"Writing into the Rupture": Visual Selves in Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment

Hana Rivers

doi:10.52214/meliora.v1i1.7935

Abstract

Multimedia texts are gaining more footing in the Asian American literary world, especially following Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s pre-eminent Dictee (1982). While lesser known, Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment (2018) is a highly referential lyric essay that employs visual elements, including personal ephemera, to consider the unrelenting complexities of Asian American identity. Analyzing Arnold’s formal intervention into Asian American literature through Francesca Woodman’s photography and Roland Barthes’ photography theory reveals that visual subjects are evasive and unknowable. Paradoxically, memorabilia has the power to rupture linear notions of time and cast into doubt what we know about past and present selves. Arnold’s engagement with the visual also extends to the body, and throughout the text she unsettles hegemonic constructions of gender and racial signification. Ultimately, an analysis of Litany for the Long Moment reveals that visual subjects rupture the concept of a stable self. Throughout this thesis, I draw from the fields of photography, poststructuralism, and critical race studies to argue that visual representation is not a sufficient mode of racial empowerment. Building off of Arnold’s claims about “writing into the rupture,” lack is not a closure, but an opening through which we can interrogate what it means to be a self.

Highlights

“The materiality of history is [...] what will not be ordered, what does not coagulate and cohere...‘history’ becomes ‘visible’ not in its narrative representation, but in its defiance of the dominant regimes of representability.”—Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics “I am writing into the rupture, the absence left there.”—Mary-Kim Arnold, Litany for the Long Moment
What does it mean to “write into the rupture”? If absence refers to a lack, what does it mean when that lack inheres as a remainder, something “left there”? In Litany for the Long Moment, a text that is at once a lyric essay, a poem, a collage, and an assemblage of references, Mary-Kim Arnold does not attempt to answer these questions with any fixed certainty
It is impossible to read this text without thinking through the role of photography, especially considering that the “long moment” referenced in its title is a direct allusion to long exposure photography

Summary

FOR THE LONG MOMENT

HANA RIVERS “The materiality of history is [...] what will not be ordered, what does not coagulate and cohere...‘history’ becomes ‘visible’ not in its narrative representation, but in its defiance of the dominant regimes of representability.”—Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics “I am writing into the rupture, the absence left there.”—Mary-Kim Arnold, Litany for the Long Moment. By using visual elements to rupture the continuity between past and present, working around rather than in direct response to the questions she poses, and cleaving words from their normative meanings, Arnold construes herself as both an agent of meaning and a visual subject that is unknowable In doing so, she destabilizes the notion of a single and coherent self. Arnold’s investment in unknowability extends beyond her problematization of memory to encompass the divide between racialized bodies and interior experience Does she unsettle the notion of a stable self in relation to photography and visual representation, she does so in relation to identificatory categories and the problem of the body as a signifier of race. Disjunction and Racial Signification “In emphasizing the intersections between a body of work whose subject is the body, with a body of theory that renders the body problematic, I intend no hard and fast correspondences, no fixed equivalence.”—Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Just

Like a Woman”

Conclusion

WORKS CITED