Page 183 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

‘Asians’ in ‘multicultural Australia’ would be in the current historical and
geo-political conjuncture. These are only some of the points I would feel obliged
to address in presenting this peculiar national problematic to an international
audience, as I have done in Part II of this book.
The difficulties I am alluding to here are suggestive of the multifaceted
complexity of questions of ‘cross-cultural’ or ‘intercultural’ communication.
Overcoming them necessitates the strategic enunciation of a narrative on my
part which negotiates the gap between ‘the particular’ and ‘the universal’, the
‘specific’ and the ‘general’, or to put it in another register, between ‘the local’ and
‘the global’. Far from being easily transcended when we enter the borderlands
through some magical process of discursive blending which ‘resolves the tension
between two [or more] cultures . . . in a dialectical play of “recognition”’ (Bhabha
1994: 114), these gaps become the discursive sites where the full extent of the
irreducibility of inter/cultural, inter/local tension becomes clear. The borderlands
represent what Bhabha (1994) calls a ‘disjunctive present’, where this tension is not
only endemic, but constitutive of our crossroads encounters. And if we want these
encounters to be meaningful at all, then we have no choice but to occupy this space
of tension, and enunciate a speaking position from within this interstitial space.
How, to put it concretely, to speak about the ‘particular’, the ‘specific’, the ‘local’
in a way which doesn’t subsume and absorb these into the abstractions of the
‘universal’, the ‘general’ and the ‘global’, while at the same time not succumbing
to the conservative and essentialist notion of complete untranslatability of cultures?
How can I discuss the re-imagining of Asians in multicultural Australia without
representing it as either a unique ‘local’ case or as just a version of a singular ‘global’
model?
Of course, the binary logic through which this space of tension is often made
sense of – the ‘local’ versus the ‘global’ – needs to be displaced. Indeed, recent
theorizing about the relation between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ emphasizes the
interpenetration, the intertwining of the two, in an ardent deconstructive attempt
to overcome seeing them in terms of a binary opposition (e.g. Appadurai 1996a;
Grossberg 1996b: 176; Wilson and Dissayanake 1996). And indeed, in these
postmodern times and this globalized world it is no longer possible to isolate any
‘local’ which does not, in some way or other, depend on extra-local forces and
influences for the construction of its identity. Cultural geographer Doreen Massey
puts it this way in relation to our definition of ‘place’, which we most commonly
associate with ‘the local’:
Instead . . . of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they
can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations
and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations,
experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than
what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that
be a street, or a region, or even a continent.
(1994: 154)

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