Page 163 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

Yet, Calhoun pointedly adds, these are equally manifestations of identity politics.
Indeed, there is a streak of romanticism in many critical intellectuals’ identification
of and with ‘new social movements’ as agents of progressive radicalism. As the
twentieth century draws to a close, however, it is clear that modes of identity politics
are proliferating across the globe with which most critical intellectuals would not
be able or willing to identify, based on the articulation of identities we generally
dismiss as conservative, right-wing, or simply other. How, then, can the pull of
reactionary conservatism which is so manifest in so many assertions of collective
identities in the late twentieth century be reconciled with the more hopeful
association of identities with becoming, with an investment in a ‘better future’,
however defined?
The conservative rhetoric of identity has permeated the cultural and political
landscape everywhere in a time when old certainties – of place, of belonging, of
economic and social security – are rapidly being eroded by the accelerating pace
of globalization: the processes by which intensifying global flows of goods, money,
people, technologies and information work to dissolve the real and imagined
(relative) autonomy and ‘authenticity’ of local traditions and communities. The
current salience of the discourse of identity signifies the level of resistance against
the forces of globalization as they are experienced and perceived ‘on the ground’.
Indeed, Manuel Castells (1997), author of The Power of Identity, volume two
of his three-volume analysis of the contemporary world economy, society and
culture, opens his book with the dramatic statement that ‘[o]ur world, and our lives,
are being shaped by the conflicting trends of globalization and identity’ (ibid.: 1).
He observes that ‘we have experienced, in the last quarter of the century, the
widespread surge of powerful expressions of collective identity that challenge
globalization and cosmopolitanism on behalf of cultural singularity and people’s
control over their lives and environment’ (Castells 1997: 2). In this scenario,
globalization is constructed as an overpowering source of destruction, while identity
is being launched not only as that which must be protected, but also, more defiantly,
as that which will provide protection against the threat of dangerous global forces.
In this sense, identity – together with its equally ubiquitous companion terms
‘culture’ and ‘community’ – become the key sites for people’s righteous sense
of self-worth and integrity, worth defending, perhaps even dying for, against
the onslaught of ‘globalization’. In this light, struggles for or on behalf of identity
tend to be conservative, even reactionary movements, aimed at restoring or
conserving established orders of things and existing ways of life, and keeping at bay
the unsettling changes that a globalizing world brings about.
This is not the place to provide a substantial assessment of the complex,
contradictory and multidimensional processes and forces which have come to be
subsumed under the shorthand term ‘globalization’. It is beyond doubt that the
economic and cultural effects of diverse globalizing forces such as the creation of
a more or less borderless world market, the virtual annihilation of time and space
by the Internet, and the intensification of transnational migrations of people, are
being increasingly felt everywhere, though unevenly and unequally. It is clear, too,

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