Selling Planetarity on an Island: On Jeju, Spivak, and Kwon

In August 2025, less than a month after I had returned to Korea from the United States, I attended a Critical Island Studies conference held at Jeju National University, where Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was scheduled to participate in a roundtable and give a keynote the following day.

The conference had been overwhelmed by the prospect of Spivak’s presence well before she actually appeared. There was excitement, but also an extraordinary amount of pressure around the event. The strain was visible. Moderators and organizers who would have been entirely capable of running an academic event seemed unusually nervous and self-conscious.

This was especially striking to me because I had already been interested in Jeju for some time and had arrived expecting the conference to introduce visiting scholars to the extraordinary amount of intellectual, political, and cultural work already taking place there. Jeju is, to me, an exceptionally rich place to think from. Its contemporary scholarship, local historical work, activist archives, artistic practices, and public conversations around colonialism, massacre, militarization, ecology, and islandness are already remarkably sophisticated.

Yet from the opening session onward, I was surprised by how little of this was actually presented.

The opening remarks and keynotes did very little to communicate the intellectual life of Jeju itself. Instead, much of what I heard came from professors who had studied or received their doctorates abroad recounting their own academic trajectories, affiliations, and encounters with internationally recognized intellectual worlds. There was a recurring quality of “back when I was abroad” to the proceedings that felt strangely disconnected from the place in which the conference was actually happening.

Because many of the scholars who had traveled to the conference appeared to know relatively little about Jeju, it seemed like a missed opportunity. A conference bringing international scholars to Jeju could have made visible the work already being done there, rather than treating the island primarily as the location in which an internationally famous theorist happened to appear. In that sense, the conference was less overwhelmed by Jeju than overwhelmed by Spivak.

By the time of the roundtable, this had produced a particular atmosphere in the room. Spivak was late, and everyone had been waiting for her for some time when we finally began to hear her approaching from the hallway.

Click—thud—click—thud.

It was the sound of a cane, moving very slowly down the corridor. The room became quiet enough to hear it. By then the anticipation around her arrival had become almost ceremonial; people seemed moved by the prospect of seeing in person someone whose intellectual stature had organized so much of the event around itself. So we sat there in near silence as the sound came gradually closer.

When Spivak finally entered, it was apparent how difficult walking was for her. She was visibly unsteady and seemed to be struggling to make her way across the room. People tried to help her, but she refused and insisted on climbing the steps to the stage herself. She managed to reach the chair and sit down.

At that exact moment, the chair collapsed with an enormous crash, and Spivak disappeared from view.

Everyone rushed toward her. After what felt like a long time, she emerged again alongside the broken chair and, with considerable difficulty, made her way back onto the stage. Everyone seemed relieved to see that she had not been seriously injured.

The keynote she was scheduled to give the following day was titled "Selling Planetarity," and what Spivak wanted to say at the roundtable was along those lines. One sentence I wrote down word for word was: “I am fed up with American institutionality.”

The argument was that American institutions had used her, that she had been taken in by them, and that she now wanted to expose what had happened. Two other sentences I wrote down were, “American ideology is stronger than I am,” and “I was a symptom.”

At the time, I had already become deeply disillusioned with American academia and had returned to Korea less than a month earlier, so I remember receiving all this with a certain degree of resignation. The room, however, began to stir.

People had already been nervous because of Spivak’s presence. Then someone—the moderator or another Korean scholar on the roundtable—responded with a mixture of deference and bewilderment. The gist was: we have come here to listen to you and learn these advanced ideas from the United States, so if you tell us this now, we do not quite know what to do with it. The Q&A that followed retained something of that confused atmosphere.

Even though it was satisfying to hear someone of Spivak’s stature say aloud something I had come to feel too much, I did not attend her keynote the following day.

The reason was that her own attitude and position still seemed to me remarkably compatible with the very American institutionality she was criticizing. Her way of speaking was dismissive, and I later heard similarly negative reactions after she gave the same lecture at another Korean university. More importantly, the disclosure did not strike me as an admission made with embarrassment - for only now realizing something that others may have known for a very long time. It came much more strongly as anger that the institution had used her, combined with a tendency to lecture those who, from where she now stood, appeared not yet to understand what she had discovered.

One phrase in particular caught my attention: “us metropolitan academics.”

There was already an us built into the sentence.

And the term planetarity itself raised another discomfort for me. Spivak continued to argue for the need to undo anthropocentrism, as though this were an intervention that American ideology had failed to make. I found myself experiencing once again a frustration I have repeatedly felt around contemporary environmentalism.

Whenever the subject becomes the planet, the environment, and human destruction of them, intellectual observation suddenly becomes simple. Complex relations are flattened into very clear categories of good and bad: environmental pollution is bad; protecting the environment is good; human beings destroy; the environment needs protection. Because the moral position seems self-evidently correct, people appear much less interested in examining the assumptions through which the problem itself is being described.

For instance, the theme of the 2024 ASTR conference, the largest annual conference in theatre and performance studies in the United States, was ecology. It was one of the least interesting conferences I have ever attended. I remember feeling that almost nobody was risking a genuinely difficult proposition. Everyone seemed to be reciting versions of an answer that had already been rehearsed and agreed upon.

At the Jeju roundtable, Spivak invoked Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and quoted him: “The planet doesn’t need humans, humans need the planet.”

The room immediately responded with that familiar academic murmur of agreement—“Mm”—and a great deal of nodding.

That reaction seemed to me a perfect example. By agreeing that humans depend on the environment rather than the other way around, scholars can easily occupy the position of the enlightened academic who humbly accepts that humans are not the center of the world.

I do not know the exact context in which Ngũgĩ made that statement, but I doubt the idea was meant to be as simple as it became in that room. I would be more inclined to read it as a reversal directed at an extremely tenacious belief that humans are the center of the planet: a rhetorical turning-around of that hierarchy, a play of reversal.

Ngũgĩ’s work has always felt to me strongly Indigenous in its orientation. And the Indigenous perspectives with which I am more familiar would, I think, lead somewhere slightly different: no, we need each other, and we also do not need each other.

The idea of humans as excess, which also appeared in Spivak’s discussion, can itself become another articulation of anthropocentrism. Humans are once again being singled out, only now as the uniquely destructive or unnecessary species rather than as the uniquely important one.

Across Indigenous ontologies, what I encounter much more often is an attempt to understand the precise textures and rhythms of human entanglement with other forms of life on earth. The question is not simply whether humans are good or bad for the planet, necessary or unnecessary to it. It is about relation, and about the particular forms of dependency, harm, care, exchange, violence, obligation, and coexistence through which life continually takes shape.

A friend once told me about a Buddhist idea that “the world is always perfect.” I have interpreted this as meaning that everything exists in a chaotic balance of entanglement, not that everything that happens is complete or morally good.

And, as so often happens at academic events like this, the question that came next in the somewhat unsettled room was immediately familiar:

“What should we do, then?”

The question, in my ears, assumes that an idea acquires value when it can be converted into something actionable that will give people a sense of resolution.

But Indigenous ontologies have already talked extensively about these topics, including what to do. The difficulty is that what they describe is often much more about being than doing, about allowing oneself to be in a relation differently rather than producing one more improved program for action. Sometimes it is about stopping, pausing, listening, and allowing oneself to be.

I once said something similar during a Q&A at an AAAS panel. A colleague later complained to me, “but how do you know how to ‘be’? That should be explained.”

That response has stayed with me because the demand for a new, more correct answer seemed to reproduce itself endlessly. There must always be a new explanation, a new method, a new model for how to inhabit the world properly. Yet sometimes what is being asked for is precisely the opposite: not another answer, but the ability to stop producing one.

In the context of that Critical Island Studies conference, I could not escape the feeling that academia itself is an island, rolling forward on assumed sameness and assumed agreement (of "us"). But its islandness has to be named before it can become capable of recognizing itself as such, and before metacognitive reflection and learning can begin.

Academia wants to perform meta-analysis on virtually everything. It understands perfectly well why self-reflexivity is intellectually necessary. Yet it repeatedly refuses to perform the same operation on itself. I continue to find the audacity of that refusal astonishing.

-

Recently I have been reading Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam and deeply impressed by it. It has been a long time since I read scholarship that I regarded so immediately as serious, fully accomplished intellectual work. Kwon’s larger oeuvre also overlaps almost uncannily with my own interests, except that he has carried them out through extremely accomplished anthropological method.

The more impressed I became by the book, however, the more a question I have had for some time grew stronger. Anthropology already has a domain in which it is extremely good, and anthropologists like Kwon demonstrate exactly what that work can look like. Why, then, when performance or art scholarship engages something considered “ethnic,” “traditional,” or culturally unfamiliar, is the quality of that scholarship judged first by whether it is anthropological enough?

Kwon is conducting a case study of Vietnam, but what interests him is clearly larger and more philosophical than Vietnam as an enclosed geographic entity. Vietnam contains an extraordinary density of war ghosts, and it is easy to see why anyone interested in histories of violence and their spiritual residues could learn an enormous amount there.

Throughout the book, Kwon consistently maintains a perspective: what remains after a history of violence is not only schism, hostility, pain, anger, and resentment. Very concrete alternative formations also emerge through and after violence: alternative families, large and durable communities, and attempts to reconstruct forms of life that run against the heroic narratives of war imposed by the state. Local spiritual practices that are neither simply institutional religion nor reducible to belief repeatedly play a major role in those processes.

Kwon’s work demonstrates, with an extraordinary level of precision and effectiveness, why ghosts and spirits are worth studying without distorting the very reason for studying them. He is able to show exactly how and why these beings matter historically and socially, rather than turning them into metaphor or treating them as irrational residues. What struck me was that Kwon was hardly the first to do so: many of the scholars he cites had already made the relevance of ghosts clear, and yet the case somehow had to be made again. The imagined reader were those I had never known how to address. In that sense, he performs almost perfectly a labor of demonstration that I have repeatedly found difficult. He proves, without compromising the object itself, why the study of ghosts can produce serious knowledge.

Perhaps citing Kwon will make some of this easier for me going forward.

Still, something else about his career caught my attention. Kwon is by any conventional measure an extremely successful scholar. He now holds a chaired professorship in England and has received major awards. Scholars move internationally all the time, of course, particularly toward institutions that support their research. But I nevertheless found his trajectory notable: undergraduate study in Korea, then another bachelor’s degree and a master’s in the United States, followed by another move to England, where he completed another master’s and his doctorate.

The fact that one of the relatively rare bodies of scholarship that makes me immediately think, this is the real thing, was produced by a Korean scholar writing not about Korea but about another country, and that the intellectual world sustaining that work developed largely outside the United States, suggested several things to me.

There is no question that Kwon’s work is exceptional. But there is also a kind of rigor that becomes more immediately visible to someone who shares enough of the cultural and historical grammar from which it emerges. The criteria through which useful knowledge becomes recognizable cannot help but feel different across intellectual and cultural environments.

When American academia fails to recognize something in my work on Korea, and when I in turn fail to find the same degree of resonance or intellectual importance in many discussions that circulate centrally in American academia, this does not necessarily mean that one side has done something correctly and the other incorrectly. Sometimes these failures of recognition may simply be unavoidable.

The problem is that authority and resources are so unevenly concentrated that judgment and exclusion occur before this possibility can even be considered.

Reading Kwon’s work gives me many ideas about how I could make the rigor of my own work easier to recognize. I can see ways of demonstrating things more patiently and more explicitly, and of establishing evidence in forms that mainstream readers know how to recognize as rigorous.

But I still struggle to decide whether I should apply those methods to my own work, because my work is not anthropology, and mainstream academia is not my target audience. It is the uncertainty about the precise level and extent of engagement my work requires with such methods that prevents me from immediately applying what I learn.

-

At the same Jeju conference where Spivak appeared, I presented work on the history of massacre in Jeju.

After my presentation, an audience member drew a connection between my work and that of another panelist and asked what connections the two of us had noticed in each other’s research. Her project was somewhat different from mine, but I mentioned something in her presentation that I had found interesting and said that I thought it could be productive to consider the two projects together.

The other panelist was the most senior professor on the panel. The level of deference shown to her by members of the audience made her position easy to infer.

Her response was to look directly at me and tell me, in front of everyone, that I was wrong. She then explained why I was wrong by describing an argument that was not the argument I had made, and concluded by telling me that I needed to study more.

The momentum of that response seemed to authorize another audience member to follow with something similar: they said that they did not have a question about my work but wanted to tell me what I needed to read and cite. All of the scholars they named came from Black studies and wrote from particular Black historical experiences.

I am used to receiving this kind of response. Anything in my work that concerns violent histories, minoritarian politics, or decoloniality is immediately treated as inadequately researched if it has not passed through Black studies.

There are obviously profound points of relation among different minoritarian experiences, particularly where the afterlives of imperial violence are concerned. But what I find difficult is the asymmetry. Why does Black studies occupy a position in which it can function as a canon that must be cited before a claim about violence elsewhere can become sufficiently developed, while work on Jeju remains something that other fields do not need to cite at all? Why can an argument emerging from Jeju appear incomplete without reference to another field, while that other field is rarely considered incomplete without Jeju?

I may have invited suggestions for relevant literature at the beginning of my presentation—I sometimes do, although I no longer remember. What stays with me is the form such advice so often takes: not as resonance—your argument made me think of this—but as a list of authorities I should know and cite. The question becomes not what the material makes thinkable, but how to make it legitimate through what is already authorized. I did not respond at that moment with these thoughts, because by that point I had enough experience to know that doing so would only give the authority in the room more material -- more words, more ideas -- to use in reinforcing a judgment already made. The scholar was already preoccupied with refuting an argument I had not made. I have learned enough discretion to distinguish between people with whom engagement might produce an actual exchange and those for whom it would simply provide further evidence for a conclusion they have already reached.

After the panel, several audience members approached me privately and spoke highly of the paper. This made the experience both more confusing and more familiar.

Again and again, I find myself wondering why public academic space so readily authorizes dismissal and correction, while appreciation and productive intellectual conversation take place afterward, informally and privately. I cannot help asking what the rules of academia actually are.

The repeated experience is that a large part of what gets called “academic reality” consists of maintaining norms about who can appropriately be marked down in public, whose work is assumed to deserve praise, whose criticism signifies sophistication, and whose appreciation risks appearing unserious. There is a collective labor involved in preserving that facade, but it does not fully describe what people actually think, what they recognize intellectually, or what kinds of conversations become productive once the formal performance is over.

I sometimes wonder whether Selling Planetarity is, once again, selling well.

If there was something youthful in my previous attitude toward academia, I think it was the expectation that I might be able to exchange something with the structure itself.

I have always been oppositional enough that I used to wonder what losing that youthful impulse would look like. Now I think it may mean giving up on the expectation that a genuine energy is desired by this particular structure. And I am realizing that this feels more liberatory than like a loss—more like understanding (finally), and realizing that the world outside this facade is much larger than I had allowed myself to believe.