Page 13 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

Hong Kong’s unsettled and unsettling location between China and the West
produces the multiple ambivalences Chow sums up, in which a desire to have it both
ways is continually undercut by the refusal or inability to identify with either. Chow
wishes to hold on to this unstable, ambivalent, doubly marginalized positionality
as the very place from where she can enact ‘a specific kind of social power’ (ibid.),
the power to interrupt, to trouble, to intervene tactically rather than strategically
in the interrogation of dominant discourses. Tactical interventions never make
counter-hegemonic claims to alternative truths but are limited to bringing out the
contradictions and the violence inherent in all posited truths. The tactical
interventionist forever remains on the border: her agency is not in anticipation of
or in preparation for the occupation of a new field by destroying and replacing
existing ones. It is ‘para-sitical’ in that it never takes over a field in its entirety, but
erodes it slowly and insiduously, making space for itself surreptitiously. Chow’s
position here echoes Homi Bhabha’s (1990b) enunciation of a ‘third space’, the
in-between space of hybridity from where cultural change can be brought about
quietly, without revolutionary zeal, by ‘contaminating’ established narratives and
dominant points of view.
To be sure, it is the diasporic intellectual’s affirmation of this essentially ‘negative’
agency of hybridity, as exemplified by Chow, that is so disturbing to their critics.
Aijaz Ahmad (1992), for example, in a scathing critique, argues that the politics
of hybridity never moves beyond the ephemeral and the contingent, failing to
produce stable commitment to a political cause, a sustained politics of radical
structural change. In a different context, Ella Shohat (1992) has similarly criticized
postcolonial theory – a body of work mostly elaborated by diasporic intellectuals
– for its theoretical and political ambivalence because it ‘posits no clear domination
and calls for no clear opposition’. Such critiques relate to a call for conscious
partisanship and unflinching commitment (to one’s class, gender, race or nation)
as a prerequisite to radical politics and knowledge. The diasporic intellectual acts
as a perpetual party-pooper here because her impulse is to point to ambiguities,
complexities and contradictions, to complicate matters rather than provide formulae
for solutions, to blur distinctions between colonizer and colonized, dominant and
subordinate, oppressor and oppressed. In short, the diasporic intellectual is declared
suspect because her emphasis on undecidability and ambivalence leads arguably
to a valuation of hybridity, which does not lend itself to the development of
revolutionary strategies of structural progressive change and systematic radical
resistance.
I must warn the reader that the spirit of the diasporic intellectual’s tactical
interventionism runs throughout this book: the space from which these chapters
were written was precisely the space of hybridity, between Asia and the West. At
the same time, I hope to contribute to a reappreciation of the politics of hybridity
– and its emphasis on multiplicity, uncertainty and ambivalence – which always
seems to be at the heart of criticisms of the diasporic intellectual’s discourse. In a
riposte to these criticisms, Stuart Hall (1996f: 244) has remarked that ‘a certain
nostalgia runs through some of these arguments for a return to a clear-cut politics

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