Page 45 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

Ho’s comparison with the European immigrants in the USA and Australia is well
taken. Perhaps the double standard she refers to is an expression of a desire to keep
Western culture white? Wouldn’t this explain why an English-speaking Chinese
is still seen, from a Western perspective, as so much more ‘unnatural’ than an
English-speaking Norwegian or Italian? From such a perspective, the idea of
diaspora serves as a ploy to keep non-white, non-Western elements from fully
entering and therefore contaminating the centre of white, Western culture. Ho’s
heartfelt indignation then should be read as a protest against exclusion through an
imposed diasporic identification in the name of a fetishized and overly idealized
‘China’. It exemplifies the fact that when the question of ‘where you’re from’
threatens to overwhelm the reality of ‘where you’re at’, the idea of diaspora becomes
a dispowering rather than an empowering one, a hindrance to ‘identity’ rather than
an enabling principle.

Hybridity and postmodern ethnicity
I am not saying here that diasporic identifications are intrinsically oppressive, on
the contrary. It is clear that many members of ethnic minorities derive a sense of
joy and dignity, as well as a sense of (vicarious) belonging from their identification
with a ‘homeland’ which is elsewhere. But this very identification with an imagined
‘where you’re from’ is also often a sign of, and surrender to, a condition of actual
marginalization in the place ‘where you’re at’. Khachig Tölölyan (1991) is right
to define diasporas as transnational formations which interrogate the privileged
homogeneity of the nation–state. At the same time, however, the very fact that
ethnic minorities within nation–states are defining themselves increasingly in
diasporic terms, as Tölölyan indicates, raises some troubling questions about the
state of intercultural relations in the world today. The rise of militant, separatist neo-
nationalisms in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the world signals an intensification
of the appeal of ethnic absolutism and exclusionism which underpin the homeland
myth, and which is based on the fantasy of a complete juncture of ‘where you’re
from’ and ‘where you’re at’ so that, ideally, all diasporized peoples should return
‘home’. 8
It is not only that such a fantasy is at odds with the forces of increasing
transnationalization and ‘globalization’ in world economy, politics and communi-
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cations. At a more fundamental, cultural level, the fantasmatic vision of a new
world order consisting of hundreds of self-contained, self-identical nations – which
is the ultimate dream of the principle of nationalist universalism – strikes me as a
rather disturbing duplication of the divide-and-rule politics deployed by the colonial
powers to ascertain control and mastery over the subjected. It is against such visions
that the idea of diaspora can play a critical cultural role.
Since diasporas are fundamentally and inevitably transnational in their scope,
always linking the local and the global, the here and the there, past and present,
they have the potential to unsettle static, essentialist and totalitarian conceptions
of ‘national culture’ or ‘national identity’ which are firmly rooted in geography

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