Page 179 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

separate ways – on to our individual destinations back in our own countries,
institutions, disciplinary enclaves, and specialist fields of interest. If the conference
is a meeting place for such a diverse range of people to share their ideas under the
common banner of ‘cultural studies’, what can that sharing consist of? Or better,
how can we make sure that that sharing takes place, that the brief encounters we
make here will have more long-standing effects? Of course, brief encounters are
by no means necessarily inconsequential – we all know that they are not! – but for
them to have life-changing impacts, so to speak, there would need to be some
pretty powerful and effective communicative exchange going on. And just as in
advertising, effective communication in the heterogeneous field of cultural studies
also depends on the right rhetorical strategies.
Let me give you a concrete example to clarify what kind of difficulties I have
in mind. In recent years, I have been engaged in a research project with a highly
localized and historically specific focus, entitled ‘Reimagining Asians in Multicultural
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Australia’. How could I speak about this project without losing some of my readers
– many of whom may be neither familiar with nor interested in such a topic – along
the way? How could I avoid risk sinking into a discourse of conjunctural idiosyncracy
which may fail to connect and intersect with other concerns, other interests, other
knowledges? Somehow it would seem much easier, in a global cultural context at
least, to evoke the concepts of race, ethnicity and nation, for example, or those of
migrancy, hybridity and diaspora – the globally trendy theoretical concepts framing
my particular object of study – without rather than with a particular reference to the
uncommon specificities of the Australian context.
The paradox, then, is that while cultural studies has staked so much on the
irreducible significance of context, on the importance of specificity and particularity
and on the articulation of historical conjuncture, the valorization of crossroads
encounters in the borderlands can actually have the effect of discouraging us from
grounding our discourse in the uncompromising contingencies of local partic-
ularities and specificities, as it would necessitate the tedious explanation of a wealth
of more or less rarified descriptive nuances which might not resonate with the
curiosity and the interests of our interlocutors on the crossroads. In such a situation
the metalanguage of metaphor and theory – the stylish abstractions of which can
be picked up and recycled without the inhibiting interference of particularizing
context – would be much more instantly gratifying for its apparent communicative
achievement. Thus, it is probably much more likely for an Australian and a Finnish
conference delegate quickly to find common ground, say, in a discussion about
the figure of the migrant as a metaphor for the prototypical postmodern subject –
an ontological discourse able to be globalized as if it were context-neutral – than
in a sustained and more time-consuming cross-cultural exchange about the history
of Aboriginal politics in Australia, on the one hand, and that of Sami politics
in Finland, on the other, even though a superficial similarity can be found in the
trans-specific, globally salient category of ‘indigenous peoples’. Of course, as Stuart
Hall, Larry Grossberg and many other cultural studies theorists have repeatedly
argued, cultural studies can only proceed through a ‘detour through theory’ – for

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