MAL ASSIMILATION is cultural formation/reformation in process. The concept emerges from the study of languages in colonial situations, and in response to what is generated at the crucible of labor, capital, domination, and expansion. MAL ASSIMILATION is the search for language to define the diasporic experience through the production of socially engaged literature. It manifests in the study of creole forms and expressions of culture in transition and transformation. Three key locations help frame it: the “discovery” of the New World in the Caribbean during the era of Spanish colonialism; migrant laborers in Hawaii in the late 1800s plantation economy; and communities in contemporary Jackson Heights, NY. These locations mark distinct, seemingly linear moments. We must see these moments from the lens of creolization as cultures themselves. In constant flux with one another. This project is a resting point for this frenetic intermixing and birthing of the epicenters described above. This creolization is not often explored, but must be done. It is a work of literature that is also a meeting place between its authors, their backgrounds, their familial histories, relations to migration and immigration. It is a site in which the work, coalescing, generates a different form of pidgin/creolization that is ongoing. This is not an analysis of linguistic formation, nor is it indexical in its goals. What the process yields is the amplification of diasporic voices across communities all too often siloed in their experience of assimilation. A creolization across historical silences and their present-day manifestations.
Ongoing collaboration with Eilin Perez
MAL ASSIMILATION takes on questions of language generation as they relate to flows of people, capital, and cultural forms in the wake of imperial expansion. The book produced out of this collaboration will be a site of refusal, one that both speaks to a growing lexicon of diaspora and gestures towards its archives. It is socially engaged in that it speaks to the interstices of diasporic entities, most clearly rooted in the personal experiences of the auteurs, but at the same time drawing sustenance from the stories of those whose stories often go untold. The pages of the book lay out labor as conveyed in bodily movement, and its repetition as part of the grammar of diaspora. A collection of images, text, sounds, and movements depicted on the pages resist form, while more specifically defining literature as expansive and indeed worthy of such an undertaking.