Page 154 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

THE CURSE OF THE SMILE

enrichment still contrasts favourably – as they at least create a space for divergent
cultural expression – with the ethnocentric rejection of all signs of cultural difference
predominant in older, more homogenizing and assimilationist discourse of culture
and society. In other words, if tolerance as a value is fundamentally limited, its
pursuit is still better than intolerance. At the same time, precisely because tolerance
is never unconditional, it is never sufficient as a guarantee for acceptance or equality.
The contradictory nature of tolerance suggests that if we are to become more
aware of the intricacies of what it means to be living in a ‘multicultural’ world and
the different ways in which we are all positioned within it, we need to analyse what
happens in those instances of interracial, inter-ethnic and intercultural tensions
which cannot be sufficiently understood in terms of the secure binary oppositions
of racism/anti-racism and tolerance/intolerance, and to a certain extent, even that
of dominant/subordinate. To put it differently, what I want to foreground here is
the complex and profound ambivalence that is inscribed in the liberal-pluralist
notion of a multicultural society.
This ambivalence operates at two interconnected levels. At a structural level, it
is a force which destabilizes the boundary lines between the two sides of the binaries,
which must be fought and suppressed if the assumptions of the multicultural
worldview are to be upheld. The self-congratulatory insistence on ‘celebrating our
cultural diversity’ in Australian multiculturalism is one clear instance of the
suppression and repression of the structural ambivalence inscribed in the very idea
of a multicultural nation. After all, what this idea generally disavows is the fact that
there are always differences which cannot be easily subsumed within the neat and
tidy enclosure of a harmonious ‘unity-in-diversity’. As Homi Bhabha (1990b: 208)
has remarked, the discourse of multiculturalism entails simultaneously ‘a creation
of cultural diversity and a containment of cultural difference’. And it is because
the containment of cultural difference can never be completely successful that
ambivalence can never be totally suppressed from the multicultural universe. This
is the structural ambivalence created by the ongoing tension between difference as
benign diversity and difference as conflict, disruption, dissension. This tension has
manifested itself in a host of difficult cultural-political issues created by multiple
cultural incommensurabilities (such as those to do with the management of gender
and sexual relations), and it is widely recognized that there can be no easy solution
to this tension.
But ambivalence also operates on a second, more subjective level. Precisely
because the discourse of multiculturalism implies a suppression of the structural
ambivalence inscribed in it in favour of an imposed ‘celebration’ of cultural diversity
and of ‘tolerance’ as a prescribed virtue, it produces ambivalent subject positions
for majority and minority subjects alike, while it also heightens the ambivalence
of the relations between majority and minority subjects. As a result, ambivalence
pervades the micropolitics of everyday life in a multicultural society. While the
dominant ideology of multiculturalism both reinforces and obscures this ambiva-
lence, it is important to examine these ambivalent moments because they have
significant consequences for the prospect of our capability to be ‘living with

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