Page 178 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

LOCAL/GLOBAL NEGOTIATIONS

increasingly multicultural world, both nationally and globally, isn’t it, or shouldn’t
it be, equally central in the borderland world of cultural studies?
How, say, would Gloria Anzaldúa and Iain Chambers, coming from such
contrasting gender, racial, geographical and cultural backgrounds that they do, be
able to enter into a dialogue with each other and have a meaningful conversation?
Such questions are not often asked in cultural studies; instead, differential position-
alities and discursive (in)commensurabilities are glossed over precisely through
the use, for example, of metaphors. The use of metaphors may give us a sense
of communicative satisfaction precisely because they work to condense complex
and contradictory meanings into handsome, manageable symbols. Thus the
common use of ‘borderlands’ as a metaphor for the experience of the blurring
of cultural boundaries that both Anzaldúa and Chambers thematize in their
work may establish a shared discursive territory, but it may also obscure the
very different trajectories each has travelled to arrive at that common ground,
the distinctive histories and experiences which have informed their respective
conceptualizations and experiences of the ‘borderlands’. One consequence is that
Anzaldúa’s specific reference to the physical Mexican/US border and her particular
Chicana perspective tends to be ignored as her work is taken up as representing the
borderlands in general, while Chambers’ reference to the Italian/North African
interface remains unspecified in favour of an abstract appreciation of the notion of
‘border dialogues’ as such. At worst, then, the metaphorization of the notion
of the borderlands can have the effect of foreclosing rather than stimulating the
going on theorizing through ongoing contextualization that cultural studies
purports to be committed to.
It is this paradox which I find myself in need of coming to terms with in thinking
about my own work in doing cultural studies as/at the crossroads, which is a central
intellectual preoccupation behind the main focus of this book. After all, ‘living
between Asia and the West’ is itself a complex borderland experience, made up
of multiple crossings of peoples, traditions, knowledges, histories . . . I have not,
in this book, aimed to do justice to all the disparate ‘local’ trajectories of this
borderland experience, many of which are of course entirely incomparable to
my own. Instead, my own biography has served here as the starting point for my
reflections on the mutual entanglement of ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’, inflected by
the historical formation of overseas Chinese diaspora, on the one hand, and by the
oblique Australian experience of being part of the West, on the other. Admission
of positionality – and (self-)reflection upon it – have become a recognized analytical
strategy in cultural studies, generating an awareness of the inevitable situatedness
of discursive knowledge (as I have highlighted in juxtaposing Azaldúa and
Chambers above), but it does not resolve the problem of communication at the
crossroads; indeed, it complicates it.
This is because more often than not, meetings at a crossroads, for example in the
global, transdisciplinary cultural studies borderlands represented by conferences,
and so on, are not just brief encounters; they are seemingly decontextualized,
fleeting moments of incidental and transient linkage after which we all go our

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