E3W Literature | University of Texas

Interview with Dr. James Kyung-Jin Lee, University of California at Santa Barbara.

This interview with James Lee, formerly assistant professor of English at The University of Texas and currently teaching Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was conducted during the month of January 2006 via e-mail by Jeremy Dean.

Jeremy Dean: In the wake of Katrina, I returned to your book, Urban Triage [reviewed in e3w Review Books 5], as a way of at least beginning to understand the crisis in New Orleans. If it were to be republished today, would you feel compelled to include discussion of Katrina in a preface or afterword? What might you say?

James Kyung-Jin Lee: I don’t know if I would include a discussion of Hurricane Katrina (and to a perhaps lesser extent, Rita) and the Gulf Coast catastrophes of 2005. I’d feel compelled to do more thorough examination of, say, New Orleans’s history and culture, its particular urban policy trajectories, its place in the larger Gulf Coast region, and the “writing back” of the city’s literary practitioners. My book was demonstrably bicoastal, and I’ve yet to reckon with the deep and sordid story of the third coast, which, unlike the other two, remains very much entangled in a history of protracted, chattel slavery. So, to the extent that I would write an addition, I’d have to talk about how limited my book was in its scope, even though I do think that some of the forces that I try to identify in Urban Triage play out in terrible ways in places like New Orleans. I would certainly hope that people are moved to write about this event as one that has many layers and many stories. The sound of the anonymous Black woman shouting “We need help” as the television news camera dollies down a crowd of people in urgent and obvious misery outside the Superdome is both a cry for immediate attention but also, in my mind, a haunting jeremiad: this has been a cry for decades, and the question must continue to be pushed: how come it took so long for us to hear it? This, I think, is our responsibility as scholars, to see how that kind of sentence reverberates in our present, and in those disappearing but spectral pasts, to create the “electric empiricity” that might make those who should hear this cry accountable to it.

JD: Despite the culturally specific context of the Katrina crisis, what are some of those more pervasive “forces” that influence the “urban triage” we see in your book, as well as in the current situation in New Orleans? I mean, where have we heard that jeremiad before?

JL: My book focused on the 1980s, but looked at this decade as a “long” one. Go back to the post-World War II era, and we already see plans in place to accelerate, on the one hand, mass suburbanization hollowing out city cores, and on the other, the establishment of various city re¬development agencies to implement urban renewal projects. These latter designs quickly took on the cliché “Negro removal,” and even conservative critics would agree that this was the immediate and long-lasting effect of “renewal.” In the US, this kind of creative destruction (Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase) almost always took on racial characteristics; the suffering and misery of displacement bore heavily on work¬ing class communities of color. In Karen Yamashita’s novel, Tropic of Orange (1997), Buzzworm, an itinerant organic intellectual, muses about the destruction of his neighborhood in Los Angeles for the construction of a freeway: “People saying if they coulda owned the property, if the property had been worth anything at the time, if they’d a known then every square foot of that land was worth millions. If they’d a known the view’d be so expensive. If they’d a known.” To bring the macro and micro together: the surplusing of capital from productive arenas into speculative ones coincides with the surplusing of land from which people, finally, are surplussed. What happens to these forgotten people in forgotten places, then, is the story that literary critics take up: some are left behind, some are sent away, and it takes severe crisis to remind ourselves that they’re still there as we shoot along our freeways and tunnel through our subways.

JD: One of the strengths of Urban Triage, as I see it, is its critique of easy multiculturalism. How do you see the apparent diversity of the current administration in tension with the disproportionately black suffering as a result of Katrina? (I’m thinking here particularly of the statements and counterstatements by Kanye West and Condoleeza Rice.)

JL: Well, I think that there is a problem with the way multiculturalism has been characterized. Take, for example, the whole rhetoric now of trying to bring back people to New Orleans so that its heritage won’t be lost or forgotten. Folks like Harry Connick, Jr. are raising money to help the city’s mostly black musicians in the aftermath of Katrina. On the one hand, this is laudable charity. And it’s a nice gesture that people are saying that they’d like to keep the city’s multicultural, diverse character. The problem with this desire is that it presumes, despite all evidence, that multiculturalism means cultural parity, as if that which came out of, say, poor Black neighborhoods was valued in the same was as Connick’s piano. It’s a truism, and perhaps even true, that all art emerges from suffering, but what Katrina made so terribly clear is that the suffering was dispensed disproportionately, and that the cultural productions demanded, however obliquely, a response to alleviate that suffering. Multiculturalism as diversity doesn’t alleviate suffering; at best it gets you at the table to start talking about suffering, but that’s it. Multiculturalism was always just a starting point, but somewhere along the way, and my suspicion is that a crucial year for this is 1978 (think Bakke), it became an answer rather than the beginning of a question. I think that the worst thing that multiculturalism has done (and I should say now that I do think that multiculturalism has done a lot for the good) is that it’s de-legitimized the cultural production of rage. How do you register rage in a way that folks can hear if you’re included in the Norton Anthology?

JD: Yes. (And though you haven’t mentioned it, I think that this uncomplicated version of multiculturalism explains Rice’s confusion at West’s anger.) But I’m going to ask you to answer your own question. How do we frame this rage, whether in our own scholarship or in our classrooms?

JL: As I used to say in class, first off, don’t call the police! This seems a silly way to respond, but I think it’s worth meditating on. Once you ask the police, the armed wing of the state, to do the “justice” work for you, then you’ve already given up, abdicated a lot. But if calling the police is not on the table, then the work of theorizing justice, of responding to rage, becomes much more tricky, difficult. But in the long run, perhaps, something more sustainable. I think writing and teaching rage compels us to confront the ways in which we are wedded to these structures and technologies of vulnerability-making, that enable our basic social desires. We’re so much closer to crisis than we’d like to imagine in our daily lives, but this deathly embrace is, paradoxically, the way to engage another’s rage that might be, in response, our own.

JD: The editors of the e3w Review of Books have tried to select a range of texts for this special section, “Consequences of Urban Crisis,” focusing on the Katrina disaster. Who have we left out? I also wonder if you might question the very notion of such a bibliographic response to human suffering.

JL: It is, of course, a question that has a long historical answer. How does one represent suffering, and what are the ethics of this representation? Think the gothic representations of violence in the slave narrative; think the politics of making visible lynching by Black writers, the terrible task of making visible (again) an atrocity based on spectacle; think the conundrum of asking victims of torture, rape, and genocide to relive experiences so that we can consume them in horror and jouissance. How can this not be traumatic and intrusive? There’s blood on our hands when we pick up these books. The catalog that we accumulate is a valley of dry and, sadly, fresh bones. But that’s where we start, and with hope it leads us elsewhere. For some of us, reading the archive of misery compels us to write. For others, there is the urge to speak, and still for others the books are thrown down and the banner of activism is raised. These, I think, are all appropriate though never perfect responses to the bibliography that ever ex¬pands the archive of misery. But I can guarantee you that for us in literary studies, such an engagement will forever give the lie to the idea that we can stand the “craft” apart from the bodies who produce them and those whose bodies are used in art’s name.

JD: So we must remember that we are not innocent ourselves. Could you close by commenting a bit more on something you mentioned earlier, that is, “our responsibility as scholars”?

JL: Well, to answer this question, I turn to John Edgar Wideman: “So this writing is for me, first. A way of holding on. Letting go. Starting a story so a story can end.” We’re all deeply wedded to the stories that undergird the structures that hold our society together, and while we wring our hands at the way these stories create all kinds of vulnerabilities in many many people, we hold to them because it’s what gets us through the day, helps us not go bankrupt, helps us contend with troublesome students, etc. But there is of course a cost to allegiance to these stories, and in moments of crisis the cost becomes, momentarily, too great to bear, even collectively. We realize in those moments that the stories that enable our deepest desires also fetter our future imaginations. So the responsibility of scholars has to do with holding on to these stories long enough to know that they are stories, and to let them go, and maybe start a new story so that a sad story can end.