Page 174 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

10

LOCAL/GLOBAL
NEGOTIATIONS

Doing cultural studies at the crossroads

The spatial metaphor of the crossroads signals for me a heightened sense of paradox
in the contemporary practice of cultural studies. Cultural studies is often described
as a practice of the crossroads, practised at the crossroads of various discourses, the
busy and vibrant ‘meeting point in between different centres, disciplines and
intellectual movements’, as the brochure for the first Crossroads in Cultural Studies
conference, held in Tampere, Finland, in 1996, put it. According to the organizers
of this conference, ‘the vitality of cultural studies depends on a continuous traffic
through this crossroads’. Indeed, the (self-)legitimacy of cultural studies – as an
increasingly global, transdisciplinary intellectual practice – depends par excellence
on an ethics (and a politics) of the encounter: on the claimed productivity of
dialogue across disciplinary, geographical and cultural boundaries, on a committed
desire to reach out to ‘the other’, and on a refusal to homogenize plurality and
heterogeneity as a way to resist, subvert or evade hegemonic forms of power. All
these avowedly ‘postmodern’ ideals have become virtual articles of faith in cultural
studies today. All well and good, but what does all this mean in practice? What
do we do once we arrive at the crossroads? How are the encounters we enter into
at the crossroads supposed to inspire, enrich, or stimulate us? How, that is, can
the myriad, different and distinct projects we are all engaged in in our own peculiar
contexts be meaningfully articulated into a larger, transnational and transdisci-
plinary, yet coherent intellectual formation? While preparing this chapter, these
questions put me in a mood of serious doubt, even a serious crisis about what it
means to be doing cultural studies in a global(izing) context. This is not necessarily
a bad thing. After all, as Gayatri Spivak (1990: 139) once pointedly remarked,
‘crisis management is [just] another name for life’ – an observation of particular
resonance within the stressful societies of advanced postmodern capitalism. But
let me share with you what this sense of crisis is, and how I think we can try, not
so much to overcome it, as I don’t think it is possible to overcome it, but to live
with it.
The importance of an ethics of the encounter is reflected in the current popularity
within cultural studies of a notion closely related to that of the crossroads, that
of the borderlands, aptly described by Henry Giroux (1992: 209) as a space
‘crisscrossed with a variety of languages, experiences, and voices’. For Giroux, such

163