Page 27 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

being the object of discrimination or exclusion; after all, great numbers of people
of Asian backgrounds in Australia and elsewhere have successfully gone on the
path of upward mobility (which is the partial rationale of the designation of ‘model
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minority’ to Asian Americans). There is no homogeneous Asianness which can
comprise the experiences of all who might fit in that category in some reductionist,
‘racial’ terms. In other words, in today’s multicultural societies race and class
(as well as gender, religion, location, and so on) form complex and dynamic
articulations which thoroughly disturb the neat and static categories of managerial
multiculturalism. Togetherness-in-difference, then, cannot be reduced to some
notion of living-apart-together, but must be understood in terms of the compli-
cated entanglement of living hybridities.

Living hybridities
Both diaspora and multiculturalism are concepts ultimately limited by their implied
boundedness. While each ostensibly points to a transgression of particular bound-
aries, a going beyond, each also ultimately produces a closure. In the case of
diaspora, there is a transgression of the boundaries of the nation–state on behalf
of a globally dispersed ‘people’, for example, ‘the Chinese’, but paradoxically this
transgression can only be achieved through the drawing of a boundary around the
diaspora, ‘the Chinese people’ themselves. In the case of multiculturalism, it is
the ideal of national homogeneity – in racial/cultural terms – which is being
transgressed in favour of an idea of cultural diversity, but more often than not
multiculturalism is understood to maintain the boundaries between the diverse
cultures it encompasses, on the one hand, and the overall boundary circumscribing
the nation–state as a whole, on the other. That is why the Australian government,
for example, is so at pains to sing the praises not just of multiculturalism, which on
its own is feared to have fragmenting, centrifugal effects, but of Australian
multiculturalism, which affirms the ultimate importance, despite the diversity
within, of overall national cohesion (A New Agenda 1999). In this sense, multicul-
turalism is nothing more and nothing less than a more complex form of nationalism,
aimed at securing national boundaries in an increasingly borderless world.
Hybridity is a concept which confronts and problematizes all these boundaries,
although it does not erase them. As a concept, hybridity belongs to the space
of the frontier, the border, the contact zone. As such, hybridity always implies a
blurring or at least a problematizing of boundaries, and as a result, an unsettling
of identities. This unsettling of identity is the focus of Part III. In Chapter 10,
‘Local/global negotiations’, the very notions of crossroads and borderlands
– popular within cultural studies – are critically examined in the context of our
desire to be able to communicate globally, cross-culturally, across all disciplinary
boundaries. It turns out, of course, that such borders are not easily crossed or
transgressed, on the contrary. Precisely our encounters at the border – where self
and other, the local and the global, Asia and the West meet – make us realize how
riven with potential miscommunication and intercultural conflict those encounters

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