College Literature

In its compositional eloquence, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée preserves the representational complexities of “distance” while it discloses an inceptual, structural relationship to the very inescapability of writing as a scene of language enacted between spaces occupied by “liberal” and “liberated” subject categories. Framed thusly, Dictée, attentive to a developing vitality that is situationally oriented to transnationally constituted space, also performs a disavowal of the categorical-universal within secular-liberal knowledges. Between Rey Chow’s aesthetics, Erin Manning’s writing on performance and embodiment, and Adriana Cavarero’s political theory, this essay argues that origin, disentangled from the present via a transnational lens, is in fact always shared and experienced as criollo; is a situation always revealing a historico-political imbrication of a creative beginning to a new language of forced imposition.