Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity: 46 (American Crossroads) - Softcover

Luk, Sharon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520296249 ISBN 13: 9780520296244

Publisher: University of California Press, 2017

Synopsis

The Life of Paper offers a wholly original and inspiring analysis of how people facing systematic social dismantling have engaged letter correspondence to remake themselves—from bodily integrity to subjectivity and collective and spiritual being. Exploring the evolution of racism and confinement in California history, this ambitious investigation disrupts common understandings of the early detention of Chinese migrants (1880s–1920s), the internment of Japanese Americans (1930s–1940s), and the mass incarceration of African Americans (1960s–present) in its meditation on modern development and imprisonment as a way of life. Situating letters within global capitalist movements, racial logics, and overlapping modes of social control, Sharon Luk demonstrates how correspondence becomes a poetic act of reinvention and a way to live for those who are incarcerated. 
 

About this title

About the Author

Sharon Luk is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of Oregon.

From the Back Cover

"The Life of Paper is imbued through and through, at once, with both a scholastically won and rendered understanding of the whole of our contemporary world--both worldwide and world-making--and a yet resolute and tenaciously held sense of the theoretical work that arises within the personal and intimate, in the apparently ephemeral fragments of a hope long become unhopeful. Addressing itself to three interwoven trajectories of life-worlds articulated in California across the past century--the migrations of Chinese into California; of the displacements of Japanese, by internment, from that same California; and the emplacement African American forms of life within the prison system--this work offers a radical reentry to the historicity gathered under this name. The thought herein is bequeathed to us by way of the generosity of a writer's respect for "the letter," as the practice of both ascesis and poesis, offering to us a unique pathway to inhabit the historicity of our time anew, beyond and otherwise than captivity. It is a consummation of the highest order of the work of theory and cultural scholarship in this domain across the past two generations. This is a beautiful book and a tremendous accomplishment in thought. Read it and give thanks."--Nahum Dimitri Chandler, author of X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

"The Life of Paper is a remarkable, eloquent, erudite, and insightful work. Luk looks at the letters written from prison by raced subjects as a site of contestation and negotiation, of self- and community-making. This book offers a fully theorized analysis of how the poetics of the letter function in the contexts of racialized incarceration, and in the process offers a profound powerful and generative analysis of the links that connect place, race, poetics and power to imprisonment."--George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

"The Life of Paper is a rigorous, beautifully written, and important work that represents the best of interdisciplinary scholarship. Its highly original and dazzling theorization of the "life of paper," as well as its careful archival work, significantly shifts our current understandings of the epistolary, "prison writing," and the reproduction of social life within spaces of racialized confinement and incarceration. Yet what I am also struck by is the sense of ethical responsibility that resounds throughout its pages."--Jodi Kim, author of Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War

From the Inside Flap

"The Life of Paper is imbued through and through, at once, with both a scholastically won and rendered understanding of the whole of our contemporary world&;both worldwide and world-making&;and a yet resolute and tenaciously held sense of the theoretical work that arises within the personal and intimate, in the apparently ephemeral fragments of a hope long become unhopeful. Addressing itself to three interwoven trajectories of life-worlds articulated in California across the past century&;the migrations of Chinese into California; of the displacements of Japanese, by internment, from that same California; and the emplacement African American forms of life within the prison system&;this work offers a radical reentry to the historicity gathered under this name. The thought herein is bequeathed to us by way of the generosity of a writer&;s respect for &;the letter,&; as the practice of both ascesis and poesis, offering to us a unique pathway to inhabit the historicity of our time anew, beyond and otherwise than captivity. It is a consummation of the highest order of the work of theory and cultural scholarship in this domain across the past two generations. This is a beautiful book and a tremendous accomplishment in thought. Read it and give thanks."&;Nahum Dimitri Chandler, author of X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

"The Life of Paper is a remarkable, eloquent, erudite, and insightful work. Luk looks at the letters written from prison by raced subjects as a site of contestation and negotiation, of self- and community-making. This book offers a fully theorized analysis of how the poetics of the letter function in the contexts of racialized incarceration, and in the process offers a profound powerful and generative analysis of the links that connect place, race, poetics and power to imprisonment."&;George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

"The Life of Paper is a rigorous, beautifully written, and important work that represents the best of interdisciplinary scholarship. Its highly original and dazzling theorization of the &;life of paper,&; as well as its careful archival work, significantly shifts our current understandings of the epistolary, &;prison writing,&; and the reproduction of social life within spaces of racialized confinement and incarceration. Yet what I am also struck by is the sense of ethical responsibility that resounds throughout its pages."&;Jodi Kim, author of Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Life of Paper

Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity

By Sharon Luk

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Sharon Luk
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29624-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Introduction: The Life of Paper, 
PART ONE DETAINED, 
1 • The Inventions of China, 
2 • Imagined Genealogies (for All Who Cannot Arrive), 
PART TWO INTERNED, 
3 • "Detained Alien Enemy Mail: EXAMINED", 
4 • Censorship and the/Work of Art (Where They Barbed the/Fourth Corner Open, 
PART THREE IMPRISONED, 
5 • Ephemeral Value and Disused Commodities, 
6 • Uses of the Profane, 
Epilogue, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Inventions of China

THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES MODERNITY FROM a trans-Pacific perspective, with a focus on the interdependent formations of China and the West vis-à-vis the development and control of infrastructures cohering around and through letters. Starting in Guangdong, struggles over technological change at this time mediated, as they were mediated by, imperialist and civil wars happening in China to control land and resources and to define national identities in an era of intensified global colonial and anticolonial ambitions in East Asia. As battles to develop and mobilize communication and transportation infrastructures in China operated as the literal form of modern statecraft and empire, these battles were inseparable from, and made fully manifest by, transformations in knowledge production — the latter also revolving around discourses of paper and print technologies. Such epistemological movements sought to invest or reorganize human meaning in competing articulations of space and thereby normalize changing operations of power in and through the architecture of social life. As the specificities of these productions of constraint and opportunity thrust migrants from Guangdong to the Anglo settler state of California, conflicting ideological imperatives of nascent nationalisms and regional capitalisms, also mediated through infrastructures of the epistolary, exacerbated global crisis and its particular manifestation in California. These contradictions culminated in the emergence of structured exclusions in order to reform rather than resolve the crisis, producing a paradigm of human detention and Angel Island as a spatial suture for differentiated processes of homogenization and unreconciled systems of global exploitation.

CIVILIZATION AND PRINTED PAPERS

This journey begins in the 1870s in Guangdong, a southern province in China, during a period of transforming social investments in paper, print, and postal technologies. At the emergent nation-state scale, these transformations both reflected and facilitated the mass displacements and reorganization of land occurring as a result of wars between and among Chinese, Japanese, U.S., and European imperialists, in addition to competing Chinese nationalist parties and, most relevant at the rural and local levels, an array of patrilineal clan groups. The standing Qing empire, led by descendants of the Jin dynasty (ca. 265–420 c.e.) identified ethnically as Manchu, rose to power in 1644 as an inclusive empire formally recognizing the Han majority as well as ethnic minority populations. Of primary concern for the purposes of this analysis are the circumstances surrounding late Qing reforms: from the 1850s to 1911, political struggles included escalating civil war with regional ethnic uprisings, warlordism, and the Taiping Rebellions targeting both European missionary and Qing government authorities; military conflict with Britain, Japan, and France; lower intensity warfare with the United States, Russia, Austria, Portugal, and Germany; and attempts to secure the Qing government's own imperial assets in Korea, Vietnam, Burma, and Taiwan. With such pressures thus bringing the Qing dynasty beyond the brink of crisis, imperial reformers launched the Self-Strengthening Movement (1860–95), instituting sweeping structural adjustments based on deliberations of how best to appropriate Western technologies to promote Chinese imperialism. It is in this context that design and control over print and postal infrastructures in China marked a primary arena through which imperialist and anti-imperialist struggles were unfolding.

This investigatation of such sweeping changes thus starts with situating them within everyday traditions and practices indigenous to villages in Guangdong at this time, where paper already possessed long-standing social meaning and sacred value. In her studies of Han Chinese folk tradition, Janet Lee Scott argues that paper itself, distinct from Holy Scripture such as the Bible or the Qu'ran, acted as "the material aspect, the physical representation of worship and belief." In such social and spiritual practices, paper and its making, offering, and burning serve as means to communicate and maintain relationships with gods, ghosts, ancestors, and the natural world. Moreover, respect for the paper, hierarchized by perceived quality and inclusive of specific categories for paper bearing characters or print, mediates and coheres particularized worldviews of an ontological totality. As Roderick Cave further contextualizes, "The value of paper bearing written or printed characters is recognized in the pious Confucian motto, 'Respect scrap paper bearing characters' (jingxi zizhi), the Buddhist tradition that special rewards will be earned by those who respect and preserve paper bearing sacred messages, and the Daoists' plentiful use of paper charms." These values assigned to paper by Guangdong communities corresponded with the venerated craft of papermaking, the latter involving intricate rituals of collective labor, cooperative living during the papermaking season, and production synchronized with the vaster ecology to ensure optimal climactic conditions and access to water and fibers.

By the 1870s, however, the importation of the mechanical printing press to the colonized territories of Shanghai introduced commercial modes of both print and papermaking that expanded alongside preexisting methods and began exerting uneven pressures for government control, deskilling, and transformation of production processes. Prior to this time, Qing rulers resisted the importation of Western printing technology for cultural, financial, and aesthetic reasons. Market-oriented industrialization did not begin in Shanghai until 1876–77, after Chinese entrepreneurs experimented with Western-style lithography first imported by Catholic missionaries to print religious imagery. By 1895, this mechanization of print media, alongside the prototype for the organization of production that commercial industrialization introduced, created a mass culture connected to Shanghai's publishing industry and spreading through print news and modern periodicals. Such changes occurred through a distinct "Chinese" nationalist print capitalism that syncretized Western techniques of production and "progress" with imperialist Chinese print and political culture, the latter rooted in existing social hierarchies and values of public service embodied by the government scholar and literati elites.

Rather than exemplify a democratic encounter between systems in a globalizing world, this hybridity took shape as Western Allied Forces colonized China by means of occupying the Qing government itself — prompting the historian John L. Fairbank, for instance, to reflect that the real curiosity of modern infrastructure in China is that "there is no way to say whether it is 'foreign' or 'Chinese.'" In these regards, perhaps geographic detail most succinctly illustrates the tense, unequal interdependence of U.S., European, and late-Qing Chinese imperialisms at this time, in this industry, and through this medium, as Shanghai's Wenhuajie district (culture and education streets), housing China's major trade and journalistic publishers and associated retailers, was located just behind the financial arsenals of the Bund and in the heart of the International Settlement of Shanghai. The International Settlement, officially dated 1854–1943, formed a unique sovereign territory negotiated mainly among British, French, and U.S. officials. These governments intentionally designed the settlement to prevent the colonization of Shanghai, China's largest city and one of the world's largest ports, by a single Western imperialist force — also creating their own multinational settler government, the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), which formally excluded Chinese membership until 1928. In this context, perhaps the bankrolls most succinctly illustrate further the material conditions of dependency of Qing rule on Western imperialists: the historian Christopher A. Reed finds that "between 1862 and 1905, seven foreign firms invested 3.9 million yuan in Shanghai's nascent machinery industry; in the same period, ninety-one Chinese firms invested no more than 87,000 yuan." Existing figures on printing machinery in Shanghai before 1930 reveal that an average of 76 percent was imported.

As the modern Chinese print industry in the late nineteenth century thus effected, as it was effected by, processes of colonial settlement, land enclosure, privatization of the means of production, and competitive capitalist domination, efforts led by the British to build a modern postal system in China further concretized these developments. Prior to modernization, the postal system in China began with the establishment of government courier services dating to the Zhao dynasty (1122–255 b.c.e.). Originally called Yu or Youyi, this imperial postal system was reorganized during the Han dynasty (206 b.c.e.–23 c.e.) and renamed Yi Zhan. Yi Zhan integrated money courier services during the Tang dynasty (618–905 c.e.) and served as the government postal service in China until about 1914 — delivering primarily government documents, letters, and military information. During a period of the Ming dynasty, sometime between 1402 and 1424, commercial need led to the emergence of private or unofficial postal institutions called minchu. For the next five hundred years, minchu served merchants, businessmen, and segments of the general population requiring postal services.

Thus plans for a new postal system in China had far-reaching significance, operating as the means for massive physical, epistemological, and political alienation and conversion. That is, this comprehensive restructuring of land marked the very institutionalization of modern nation- state borders and colonial governmentality, as implementation mediated the dismantling of existing infrastructure and its replacement with a new state apparatus that would systematically reorganize and fix both space, through the creation of addresses, and time, through the standardization of scheduled delivery. Qing government officials resisted the introduction of both modern postal and telegraphic technologies for as long as possible, since such technologies constituted the concrete form of colonialism and marked the ultimate political and economic demise of the dynasty. Specifically, representatives of the failing empire foresaw the perilous effects of Western control of modern technology within China, the flood of further concessions that would follow initial treaty negotiations for its development and use, and the amplification of precedents by which colonial forces demanded reparations from the Qing government for property damages exacted by anticolonial popular movements. For these same reasons, Robert Hart — a British official working in the Qing government as inspector general of imperial maritime customs — prioritized the modernization of the Chinese national post in 1861, contemporaneous with his role in establishing an illegal telegraph line operated from Shanghai to Wusong by the Great Northern Telegraph Company. Hart's plans for the Chinese Maritime Customs Post, facing tremendous resistance, did not come to full fruition until its official opening on 20 March 1896; eventually evolving into the Chinese National Post based in Shanghai, the latter did not achieve full command until 1926, making the post office the last institution in China to become modernized.

In this context, burgeoning scholarship to facilitate and rationalize such multinational colonial projects in East Asia precipitated an encounter between British and U.S. Orientalist formations and their historical suturing at this conjuncture. This shared ideological undertaking occurred precisely through narrative constructions of the Chinese "invention" of both paper and print, under the framework of "the four great inventions of ancient China," to socialize movements of enclosure and economic dependency. Beginning in 1859, foundations for this discourse were laid with the work of the British scholar and missionary Joseph Edkins, who sought to convince his readers that the opening of China would be "highly promising to western enterprise." Arguing that "in the practical qualities that constitute the greatness of a nation the Chinese are superior [to the Japanese and Hindoos]," Edkins's evidence for such an assertion includes the comparative claim that Japan, unlike China, "can boast of no remarkable inventions and discoveries, such as printing, paper-making, the mariner's compass, and the composition of gunpowder." Edkins's thesis was discovered and popularized in 1925 by Thomas Francis Carter, an American professor at Columbia University who served as a school superintendent in China from 1910 to 1925. Generating a universalized origin story about paper and print as articulated with technologies of navigation and warfare, Carter thus fully elaborates the discourse of "the four great inventions":

Four great inventions that spread through Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance had a large share in creating the modern world. Paper and printing paved the way for the religious reformation and made possible popular education. Gunpowder leveled the feudal system and created citizen armies. The compass discovered America and made the world instead of Europe the theater for history. In these inventions and others as well, China claims to have had a conspicuous part. ...

The restlessness of the tribes of Central Asia during the early centuries of our era brought several hundred years of anarchy in China, corresponding to the Dark Ages in Europe; but as these barbarian migrations did not cause quite such a complete rooting up of classic civilization in Eastern Asia as they did in the West, China quickly recovered and was earlier ready for those inventions which came into Christendom with the beginning of the Renaissance. Marco Polo's record shows us a China whose civilization already in the thirteenth century had come to full bloom and had advanced very much further than that of contemporary Europe.

Through a story of shared technology, this mythologizing narrative dispossesses "classic civilization in Eastern Asia" of historicity in order assimilate a fetishized Chinese past into the trajectory of Western imperialist conquest in the region. The discourse thus mediated, as it sanitized, the brutality characterizing contact between "East" and "West" in the Asian Pacific as it was in the context of coercion, warfare, and occupation that Carter concluded his 1925 study, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward, "Ts'ai Lun [Chinese diety/mythic inventor of paper] and Gutenberg, spiritual father and spiritual son." Such a formulation of civilized affinities, while erasing movements of colonial violence from public memory, also furnished justification for warfare against an ostensibly shared enemy of man — the latter constructed in negative contradiction through the ideology of "barbarian migrations." Ironically then, we shall soon see that the spiritual brethren that Anglos wanted to make in China are the very same as the barbarian migrations that Anglos wanted to destroy in California!

EPISTEMOLOGY AND CHINESE SELF-GOVERNMENT

Ancient Chinese had an advanced understanding of the sciences of physics, engineering, chemistry and astronomy. Their numerous discoveries and inventions have shaped the development of science and impacted on human civilisations around the world. In this new series of stamps, "Four Great Inventions of Ancient China," Hong Kong Post showcases four revolutionary Chinese technologies — the compass, printing, gunpowder and papermaking. ... These ancient inventions have profoundly changed the world since they emerged many centuries ago. The compass ushered in a brave new world of exploration and trade; the invention of gunpowder changed warfare tactics through the development of weaponry; and printing and papermaking facilitated the spreading of knowledge to lay the cornerstone for universal education.

HONG KONG POST, 18 August 2005

Concurrent with this density of colonial pressures, the Qing government collapsed in the midst of widespread social movements — articulated along a variety of axes including economic, ethnic, and religious differences — that culminated in the Revolution of 1911. Throughout the country, struggles for political dominance that characterized and followed the revolution forced the Imperialist Chinese bloc to restructure and, in efforts to retain state power and legitimacy under an unstable republican government, redraft a collective self in modern nationalist terms: more precisely, reimagining a popular supremacist identity through deployments of technological innovation. The latter refers both to the physical means of print production that the defunct Qing government still controlled relative to competing Chinese nationalist blocs and to the ideological content produced by the dominant intelligentsia. That is, revised by nothing other than the intervention of Thomas Francis Carter, the release in China of The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward immediately moved Chinese imperialist discourse from a defensive to an agreeable position vis-à-vis competing ideologies with the West of world technological history; as Reed argues, "Convinced, even inspired, by Carter's argument that the source of one of the distinguishing technologies of Europe's modern period lay in China, the Chinese now began to lay emphasis on their country's central place in the world technological history in general and, more specifically, in printinghistory." Hence, with the official Chinese appropriation of Carter's work, the banner "The Four Great Inventions of Ancient China" (Zhong Guo si da fa ming) became so pivotal to solidifying modern Chinese nationhood that it eventually formed part of the compulsory Chinese elementary school curriculum and as recently as 2008 provided a theme for the Beijing Summer Olympics. In what might be considered more precisely here as "strategic Orientalism," the Imperialist Chinese bloc's authentication of Carter's claims thereby served to reassert the former's political viability in a mode that could appear consistent with the imperial tradition and referential universe and yet, mediated through an emergent discourse of the West, could also place imperial China in a modern planetary context that was becoming "global" through processes of racial capitalist domination. So animates a genealogy of quasi-antagonistic yet deeply cooperative multicultural histories of science and technology, wrapping around paper and print and ultimately interweaving to fortify both Western and Chinese imperialisms during a period of dramatic world-making and epic battles over the definitions of civilization.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Life of Paper by Sharon Luk. Copyright © 2018 Sharon Luk. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520296249
• ISBN 13: 9780520296244
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328