Sorry to say, I’ve decided to stop posting on this site.
I will continue my other blogsite, where I focus more on my research and lifework, as well as entertainment and fun and philosophy and activism through words.
Please visit my other site and subscribe. Otherwise: Sayonara, Adios, Anyong Seyo………
For my other blog site, CLICK THE THE LINK >> Dream of the Water Children: The Black Pacific (full of music, social theoretical thought, articles, news, etc.)
My book: Dream of the Water Children: Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific, was slated for a June 2016 release, but will be out in the Fall instead (November).
For those of you interested in Black Pacific histories, storytelling, postcolonial analysis, and Black-Asian and indigenous perspectives, you might appreciate my book: Dream of the Water Children: Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific will be released this coming Fall (2015) by 2Leaf Press in New York.
It is a combination of family and friends’ collective memoir, dreams, dreams and recollections on being a black body in the Pacific Rim, from ancient times to the present, combined with a mystery and soul-searching investigation of my reflections on my relationship with my mother, as well as my father and family.
The Occupation of Japan, indigenous South Seas and Pacific Islands histories, women’s lives in relation to US militarism, divided Korea, the Philippines Resistance War against the US, Negrito peoples, African-American soldiers in Asian Wars, French Indochina and American Vietnam Wars, European colonization in the Pacific, and life in today across the US, are only some of the aspects evoked in a meditation of self-in-history.
The book is not written in traditional ways, mixing genres and disciplines without dividing into categories. It is not a social history or case study, but memories with research notes and reflections on readings, related directly to my investigation on how I and family members have grown to be a self within larger histories of militarism and colonization.
From my mother speaking to me through a dream, to my father’s interpretation of his Vietnam War experience, to my present-day experiences with racism in San Francisco from both Japanese and white people, to newspaper articles and stories from my childhood and the infanticide, a mystery regarding my own background opens new questions on the world, what it tells us versus what we know and remember, what we choose to maintain or refuse, and how we maintain, perpetrate or become victims of violence and oppressions is at the core of questions that I pose for the meaning of what lives we live and what we must become.
The central focus of my book is of being the identity of a Black-Japanese Amerasian, born in the postwar, to a mixed-race Japanese woman who meets my would-be father, an African-American military man stationed in Japan during the Korean War. Transnational life, military life, and the jarring changes and adjustments needed in the middle of it, and continuing into adulthood–are the main ways in which I choose to remember a few events in my life, and conversations with my mother, to evoke a dream-like sequence between academic writing and the lament of life in loss, war, and the struggle for empowerment.
If interested, please visit the website for my book, to keep informed:
Things are going slow at 2Leaf Press, the publisher of my book. It’s not unusual, with all the things going on there.
So my book will not likely be published in the next two months. It might be out by the END OF THE YEAR but perhaps later than that. HOPE EVERYONE Interested in the Book will eagerly look forward to it coming out when it does!!!
PUBLISHER’S INFORMATION ON MY BOOK:
Dream of the Water Children
Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific
by Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd
DREAM OF THE WATER CHILDREN, at once a haunting collective memory and a genre-bending critical account of dominance and survival, interweaves intimate multi-family details with global politics spanning generations and continents. Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd’s debut work defies categorization as histories and families are intimately connected through sociological ghosts alive in the present. It is a one-of-a-kind ‘non-fiction’ inter-disciplinary evocation that will appeal to not only those interested in Black and Asian relations and mixed-race Amerasian histories, but also a wide general audience including those interested in Asian, Asian-American, Nikkei, African-American, and mixed-race identities as well as multicultural literature, history and post-colonial memoir. Those focused on academic studies such as women and gender studies, ethnic and critical mixed-race studies, social justice curriculum, political histories, memory, feminism, and militarization, etc. will appreciate the profound questions for thought that rise up from the pages. Cloyd’s book not only challenges readers to explore technologies of violence, identity, difference, and our responsibilities to the world, it will also move readers through emotional depths.
REVERIES & RAGE: On Colonization and Survival
Saturday, October 26
TICKET PRICES REDUCED!!! – To: $5.00 Sliding Scale!
Presentations begin at 8:00pm at Women’s Building in San Francisco
So just a few comments on thinking through my writing on Chick-Fil-A in the previous post:
A few people have commented that the post is anti-Christian.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I’m anti-domination-as-oppression.
Why an un-thought, un-named Christian historical presence of mainstream American thinking –and alongside the Paganism that Christian institutions of the past destroyed, are working in tandem as dominant over other ways of thinking, doing, and structuring lives, peoples, norms, is the point and target of my critique and questions concerning how to live with differences in our world.
My writing is not anti-Christian. It is the assumption that historical Christian-based thinking about nature, persons, values, and the categories that are formed to give life to American culture, is something that goes as dominant and undisturbed and maintained and defended above other ways of thinking and structuring our values and societies—this is the issue.
How these un-examined values may then, be named as ‘democracy’ or ‘civility’ and ‘freedom’ and the use of the term ‘God’ in order to establish legitimacy, are an underlying problematic raised by this general critique that is almost unnamed in my previous post, but is there.
There are many valuable and useful things that Christianity, as in all religions, have brought through into lives and identities and institutional and legal norms. But without examining its domination-practices, our so-called ‘goodness’ or ‘spirituality’ or ‘glory’ or ‘freedom’ or other such terms, are nothing but cover-ups and disguises for abuse, corruption, denial, arrogance, simple-mindedness, violence and delusion.
These things are not necessary but continue to exist and operate through us because we may refuse–yes REFUSE, to think differently in relation to our own practices of domination–most of which is unconscious (because we deny history, culture and politics in our worldviews in the present).
My mother, whom my “Dream of the Water Children’ Project is devoted to, passed away on September 17, 2011 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I will be grieving, mourning, regretting, remembering, giving. In her honor, I continue my work/life.
As you may have noticed, YouTube, Daily Motion, Vimeo and the other VIDEO-SHARING sites, are now strangled by our capitalism. These strangulations impede on sharing (in the name of individualism and safety coupled with money-needs). Sound is taken away and ruined. Granted, the postings of music and other things people make money off of, cripples the artists who struggle to survive. But this is what I mean. We are all participating. In participating, we must question freedom and what it must function like.
So we must now enjoy the videos on this site, without sound or listen-able sound.
Enjoy.
I comment here on a Great post by MaiBao (ahmongwoman.wordpress.com) that speaks to forgetting and how important forgetting is in becoming a national citizen. As much as the US likes to portray itself as a cultural mosaic, it is strongly based on very subtle forms of assimilation and marginalization. In some cases, as is the current situation of excluding Islam from an acceptability and its Islamophobia, the marginalization is extreme and unwarranted. Cultural heritages under the umbrella of ‘American citizen’ is a double-edged sword.
As people come to America or Europe to escape forms of violence that the US government and the Europeans create around the world through economic/military policies and covert operations, the sequestering of geographies of acceptability are created, and the social fabric of control become clearer through: assimilate or cannot assimilate, incarcerate or cannot incarcerate, criminalize or become a saint, become a nobody or do these certain things–then, and even then, as this post says to us, you may never arrive at ‘citizen.’ The racial, cultural, economic, linguistic, and body-form fabric of acceptability does have a dominant, mainstream center that everything circles around. This is why Americans spend most of their lives ‘finding themselves’ and ‘re-gaining themselves’ and ‘finding our true calling.’ It is because we live in a society where that is taken from us, as Americans. And at the same time, it is being stolen around the world, through globalization and its effects: displacement, refugee camps, demotion, de-prioritizing, ghetto-izing, criminalizing, judicial systems that make bureacracy strong, dominant secular Christianizing of morality, and the hierarchy of the white ways of thinking and doing and moralizing at the top. Even many so-called ‘white’ people cannot make it there. It is a nightmare. Then we add gender, sexualities, and other aspects of dominance and demotion and we have the fabric of our present world that has been globalizing (a neo-colonial continuation of expansion–through minds and economices instead of outright ‘direct invasions’) over centuries.
I hope, that through reading this posting by this Hmong-American, that we come to realize the treacherous path of forgetting, remembering, claiming, and resisting as everyday life, while we gain privileges in the troublesome American citizenship dream.
Here is the great post by MaiBao who is at: ahmongwoman.wordpress.com:
via A Hmong Woman
AI NO KO 