Page 175 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

borderlands are analytically and politically productive because the experiences and
voices coming together in them ‘intermingle with the weight of particular histories
that will not fit into the master narrative of a monolithic culture’ (ibid.). Giroux
talks here about the voices and experiences of students in the context of the teaching
of cultural studies, but it seems fair to say that these ideas are axiomatic more
generally for cultural studies as an academic practice. As cultural studies routinely
conceives of itself as a borderland formation, an open-ended and multivocal
discursive formation with a commitment to what Stuart Hall refers to as ‘going
on theorizing’ (in Grossberg 1996c: 150), there is a clear inclination in this
theorizing to value, if not celebrate and romanticize notions of the borderland,
the ‘third space’, the liminal in-between, and so on as the symbolic spaces where
fixed and unitary identities are hybridized, sharp demarcations between self and
other are unsettled, singular and absolute truths are ruptured, and so on. That is,
the borderlands tend to be imagined as a utopian site of transgressive intermixture,
hybridity and multiplicity, the supposed political radicalness of which mostly
remains largely unquestioned. 1
This utopian vision of the borderlands strikes me, ironically, as a postmodern
version of the modernist Habermassian notion of the ‘ideal speech situation’, where
everybody can participate equally and freely in unrestrained rational conversation
and communication (Habermas 1984). Habermas’ vision has rightly been criticized
for its universalist oversight of the power relations which over-determine the
differential communicative capacities and opportunities of inescapably embodied
speakers. But postmodern celebrations of the borderlands, too, are often infused
by a desire to wish away – or at least overcome – the operation of power and by
a claim to the possibility of transcendence. They tend to nurture a poetic vision of
the borderlands as a site of radical openness where the ‘resistive’ forces of dialogic
excess triumph over the dominant forces of discursive closure, where the disorderly
contaminations of the margins subvert the orderly impositions of the centre, where,
as Hall states in his essay ‘For Allon White’, ‘the fluidity of heteroglossia’ dislocates
and displaces ‘language’s apparently “finished” character’ (1996b: 297).
Thus for the Chicana feminist poet Gloria Anzaldúa, author of the influential and
widely acclaimed Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the borderlands, ‘that
juncture where the mestiza stands’, is the site ‘where the possibility of uniting all
that is separate occurs’ (1987: 79). As she says in her preface, ‘the Borderlands are
physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people
of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper
classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy’
(ibid.: np). The hybrid creature of the mestiza is, for Anzaldúa, the inhabitant par
excellence of the borderlands. The mestiza ‘operates in a pluralistic mode – nothing
is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned’
(ibid.), giving birth to ‘a new consciousness’: ‘though it is a source of intense pain,
its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the
unitary aspect of each new paradigm’ (ibid.: 80). Drawing on her own experience
of living on the traumatizing cultural border zone between Mexico and the United

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