Browsing by Author "Brink, Dean Anthony"

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Affective frames and intra-relational finites in Jorie Graham's Sea Change
(2017-12-01)
Brink, Dean Anthony
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外國語文學系
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Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
This article brings into conversation a Badiouian ethics and Karen Barad's post-phenomenological relationality of "intra-actions" among the human and nonhuman so as to situate the environmentally and politically engaged poetry included in Jorie Graham's Sea Change. Criticism has avoided exploring the interplay between stylistic choices and political dimensions in her poetry, which includes engagements with pressing environmental issues today (global warming, rising seas, and chaotic weather), preemptive wars, and questions of plausible poetic agency itself. Foregrounding a material dimension while still maintaining a sense of responsibility, this essay highlights Alain Badiou's use of poetic configurations as "subjects" engaging in ethical world-recognitions that help situate an important underlying posthuman ethos evident in Graham's poetry. Barad, in a discourse with roots in quantum physics, argues that we must rethink representation from an entirely different phenomenology of intra-actions, beginning with relations, not objects or Cartesian selves. Thus both Badiou and Barad, in radically different but complementary ways, situate ontological finites-poems and sites of intra-action-as means of overcoming Derridean diff,rance, which remains one formal cornerstone of postmodern displacement evident in American mass media's post-truth equalization of all positions without situating possibilities of coherent analysis or engagement. In conversation with the work of Judith Butler as well as Badiou and Barad, this essay intends to make a small contribution to feminist posthumanism and politics, and expand our sense of ethical and affective engagement in New Materialist criticism.
Postcolonial positioning and Japanese imperial affect in interwar Dada prose poems
(2018-01-01)
Brink, Dean Anthony
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外國語文學系
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Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Between the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and the Mukden Incident (1931), Japan's mounting colonial presence manifested itself in the activities of the South Manchuria Railway Company as well as in the Japanese forces' skirmishes for control of the region. The poet Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900-1990) would draw on his memories of Manchuria, where he lived until attending college in Kyoto, to situate hyperobjects and colonial minutiae in counter-hegemonic anticolonial and antiwar prose poems. His subtractive poetic configurations - not Surrealist but certainly building on Dada precedents - isolate incongruous elements (evental traces) in Alain Badiou's sense of being faithful to a critique of the ethics of a colonial apparatus. Having grown up within the colonial enterprise himself, and subject to high-minded Japanese media representations and instilled imperial affects, Kitagawa positions himself against the machinic drive for colonial profits and the abuse of labour and prostitutes. This article thus situates aesthetic strategies for displacing imperial affect as projected onto spaces of Japanese expansion so as to document radically anticolonial subject possibilities among Japanese nationals themselves. As postcolonial artefacts, these prose poems suggest the contradictions of European modernity writ in the Japanese rhetoric of cosmopolitan East Asian development and liberation as cultural production that aestheticises colonial extraction of labour and raw materials.