As I reflect on what it means for diaspora to be sited, Hayle’s words illuminate a puzzling interlinkage between diaspora and database: both “can only speak that which can be explicitly spoken” (1605). When I think of Karen peoples’ movement across time and space, I think of fixed dates and mappable locations—material sites locked into…
A product of Burma’s diaspora, I’m rooted in a country only familiar to me in its immaterial, unbounded, storied form; evoking a home that is more apparition than physical site. Yet, my roots—my linkages to the non-space of Karen oral histories—are also characterized by an abiding rootlessness: we (myself/my ancestors) dwell not in static spaces…
In Byung-Chul Han’s “Hypertext and Hyperculture,” he ends with the idea that “Re-theologization, re-mythologization, and re-nationalization are common reactions to the hyperculturalization of the world” (10). There is a suggestion that the hyperculturalization of the world will lead to a type of fundamentalism. Considering this was originally published in German in 2005, I feel it…
To begin with, reading Borges (2018) was quite nostalgic; it brought back memories of literary criticism, the necessity of thematic coding, and events that come to life in your mind. Now, I nearly feel confident in predicting that whoever wrote the script for The Flash (2023) got some inspiration from this short story and its…
Reading Borges in the past, I remember regarding the infinite permutations of “garden”-pathing, forecasting hypertext, abundant, wonderful, and inviting. But this time, the fourth? or fifth?, a Friday afternoon in late August, am struck by the inexhaustible and therefore exhausting (for mortal humans) infinitude. A garden does not plant, nor water, nor curate itself. The…