Objectify This

Today’s post is brought to you by the word bricolage, which  Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright define as

the practice of working with whatever materials are at hand, and making do with what one has. As a cultural practice, bricolage refers to the activity of taking consumer products and commodities and making them one’s own by giving them new meaning . . .  to create resistant meanings out of commodities. For instance . . . wearing sneakers unlaced or baseball caps on backwards can  . . . change the intended meaning of those products. The punk practice of wearing safety pins as body ornamentation is one of the most well-known examples of bricolage.

Over at the New York Observer, Sharon Elizabeth Samuel describes the wave (sorry) of racism/Orientalism following the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and horrifying nuclear catastrophe as “foot-in-mouth syndrome.” It’s an epidemic, though, more like Hoof-and-Mouth: from the AFLAC duck man Gilbert Gottfried to members of New York City Ballet. (Gottfried was fired from AFLAC, which does three quarters of its business in Japan.) The most egregious case, the vlog of college student Alexandra Wallace, has got people tweeting and squawking.ju

But if Mz. Samuels demurely refrains from calling out the hate that dares not speak its name, it’s because she can count on Jimmy Wong do do so with more bricolage. Samuels writes,

“Out west, one Alexandra Wallace, a UCLA student who posted a video on YouTube March 11, blasted her Asian classmates for talking on the phone in the library (regarding, she presumes, their relatives in “the tsunami thing”), among other crimes. Ms. Wallace imitated an Asian student’s speech—”Ohhhh! Ching chong ling long ting tong”—while priding herself on her “American manners.”

“The rant, which went viral despite being removed by Wallace on Sunday, promptly earned the third-year political science (indeed!) major a number of death threats. (None of this, by the way, is the lesson worth learning!)

“Enter Jimmy Wong, a 24-year-old musician who decided to take a softer approach. He posted a video response Tuesday, March 15, featuring “Ching Chong,” a humorous love song dedicated to Wallace. It garnered over 125,000 hits in five hours, yet Wong’s ultimate victory lies in the fact that over 100,000 viewers and thousands of page subscribers have since populated his other videos. He was yesterday’s #1 most viewed musician on YouTube.”

Wong’s video begins with clips of Wallace, so that he can recycle them and provide new meaning. Bricolage is the ultimate expression of agency in the face of adversity; it acknowledges the presence of differing views while it challenges them on their own terms. In this case of objectification through racism, it positions Wong in relation to Wallace’s subjectivity/ego, and therefore into her definition of subjectivity itself. His romantic language may be read in reference to Barthes’ claim that “the lover’s realm” is the “paradisaic realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning. . .”

Enjoy! Hat tip to Esther for the link and Priyanka for A Lover’s Discourse.

Of course, the real epidemic is the Dap Dip. . . I am hesitant to post this as the medium-wack captions below this non-video aren’t awesome. Time for some bricolage, y’all.