Page 177 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

are the influx of North-African immigrants into Italy, where Chambers, himself an
2
immigrant from England, lives and works. Yet while Chambers celebrates the
borderlands for the opportunity it affords him to be enriched by encounters with
others and to be made aware of his own boundaries (which conjures the assumption
that away from the border zone he can live with a ‘normal’ – if perhaps staid –
sense of unitary self and identity), for Anzaldúa inhabiting (and celebrating) the
borderlands as the site where the mestiza’s plural personality is forged is not
a matter of desire, but one of survival.
I am invoking these divergent political and cultural meanings of borderland
existence to make the point that if doing cultural studies implies entering a
borderlands of sorts – the transdisciplinary, translocal, transcultural borderlands
of critical intellectualism in the globalized world on the cusp of the twenty-first
century – then this shouldn’t be mythologized simply as a liberating space for the
democratic expression and articulation of multiple perpectives, partial truths and
positioned identities, the space for the emergence of a happy (and radical) hetero-
glossia of narratives, experiences and voices. Inhabiting the borderlands not only
entails political empowerment and transcultural enrichment, but poses its own,
distinctive difficulties, which we cannot capture through the abstract embrace of
what Arif Dirlik (1994b) calls ‘borderland radicalism’. While I do not share all
of Dirlik’s dismissive attack on authors such as Anzaldúa, there is much validity in
his complaint that the notion of the borderlands appears too often in cultural
studies and postcolonial theory ‘in ahistorical and metaphorical guise’ (ibid.: 97).
Indeed, as Caren Kaplan (1996) has noted, one of the problems in much cultural
studies writing these days is the extent to which interrelated spatial notions such
as border-crossing, travel, migrancy, exile, deterritorialization, and so on have taken
on the status of abstract metaphors, severed from their historical grounding in
concrete, specific and particular contexts. But didn’t the strength of cultural studies
lie precisely in its attention to context, in the rigorously anti-reductionist theoretical
and methodological assumption that relations between people, culture and power
– to capture in a catchphrase what cultural studies is ‘about’ – can only be grasped
in their concrete, particular and specific contexts?
I can clarify now why the metaphor of the crossroads signals a heightened sense
of paradox and crisis for me. The paradox, it seems to me, is that the very self-
reiteration of cultural studies as a transdisciplinary, transnational borderland, an
intellectual crossroads of people and ideas coming from different locations and
encompassing a wide range of focal concerns, approaches and interests, may have
contributed to the increasing prominence of metaphorical thinking in its theoretical
discourses. If the crisscrossing of a variety of languages, experiences and voices is
characteristic of the discursive world of cultural studies, how does one make oneself
not only heard, but also listened to? How, put simply, does one communicate in
a heterogeneous world? This, to an extent, is a question of what is commonly called
‘intercultural communication’. But if the problematic this refers to – how differently
positioned subjects can make themselves understood and construct shared
understandings across cultural boundaries – is a central one for social life in our

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