![]() #KOREAN PIDGIN ENGLISH IN HAWAII FREE#A haunting version of such life-change and caritas is New England Puritanism offspring Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s opening of Free Home for Incurable Cancer on the Lower East Side, after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1891, and her founding of a Dominican order as Mother Mary Alphonsa. “He a new creature: old things are passed away behold, all things are become new” reverberates the staggering present-tense claim for conversion, down through centuries of repetition, for the incoming-power of the inaugurating/ reborn subject (“new creature”) of early Christian modernity. Conversion means a turning with and as some force of newness: it affirms, plugs into, and enacts energies of becoming, eruptive ideas, recomposition, and a creativity (or beatitude) latent or damaged in the self. In conversion, broadly speaking of it as a transfigurative poetics, one encounters a life-force of amplified being like the New Haven ship coming into harbor for Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia or his meeting the “praying families” of New England, or Dylan’s seeking out the folk-mentorship of Woody Guthrie reborn in a New Jersey sickbed, or Allen Ginsberg meeting Kerouac and Snyder on the Beat roads of San Francisco and writing Howl. The Pacific Ocean could come to signify a bioregional site of coalitional promise as much as a geopolitical danger zone of peril: and, as I will aim to show, the forging and worlding of an ocean-based ecopoetics can help in this regard to reconfigure city, region, ocean, river, and planet into figurative unity. To do so, the ocean would have to be framed in terms that can inspire an imagination of co-belonging, mutual interest, and care. This ocean commons so-called, if figured as a vital biospheric element necessary to sustaining life and planetary health, could help build up tactics and affects of ecological solidarity and modes of co-dwelling. For, in an environmental sense as well, we can all but forget the ocean while dwelling in an urban life-world (in huge, consumption-rich cities like Shanghai, Honolulu, Kaohsiung, and San Francisco, or Berlin and London in the Northern Atlantic for that matter) that depends for its very modern well-being on, from, and across the ocean. In effect, we need another, bigger, and better way of framing this shared oceanic horizon that is to say, another way of converting the Pacific Rim into a shared if wary figure of geo-poetic and ecological interest, as I will go on to evoke through a conjuration of experimental poets and writers whose work enacts forces of “becoming oceanic” and formally as well as in content suggests a different mode of belonging to region and globe than the post-Hegelian will-to-dominion. In this process, minority literature may best articulate this “borderlands” interface, forging this language where the past and the future mix and form something new. " More so than British English today, “American English” is a global language, a globalizing language expanding the territory of global capital and of Americanization, to be sure, but also being “deterritorialized” at multiple points, which is to say it is worked over and transformed daily by minor expression, “necessarily worked upon by all the minorities of the world.” American English is becoming Konglish and Singlish and Ebonics and Hawaiian Creole English, amplifying its variations and mongrel mixtures at the transnational and local interface. Though I’ve been living in America for 30 years now, my roots remain elsewhere. Jessica Hagedorn: “I’m not interested in just writing ‘an American novel.’. Displaced and nomadic at the core, minority literature is a mongrel mixture of roots and wings traced across huge and multilingual spaces, as I will discuss, like the trans-Pacific. ![]()
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