Retro II

Retro II: To Us To-Day Alyson Cole and Kyoo Lee Slowly but surely, we have been working on this issue since Summer 2020, which inevitably doubled. The Covid-19 pandemic remains challenging on all levels, and while we hope that by the time the issue appears in print the situation will have become at least more manageable, our hopes remain vulnerably our own and what we need, in (re)turn, in the face of this kind of epochal crisis and ecological disaster on a planetary scale, is a lucid humility, another form and phase of re-remembering: who we were and could become. This double issue, “To Us To-Day” as we “Return Forward (Retro I),” opens with Sara Ishi’s re(tro)articulation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s paradigm-shifting, artful insights into nonhuman subjectivity. Beginning with a contemporized reading of her critique of anthropocentrism in a 1983 interview, Ishi shows how such an active retro reading can recontextualize the “Speculative Turn” in continental philosophy that emerged roughly two decades later in the works of, for instance, Graham Harman and Jane Bennett. Marie Draz’s rereading of María Lugones’s influential analysis of the colonial/modern gender system in the age of gender diversity is also retro-futural in that regard. She shows how Lugones’s model, her theoretical focus on the racialized material history of “the biological sex,” becomes even more illuminating, as it can incisively explain the retro deployment of “it” in recent anti-trans legislation, for instance. [End Page v] Elisabeth Paquette’s revisiting of Monique Wittig, a classic figure from so-called “second-wave” feminism, via Sara Ahmed’s feminist theory and practices as a point of interlocutory (dis)connection, considers the relevance of her “lesbian” theorizing to twenty-first-century intersectional feminism. While reassessing both the power and limits of Wittig’s primarily white feminist discourse from a contemporary viewpoint, Paquette turns to Wittig’s more specifically “literary” writings as a potential site for retooling her progressively inclusive politics, especially its alliance with feminist theorizing by women of color. Another such transhistorical and transhuman, retro-link is explored by Caio Yurgel who details what is entailed in Clarice Lispector’s dedication, “To the egg I dedicate the Chinese nation.” Yurgel’s subsequent exposition of Lispector’s Daoism, especially a kind of poetic cynicism or ethos of methodologized underachievement she shared with Lin Yutang whose Daoist philosophical work she often (mis)read with a great deal of interest, uncovers the nuanced power of a syncopated life. Taking the notion of the “retrospective glance” from memory studies as the cue, which could also be taken as a sort of site/sight of kinetic “proregress” discussed in Yurgel’s piece, Arina Rotaru articulates this complex dynamic of oblivion and resuscitation within and outside the cinematic politics of representation while taking us through the world of Soyoung Kim’s documentary cinematic projects, her Exile Trilogy on Koryo Saram (Koryo People or Person as a diasporic subject, the name that ethnic Koreans in the former Soviet Union/Central Asia gave themselves), which concluded in 2019 with Goodbye My Love, NK. Rotaru highlights how their diasporic gaze resists, through the melancholic autonomy of multiple displacements, the somewhat equally absurd representational logic of Western-centric trauma-studies perspectives. In a similar vein, focusing on Goodbye My Love, NK, the last one in the series, while questioning the systematized blind spots in and of representational readings of diasporic subjects, Hunmi Lee shows us a way to understand the interstitially multiple us-ness of a forgotten North Korean diaspora, whose memories are suppressed between and under the Cold War legacies of two Koreas still today. The tranScripts section, this time, is quite a feast. Clustered into five subsections, each of which can be read like a pod, every piece is connected by and to “Us To-Day.” 1. Focus: on Soyoung Kim’s Exile Trilogy continues the thread on Kim’s Trilogy with transdisciplinary and -continental contributions from Hye Young Kim, Early Jackson, and Ran Ma, and 2. Memoirs, where archival perspectives are autotheorized through spirited writing practices, feature both Erica Hunt’s prose poetic exposition and Mieke Bal’s

Anthropocentrism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philosophy