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 of mu – 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. Mu is both a loving homage to and a playful subversion of political inheritances and the unsayable beyond law.

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 of Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law.

Note on Etymologies  ix
Preface  xi
Acknowledgments  xxi
savoir black  1
terra incognita  29
nonperformance  63
non liquet blackness  103
the sur-round  131
res nulla loquitur  167
mu  187
Notes  207
Bibliography  227
Index  241