• Asian review of World Histories
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.81-112
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• 2015

This essay interrogates the category of the 'global' in the emerging domain of 'global intellectual history'. Through a case study of the Indian social-religious reformer Rammohun Roy (1772/4-1833), I argue that notions of global selfhood and rights-consciousness (which have been preoccupying concerns of recent debates in intellectual history) have multiple conceptual and practical points of origin. Thus in early colonial India a person like Rammohun Roy could invoke centuries-old Indic terms of globality (vishva, jagat, sarva, sarvabhuta, etc.), selfhood (atman/brahman), and notions of right (adhikara) to liberation/salvation (mukti/moksha) as well as late precolonial discourses on 'worldly' rights consciousness (to life, property, religious toleration) and models of participatory governance present in an Indo-Islamic society, and hybridize these with Western-origin notions of rights and liberties. Thereby Rammohun could challenge the racial and confessional assumptions of colonial authority and produce a more deterritorialized and non-sectarian idea of selfhood and governance. However, Rammohun's comparativist world-historical notions excluded other models of selfhood and globality, such as those produced by devotional Vaishnava, Shaiva, and Shakta-Tantric discourses under the influence of non-Brahmanical communities and women. Rammohun's puritan condemnation of non-Brahmanical sexual and gender relations created a homogenized and hierarchical model of globality, obscuring alternate subaltern-inflected notions of selfhood. Class, caste, and gender biases rendered Rammohun supportive of British colonial rule and distanced him from popular anti-colonial revolts and social mobility movements in India. This article argues that today's intellectual historians run the risk of repeating Rammohun's biases (or those of Hegel's Weltgeschichte) if they privilege the historicity and value of certain models of global selfhood and rights-consciousness (such as those derived from a constructed notion of the 'West' or from constructed notions of various 'elite' classicized 'cultures'), to the exclusion of models produced by disenfranchised actors across the world. Instead of operating through hierarchical assumptions about local/global polarity, intellectual historians should remain sensitive to and learn from the universalizable models of selfhood, rights, and justice produced by actors in different spatio-temporal locations and intersections.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.1-28
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• 2013

Edward Abbey is regarded as one of the most influential ecological or nature writers. He celebrates the American Southwestern desert, argues for wilderness preservation, and advocates politically-oriented environmental activism to defend wilderness. He, however, does not classify himself as a nature writer, but rather places himself in the tradition of a kind of autography. His books show his fascination with the delicate harmony of the desert, and at the same time his personal journey over the desert. That is, eco-centered, he keeps his journey into the heart of the desert. He finds the desert harsh, brutal, fatal, and most of all, indifferent. The desert reveals simplicity and mystery, silence and revelation, and emptiness and fulfillment. This mythical and paradoxical essence of the desert draws him into the place and inspires redemptive humility and beauty, which, in turn, peel off his old ego or self. During his journey, Abbey tries to immerge himself with the desert yet remains intact and individual. The desert serves for him as the bedrock which sustains him and offers an opportunity to gain a new whole perspective. Like a pocket hunter in the desert whom he characterizes himself, he sticks to the desert to dig out ground for his existence and survival. Pulling the energy and force of the desert into his soul, Abbey is free, or compelled to contemplate what is beyond the human. His experience in and of the desert leads to a discovery of self and initiates selfhood.

• American Studies
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.57-81
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• 2020

The purpose of this essay is to reexamine the overlooked politico-philosophical paradoxes of early American democracy. From its beginning, the American Republic was predicated on the conceived notion of political autonomy and independence from the British Empire. Those who fought for the cause, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, invented and internalized so-called self-evident propositions which served as the key ideological foundation of the American Republic. Moreover, the unique historical ontology of American democracy was coupled with the politico-philosophical necessity of collective fantastical belief in the equation of selfhood with nationhood. By delving into how particular philosophical ideas and political concepts helped shape the visionary imagination of framers and their contemporaries, I investigate the way in which philosophy and politics are constitutive of the ideological fabric of the substantial-both conceptual and practical-paradoxes of the early American democracy.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.69
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• pp.71-110
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• 2015

Beyond the technological behaviorism-oriented notion of prosumers, the current study explores the question of digital creative labour of the youth in the interrelated context of post-capitalist crisis and neoliberal ethos of selfhood. This analysis is situated particularly in the social conflicts and struggles in Korea, where the problems related to the precarization of the younger generation have been increasingly aggravated (in the realm of embodied reality) whereas their digital activities have been highly expressive (in the realm of mediated reality). The contradictions embedded in the question of the labour of the youth are delineated in the respect of the subjectivities of young free labour, or 'digital creative labour' in proposed terms: the precarious young free labour in Korea is the compound of social fragmentation, economic polarization, expansion of cognitive and emotion labour, boom of hedonistic consumerism, economic-cultural celebration of creativity and self-entrepreneurship, technological saturation of digital media, subjective/collective affects around excitement and ambition but also of anxiety and fear. The ambivalence and complexity of the young free labour is converged at the emergence of homo-economicus (Michel Foucault) through the subjectivation of the social (con)fusion of post-capitalist crisis and neoliberal governmentality of selfhood.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.113-171
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• 2017

Science and engineering college students, so-called engineering students, account for nearly half of Korean university students. Existing research on younger generations poses a question of young generation after the financial crisis as a 'genuine' survivalist who carries out 'passionate labor' to pursue 'ordinary life' and 'banal stability'. They are diagnosed as failing to "locate the course of their lives in relation to a larger being that transcends self". But is there a value that can replace the survival value in front of us today, which is possible to be practiced and narrated by the young generation of Korea, especially the engineering students? What value (if any) is not captured by survival value, and what mechanisms and processes can and can easily be used by engineering students? Our research uses interviews conducted at one research-centered science and engineering university in a local metropolitan city, Korea. In conclusion, we emphasize that a transformed version of developmental nationalism, in which individual scientists/engineers pursue their 'authentic' passion and unintentionally contribute to the development of the nation through byproducts of their research, exerts strong influence upon the formation of young engineering students' narratives linking their selfhood and the good.