Cathy Park Hong's Translating Mo'um

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Over Thanksgiving, I read Cathy Park Hong's first book of poetry Translating Mo'um (Hanging Loose Press, 2002).



It's really quite amazing. I don't think I understand most of it, and it's the kind of writing that makes me want to go back and read and think and read some more. I think I'm going to buy a copy now! (I read the library's copy.) Hong is doing something exciting with language -- lines unfold words full of contradictions and uneasy connections.

( Assiduous Rant )

In this text, she also focuses a lot on bodies and how people view bodily difference. My favorite poems are the ones dealing with Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins, and with Saartje Baartman, aka Hottentot Venus. The Siamese Twins and Hottentot Venus were subjected to the gaze of the "civilized world" and used to render the cultures and worlds from which they came primitive, grotesque, and exotic. Hong's poems about them imagine their perspectives, pushing back against the scrutiny on their bodies.

Additional things: The Village Voice has a strange review of Translating Mo'um: "Twin Set" by David Mills.

Poets & Writers online has a wonderful, short interview with Hong, mostly about her second book, Dance Dance Revolution (Norton, 2007): CATHY PARK HONG ON IDENTITY-POLITICS POETRY AND BUSH AS THE TRUE POSTMODERN PRESIDENT.

New book by E. San Juan Jr.

[thebowlerhat.livejournal.com]

Hey everyone,

Sorry I've been absent from the community lately, but I've been extremely busy. All the book recommendations look great though. I can't wait to check them out in more detail in a couple of weeks. I just wanted to let you know about a new book by E. San Juan Jr. available on this site: http://www.lulu.com/content/1205858.

ISBN: 978-1-4303-2744-8
Publisher: Lulu.com
Rights Owner: E. San Juan, Jr.
Copyright: © 2007 E. San Juan, Jr. Standard Copyright License
Language: English
Country: United States
Edition: First Edition

Here's what they say about it:

Description:

This project of "balikbayan" (homecoming) unfolds through poems and one essay-in-progress spanning four decades of exile. It seeks to map one emigre's itinerary through terrains of disruption and dislocation. Written in English and in Filipino (with translations into Chinese, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Italian), these traces of the writer's journey strive to foreground the ordeals of deterritorialization shared by all colonized peoples--a universal experience given a local habitation and name in the trajectory of this flight in search of passages to uncharted shores. Less a Baedeker for remembering or reaching a destination, this palimpsest of tropes/signs hopes to construct zones of departure for discovering new territory built out of a history of collective sacrifices grounding our dreams and desires. Exile is the name for this material process of renewal and liberation--love for whoever is returning, the beloved fulfilling the promise of redemption in the birth pangs of revolutionary struggle.

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About the author:
A Filipino resident in the U.S., San Juan is an internationally recognized cultural critic whose works have been translated into French, German, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and other languages. San Juan's two previous books, Racial Formations/Critical Transformations (Humanity Books), now a classic in ethnic studies, and After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-U.S. Confrontations (Rowman and Littlefield), won the Myers Human Rights Awards. He has also received a MELUS award and the Asian American Association Prize for distinguished contributions to the discipline of cultural studies. San Juan was previously a Fulbright lecturer at the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and visiting lecturer at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. San Juan’s previous works include The Philippine Temptation (Temple UP); Beyond Postcolonial Theory (Palgrave Macmillan), Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke UP); Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell UP); and Himagsik (De La Salle UP). Available in the Philippines are:Allegories of Resistance; a re-issue of Toward a People’s Literature, and a new collection of poems, Sapagkat Iniibig Kita, all published by the University of the Philippines Press. Forthcoming are Balikbayang Sinta: An E. San Juan Reader (Ateneo U Press) and From Globalization Toward National Liberation (U.P. Press). San Juan taught at several universities, including the University of California, Brooklyn College of CUNY, University of Connecticut, and Washington State University. He was recently a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center at Bellagio, Italy.