonizers are, to borrow Lugones’s phrase, “self-deceiving multiple [selves]” (IP 14). Lugones insightfully argues that oppressors self-deceive themselves about their own multiplicity through “disconnection of memory,” which entails the failure of “cross-referencing, without first person memories of him- or herself in more than one reality” (14–15). Killing the transgressors of colonial power aims to help the colonizers to forget their own violation; colonizers rely on self-deception to secure the legitimacy of their dominance and the success of their practice.
Although forgetfulness helps colonizers suppress their multiplicity, remembering is a crucial aspect of survival for the colonized. As Cha writes:
Why resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound. The past emotions all over again. To confess to relive the same folly. To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion. (2001, 33)
To revisit the past and to reclaim memory as a “[w]ould-be-said remnant” (38) is to re-live the liminal space between the two arrows in Lugones’s articulation of “oppressing ← → resisting” forces; it is to remember the multiplicity of the colonized. As Lugones says, “The limen is the place where one becomes most fully aware of one’s multiplicity” (SAS 59). Lugones calls the liminal space in the colonial context a “fractured locus” (TDF 748). The colonial fractured locus results from ongoing negotiation and resistance between the colonial imposition of systems of oppression on the colonized and the fluency and memory that the colonized have of their native cultures. The fractured locus allows the colonized to conceive of themselves as “not exhausted by domination” (OC 77). While the colonizers strive to create unified selves to sustain their authority, the colonized aim at maintaining their multiplicity for survival and emancipation. In the colonial fractured locus, the colonized adopt what Lugones calls a streetwalker’s perspective, which defies the bird’s-eye view sight of the colonizers (TSC). The colonized resist the power of coloniality at every turn of contact in both small and large scales, which renders coloniality an impossible accomplishment. Remembering, maintaining, and deploying multiplicity at the colonial fractured locus is imperative for the colonized to transform their reduced, colonial selves into decolonial selves who insist on their own irreducible multiplicity.
Cha’s decolonial feminist strategies mainly include challenging the anonymity and exchangeability of people enacted by colonizers and created by the logic of oppression. In several sections of Dictée, Cha humanizes resisters by including photos of woman warriors before she narrates their lives.6 For example, the section “Calliope-Epic Poetry” begins with a photo of Cha’s mother in her youth. The section ends with another photo of her mother at an older age, which appears just after Cha tells her mother’s struggle in the process of immigrating to the United States. Cha’s mother’s identity and history is constantly questioned at U.S. immigration checkpoints: “Every ten feet they demand to know who and what you are, who is represented” (2001, 57). In order to decolonize the colonial gaze that freezes the colonized as ahistorical objects, Cha includes two close-up photos of her mother at different ages in the same section to highlight the change of the corporeal body in the passage of time.7 This decolonial strategy makes her mother visible as an historical subject and as multiple across time. Elizabeth Frost also notices that the photos of Cha’s mother “provide a point of reference and signify both the concrete effects of time’s passage and a historical frame” (2002, 184).
In addition to putting faces back on resisters to challenge the anonymity that the oppressive power actively produces, Cha defiantly subverts the notion of exchangeability that operates in the logic of oppression with an alternative concept of interchangeability guided by the logic of resistance. Cha’s particular idea of resistant interchangeability emphasizes the continuity of resistance across time and space. In her close reading of Dictée, Michelle Black Wester notices that the interchangeability of women is emphasized through Cha’s mother, Hyung Soon Huo, whose story follows that of Yu Guan Soon. While the story of Yu Guan Soon focuses on her sacrifice at the age of seventeen, Cha’s mother’s story begins when she is eighteen years old. Wester argues that “the numbering is significant because it implies that Hyung Soon Huo’s story can be read as a continuation of Yu Guan Soon’s” (2007, 184). Wester’s insightful observation suggests that whenever colonial forces cannot be successfully combated, resisting forces always emerge as embodied and manifested in particular women’s lives. The shared colonial forces that Yu Guan Soon, Cha’s mother, and Cha resist at different temporal moments and spatial locations are those of the Japanese colonization of Korea in reality and in memory.
Yu Guan Soon’s resistance is outward, direct, and large scale in her organization of a massive demonstration against Japanese colonizers. Although Yu Guan Soon’s cry for Korean liberation from Japanese colonization in her native land is stifled when she is violently killed, Cha’s mother continues Yu Guan Soon’s resisting force in a more private and small-scale fashion by speaking Korean in the foreign land of China while it was forbidden under Japanese occupation.8 Cha writes: “The tongue that is forbidden is your own mother tongue. You speak in the dark. In the secret. The one that is yours. Your own. You speak very softly, you speak in a whisper. In the dark, in secret. Mother tongue is your refuge” (2001, 45).9 While Cha’s mother speaks a resistant language in private in China, Cha makes her mother’s Korean whisper in China and Yu Guan Soon’s outcry in Korea heard once again in English in the United States through her writing in Dictée. The multilayered echo of resistant voices among Yu Guan Soon, Cha’s mother, and Cha at different temporal moments and spatial locations suggests a particular construction of the self that McDaniel identifies as “an episodic, serialized version of self” (2009, 73). McDaniel argues that the main characteristic of a serial and relational strategy of self-construction lies in “the desire to expose the significance of others on our own self-imaging” (84). According to McDaniel, simply collecting and repeating the stories and histories of others is not enough to form a serial self. Instead, a serial construction of the self must encompass the notion that “seeing the self through the bodies of others allows their stories to continue beyond their physical existence. This continuation beyond death is a driving force behind seriality and serial self-representation, as objects that are lost may also be found” (84). Cha’s construction of a serial self reveals a particular form of interchangeability with difference guided by the logic of resistance that does not fall into the pitfall of anonymity. Interchangeability with difference involves an overlapping of lives and experiences without substitution or exchange but with ongoing interaction.10 I argue that Cha’s resistant notion of interchangeability is a kind of intersubjectivity in Lugones’s sense of the term; it results from our fluency in each other’s resistant histories and strategies in order to make each other legible subjects in different “worlds.”
For Lugones, intersubjectivity is the basis on which others recognize us as resisters and we recognize others as resisters: “there is a need and an excitement to being understood in intersubjective encounters” because intersubjectivity makes resisters who are invisible in the matrix of oppression legible to each other (TSC 219). Intersubjectivity is not only what resisters desire but also what they must achieve in order to make sense of their own existences because resisters are not individuals affirmed by institutions; resisters are “active subjects” who require each other’s backing at every turn in order to make sense of their words, gestures, and movements, all of which lack institutional support (219).
To facilitate intersubjective encounters among resisters that would make their subjectivities sensible, complex communication is required. Complex communication enables us to communicate across differences through a playful attitude in a liminal space, even though we may arrive at that liminal space through different journeys.11 What makes complex communication successful is recognizing each other as resisters to intermeshed oppressions, as well as our willingness to decipher each other’s resistant strategies in order to imagine, nurture, and create liberatory possibilities collectively. Complex communication demands our openness to uncertainty without “assimilating the text of others to our own” (OC 84). It is a manner of interaction that is “enacted through a change in one’s own vocabulary, one’s sense of self, one’s way of living, in the extension of one’s collective memory, through developing forms of communication that signal disruption of the reduction attempted by the oppressor” (84). Complex communication is not only a linguistic practice but also a spatial one. Lugones’s world-traveling is a strategy that facilitates complex communication and points to a spatial dimension where intersubjectivity and multiplicity can be supported. World-traveling requires its travelers to “[trespass] against the spatiality of oppressions” that are guided by a categorial and dichotomous logic (IP 11). The epistemic shift catalyzed by traveling to others’ worlds to recognize “what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes” requires us to rechart the relationality of space not only to reconceive our sociality with people in different worlds anew but also to try out alternative interactions with them to create decolonial options collectively (WT 97; original emphasis).
While world-traveling helps us shift perspectives, a politics of memory also plays a crucial role in the process of complex communication. Lugones argues that
the liberatory experience lies in this memory, on these many people one is who have intentions one understands because one is fluent in several “cultures,” “worlds,” realities. The liberatory possibility lies in resistant readings of history that reveal unified historical lines as enacting dominations through both linearity and erasure. (SAS 58–59)
We need to remember our other selves in different worlds in order to cross-reference different realities for the purpose of retaining our multiplicitous self. However, merely remembering ourselves in other worlds and understanding ourselves as multiplicitous is not sufficient to achieve liberation, as Lugones tells us (SAS 62). What leads to emancipatory possibilities is a collective practice “born of dialogue among multiplicitous persons who are faithful witnesses of themselves and also testify to, and uncover the multiplicity of, their oppressors and the techniques of oppression afforded by ignoring that multiplicity” (62). Remembering is both individual and collective rebellion with a transformative and subversive potential. Through the strategies of world-traveling and remembrance, intersubjectivity achieved through complex communication begins from a coalitional starting point. If we are satisfied in our own compartmentalized space delineated by the oppressors, we will not be able to recognize other resisters as active subjects and will not begin to imagine emancipatory spatialities. In Dictée, Cha performs complex communication to read women warriors across time and space alongside each other; she fosters the intersubjectivity between them without collapsing their differences. The interchangeability with difference between Yu Guan Soon and Cha’s mother embodies complex communication in this sense.
Tenth, a circle within a circle, a series of concentric circles.
—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée
In Dictée, Cha unfolds two levels of a decolonial self: on the one hand, the decolonial self is embodied in each woman warrior who maintains her multiplicity at the fractured locus in the matrix of oppressive power. Cha highlights their resistances at the point of reduction of their lives, languages, and politics in different narrative segments such as the respective stories of Yu Guan Soon and Cha’s mother. On the other hand, reading Dictée as a whole, Cha constructs a decolonial self who is also a coalitional self by creating a community of women warriors across time and space, as is the case with Cha’s situating herself in the serial lives of Yu Guan Soon and her mother. Cha creates this alternative genealogy of resistance through memory, cross-reference, and a sense of belonging. In recognizing differences, intersubjectivity is achieved in the construction of the coalitional dimension of the decolonial self through complex communication.
The two levels of a decolonial self are interconnected. To conceptualize the two levels of a decolonial self at once, I propose a ripple imagery to illuminate Lugones’s concept of multiplicity as it relates to her notion of a decolonial self. I theorize the ripple imagery by detailing the forces and spatialities that facilitate the emergence of a decolonial self. These include the simultaneously distinguishable and connected relation between nondominant differences in the decolonial self and its underlying coalitional politics.
The ripple imagery is an energy field that consists of a series of concentric circles or partial circles. A set of visible circles in the ripple imagery is created by the intensification of both the oppressive force moving from the inside out and the resistant force moving from the outside in. The oppressive force is the energy accumulated when an outside object drops into a collective body of water. The outside object alone does not create the ripple itself. Instead, it is the energy gathered at the moment when the object violently collides with one point of the body of water that creates multiple layers of the ripple. Therefore, the ripple is the effect of the oppressing ← → resisting forces in Lugones’s articulation rather than of a single direction in itself. The visible layers of the ripple show that the oppressive force does not precede the resistant force; rather, the two exist simultaneously. The particular movement in the ripple imagery is well captured by Cha’s words: “You are moving accordingly never ahead of the movement never behind the movement you are carrying the weight from outside being the weight inside. You move. You are being moved. You are movement. Inseparably. Indefinably. Not isolatable terms” (2001, 51). What connects the layers of the ripple together is the tension between the continuous resisting force and the dispersed oppressing force, just as the lives of Yu Guan Soon, Cha’s mother, and Cha are concentric circles in their shared resistance to Japanese colonization in reality and in memory.
Each visible ripple layer can be viewed as the emergence of a decolonial self who maintains its multiplicity at the fractured locus of opposing forces. The fractured locus allows the self to see “a double image of herself” when shifting perspectives between different realities, and this in turn leads the self to recognize her incompatible attributes in different worlds (WT 92). The incompatible attributes make the self multiplicitous rather than unified. Furthermore, in the ripple imagery, each circle of the ripple field is a nondominant difference with its own value and wholeness; there is no hierarchical relationship between layers in a horizontal field of the ripple. Unlike the hierarchical difference that privileges one dominant difference and views other differences as deviation from the dominant difference, nondominant differences are recognized in virtue of their own value without hierarchical evaluation. Communicating between nondominant differences can nurture the repertoire for emancipation as well as extend the collective memory between resisters without privileging one difference over others.
Conceptualizing each layer of the ripple as a whole in itself does not mean that it is isolated from other layers and self-enclosed. While layers of the ripple have distinguishable boundaries, a set of circles can also be mapped onto the same field of the ripple without a clear-cut separation from other layers of the ripple. In the ripple imagery, there is no possibility to separate one layer of the ripple entirely from another because the boundary between layers is permeable to the others. As Lugones writes, “worlds are indeed permeable,” while also being multiple (IP 16). Therefore, each discernible layer of the ripple is in itself whole but is also a part of the larger whole of the ripple field. The creation of a whole field of the ripple does not erase the differences between its layers. Visualizing differences through the ripple imagery shows how the coexistence of the dual nature of individuality and interconnectivity in Lugones’s theory of difference is possible.
Shifting the focus from individual layers of the ripple to the entire ripple field is to move from the first level of an individual decolonial self whose multiplicity is located in the liminal space between the oppressing and resisting forces to the second level of a decolonial self who is a coalitional self situated in a resistant community of difference. It is also a shift from “I” to “we” in Lugones’s expression of “I → we,” where the arrow signifies “the transitional quality and dispersed intentionality of the subject” (TSC 227). Lugones uses the term active subjectivity to refer to the dispersed intentionality of resisters. What characterizes active subjectivity is its intersubjective nature. As Lugones argues: “Resistant intentions are given form necessarily intersubjectively” (216). Lugones understands the intentionality of resisters as “lying between rather than in subjects” (208; original emphasis). Further, Lugones explains:
Active subjectivity is alive in the activity of dispersed intending in complex, heterogeneous collectivities, within and between worlds of complex sense. The activity is not subservient or servile but in transgression of dominant sense. The dispersion includes a dispersion of meaning through a translation that does not rest on equivalences between words but on worldly connections in living in transgression of reduction of life to the monosense of domination. (217)
Lugones moves away from the notion of agency to that of active subjectivity whose backing comes, not from institutional recognition, but from other resisters who are aware of both the reduction of their lives and their multiplicity. Active subjects are not only oppressed but also resistant against the spatiality of domination. The intersubjective nature of active subjectivity in the movement of “I → we” makes conceivable a decolonial self whose multiplicity resides not only in one body but also across bodies and times to form a coalitional self. But the move from “I” to “we” does not erase the differences between bodies that consist of the “we.” Similar to the relation between layers in a ripple field, the differences constituting the coalitional decolonial self are simultaneously individually distinguishable and collectively interconnected. In the example of Dictée, Cha retains the individual differences among women warriors but emphasizes the continuity of their resistant forces across time and space.
The ripple imagery is a metaphor of being as well as doing. It illuminates two levels of Lugones’s theory of multiplicity in relation to her decolonial feminist thought: the ontological and the coalitional. Each discernable layer of the ripple manifests the ontological dimension of multiplicity that makes visible the fractured locus between oppressing and resisting forces where the colonized are situated. The entire field of the ripple helps us grasp the coalitional aspect of multiplicity that renders seemingly discrete colonial differences into a sticky field of nondominant differences with inseparable interconnectivity due to memory and complex communication. Lugones’s project of decolonizing ourselves requires understanding and praxis in regard to both levels of multiplicity at the same time. The decolonial self conceptualized in the ripple imagery is infinite, open, and always in the making. The decolonial self can be expanded, condensed, or multiplied depending on whether the interaction between the oppressive forces and the resistant forces that drive the ripple imagery of the decolonial self is weak, strong, or multiple.
1.María Lugones, “Resisting Gender: Toward a Decolonial Feminism” (lecture, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, March 14, 2014).
2.I use the term border with reference to Walter Mignolo’s concept. Mignolo argues that decolonial thinking dwells in the border, a space of “exteriority” that is “not the outside, but the outside built from the inside in the process of building itself as inside” (2012, 26). The border is the space where those who do not conform to Western modernity reside; it is also the space where we have the potential to cast off our previous epistemic baggage by “learning to unlearn in order to relearn and to rebuild” (26).
3.For example, Nicole McDaniel calls for reading Dictée as a memoir rather than as an autobiography (2009).
4.I use the concept of exchangeability to reflect a particular intracorporal relationship that Jennifer McWeeny identifies when she states that “bodies are ‘exchangeable’ with one another when they are alternately used to serve the same function” (2014, 280).
5.The Japan-Korea Protectorate Treaty, signed in 1905, ended Korean diplomatic sovereignty and made Korea a protectorate of Japan.
6.A woman warrior is “a female figure—historic, literary, or mythical—who performs male tasks or social roles with the aim of avenging a family, village, nation, or a group of people oppressed by war, poverty, or colonial rule” (Lee 2010, 64). The phrase “women warriors” also recalls Asian American writer Maxine Hong Kingston’s famous novel about immigration, The Woman Warrior. With the use of this phrase, I also hope to situate Dictée within the genealogy of Asian American women’s writings on immigration that feature women resisters.
7.I use the term colonial here because it is important to emphasize that the U.S.-Korea relationship is also a colonial one, despite the role of “liberator” that the United States assumed after World War II by removing the Japanese from Korea. As Chungmoo Choi argues, “(post)colonial South Koreans have continued to mimic Western hegemonic culture and have reproduced a colonial pathology of self-denigration and self-marginalization, which have [sic] long blinded the South Koreans from critically assessing their ‘liberator-benefactor’ as a colonizing hegemon” (1993, 83).
8.Cha’s mother is a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles.
9.In Borderlands/La Frontera, Chicana feminist philosopher and writer Gloria Anzaldúa also states that speaking one’s mother tongue is an act of home (re)creation: “For some of us, language is a homeland closer than the Southwest—for many Chicanos today live in the Midwest and the East” (2007, 77). In addition, Anzaldúa proclaims that mother tongues are integral to one’s identity formation when she writes, “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language” (81).
10.Lugones emphasizes the interactive dimension in forming self-knowledge and catalyzing self-change when she writes: “self-knowledge is interactive” and “self-change is interactive” (LPF 74).
11.According to Lugones, a playful attitude refers to an “openness to uncertainty, which includes a vocation not bound by the meanings and norms that constitute one’s ground”; it “enables one to find in others one’s own possibilities and theirs” (IP 26).
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2007. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. 2001. Dictée. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Choi, Chungmoo. 1993. “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea.” Positions 1(1): 77–102.
Frost, Elizabeth A. 2002. “ ‘In Another Tongue’: Body, Image, Text in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” In We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics, edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue, 181–92. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Kim, Hyo. 2008. “Depoliticising Politics: Readings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” Changing English 15(4): 467–75.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. 1976. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Random House.
Lee, Karen An-Hwei. 2010. “From Female Self-Sacrifice to Korean Freedom Fighter: Yu Guan Soon in Theresa Cha’s Dictée.” In Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine: Essays on Literature, Film, Myth and Media, edited by Lan Dong, 63–81. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
McDaniel, Nicole. 2009. “‘The Remnant Is the Whole’: Collage, Serial Self-Representation, and Recovering Fragments in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” ARIEL 40(4): 69–88.
McWeeny, Jennifer. 2014. “Topographies of Flesh: Women, Nonhuman Animals, and the Embodiment of Connection and Difference.” Hypatia 29(2): 269–86.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2012. “Decolonizing Western Epistemology/Building Decolonial Epistemologies.” In Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, edited by Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta, 19–43. New York: Fordham University Press.
Ortega, Mariana. 2001. “‘New Mestizas,’ ‘World’-Travelers,’ and ‘Dasein’: Phenomenology and the Multi-Voiced, Multi-Cultural Self.” Hypatia 16(3): 1–29.
Wester, Michelle Black. 2007. “The Concentric Circles of Dictée: Reclaiming Women’s Voices Through Mothers and Daughters’ Stories.” Journal of Asian American Studies 10(2): 169–91.
Wong, Shelly Sunn. 1994. “Unnaming the Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” In Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, edited by Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, 43–68. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.