Page 185 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

an intersection of global/local linkage, shaped by what Wilson and Dissanayake
(1996: 5) call ‘the counterlogic of the both/and’.
There is another paradox lurking here, however, a paradox which will lead
me back to the problematic of trans-local, cross-cultural communication in the
borderlands. The paradox is that the direct political usefulness of globalizing
the imaginary construction of a particular local identity, say, that of ‘Australia’,
remains circumscribed within the framework of cultural politics in that particular
locality itself: that is, it is in the first instance only within Australia itself that the
renegotiation of and struggle over Australian national identity will be meaningful
and consequential. To put it bluntly, I am interested in it because I live here, and
because it affects the conditions of my daily existence. I don’t think it would be
reasonable or realistic to expect cultural studies practitioners from elsewhere, each
of them involved in their own ‘local’ practices and interventions, to be interested
(in the full, political sense of that word) in the peculiarities of these Australian
negotiations other than for purely scholarly or informational reasons. In this sense
the popular slogan, ‘Think globally, act locally’ harbours an often unrecognized
contradiction: while it encourages all of us to think of what unites us, it simulta-
neously fragments us by its encouragement to focus our political practice on each
of our immediate local surroundings. Indeed, it is well recognized that the very
intensification of globalization has led to an increased felt necessity and desire to
elaborate ‘an intensified vision of the local situation’ (Wilson and Dissanayake
1996: 5), a new localism which, precisely because of its awareness of the power
of globalizing forces, is ever more motivated to guard its distinctive identity
(Featherstone 1996; Castells 1997).
Paradoxically, then, the project of reconstructing ‘the local’ in terms of ‘the
cross-border linkages and synergies at the global/local interface’ (Wilson and
Dissanayake 1996: 6) depends for its affective and political engagement precisely
on the continued existence of that ‘local’ as a ‘real’ locality, a materially existing
geographical, social and cultural location for situated living and working. For
all the hype about the increasing deterritorialization of life in capitalist post-
modernity (as exemplified by cyberspace), most of us still depend for our everyday
reproduction on the here-and-nowness of (a) ‘home’, however defined. For all the
attempts by Keating and others to re-imagine ‘Australia’ so that it embraces rather
than closes itself off from ‘Asia’/’Asians’, Australia remains, for both historical and
geographical reasons, a locality distinctly set apart from Asia, experienced as such
by its inhabitants and fought for as such, by many of those inhabitants, against the
increasing intensity of global flows (of capital, people, culture) traversing and
entering Australian territory, mostly originating in Asian sites. In short, while the
dichotomy between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ may have been sophisticatedly put
under erasure in theory, the sturdy intransigence of ‘the local’ tends to continually
reassert itself in practice, in everyday life, in public discourses such as the news,
in political struggles, and, as I have indicated, in international cultural studies
meetings. While we know now, thanks to both poststructuralist cultural theory
and postmodern late capitalism, that the local/global dichotomy is not

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