"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"--
In March 2020, Sora Y. Han learned her father was dying of cancer just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived on California's shores. These two events led Han to introspection: Who have I been writing to? and Who have I been writing for? In her observance of the 49 days of mourning in Buddhist tradition, answers come in the form of mu no thing, nothingness. Hans poetic meditations on freedom struggle come alive in the empty spaces between words, letters, and pictograms spanning her many languagesEnglish, Korean, Chinese, jazz, law, and poetry. Transliterating and dystranslating the writings of Fred Moten, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, and others through the Korean alphabet, Han weaves the DMZ, Bettys Case, the Thirteenth Amendment, Afro-pessimism, and psychoanalytic desire together into the open field of Bay Area radicalism. Mu is both a loving homage to and a playful subversion of political inheritances and the unsayable beyond law.
Sora Y. Han offers a poetic and radical work of legal theory and criticism that works at the confluence of Korean and Black anticolonial thought and freedom struggles to articulate new visions of freedom.
