Page 94 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

UNDOING DIASPORA

nationalist: it feeds into a transnational nationalism based on the presumption of
internal ethnic sameness and external ethnic distinctiveness. Unlike the nationalism
of the nation–state, which premises itself on a national community which is
territorially bound, diasporic nationalism produces an imagined community which
is deterritorialized, but which is symbolically bounded nevertheless. Its borders are
clearly defined, at least in the imagination, and its actual and potential membership
is finite: only certain people, notionally ‘Chinese’ people, can belong to the ‘Chinese
diaspora’.
It is this particularist vision inherent in the diasporic imagination that Benedict
Anderson has scathingly criticized as lacking in ‘universal grounding’. In his view,
it ‘represents a certain contemporary vision of cosmopolitanism based on a quasi-
planetary dispersion of bounded identities’, attractive to some, Anderson suggests,
because it makes them feel ‘entitled to belong to ancient bounded communities
that nonetheless stretch impressively across the planet in the age of “globalization”’
(Anderson 1998: 131). According to Anderson, this vision distorts the way
global migrations and historical change form real social subjectivities because
it assigns particular people a priori to particular diasporic groupings: ‘Wherever
the “Chinese” happen to end up – Jamaica, Hungary, or South Africa – they
remain countable Chinese, and it matters little if they also happen to be citizens of
those nation-states’ (ibid.). One does not have to share Anderson’s dismissive
rejection of identitarian notions of ethnicity per se to agree that the discourse
of diaspora is authorized in principle by a fundamental notion of closure: it
postulates the existence of closed and limited, mutually exclusive universes of ethnic
sameness.
Seen this way, then, diasporas cannot simply be counterposed to nation–states:
interestingly, a cultural nationalism – in the sense of the proposition of an imagined
cultural community with clear boundaries, whether territorial or ethnic – underpins
the construction of both. But if this is so, then we can ask the question whether
diasporas – no longer to be seen as unambiguous sites of liberation in opposition
to the presumably oppressive site of the nation–state – can exercise their own
forms of disciplinary power on their members. If one of the key modes of power
nation–states have over the people in their respective territories is that of inclusion
and exclusion, don’t diasporas apply similar mechanisms in patrolling their
boundaries? This, indeed, is how Duara (1997: 40) describes the work of the early
twentieth-century nationalist activists who, ‘with a totalizing vision of community
seek to eliminate these permeable boundaries [of local overseas Chinese commu-
nities] or transform them into the hardened boundaries of a closed community’.
In this light, practices of resinicization aimed at re-imbuing those who apparently
had ‘lost’ their Chineseness with their ‘true’ cultural identity, can be interpreted
as practices of forced inclusion: they are attempts to prevent those who had dispersed
themselves from the homeland from ‘going astray’ and to sharpen the boundaries
of the Chinese diaspora. Ironically, these very migrants cannot help but blur these
boundaries through their everyday interactions with and adaptations to their
non-Chinese environments.

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