Page 181 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

immediately with those who are more than superficially familiar with contemporary
Australian culture and society, I cannot assume such a thing from those who are
not. Further, in presenting the project in an international forum – as in the publi-
cation of this book – in taking my localized object of study into the transnational
cultural studies borderlands, I have to be aware that language does not elicit unitary
meanings; aware, that is, of the multiaccentuality of the sign. I would have to be
especially aware, for example, that certain signs already circulate in cultural studies
with powerful meanings attached to it, mostly, to be sure, originating in corners
of the world which dominate the global intellectual scene, i.e. Britain and the
United States. 5
We pay far too little attention to the historical and cultural traces carried by our
seemingly most abstract or general theoretical concepts and metaphors. As Dirlik
(1994b: 97) remarks: ‘Borderlands may appear on the surface as locations of equal
cultural exchange, but they are products of historical inequalities, and their
historical legacy continues to haunt them.’ Thus, it is interesting to note that
in metaphoric renderings of ‘the borderlands’ in cultural studies it is precisely
the US/Mexican border looming large as the ‘real’ but tacit reference point,
thanks of course to the pioneering work of Anzaldúa and others, and not, say, the
North/South Korean border, the Russian/Finnish border or, for that matter,
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the (real and imagined) border zone that separates Australia and ‘Asia’. Another
example is the elevation and repetitive evocation of Los Angeles as the quintessential
‘postmodern city’ (e.g. Soja 1996). More directly relevant to my project, the term
‘race’, too, has a heavy connotative loading within cultural studies discourse which
almost inevitably associates it with the African diaspora in the United States and
Britain. It is mainly due to the very important and innovative theorizations
of ‘blackness’ on both sides of the Atlantic that ‘race’ has acquired its current
conceptual prominence in cultural studies. Anyone doing work on ‘race’ today will
have to take account of the pathbreaking work of Paul Gilroy (1987; 1993a; 2000),
Kobena Mercer (1994), Henry Louis Gates (1986), bell hooks (1990; 1992), and
Cornel West (1994), to name a few – at least, anyone who wants to join and
be taken seriously in the ongoing intellectual conversation on the politics of ‘race’
in transnational cultural studies. At the same time this work, while constituting
a prerequisite reference point, cannot just be a neutral template for engagements
with ‘race’ in other geo-cultural and political-historical contexts. Thus, the category
‘black’ in Australia refers to Aboriginal people, whose history of dispossession
and genocide and whose resistive indigenous attachment to ‘the land’ have nothing
in common with the African diasporic history of forced transatlantic movement
as symbolized by the slave ship (Gilroy 1993a). In discussing the politics of ‘race’
in Australia, I cannot afford to overlook such vast differences in political and cultural
inflection: indeed, I am aware that when I am addressing an international
readership, I can only make myself understandable by taking on a self-consciously
comparative perspective.
My project, however, does not focus on ‘blacks’ but on ‘Asians’ – a category
positioned very differently in the politics of ‘race’ and, in general, for various reasons

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