Memory and Anti-Documentary Desire in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee is rapidly acquiring critical currency as one of the most recent pieces of ethnic autobiographical evidence to be resuscitated by researchers within the fields of Asian American, feminist, film, and post-colonial studies.(1) Trinh T. Minh-ha in her seminal work Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism invokes Cha's work as a narrative instance of post-colonial displacement. A new volume of critical essays devoted to Dictee, edited by Elaine Kim, recently appeared.(2) At the same time, another rescue mission is underway: the University Art Museum in Berkeley is currently in the process of establishing the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Archive, featuring everything from her videos to her private, pencil-scribbled journals. So when I call the increasing attention to Cha's so-called autobiography a resurrection, I am alluding to both the text's incipient emergence into critical attention and the larger project of exhumation surrounding Cha's life.(3) But what does it mean to read this increasingly prominent text as a "multicultural, feminist, post-colonial and ethnic memoir" when its process of recollection continually stalls and refuses identification even on the simplest level? Dictee is anything but self-evident. Speaking through disembodied yet multiple voices, borrowed citations, and captionless photographs, this supposed autobiography gives us a confession that does not confess, a dictation without origin, and history without names. It offers up bits of re-collected narratives, but they stand in the text as half-revived, half-buried information. Indeed, in Dictee, acts of recollection (in the sense of memory recall) are frequently indistinguishable from acts of collection (in the sense of gathering bits of objects). There are sections, for instance, where the narration seems to be offering us personal memories, but it soon becomes clear that the narrator might be merely reciting borrowed lines from other textual sources. One would be hard pressed to pinpoint what it is specifically that makes this text an autobiography. The process of memory within this text is difficult and recalcitrant--a double movement of attachment and detachment, retrieval and interment. How do we read its political intention when we can hardly locate a political subject? How do we construct a political subject when that "subject's" very voice, and its boundaries, is always in oscillation? How does this apparently postmodern, seemingly ahistorical and dislocated recit comes to effect its intense, localized critique of cultural history and its reconstructions? Prior to designating Dictee's representative value as a piece of cultural evidence, it seems crucial to confront the text's resistance towards its own visibility: the oblique relation it takes towards itself as an object of revelation. Accordingly, this essay examines how the very nature of a cultural "rescue mission" is profoundly problematized within Dictee and exposed as an arena where epistemology and power are in perpetual contestation. I will begin by focusing on this so-called autobiography's troubled relationship to visuality, history, and marginalization as a critique of certain modes of minority discourse. I will demonstrate the ways in which the text undermines its own "filmic, documentary" desires and suggests ways in which this ambivalence embodies an internal critique of documentation as the foundational logic of the memoir. Cha's critique of the "ready-made" image of the marginalized subject disturbs the tenets of representation on which the ideology of the ethnic bildung rests. I propose that the "form" of Dictee effects a historical and cultural reconstruction that enacts, simultaneously, a critique of that reconstruction. 1. Resuscitation How does a reconstruction of history effect a critique of that reconstruction? In order to answer that question, we need to first examine the desire for history, especially when it comes to minority literature. …