Author: Yongho Kim 김용호

  • Oblivio Laws oblivio com archives 04122101 html me…

    Oblivio. Laws.
    oblivio.com/archives/04122101.html

    me. The Defects and Imperfections of my School
    b.yokim.net/145

    news. Macalester College Trustees Approve Financial Aid Changes
    macalester.edu/whatshappening/press/2004/011105.html

    I’ve been afraid of actually implementing (or advising for) change, wherever I belonged. When I wrote the harsh (and well founded, to my immediate experiences at least) critique of high school education, my teachers discussed it in the faculty meeting and brought it back to me enthusiastic about new opportunities and seeking for advice on how to improve upon it. (How do you foster creatvitiy?) Back then, I was shocked/afraid of their reaction. My critique was an angry rant at a very real social fact. Why are our 40 hours/week of high school life draining to waste? Because you chop off their creativity, I said. How do you encourage it? I don’t know.

    Criticizing institutions close to yourself (family, school, work) is a dilemmatic choice. There’s more meat you can slash at, but because it’s a bilateral relationship, you also owe things to them. Last year, late at the DNBAM, I started feeling a deep guilt towards my own academic performance (read: low grades – or, 1.5 GPA) and my activism. Can I really criticize the institution at which I am doing poorly? If someone says, “oh, but you’re just making a big fuzz to avoid tihnking about how you suck at classes”, isn’t she right?

  • Mr. Schultz, you can shove "tolerance" down my ass

    RE: Intellectual Diversity at Macalester. Joseph Schultz, Mac Weekly Feb 18
    themacweekly.com/article.php?article=72

    Good call, Mr. Schultz. Let’s promote “political diversity”, and you lay it out by splitting the entire 1,800 of the Macalester population into democrats and republicans. I’m not even talking about international spectrum of political ideas, I’m just saying, hey, what ever happened to the 5% that voted green in 2000 (of course they abstained in 2004 because Kerry supporters scared the hell out of them), who in themselves were not purely Green but consisted of a conglomerate of commies, socialists, nazis and the like? What is it with assuming class-elite transnational students are “liberals”? What is it with assuming the opposite of liberalism is conservatism? When you pull a bunch of people you don’t know, observe what they do, and give them a label according to your own heterodoxic understanding of the world, it’s called ethnocentrism. Or, ignorant white suburban tolerance.

    Brushing personal, everyday formations of political ideas aside, I’m the ultra-right, and these U.S. “new” conservatives are just a joke. What’s the deal with getting nonwhites in office? What’s the deal with assuming capitalism is “the thing to do” for conservatives? What’s all this rambling on your BIPOLAR diversity? Excuse me, did Fukuyama said that history was ended, well back in 1990?

    Dude.

    Repeat after me:

    Fucking do fucking not fucking classify fucking nonresident fucking aliens fucking with fucking your fucking categories.

  • False (third world) Consciousness

    False (third world) Consciousness
    Response to presentation on public art
    Art 149: Principles of Art
    February 17, 2005
    Yongho Kim

    Assignment: Consider a favorite space in your life. … In a length of 1-2 pages, describe this place in detail, thinking especially about physical qualities of the site which conribute to your positive recollections. Can you draw any conclusions about these characteristics which might be transferable to other places and times?

    My favorite space hangs with a photography of high school I always carry with me. In this essay, I will talk about the geopolitical aesthetics of the image.

    (more…)

  • notes, freedom movements

    feb 14 notes
    freedom movements
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  • The Black Body as a feared Necessity in the Post-Industrial Urban Economy

    response paper to the Sixth Annual African American Studies Conference at Macalester College

    Freedom Movements
    February 16, 2005
    Yongho Kim

    In her keynote speech Democracy and Captivity, Joy Ann James argues that the prison-state constitutes the institution through which neoslave narratives are embodied in the United States. A neoslave narrative, James argues, is “a recycling of the fear/hate of the black body”, but in her use of the prefix neo, I think, she is also pointing out parallel structures of doxa regarding the slave and its relationship to the master in american public discourse, both during pre-“emancipation” and in the current times.

    As Rose Brewer and Nancy A. Heitzeg, and several other speakers/participants argue throughout the conference, the prison-state weaves itself closely together with the prison industrial complex, an economic structure aimed at squeezing a critical surplus required for sustained economic growth. With the rise of the post-industrial ghetto, white america fears and decimates the unnecessary black bodies while simultaneously depending on its cheap or free labor to sustain a new economy.

    In this paper, I trace the path of this development through a small sample of focus points in history and try to set the grounds for understanding the business downtown/inner city ring/suburb as an expression of neoslave narrative.
    (more…)