Dear Diane and xmca members,
I guess I can feel your feelings, Diane--that it's a difficult time both
emotionally and intellectually, as well as in terms of community-building,
re-building, and sustaining. I haven't written to the xmca community for a
long, long time due to the hectic work of a (female/psudo-post-colonial)
academic/teacher/researcher/faculty member; however, ever since I joined
the list in 1994, while still a doctoral student in Toronto, Canada, I have
always cherished the xmca community as a rare alternative space where more
open norms of interaction (both intellectual and sociocultural) can be
experimented, where intellectual ideals shared and serious discussion
staged, where half-baked ideas can be voiced, and where peoples coming from
diverse backgrounds, histories, ethnicities, cultures can find a meeting
place to enhance understandings of one another.
I hope this community stands strong even in this very difficult time.
Writing in a quiet office in a small island located at the Continental
Shelf of the South China Sea, while others are celebrating the ancient
"Mid-Autumn / Lantern Festival" outside in various touristy places in Hong
Kong, China, Taiwan..., I'm alone here reading these xmca exchanges, and of
course, doing my research projects, preparing my Wednesday lecture notes,
reviewing this and that article for this and that journal, writing comments
on my students' teaching journals--as if frozen in time and space, I feel
that the crisis is not limited geographically, culturally, or
intellectually to a single nation, a single country, a single discipline,
or a single tradition. A deeper crisis is spreading both inside and
outside; there's no centre of crisis, as it's in everywhere, taking
different sociohistorical cultural forms.
To return to the practical and mundane, perhaps we need to have a
discussion topic or some discussion topics around certain themes--perhaps,
around how disciplines such as psychology or education or linguistics or
applied linguistics have/have not in different ways contributed to the
present crisis (both political, military, emotional...and intellectual...),
perhaps, how the construction of different subjectivities, of different
subject positions (e.g., of a suicidal religious fighter/killer; or of a
patriotic, nationalistic revengeful citizen)--how the sociohistorical
cultural processes, practices, and symbolic systems involved in such
"subjection" processes (in the on-going processes of production of subject
positions and subjectivities) are not too different--in producing me and
you, him and her, a Muslim figther, an American fighter, an academic, ...
--how all these processes might share some seemingly common mechanisms and
techniques and practices though radically different in appearances.
Sending you greetings from an ancient myth--the Mid-Autumn Festival,
celebrating the rising to the moon of a beautiful kind-hearted queen, who
has stolen the ever-lasting-life potion from the cruel emperor, who once
was a hero who shot down 9 suns in the sky to save a whole nation and
people from extinction, but who later turned to be a cruel despot after
becoming the hero--the ancient old morals, but ever-relevant storylines...
Best,
Angel Lin
Hong Kong
At 09:34 PM 9/30/01 -0600, you wrote:
>i hear your question mike - and feel conflicted.
>on the one hand, a discussion about global politics and culture could be
>valuable,
>
>but by the same hand, this list is dominated by Americans who hold
>particular nationalist perspectives. i wonder how fruitful such a
>discussion would be...
>
>on the other hand, the "crisis' in psychology pales in relation to the
>events of the past few weeks.
>
>might it be possible to explore less political science,
>and more social activity in light of the real-life crisis? i've
>appreciated bill and phillip's remarks quite a lot, as efforts to
>understand:
>
>i'd certainly appreciate more of the same kinds of analysis,
>but i would be discomforted by the nationalist assumptions underpinning
>any discussion of 'terrorism' - there IS a psychology to all of this,
>an intersection of ideology and dissension,
>-- but to find a way to discuss the crisis of NYC in ways that are not
>implicating personal patriotisms may be too thin ice.
>
>perhaps there is a different reading, a way to locate a discussion,
>one that addresses the social realms of global violence. this is surely an
>opportunity for CHAT to be more globally-relevant,
>more aware, and so on.
>
>?
>just thinking out loud,
>diane
>
>
>***************************************************************************
*********
>"Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a
>cigarette in a gutter - all are stories. But which is the true story? That
>I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard,
>waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making
>this note and then another, I do not cling to life."
>Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.
>
> (...life clings to me...)
>***************************************************************************
**********
>diane celia hodges
>university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
>instruction
>vancouver, bc
>mailing address: 46 broadview avenue, montreal, qc, H9R 3Z2
>
>
>
***************************************************************
Angel Lin, Ph.D.(Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
University of Toronto)
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Communication
City University of Hong Kong
Tat Chee Ave., Kowloon, Hong Kong
Fax: (852) 2788-8894; phone: (852) 2788-8122
E-mail: enangel@cityu.edu.hk
http://www.cityu.edu.hk/en/staff/angel/angel.html
http://www.tesl-hk.org.hk
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