Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition [Hardcover]

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 ofmu–no thing,nothingness. Han’s poetic meditations on freedom struggle come alive in the empty spaces between words, letters, and pictograms spanning her many languages—English, 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,Betty’s Case, the Thirteenth Amendment, Afro-pessimism, and psychoanalytic desire together into the open field of Bay Area radicalism.Muis both a loving homage to and a playful subversion of political inheritances and the unsayable beyond law.USSora 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.Sora Y. Han is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society, Comparative Literature, and African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author ofLetters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law.“Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition is a breathtaking work of impressive range. In a style that is remarkably poetic, Sora Y. Han moves from mourning her father’s death according to the Korean Buddhist conception ofmuto Lacanian psychoanalysis, from contemporary experimental black and Asian American poetry to black critical theory, from US law—constitutional, carceral, and contract—to differential geometry and Korean history. I learned a great many tlcŒ