Full Description
In March 2020, Sora Y. Han learned her father was dying of cancer just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived on California's shores. These two events led Han to introspection: "Who have I been writing to?" and "Who have I been writing for?" In her observance of the 49 days of mourning in Buddhist tradition, answers come in the form of mu - no thing, nothingness. Han's poetic meditations on freedom struggle come alive in the empty spaces between words, letters, and pictograms spanning her many languages-English, Korean, Chinese, jazz, law, and poetry. Transliterating and dystranslating the writings of Fred Moten, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, and others through the Korean alphabet, Han weaves the DMZ, Betty's Case, the Thirteenth Amendment, Afro-pessimism, and psychoanalytic desire together into the open field of Bay Area radicalism. Mu is both a loving homage to and a playful subversion of political inheritances and the unsayable beyond law.
Contents
Note on Etymologies ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xxi
savoir black 1
terra incognita 29
nonperformance 63
non liquet blackness 103
the sur-round 131
res nulla loquitur 167
mu 187
Notes 207
Bibliography 227
Index 241
