Responses to Karen Tei Yamashita’s Keynote Address: Anthropocene, Capitalocene

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this extraordinary session. Knowing that I don’t have much to offer, knowledge-wise, to such a highly specialized audience, my only justification for being here is that I have been a great admirer of Karen Tei Yamashita’s work ever since my son was a toddler, twenty years ago.

It is always a tremendous joy to listen to what Karen says or read what she writes, and I believe many people here share that feeling. First of all, I like her accent. I believe it to be heavily Californian with or without a trace of Japanese-American-ness in it, belonging to the same league as that of Garrett Hongo, Karen’s high-school literary friend. As a non-native speaker of American English, I have tried to emulate their accent. For speaking or for writing, I would go to school any time with Karen for her intelligence, critical acumen, and rich sense of humor. Garrett, I suppose, must have some HCE, not the father HCE in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, but rather Hawai’i Creole English, running in his family. Karen may not have that kind of Pidgin (with a capital P) in her verbal repertory, but with any amount of Brazilian Portuguese and several Japanese dialects including Japanese-Brazilian Japanese flowing in, I imagine she has long been speaking her own personal version of pidgin. And as for writing, any great writer writes in her own idiolect.

Then Karen has this crazy sense of trans-lingual punning! In whose imagination but hers can Ishmael and Ishi-maru and Ishi come together to draw up a surprising mental landscape? Her talk was like treading on transnational, transcultural, trans-historical, trans-lingual stepping-stones in a sea of the vaguely familiar. The experience doesn’t make us uneasy as if the area were soaked in the feeling of the unheimlich, and it doesn’t only give us a good laugh as if it were a series of sophisticated jokes, but it invites us to explore on our own an unknown network of correspondences and meanings scattered across the global history of the past two centuries or so. Karen quoted her father John’s beautiful letter to his sister in which he wrote: “I say all is adventure and more adventure.” And come to think of it, this “all is adventure” principle is the general condition and hidden subject of all immigrants’ literature. And today in this highly mobile world of ours almost all of us are de facto immigrants who are trying to survive with the daily skills of bricolage and a constantly changing, or forced-to-change, personal pidgin language.

The triggering text of Karen’s talk today is, of course, Moby-Dick, and the central locus is the Pacific Ocean. Locus, I said, but it’s not a point, it’s a vast, almost limitless extension, and the central topos, both physically and thematically, is none other than the ship Pequod. And the ship leads us readers directly into this in-between space between the US and Japan. In order to follow and support Karen’s thematic alignment, let me quote this passage from the introduction of Reimagining the American Pacific (2000) by her Santa Cruz colleague Rob Wilson:

Ahab’s very ship is named to commemorate the destruction of the Pequot Indians in Connecticut in 1637, which later led to the wholesale destruction of native peoples. To suggest its imperial globality, interestingly enough as well, this doomed multicultural ship of American commerce named Pequod is also transnationally masted with pine wood from “double-bolted” and “impenetrable” Japan. . . . A piece of Pacific timber from pre-Perry and Dutch-influenced Japan, that mysterious nation of typhoons, racial phobia, managed ports, and closed markets.

Needless to repeat here, but it was all about markets, an economically motivated contact and ensuing oceanic venture, following the predicted shadow of the great whale that was global capitalism avant la lettre.

The whale ship was a venture business, and as a very small floating island with its own minimalist multiracial...