Liberty Chee

Covid-19 destabilized a number of my implicitly-held assumptions. I have had glimpses of these insights before, but the onset of the crisis have made them clearer. One is a kind of clear-cut division between what 'Europe' and 'the West' mean as imagined objects, or discursive entities. 'Europe' has always been exceptional - the end-point of a linear march of history, and therefore a model to be emulated. Surely being better means knowing better. And knowing better presumably entails seeing better. Europe's ways of seeing - its theories, models, concepts, methods - give clarity, illuminating the world as it exists, giving hints to how it should be. I'm amazed of course at how I have held these implicit assumptions, even after having aced a course on postcolonial theory in the in-between space of postcolonial Singapore. So yes, after having moved and lived in Europe for nearly two years, I have become well and truly decolonized. Who knew that I needed to m

I thought I'd start a journal again, to document shifts in my life, work and subjectivity. I have been promising myself all these months that I will revise Ethnographer as Parrhesiast . I have not really started making an effort until the world has demanded I do. And well, life circumstances have also allowed that I do. I am stuck thinking about the comments of Reviewer 1 - notably how parrhesia (Foucault) and diffraction (Barad) hang together. I am revisiting old drafts, my summaries of the CdF lectures, and secondary commentary on the concepts, hoping for inspiration. It's a bit like reading tea leaves. Or waiting for inspiration to fall like manna from heaven.