Page 180 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

LOCAL/GLOBAL NEGOTIATIONS

no understanding can be reached without an appropriate level of theoretical
abstraction – but there is a danger, as the cultural studies borderlands becomes
increasingly globalized, to never return from the detour, to turn the detour into
a never-ending trip in itself. The comparison I made a while ago with the world of
advertising is not entirely gratuitous in this respect. Precisely because theory ‘travels’
more easily across cultural and national borders, it is also more amenable to global
marketing, as any academic publisher would tell you. As Meaghan Morris and
Stephen Muecke (1995: 1) remark in their editorial statement to the new Australian
cultural studies journal the UTS Review, ‘as publishers want cultural studies from
all over the world to be written for an international market’, what tends to be
favoured is a ‘socially groundless, history-free genre of “Theory” that cannot engage
with the cultural differences it endlessly evokes’. Decontextualized theory sells
precisely because its abstractions allow it to be appropriated by a wide range of
audiences, while localized studies and knowledges are always in danger of being
ghettoized in their own field of particularity. 4
This is not, of course, a call for the abandonment of the ethics of the encounter,
and for a return to the illusory security of the confines of home disciplines, local
cultures and bounded communities. On the contrary, precisely to counter the
ghettoization of localized knowledges we need more, not less encounters between
disparate local knowledges; that is, we need to increase traffic through the crossroads
– not least, as I will elaborate below, in order to destabilize the closures involved
in establishing the localness of local knowledges. We need to take the challenge of
living in the borderlands more, not less seriously, because, frankly, I think we have
no choice. In this increasingly interconnected and interdependent globalized world
we can all be said to live, indeed, in metaphorical if not literal borderlands, although
of course not all in the same borderlands, as we have seen with Anzaldúa and
Chambers. Within a transnationally dispersed cultural studies, itself a symptom
and an effect of this globalized postmodern condition which both subsumes and
fragments us all, this means that we need to work through and with the paradox
I have just outlined; the paradox, that is, which is produced by the simultaneous
operation of the pull toward abstraction and decontextualization, on the one hand,
and the need to concretize, historicize and contextualize, on the other (Stratton
and Ang 1996).
The cultural studies borderlands, then, are not a power-free site for unrestrained
and heteroglossic dialogue and exchange, but a contested terrain where concrete,
differentially positioned subjects have to forge particular strategies to speak and
to be heard. At play here is a politics of (mis)communication where the transfer of
meaning cannot be taken for granted. Take, for example, my research topic ‘Re-
imagining Asians in Multicultural Australia’. How can I speak about this topic in
such a way that it doesn’t compromise the historical and political specificities
involved, while still being understood by and of interest to an international cultural
studies audience who may not be particularly interested in either Asians or Australia,
or in multiculturalism for that matter? While the intellectual and political import
of my project, as represented in its title, would in all likelihood strike a chord quite

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