Mu, 49 marks of abolition

In: Black outdoors

Abstract

"Sora Han's Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition is a work of radical legal theory in the form of an epic, 'stream of unconsciousness' prose poem that reads the law as a social text. Deploying polyglossic interpretation as a poetics of relation among English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and French-languages imbued with genealogical, colonial, theoretical and symbolic significance for Han-she develops a psychoanalytically inflected method of "dystranslation." After Han's father died in 2020, she took up the Korean Buddhist tradition of mu, mourning the dead for forty-nine days. Each of the book's forty-nine sections represent a day of mourning, an occasion for meditating on the law of surplus: surplus in language, surplus in oedipality, surplus of time in abeyance. Through engaging with texts across Asian and Asian American studies, Black studies, legal theory, and poetry, the book recalls the distinct post-1968 historical sense of "Asian American" as a radical anti-imperialist orientation of life and thought very much in conversation with other movements for social change. Not only do we encounter the complexity of being Korean American in relation to issues of Blackness, colonial imperialism, and the juridical and carceral inflected conditions of social existence in the US, but we also learn how to read across all these texts and conditions in a fluid dynamic multidirectional exchange of energy that opens up conventional fields of knowledge to novel possibilities of thinking"--