One of my warmest memories is a pattern: me in the passenger’s seat of my grandpa’s (Bobo’s) dusty, wood-paneled station wagon, Bobo behind the wheel, sun glinting off his square framed glasses, telling me a story (probably something comedically jarring, like that time he complimented a villager’s cat in rural Burma, mistakenly using a word…
In a post-globalization world, when the horizon of cultural mixing is rapidly expanding and we are renegotiating our understanding of values, perceptions, and habits—Byung-chul Han sees this cultural shifting through a lens of optimism and names it Hyperculture. The definition of culture is varied and anthropologists, sociologists, or literary critics explain the term from different…
– In Computer and Composition, technofeminism has emerged to critique the historical domination of male figures in the domain of digital spaces, technology and culture, which were inherently biased against women. The hegemonic designs and definitions of technology often limit women as eternal outsiders in that very realm and perpetuate harmful stereotypes as technologically challenged/inferior…
I’ve been thinking about how the deeply sited nature of diaspora translates into digital spaces that collapse time, space, and embodiment—elements whose intersection manifest as “site,” a concept Han suggests is the antithesis of hyperculture. But I’ve also been thinking about who might guide us through “de-distanced” landscapes, enacting Walter Mignolo’s decolonial concept of “pluriversality,”…
Han’s example of a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt is not necessarily eager to experience a foreign culture, rather suggests that they have no existing cultural roots to identify another culture as a foreign one. If we just look at this class, it consists of people representing such vast cultural diversity. However, visually we all…
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…