Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies Series. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press in association with UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Los Angeles, 2015. xxvi, 184 pp. US$49.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3925-3.
One of the benefits of Myanmar’s ongoing transformation after decades of military rule is that the scope of academic reflection is broadening, and broadening quickly. In the past, scholars were generally content to grapple with the familiar binaries: generals and democrats, minorities and majorities, war and peace. In Tamara C. Ho’s densely composed and passionately argued Romancing Human Rights, we get an entirely new set of critical dispatches. These emerge from the close reading of a motley collection of source materials and authors, everything from George Orwell to Aung San Suu Kyi, and Rambo to Zoya Phan. The interpretations are bold, often grasping at a single paragraph to make punchy postcolonial assertions about the deeper priorities and prejudices of the authors.
The basis for Ho’s re-reading of “the hegemonic influence of Western heteropatriarchy” (xi) is “Asian/American” (xvi), meaning there is a “slash” in the identity matrix. In her words, Ho presents a “queer/feminist genealogy [that] tracks displaced Burmese women as real and fictional author-translators across the twentieth century in various geopolitical spaces” (xvii). Her advantage for this type of scholarship is historical and personal: Ho is a “doubly diasporic feminist critic, a tayoke (Chinese) immigrant from Burma with the privileges of US citizenship and education” (xviii).
Given the genre, there is no escaping the barrage of concepts and theory, unleashed with gusto in chapter 1’s survey of “interracial affiliations and transnational antagonisms.” Ho’s “analysis highlights how the political power of ‘the West’ (the United States in particular) operates in neo-Orientalist, messianic discourses about ‘saving’ the abjected, minoritized, and postcolonial Other” (5). The whole point of her re-reading of the literary materials is to challenge “heteropatriarchical normativity” (15), which at one stage morphs into “an overdetermined and homophobically Orientalist trope” (22).
In this case, the literary homophobe is the scripting of Rambo, a 2008 film that sees the classic Hollywood brawler take to a Myanmar army battalion with a heavy machine gun. It is hardly high art, but Ho gives Sylvester Stallone’s notorious character the full critical treatment. In her view, “Rambo perpetuates a heterosexist, individualistic ethos and unchecked collateral damage while reinforcing U.S. exceptionalism and Christian spiritual redemption” (23). Later, in chapter 2’s discussion of “possessive investments in masculinity,” we learn “how Western imperialism and patriarchal hegemony worked to obliterate feminized and minoritized discourses” (26). Later, on the same theme, we get the interpretation of a “phallic needle” (50).
However, when it comes to the grim and often violent politics of Myanmar, Ho is curiously imprecise. She lumps together a “series of brutally repressive military governments since 1962 (i.e., General Ne Win and the BSPP, SLORC, SPDC, USDA, and USDP)” (67). The fact that the USDA was never the government, and that the USDP (which ruled from 2011 to 2016) implemented wide-ranging political and economic reforms, does not fit Ho’s story of uninterrupted and unrelenting brutality.
Instead, Romancing Human Rights goes back to broadcasting unflattering appraisals of other writers. One unlucky biographer is admonished for a “passage [that] illustrates enduring voyeuristic and Orientalist fantasies about Burma” (81). In this style, Ho ends up criticizing those with whom she more-or-less agrees, arguing that one otherwise useful analyst “falls prey to the imperialist (Western) tendency to sexualize and eroticize Burmese bodies” (81). In Ho’s sharp assessments, nothing can ever be taken for granted or accepted at face value. Apparently “the authors of Burmese descent examined in Romancing Human Rights are a few examples of minoritized voices that are too often ignored or repackaged for exploitation/profit by the publishing marketplace and consumption by mainstream audiences of the global North and One-Third World” (110). In another section, Ho scornfully writes of Myanmar’s “reforms” (115). Myanmar today remains imperfect, of course. The fact that this book does not appear to mention Naypyitaw, not even once, is an indication of a curious disconnect from the harsh realities of power and ideas.
The book’s 498 footnotes are also fascinating artifacts of Ho’s literary method. Footnote 3, on page 121, presents another phallic reference, this time about sixteenth-century reports of penile enhancement. Later, on page 158, in footnote 25, Ho admits that her “study does not extensively engage literature or journalism written in Burmese” (158). Given her immense effort to reclaim a more authentic and politically acceptable vision of Myanmar culture, it is surprising that we do not learn more from the pluralized vernaculars of the people themselves.
Colonialisms and their postcolonial rebuttals are certainly worthy subjects of scholarly labour and Ho is to be commended for her thorough and radical approach. Yet, when it comes to today’s geopolitics, if there is a serious colonial element to life in Myanmar it rarely emanates from Ho’s reviled West. It is big Chinese players—ably abetted by Singaporeans, Koreans, Thais, and Malaysians—who are doing their utmost to reshape the economy, exploit national and human resources, and stamp an entirely new set of values on society. In most cases, these implacably illiberal influences are the ones deserving our sustained critical scrutiny. In this respect, Ho’s literary interpretations may prove anachronistic when put side-by-side with the foundational battles for livelihood that matter so much to millions of people across Myanmar today.
Nicholas Farrelly
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
pp. 407-409