Page 198 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

I’M A FEMINIST BUT . . .

optimism, I suspect, can only be expressed from a position which does not have
to cope with being on the receiving end of those orders and structures. Flax’s ‘we’,
therefore, can be read as a white ‘we’: it is white needs for order and structure
which she implicitly refers to and whose roots she wants to expose (and, by
implication, do away with), and it is only from a white perspective that ‘tolerating’
ambivalence and disorder would be a ‘progressive’, deuniversalizing step. The
problem is, of course, that the order and structure of white/Western hegemony
cannot be eliminated by giving up the ‘need’ for it, simply because its persistence
is not a matter of ‘needs’. From the perspective of ‘other’ women (and men), then,
there is no illusion that white/Western hegemony will wither away in any
substantial sense, at least not in the foreseeable future. The nature of global capitalist
modernity is such that these ‘other’ peoples are left with two options: either enter
the game or be excluded. At the national level, either integrate/assimilate or remain
an outsider; at the international level, either ‘Westernize’ or be ostracized from the
‘world community’, the ‘family of nations’. This ensures that the position of the
non-white in a white-dominated world and the non-Western in a Western-
dominated world is always necessarily and inescapably an ‘impure’ position, always
7
dependent on and defined in relation to the white/Western dominant. Any
resistance to this overwhelming hegemony can therefore only ever take place from
a position always-already ‘contaminated’ by white/Western practices, and can
therefore only hope to carve out spaces of relative autonomy and freedom within
the interstices of the white/Western hegemonic world itself.
It is in this historical sense that the hierarchical binary divide between white/non-
white and Western/non-Western should be taken account of as a master-grid
framing the potentialities of, and setting limits to, all subjectivities and all struggles.
Feminists and others need to be aware of this systemic inescapability when ‘dealing
with difference’. This is where I find Flax’s insistence on ambivalence, ambiguity
and multiplicity useful, not to celebrate ‘difference’ as a sign of positive post-
modern chaos, but to describe the necessary condition of existence of those who are
positioned, in varying ways, as peripheral others to the white/Western core. There
is no pure, uncontaminated identity outside of the system generated by this
hegemonic force. Despite hooks’s largely autonomist stance on the African-
American political struggle and counter-hegemonic practice (see for example, her
essays in hooks 1990), it is clear that the very construction of Black identity in the
USA is intimately bound up with the history of slavery and segregation, just as
contemporary Aboriginal ‘identity’ in Australia cannot erase the effects of 200 years
of contact and conflict with European colonizers (see Attwood 1989; Collishaw
1999), and the ‘identity’ of Third World nations, mostly postcolonial, cannot
be defined outside the parameters of the international order put in place by the
unravelling of European colonial and imperial history. The irony is that while all
these ‘identities’ are effected by the objectification of ‘others’ by white/Western
subjects, they have become the necessary and inescapable points of identification
from which these ‘others’ can take charge of their own destinies in a world not
of their own making. Ambivalence, ambiguity and multiplicity thus signal the

187