Page 204 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

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CONCLUSION

Together-in-difference
(The uses and abuses of hybridity)

One of the most urgent predicaments of our time can be described in deceptively
simple terms: how are we to live together in this new century? ‘We’ and ‘together’
are the key sites of contestation here. In this postmodern world of multiplying
claims to particularist identities, any overarching sense of ‘we’ has become
fundamentally problematic and contentious. The emergence of what Cornel West
(1990) has called ‘the new cultural politics of difference’ has bred a profound
suspicion of any homogenizing representation of ‘us’, especially among those who
used to be silenced or rendered invisible by such universalizing claims to ‘humanity’.
In this climate, the very idea of living ‘together’ becomes hugely daunting. Can
togetherness be more than a coincidental and involuntary aggregation of groups
being thrust into the same time and space, an uneasy and reluctant juxtapositioning
of different bodies and identities forced to share a single world even if their respective
imaginative worlds are worlds apart? What are the possibilities of constructing
transcultural imagined communities in this era of rampant cultural differentiation
and fragmentation? How, in short, can we live together-in-difference?
This book is a contribution to our thinking about these difficult but urgent
questions, focusing – in broad terms – on the entrenched dichotomy between ‘Asia’
and ‘the West’, as well as the internal divisions within each of these categories.
Throughout, I have argued for the importance of hybridity as a means of bridging
and blurring the multiple boundaries which constitute ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’
identities as mutually exclusive and incommensurable. Theories of hybridity,
however problematic, are crucial in our attempts to overcome what Rita Felski
(1997) has termed ‘the doxa of difference’. As she puts it:

Metaphors of hybridity and the like not only recognize differences within
the subject, fracturing and complicating holistic notions of identity, but
also addresss connections between subjects by recognizing affiliations,
cross-pollinations, echoes and repetitions, thereby unseating difference
from a position of absolute privilege. Instead of endorsing a drift towards
ever greater atomization of identity, such metaphors allow us to conceive
of multiple, interconnecting axes of affiliation and differentiation.
(ibid.: 12)

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