The Act of Re/Membering: Daughterly Haunting and Ghostly Others

• In Event: Postcolonial Epistemologies and Transnational Social Justice: Knowledge, Power, and Difference

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to theorize, as an Asian immigrant woman in the U.S., how variously racialized subjects can “re/member” (Rhee, 2006) our intertwined colonial histories of overlapping territories (Said, 1994) with other minoritized communities. This act of re/membering is inevitable if any postcolonial subjects are to “know” the ghostly memory of collective traumas of injustice, violence, and oppression done in, by, and beyond the U.S. This work requires not redemption but invention of ways to fight contemporary neoliberal racisms that are always already haunted by the past (Rhee, 2012).

Theoretical Perspectives
In our globalized and neo-liberalized multicultural context of U.S. education, race is pressed to work in new – neoliberal – ways, regenerating different kinds of categories and meanings, yet also continuously drawing upon old categories and meanings to effect and rationalize current social arrangements of power and exploitation, violence and expropriation (Goldberg, 2009; Rhee, 2012). Different differences that complicate and challenge traditional racial categories and identities highlight the need for educational researchers and theorists to address these changing relations and workings of race and racism “in addition to” the dominant binary racial memory of black and white (Subedi & Daza, 2008). Nevertheless, this hardly means that white supremacy that often relies on anti-black schemes has weakened its reigning power over U.S. education (Giroux, 2003; Macedo & Gounari, 2006). In this space, how can we move our discussion beyond a very palatable neo-liberal individual based celebration and tolerance approach in dealing with issues of race and racism?

Methodology
In order to challenge neoliberal scienticism (Daza, 2013), I draw my methodological inspiration from creative literary works, such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996). Building upon Shi-li Chang’s concept of “daughterly haunting and historical traumas” (2004), I explore how private wounds of injustice can be a site for variously racialized subjects learn to be awakened by the haunting memory of historical traumas, which is beyond the reach of our own cultural-historical episteme.

Results
These literary works suggest that, rather than trying to forget, exorcise, possess or master this ghostly presence of collective traumas, we learn to recognize and accept our messy entanglements with (each) other’s histories. By re/membering the returning and embodied ghosts (of others), however ambivalently and contradictorily, into our own daughterly memory and inheritance, I argue that we as various racialized subjects may be able to facilitate circulations of historically unspoken possibilities of constitutive co-existence with each other as well as with the past, present, and future in the context of U.S. education.

Significance
This work produces strategic counter-narratives against neoliberal racism that build silently on the structural conditions of racism while disabling the very categories of their recognizability. By producing historically bound yet new ghostly-haunted insights that reveal how the meanings, categories, and concepts of races are constantly being reconfigured, the paper re/members our anti-racist solidarity with each other.

Author

• Jeong-Eun Rhee, Long Island University - C.W. Post Campus