BAR Book Forum: Eunsong Kim’s “gospel of regicide”and Juno Salazar Parreñas’ “Decolonizing Extinction”
Our authors contemplate the “antiblack horizon” in Asian American imaginaries, and orangutans’ relationship to colonialism and white supremacy.
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Eunsong Kimand Juno Salazar Parreñas. Kim is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Northeastern University.Her book is gospel of regicide.
Parreñas is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University and editor of Gender: Animals.
Her book is Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation.
Eunsong Kim’s gospel of regicide
“Fighting antiblackness often means fighting with those closest to you.”
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Eunsong Kim:This year has been a strange year for Asian American visibility. We have on one hand Asian American protests in New York City for the maintenance of antiblack educational structures (the last large Asian American protest in NYC was in 2016 against the indictment of the cop that murderedAkai Gurley. Antiblackness is connecting much Asian American “activism”), viral footage of ongoing antiblack violence perpetuated by Asian American business owners, and then the box office success of the celebratory capitalistfilm about rich Asians.
I situate this moment not so that I might say my book is different, because as someone I love once told me—fuck positive representation—but in order to situate the antiblack horizon currently offered by ongoing and visible Asian American imaginaries.
As an Asian American woman, I do not see myself outside the political formations of Asian American—consciousness does not bring an outside or exemption—but I wrote this book to fight against my/their insides. There is fighting white supremacy and there is fighting antiblackness. I have found that fighting antiblackness often means fighting with those closest to you, me.
This fight is continuous and unfinished because, no else can get that close.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
Poetry can be a strange medium—I have written more explicit essays on race and I usually know what to expect from them. I receive direct feedback when my argument is not as clear as I hoped for them to be, or when my evidence requires more profound engagement. As a poetic text, gospel of regicide is one experiment on the questions and thoughts I found impossible to articulate in prose, and whose forms needed more room for movement. I hope activists and community organizers tell me what they found needed more, and what they found was porous.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
There’s a poem on page 76 on the political naturalization of metaphor/similes, which is something I care a lot about. In general, I hope we can collectively unlearn using policing as metaphor. To be critiqued is not to be policed—I find it astonishing that writers, but poets in particular, collapse the former for the latter.
I hope we can see that it isn’t sexy or bold to create “drone” similes, to create tension through the abstract deployment of conditions and forces that the writing body is disassociated from. Art historian Jane Blocker describes this to be akin to the banking process of “risk-transfer.” I want to posit that those who use policing—but whose bodies and lives are not policed—know the risk associated with being policed and transfer the affect, the image, to advance their rhetorical/political position. Policing remains, the risk remains. Someone else—who has not experienced the risk—advance their position in the deployment of transfer.
I’m not suggesting that my book is some orthodox realist document, but I am interested in conversations about the impact of language: poetic and otherwise. And I want to know, in all the ways, how certain kinds of imaginaries become part of our own, and how we might dissect them endlessly for the invention of something else.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson was the first text I encountered that opened up the world for me, Roberto Bolano’s Distant Star for its eviscerating clarity, the transformative possibilities offered in Lisa Lowe’s Intimacies of Four Continents; I read and re-read Cheryl Harris’ “Whiteness as Property” and Mari Matsuda’s writing as often as I can.
I was trained by Fatima El-Tayeb and Page duBois and think of them in everything I write.
My brother Joseph Kim is journalist and photographer who has reportedon activist organizing in Korea for the past seven years. I am inspired by his ongoing research, by his approach and care for organizing and emergent protests.
I keep an eye out for new writing by Allia Griffin, William Anderson, and Maya Mackrandilal and look up to those who legibly and illegibly walk out, shout, refuse, kneel, for a world unlike the one we inhabit.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
The loose main character of my book is the gnostic text, Gospel of Judas.
The gnostic text re-imagines Judas to be a politically ambitious character. It asserts that ifthe biblical narrative offers a Judas that is greedy, politically bankrupt, and amoral, it is for a narrative direction. Judas is the necessary catalyst for the crucifixion, resurrection: treachery is the cause for rupture.
I’ve noticed a trend in television that posits a version of this argument. Plot lines where children discover the evil they have been fighting is really, their parents/family and so—what to do from there? How to break from this love?
Inspired by the work of Lucas de Lima, Christina Sharpeand others—I’m trying to think about treachery as something to politically explore.In a moment when some of us remain in certain communal formations out of narrative loyalty, a fidelity that has been assumed, I hope to suggest the power and possibilities of breaking from this narrative.
Juno Salazar Parreñas’ Decolonizing Extinction
“Migration is a state of being for all kinds of life.”
Roberto Sirvent:How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Juno Salazar Parreñas: Decolonizing Extinction considers the question of how to live and die in this “age of extinction,” when colonial legacies help determine who and what are in better positions to survive. The ‘we’ for me is inclusive. It begins with semi-wild orangutans, which are critically endangered, and the people in their lives at two wildlife centers in Sarawak, present day Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. And from there, by thinking about the wildlife center as a workplace and as a shared place of displacement for both animals and people, it gets me to think about how we might live together on this planet with others—including nonhuman others.
“Can we cease relations of violent domination and instead embrace the vulnerability of living with nonhuman others?”
These orangutans are neither wild nor tame: they were displaced by dam construction and agricultural industrialization, either directly in their lifetime or they’re descendants of that displaced generation. The constraints they experience inspired me to theorize the freedom that Sarawakian caretakers aspire for them. It’s the same aspirational word for freedom used by Indonesian and Malaysian anarchist youth. It differs from independence in the postcolonial nation-state. The semi-wild orangutans’ state of being almost free echoes the conditions of freedom in Sarawak—which in some ways is an internal colony of Malaysia. What I think of as “arrested autonomy” is a problem I felt for both people and apes: it is the problem of being caught in institutions that supposedly develop freedom, but instead instill dependency.
The relations I perceived between semi-wild orangutans and specific Sarawakian persons got me to wonder, can we cease relations of violent domination and instead embrace the vulnerability of living with nonhuman others? This to me is the question at the heart of how to relate to the greater world around us: some would rather outsource danger and risk. I instead wonder what if we valued the opposite.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
If we were to recognize that nonhuman actors—whether orangutans or another ape, or really anything considered to be part of the environment, if we were to recognize that nonhuman actors were and continue to be subject to colonial violence, that they are reduced to objects whose value is only either use value or aesthetic value, if they are given any value at all, what kind of relationships and politics are possible from such an understanding? What kind of anticolonial ethos can grow from knowing that orangutans have been displaced by the effects of nineteenth century white supremacy and are being driven to extinction by twentieth and twenty-first century global capitalism?
“What kinds of connections can we perceive between ourselves and nonhuman actors?”
I don’t want to fuel debates where you have to choose between social justice on one side and animal liberation or environmentalism on the other. For people of color, what kinds of connections can we perceive between ourselves and nonhuman actors?Could we care more about impacts on nonhuman bodies—whether we are talking about water bodies or land bodies or specific animal bodies—and not because it has a direct and toxic impact on ourselves? So for example, a common argument against oil pipelines is the impact downriver communities will feel. While the most persuasive arguments are made along such lines, could we acknowledge that we need to minimize impacts on an earth that we ultimately share with others, on the basis of a responsibility towards others?
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
We tend to get wrapped up in the immediate present; our responses are often urgent reactions. While I think it’s important to stay informed, I also wonder what we can take in when we think about time scales differently. Phrased as a question, what different perspectives are possible when we think through different time scales?
I got fixated on the idea that exchange, migration, and finding refuge is a human and nonhuman phenomenon that takes place over millennia. It’s only since the Pleistocene Ice Ages that orangutans have been located in Sumatra and Borneo in Southeast Asia. It’s because climate change hundreds of thousands of years ago pushed them to find refuge on these two landforms and the shelf connecting these two landforms got submerged when the ice melted. Thinking about such matters for me especially emphasizes the lesson that borders are arbitrary, that migration is a state of being for all kinds of life, that being attached to land is more of a European orientation to space than it is in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, where you have multiple, split sovereignties (where you pay tribute to multiple leaders and not just one).
“Nothing—even something as seemingly entrenched as capitalism—can stay the same.”
Knowing that the climate has changed in the past and that it continues to change is not to diminish the problem of climate change, which is a deeply political problem: those who have had the least impact on the planet will suffer the most consequences and those who have possessed the most will have the resources to buffer themselves from the worst. Instead, I think knowing past climate change events could inspire us to remember that the world as we know it is subject to change and subject to radical transformation, that nothing—even something as seemingly entrenched as capitalism—can stay the same.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
I’m really quite inspired by Renato Rosaldo, a Chicano anthropologist working in the Philippines during martial law and the Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s, who listened to stories of Igorot men who were forced to give up headhunting. I would say he’s part of the first generation that sought to decolonize anthropology, that worked away from anthropology’s colonial legacy to take seriously experience, everyday cultural production, and what folks inspired by Gramsci might call organic intellectuals. The poems he wrote when his partner and fellow anthropologist died after she accidentally fell off a cliff on a terrain that she knew well are deeply profound for how they bring you to a very common place of grief, but one framed through the specificities of a given time and place.
“How to survive when the world you know comes to an end?”
I’m also deeply inspired by Anna Tsing. I’ve read her first book, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, many times, but the first time wasin an undergraduate class divided between white Americans who didn’t think they had any culture and Filipino-American nationalists. That book defied the white students’ colonial expectations and challenged my fellow Filipino-American students’ nationalism in ways that transformed what I thought was possible to imagine. Her second book, Friction, shows a way for studying capitalism from the ground up, which I think should be essential reading for anyone interested in critiquing global capitalism.
And finally, I’d say the novelist Octavia Butler, whose influence on me is relatively recent. The Earthseed series is really haunting for the way it resonates now, but also for the question of how to survive when the world you know comes to an end. This very dystopic question is one that I think is all too relevant for many different kinds of populations, including the ones that most occupy my thoughts.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
The world of orangutan rehabilitation is a strange world with a surprising set of relations, that even when it is at the forefront of capitalism through being set up, institutionally speaking, as a private-public partnership, it hosts other ways of being in the world: it’s in this world of orangutan rehabilitation that it’s possible to go against its framing to continue to have folkloric, ancestral resonance with what we might call the “nonhuman world” and it’s also possible to realize decolonizing possibilities, even within a system deeply entrenched within colonial structures.
It’s the exception to the rules that I find exciting and inspiring. It’s inspiring to see how people imaginatively figure out ways to defy rules that are imposed on them that just don’t make sense. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this, but I think it would be enough to say that people really do find imaginative ways to resist power structures in a variety of circumstances and under a variety of constraints. The question that is really the intriguing one to ponder isn’t about how to survive under current conditions, but what kinds of pleasure and joy are possible under the constraints in which we find ourselves. If our demise is imminent, how can we die well? And that final question is really the question that I hope stays with readers.
Roberto Sirventis Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network. He’s currently writing a book with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong called American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
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