Page 14 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

of binary oppositions’. Hall notes that the current crisis of the left can be understood
precisely as a sign that there are no longer, if there ever were, simple lines to be
drawn between goodies and baddies. This doesn’t mean that there are no hard
political choices to be made, but, he asks, ‘isn’t the ubiquitous, the soul-searing,
lesson of our times the fact that political binaries do not (do not any longer?
did they ever?) either stabilise the field of political antagonism in any permanent
way or render it transparently intelligible?’ And, so Hall continues, ‘Are we not all,
in different ways, . . . desperately trying to understand what making an ethical
political choice and taking a political position in a necessarily contingent political
field is like, what sort of “politics” it adds up to?’ (1996f: 244).
‘Hybridity’ captures in a shorthand fashion the complexities and ambiguities of
any politics in an increasingly globalized, postcolonial and multicultural world, a
world in which heroic, utopian ideas of revolutionary transformation seem seriously
out of touch even as sites of social struggle and political conflict have multiplied.
In this light, Chow’s emphasis on ‘tactics’ rather than ‘strategies’ signifies a realistic
recognition of the limits to radical political intervention in the contemporary
world. These tactics should be taken more rather than less seriously as the very
concrete instances in which people work out specific, situationally determined
modes of ‘hybrid accommodation with national and transnational forces’ (Clifford
1998: 367). Hybridity, here, should not be dismissed pejoratively as the merely
contingent and ephemeral, equated with lack of commitment and political
resoluteness, but should be valued, in James Clifford’s (ibid.: 366) words, as ‘a
pragmatic response, making the best of given (often bad) situations . . . in limited
historical conjunctures’.
In the course of this book, I will argue for the importance of hybridity as a basis
for cultural politics in a world in which we no longer have the secure capacity
to draw the line between us and them, between the different and the same, here
and there, and indeed, between Asia and the West. We now live in a world of
what anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1988: 148) has characterized as ‘a gradual
spectrum of mixed-up differences’. This is a globalized world in which ‘people
quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power’ are
‘contained in a world where, tumbled as they are into endless connection, it
is increasingly difficult to get out of each other’s way’ (ibid.: 147). Hybridity is a
necessary concept to hold onto in this condition, because unlike other key concepts
in the contemporary politics of difference – such as diaspora and multiculturalism
– it foregrounds complicated entanglement rather than identity, togetherness-in-
difference rather than virtual apartheid. The diasporic intellectual may in fact
be especially well placed to analyse this complicated entanglement beause it is
embodied in her own life trajectory.

From Asia to the West
As an ethnic Chinese, Indonesian-born and European-educated academic who
now lives and works in Australia, I sort of fit into the category of the ‘diasporic

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