What is the relationship of the abstract processes of oppression and concrete, lived experiences of oppression? Jason uses his recent encounters with Korean American and Zainichi Korean activist groups to think, and re-think, what it means to have a critical consciousness, and to be a part of the Korean diaspora.
Quoted in the Podcast, In Chronological Order:
“There is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.” - Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Another Knowledge is Possible
“[W]e must have the strength, and use it from time to time, to shatter and dissolve something to enable [us] to live: this [we] achieve by dragging [our pasts] to the bar of judgment, interrogating it meticulously and finally condemning it; every past, however, is worth condemning…” - Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
“In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged round me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal.” - Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks
“[T]he problem considered here is one of time. Those Negroes and white men will be disalienated who refuse to let themselves be sealed away in the materialized Tower of the Past. For many other Negroes, in other other ways, disalienation will come into being through their refusal to accept the present as definitive.” - Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks
“The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.” - Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keep it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife…” - W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Music Credits
“Freedom of Speech”, Immortal Technique
“ 우리 시대” [oo'ri shidae], trans. “Our Era”],Windy City (feat. Tiger JK)
