Scholarlink

The poetry in Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire (2012) is separated into three timelines: the period of westward expansion in the United States, a contemporary story of fine art reproduction in China, and a futurist story of data workers in California. These three sections are united in their interrogation of the role of ideology in creating and sustaining an empire. I argue that the first timeline stages a representation of ideology in the traditional Althusserian sense, that the second timeline shows this representation as inadequate, and most importantly, that the final section suggests a new model for oppression. This new model allows for a new approach to looking at anger in Korean American literature. Up to this point, anger has been seen as something felt by a protagonist in a novel or poem. Now, anger is seen as the all-pervasive condition of the world in which we all reside, which in the poems is represented as Manifest Destiny, then Special Economic Zones, and finally as ubiquitous surveillance. The role that Korean American literature plays in understanding this new model is that it provides the tools, developed in the previous chapters, for separating good anger from bad. The main argument is that the ruling class no longer maintains its power through the ownership of capital. Instead, as McKenzie Wark maintains in Capital Is Dead (2019), this ruling class “owns and controls information.” The owning and controlling of information is no longer capitalism, “but something worse.” Following on Wark, I argue that this use and abuse of data changes ideology in a fundamental manner. Rather than having a world from which an individual can feel more or less estranged in an Althusserian sense, the new reign of data suggests that estrangement is the fundamental experience of the world. In other words, the concept of anger is problematized, since there is no emotion that is not anger to feel estranged from, which would thus leading to ideology; rather, the feeling of anger is already the fundamental characteristic of our data-driven reality. While in Hong’s book this new model is located in the future, the end of the chapter argues that a similar state is brought about not only by our data-driven world, but also pandemics such as that caused by COVID-19, which are part of our present.

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

The World Is Angry: The Poetry of Cathy Park Hong

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2025年

查看全文
  • Brian Willems

摘要

The poetry in Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire (2012) is separated into three timelines: the period of westward expansion in the United States, a contemporary story of fine art reproduction in China, and a futurist story of data workers in California. These three sections are united in their interrogation of the role of ideology in creating and sustaining an empire. I argue that the first timeline stages a representation of ideology in the traditional Althusserian sense, that the second timeline shows this representation as inadequate, and most importantly, that the final section suggests a new model for oppression. This new model allows for a new approach to looking at anger in Korean American literature. Up to this point, anger has been seen as something felt by a protagonist in a novel or poem. Now, anger is seen as the all-pervasive condition of the world in which we all reside, which in the poems is represented as Manifest Destiny, then Special Economic Zones, and finally as ubiquitous surveillance. The role that Korean American literature plays in understanding this new model is that it provides the tools, developed in the previous chapters, for separating good anger from bad. The main argument is that the ruling class no longer maintains its power through the ownership of capital. Instead, as McKenzie Wark maintains in Capital Is Dead (2019), this ruling class “owns and controls information.” The owning and controlling of information is no longer capitalism, “but something worse.” Following on Wark, I argue that this use and abuse of data changes ideology in a fundamental manner. Rather than having a world from which an individual can feel more or less estranged in an Althusserian sense, the new reign of data suggests that estrangement is the fundamental experience of the world. In other words, the concept of anger is problematized, since there is no emotion that is not anger to feel estranged from, which would thus leading to ideology; rather, the feeling of anger is already the fundamental characteristic of our data-driven reality. While in Hong’s book this new model is located in the future, the end of the chapter argues that a similar state is brought about not only by our data-driven world, but also pandemics such as that caused by COVID-19, which are part of our present.