Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition
Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition
by Sora Y. Han
Duke University Press, 2024
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-1-4780-2097-4
Paper: 978-1-4780-2783-6
eISBN: 978-1-4780-9414-2 (OA)
eISBN: 978-1-4780-2571-9 (standard)
About the Book
In March 2020, Sora Y. Han learned her father was dying of cancer just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived on California's shores. These two events led Han to introspection: “Who have I been writing to?” and “Who have I been writing for?” In her observance of the 49 days of mourning in Buddhist tradition, answers come in the form of mu – no thing, nothingness. Han’s poetic meditations on freedom struggle come alive in the empty spaces between words, letters, and pictograms spanning her many languages—English, Korean, Chinese, jazz, law, and poetry. Transliterating and dystranslating the writings of Fred Moten, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, and others through the Korean alphabet, Han weaves the DMZ, Betty’s Case, the Thirteenth Amendment, Afro-pessimism, and psychoanalytic desire together into the open field of Bay Area radicalism. Mu is both a loving homage to and a playful subversion of political inheritances and the unsayable beyond law.
About the Author
Sora Y. Han is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society, Comparative Literature, and African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law.
Reviews
-- R. A. Judy, author of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black
-- M. NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong!
“Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition is a breathtaking work of impressive range. In a style that is remarkably poetic, Sora Y. Han moves from mourning her father’s death according to the Korean Buddhist conception of mu to Lacanian psychoanalysis, from contemporary experimental black and Asian American poetry to black critical theory, from US law—constitutional, carceral, and contract—to differential geometry and Korean history. I learned a great many things from this book.”
-- R. A. Judy, author of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black
“49 breaths to accompany a father on his final journey to the Ancestors; 49 stops along the penitentiary pilgrimage that is the huis clos of language; 49 periodic beats to move us through the thicket of legal theory into a destabilized poetics of off; 49 stepping stones into the mourning ground where law and poetry confront each other in the violence of grammar—49 times over Mu gifts us the means to mourn the split ‘Tongue of Adam’ that conscripts, constricts, and condemns.”
-- M. NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong!
Tags
Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study, Mu, Poetics, Ethnology, Asian American & Pacific Islander Studies, Language, Ethnic relations, Study and teaching, Race relations, African Americans, African American & Black Studies, Law, Cultural & Ethnic Studies, United States, Social Science
Open Access Information
Label: University of California, Irvine
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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