Page 186 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

LOCAL/GLOBAL NEGOTIATIONS

ontologically real but a discursive construct, this does not mean that as a discursive
construct it no longer operates as a social and cultural reality. While transnational
capital and information technology are increasingly creating a ‘borderless world’
(Myoshi 1996), the symbolic importance of borders remains a constitutive element
in the formation of identity, community and affiliation. As Hall puts it:

The concepts of ambivalence, hybridity, interdependence, which . . .
began to disrupt and transgress the stability of the hierarchical ordering
of the cultural field into high and low [and, we may add, inside and
outside, us and them, here and there, local and global], do not destroy the
force of the operation of the hierarchical principle in culture.
(1996b: 302, emphasis in original)

We should not, in short, underestimate or deny the continued operation of dicho-
tomizing and separating forces in any encounter, any transcultural interaction in
the borderlands, as well as the forces of exchange, sharing, and mutual recognition.
What is at stake here then is not a fetishization of the local which, as Grossberg
(1996b) has noted, often accompanies the call for specification and particularization
within cultural studies. My problematic here is the opposite one: how can we, in
recognition of the inescapable situatedness of all intellectual production, translate
localized, specific knowledges onto the translocal, transspecific register of the
‘global’, transnational borderlands? As Bruce Robbins (1993: 183) puts it: ‘How
far can this metaphor of locality be reconciled with the expansive awareness or
worldliness that we also aspire to?’ To return to my own case, how can I speak
about ‘re-imagining Asians in multicultural Australia’ without descending into
an unproductive, conversation-stopping particularism which would merely confirm
the intransigence of the local and the relativity and incommensurability of
all knowledge? How would it be possible for me to tell this story not just as one
with ‘local’ points of departure, but as one with ‘global’, or at least translocal,
transspecific destinations and effects?
As I have already suggested, an explicitly comparative perspective is called for
here, as the strategy of comparison implies an awareness of difference as its episte-
mological stimulus while at the same time, in its very requirement of juxtaposing
at least two realities, being a guard against exaggerated notions of uniqueness
and incommensurability. Thus, we should expect as much as we can, say, from
a dialogue between Gloria Anzaldúa and Iain Chambers; and put as much effort
as we can in the substantiation and specification of the metaphors and concepts
we use to establish our common grounds. This is not altogether different from
the ideal of cosmopolitalism, embraced by Bruce Robbins not, in his words, ‘as
a false universal’ but ‘as an impulse to knowledge that is shared with others, a
striving to transcend partiality that is itself partial, but no more so than the similar
cognitive strivings of many diverse peoples’ (ibid.: 194). This, of course, returns
us straight to the borderlands, the arena where the sharing of partial perspectives
and knowledges are supposed to take place, in what Robbins (ibid.: 196) calls

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