Page 210 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

CONCLUSION: TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE

If there is an overall theoretical thread in this book, then it is the deployment of
this postcolonial concept of hybridity to problematize the concept of ethnicity
which underlies the dominant discourses of both ‘diaspora’ and ‘multiculturalism’.
Ethnicity, as Arjun Appadurai (1996a: 13) has noted, is ‘the idea of naturalized
group identity’, and both diaspora and multiculturalism ultimately rely on the
‘ethnic group’ as their main constituent or building block. But as I have argued in
my reflections on Chineseness and Chinese identity, the very consciousness of the
‘ethnic group’ in and for itself, say, ‘the Chinese’ or any combinatory, hyphenated
specification of it, is not the result of some spontaneous, primordial idea of kinship.
As Appadurai (ibid.) points out, ethnic consciousness depends on the active
mobilization of certain differences to articulate group identity. Both ‘diaspora’
and ‘multiculturalism’ are profoundly implicated in this very process of cultural
mobilization of difference in the interest of (ethnic) identity: diaspora by globalizing
the ‘ethnic group’, thus emphasizing ‘sameness in dispersal’, and multiculturalism
by subsuming it as a neatly delimited box, one among many, within the bounded
container of the pluralistic nation–state, what I have described as ‘living apart
together’. There is a tension between the two insofar as diaspora tends to pull
ethnic identification out of the circumscribed space of the nation–state, while
multiculturalism desperately attempts to contain ethnic group formation within the
nation–state’s boundaries. But both logically operate as conceptual brakes on the
idea of hybridity because in the end, they cannot exist without a reification of
ethnicity, and therefore of identitarian essentialism and closure.
To be sure, ethnicity is a very powerful mode of collective identification in
the globalizing world of today. Ethnic categories exert their influence either as
bureaucratic fictions – as in official policies of multiculturalism – or as imagined
communities constructed from below, by ‘ethnics’ themselves, as a means of accen-
tuating ‘our’ difference in a context of fluid co-existence with many heterogeneous
others. Diasporas are the globalized embodiments of such ethnicized imagined
communities. The very ubiquity of ethnic claims today points to the apparent
paradox of ethnicity’s mobilizing power in a thoroughly hybridized world. In
this context, as Pnina Werbner (1997a: 22) points out, ‘we have to recognise the
differential interests social groups have in sustaining boundaries’. She considers
the question (ibid.: 4) ‘why borders, boundaries and “pure” identities remain
so important, the subject of defensive and essentialising actions and reflections,
and why such essentialisms are so awfully difficult to transcend’. Indeed, in arguing
for hybridity I am not denying the cultural and political significance of ethnic
identifications today; nor do I wish to essentialize essentialism by suggesting that
all (self)-essentializing strategies are the same and necessarily ‘bad’. After all, as the
example of Aboriginal identity shows, essentialism can operate as ‘a political weapon
in a public struggle for state resources, citizenship rights or a universal morality’
(Werbner 1997b: 249). However, while the politics of ethnicity – either in diaspora
or in multiculturalism – can be enormously empowering, its broader effects are
not always benign or beneficial, on the contrary. As Werbner (ibid.: 229) remarks:
‘Policy decisions, state fund allocations, racial murders, ethnic cleansing, anti-racist

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