Page 47 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

These examples make it clear that the peculiar meanings of diasporic Chineseness
are the result of the irreducible specificity of diverse and heterogeneous hybridiza-
tions in dispersed temporal and spatial contexts. This in turn means that the
unevenly scattered imagined community of the diaspora itself cannot be envisioned
in any unified or homogeneous way. 10 Chinese ethnicity, as a common reference
point for this imagined community, cannot presume the erasure of internal
differences and particularities, as well as disjunctures, as the basis of unity and
collective identity. What then is still its use? Why still identify ourselves as ‘Chinese’
at all?
The answer depends on context: sometimes it is and sometimes it is not useful
to stress our Chineseness, however defined. In other words, the answer is political.
In this thoroughy mixed-up, interdependent, mobile and volatile postmodern
world clinging to a traditional notion of ethnic identity is ultimately self-defeating.
Inasmuch as the stress on ethnicity provides a counterpoint to the most facile forms
of postmodernist nomadology, however, we might have to develop a postmodern
notion of ethnicity. But this postmodern ethnicity can no longer be experienced
as naturally based upon tradition and ancestry. Rather, it is experienced as a
provisional and partial ‘identity’ which must be constantly (re)invented and
(re)negotiated. In this context, diasporic identifications with a specific ethnicity
(such as ‘Chineseness’) can best be seen as forms of ‘strategic essentialism’ (Spivak
1987: 205): ‘strategic’ in the sense of using the signifier ‘Chinese’ for the purpose
of contesting and disrupting hegemonic majoritarian definitions of ‘where you’re
at’; and ‘essentialist’ in a way which enables diasporic subjects, not to ‘return home’,
but, in the words of Stuart Hall, to ‘insist that others recognize that what they
have to say comes out of particular histories and cultures and that everyone speaks
from positions within the global distribution of power’ (1989: 133).
In short, if I am inescapably Chinese by descent, I am only sometimes Chinese
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by consent. When and how is a matter of politics.

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