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DIASPORIC MEDIATIONS Between
Home and Location
R. Radhakrishnan
University ...
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DIASPORIC MEDIATIONS Between
Home and Location
R. Radhakrishnan
University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London
Copyright 1996 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following: chapter 1 fromdifferences:A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies,2.2 (summer 1990): 126-52, copyright 1990 Indiana University Press; chapter 3 from The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); chapter 4 from MEWS 14.2 (summer 1987): 5-19, copyright 1989, reprinted by permission of the Society for the Study of the Multiethnic Literature of the United States; chapter 5 from Theory/Pedagogy/Politics: Texts for Change, ed. Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, copyright 1991 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, used by permission from the University of Illinois Press; chapter 6 from Feminism and Institutions: Dialogues on Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); chapter 7 from Views beyond the Border Country: Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics, ed. Dennis L. Dworkin and Leslie G. Roman (New York: Routledge, 1992); chapter 8 from Callaloo, 16.4 (1993): 750-71, reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press; chapter 9 from Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et al. (New York: Routledge, 1991); chapter 10 from The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Boston: South End Press, 1994). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Second printing 1997 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Radhakrishnan, R. (Rajagopalan) Diasporic mediations : between home and location / R. Radhakrishnan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2640-5. — ISBN 0-8166-2641-3 (pbk.) 1. Postmodernism—Social aspects. 2. Culture. 3. Ethnicity. 4. Identity (Psychology) I. Title. HM73.R329 1996 301'.01—dc20 95-46541 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
For Appa, Amma, Asha, and Surya
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Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 / The Changing Subject and the Politics of Theory
ix xiii 1
2 / Toward an Effective Intellectual: Foucault or Gramsci?
27
3 / Ethnic Identity and Poststructuralist Differance
62
4 / Culture as Common Ground: Ethnicity and Beyond
80
5 / Canonicity and Theory: Toward a Poststructuralist Pedagogy 96 6 / Negotiating Subject Positions in an Uneven World
119
7 / Cultural Theory and the Politics of Location
133
8 / Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity
155
9 / Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity
185
10 / Is the Ethnic "Authentic" in the Diaspora?
203
Index
215
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Acknowledgments
So strange this genre called "Acknowledgments" that invites even as it frustrates the will to narrative. On the one hand, I want to begin at the beginning and thank people, events, and influences in a chronological order. But on the other hand, these very people, events, and influences, as well as my profound indebtedness to them, constitute a simultaneous order that has very little to do with "befores" and "afters." So here I go stumbling through my gratitude: without method, poorly prepared, and inadequately temporalized. My heartfelt thanks to my friend and editor Janaki Bakhle, who took the initiative in collecting these essays into a single volume, and for her patience with my will to procrastinate. I would like to thank her also for many hours of deep and intense dialogue on matters macro and micro. My thanks to the editorial staff of the University of Minnesota Press, Biodun Iginla, Jeff Moen, Mary Byers, and Anne Running, for their help and cooperation. I extend my sincere appreciation to Mike Sullivan at the University of Massachusetts Computer Center and, in particular, to Asha Radhakrishnan, who transformed a series of low-tech texts into a computer-friendly unit without ever making me feel like a hopeless Luddite. To Bruce Robbins and Kamala Visweswaran, readers of these essays, many thanks for your insightful comments and suggestions. It feels like just yesterday when I was in graduate school at SUNY-Binghamton working on my dissertation with William V. Spanos. Thank you ever so much, Bill, for your support and generosity and for the intense ethicopolitical passion that you bring to every aspect of your work. The summer of 1982 was a IX
x / Acknowledgments very special time for me at the School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University, where I had the privilege of studying with Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. I thank them for their brilliance, their friendship, and their exemplary groundbreaking intellectual activism. In a similar vein I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Subaltern Studies Group for their tireless and rigorous work. These essays have been previously published in a variety of contexts over a period of time. In addition to the formal thanks for permission to reprint, I wish to thank a number of colleagues who invited me to contribute these essays: Naomi Schor, Elizabeth Weed, Joseph Skerrett Jr., Bruce Robbins, Masiid Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Linda Kauffman, Abdul JanMohamed, David Lloyd, Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Sonia Sahni, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Tejumola Olaniyan, Dennis Dworkin, Leslie G. Roman, Andrew Parker, and Doris Sommer. Several of these essays were rehearsed as talks and presentations at the following venues: University of California-Berkeley, Stanford University, Harvard, Florida State University, University of Rochester, Wesleyan University, Brown, Rutgers University-Newark and New Brunswick, University of Warwick (England), Dubrovnik, Phillips Academy, University of WisconsinMilwaukee and Madison, University of Chicago, University of Minnesota, Dartmouth College, University of New Hampshire, University of Alabama, University of California-Santa Barbara, Montclair State University, Institute for the Advanced Study of Humanities at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Smith College, Princeton, and the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. I am deeply grateful to my hosts and my audiences for their hospitality as well as their critical engagement with my work. My grateful appreciation goes out to Gerald Graff, Catherine Stimpson, Richard Ohmann, Brook Thomas, Susan Stanford Friedman, Elizabeth Meese, Barbara Johnson, Donald Pease, Jonathan Culler, George Levine, Andrew Ross, Cornel West, Martin Dillon, Joseph Adams, Chris Fynsk, Ted Norton, and Marsha Abrams for their support and encouragement at different times during these years. It gives me great pleasure to extend a warm and appreciative "Namasthe" to a number of my colleagues in my department: Jules Chametzky, Michael Wolff, Lee Edwards, Arlyn Diamond, Margo Culley, Vincent DiMarco, Don Cheney, and Arthur Kinney. It is with a sense of excitement that I thank the many graduate students who, in course after course and seminar after seminar, kept me honest with their intellectual challenge. My special thanks to Ben Xu, Valerie Traub, Brenda Marshall, Poonam Pillai, and C. Margot Hennessy. It was such fun and excitement working with you.
Acknowledgments / xi Putting these essays together amounts to an act of solidarity with a community with whom I share a wide range of themes, issues, crises, and dilemmas, as well as excitement, intellectual pleasures and thrills, and complex epiphanies. Home-Away, Near-Far, Location-Travel: amid these shifting and perennially negotiated signposts and borders, it has been an immensely rich and moving experience to have found a community of "minority" and "diasporan" thinkers who bring to their work an undeniable immediacy of history and lived experience. It is from within this community that I wish to speak, in active advocacy of ever-broadening coalitions based on the reciprocities of ethicopolitical persuasion. To Sukun, "thank you" is inadequate for your comradeship and for all I have learned from you; to Bhaskar, genuine appreciation for your finely tuned intellect and your capacity to imbibe knowledge under any circumstance. Thank you, Chandrashekar, for communicating to me the passion for critical analysis. I thank my parents with a full heart for letting me follow my own ways: believe me, you are very much a part of my diaspora. Asha, thank you for your friendship and solidarity, and your unique capacity to motivate even as you put up with a never-ending history of lapsed deadlines. I look forward to never being able to get over my indebtedness to you. To Surya, hey, who else can I learn from if not from you?
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Introduction
Finding a title for this collection has not been easy, mainly because each of the essays here is both its own autonomous context and part of a process: a process of change, adjustment, and negotiation. Naming a process is problematic: how and where does one get a normative entry into a process? The point-of-entry problem was resolved almost fortuitously by the single adjective "diasporic," hence the present title,Diasporic Mediations.It became a way of acknowledging where I am: my present academic-immigrant location in the United States. Does my present location have a theme all its own, or is it a perspective on a preexisting theme? Is the diaspora an epiphenomenal condition that recalls and comments on (and is supplementary to) an earlier authentic condition, or is it, as the history of the present, transformative both of itself and its origins? For my purposes here, the diasporic location is the space of the hyphen that tries to coordinate, within an evolving relationship, the identity politics of one's place of origin with that of one's present home. The term is not used either as a mark of privilege or as a universally representative human condition. As a matter of fact, one essay in this collection, "Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity" (chapter 8), strongly contests such a comfortable universalization of diasporic perspectives. Diasporic subjectivity is thus necessarily double: acknowledging the imperatives of an earlier "elsewhere" in an active and critical relationship with the cultural politics of one's present home, all within the figurality of a reciprocal displacement. "Home" then becomes a mode of interpretive in-betweenness, xiii
xiv / Introduction as a form of accountability to more than one location. As I try to point out in chapter 10, "Is the Ethnic 'Authentic' in the Diaspora?," I cannot live, earn, pay taxes, raise a family, produce scholarship, teach, and take passionate and vigorous political stances here, and still continue to call it "not-home." Conversely, I cannot historicize the very valence of my being here except through an Indian/subaltern/postcolonial perspectivism. The demands of the "politics of location" are complex: "home" and "not-home" and "coming" and "going" are neither literal nor figurative, but, rather, issues within the politics of "imaginary geographies." And just as my location produces a history of its own, so does my subject position as a practicing academic intellectual create its own tensions and limitations. My purpose here is neither to defend this particular "assigned subject position" nor to feel romantically guilty by virtue of it, but rather to point out that subject positions are to be thematized and problematized with reference both to themselves and to a larger body politic. There are diasporas and diasporas, and the mediations offered here are very clearly marked in all their ideological specificity and finitude. All these essays can also be seen as attempts to find a voice: a voice in relationship to a cause as well as a constituency. What happens when the voice speaks in multiple registers, or carries multiple valences? Should the project of honoring different subconstituencies within the same subjectivity paralyze speech altogether? Does speaking in different voices make one a chameleon, a mere ventriloquial artist lacking in integrity? Can the voices be orchestrated within a single symphony, or can coherence be produced in and through the contradictions? I would just like to suggest that such an enterprise must necessarily take place in multiple locations in response to multiple imperatives—hence, diasporic mediations in more than one direction in the name of a multilateral, multihistorical universalism based on an equal and reciprocal relationality. Clearly I wasn't always of the diaspora. All of my life until 1978 had been lived in India. But with my diasporic displacement, there is a "now" and a "then" to my life, underwritten by a "here" and a "there." If it is true that historicizing has always been difficult (since it is never clear if the purpose of historicizing is to instrumentalize the past in the service of the present or to conserve the past through continuity in the present),1 historicizing in the diaspora becomes doubly complicated, since we now have to deal with discontinuity both in a temporal and in a spatial-locational sense.2 It is difficult to continue to historicize as though the diasporic move had not taken place, and it is equally disingenuous to behave as though the diaspora were a form of pure countermemory that breaks with the past altogether. With a change of location, there is both change and no-change. One does not have to reside in India
Introduction / xv to be an Indian, and living in the United States does not make one American. When people move, the very continuity of their identity is expressed as a function of historical change. It is as though the phenomenon of moving away from one's given home into an acquired home vividly thematizes some of the constituent problems of historiography: how to represent the past in and through its very displacement, and how to speak for the present critically and genealogically. Let me put this in personal terms. When in India, in Madras, I was teaching contemporary American literature, literary criticism, and the typical range of courses in English literature. Here, both as teacher and as productive scholar, I specialize in theory and postcoloniality. How does this scenario locate me, organically as well as specifically?3 I remember with great affection those years in India when a number of us would discuss the relevance or not of "English" in India.4 Indeed, many of us had participated as undergraduates in protest movements that questioned the centrality of English in Indian pedagogy and curricula. We had gotten tired and angry with people who would say: "He is so well educated. Just listen to his English." But we were part of the contradiction ourselves. We would question the macropolitical and cultural dominance accorded to English even as we continued to cherish our epiphanies in our academic-professional encounter with English literature. Conversely, what does it mean to teach "postcoloniality" here? What do "here" and "there" mean? Are these discursive-epistemic and institutional spaces devoid of historical specificity, or do the "here" and "there" mark historical boundaries not to be easily transcended in the name of a glib transnationalism? As Aijaz Ahmed points out in his book,In Theory,there is more irony here. The academic turf "here" has been so prepared that graduate students and scholars who come here from the third world are expected to be invested in postcoloniality. Not only is it the latest cutting edge in the mercurial proliferation of the discourses of the "post-," but it is also deemed the appropriate niche for third world scholars. But what if an Indian, or a Nigerian, wanted to be at home in Elizabethan OF Romantic literature? Would such a choice be lacking in historical density or urgency? Aha! but we cannot afford to forget that the same scholars and intellectuals who were teaching Keats and Shelley back home are the ones who are teaching postcoloniality away from home. It is the same interpellation working in both cases: the one the flip side of the other. The point in all this is that the postcolonial scholar-intellectual is victim to more than a literal sense of location. Whether "here" or "there," it is the internationalization of the avant-gardism of the West that threatens the organic solidarity of the postcolonial subject. The very fact thatwhatthe. postcolonial
xvi / Introduction scholar teaches, rather than how or with what critical perspective she teaches, has taken on an almost fetishistic significance in the academy is ample testimony to the reality of the ongoing psychological and internal impact of colonialism.5 For if one were truly postcolonial, it would not matter what one taught or thought about: Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe, or Bessie Head. My very historical as well as epistemological perspective as a postcolonial intellectual would establish, irrespective of what I teach, its own hegemony subjectively as well as agentially. Why, after all, did I choose to come/go west? It would seem inevitable that anyone with a professional interest in Western literature should go west in pursuit of her academic goals. The motivation for a humanities scholar to go abroad is rarely economic or financial. And in any case, even as I was in India, I had been interpellated by the ideology of Western humanism. The question to ask is: What is the nature of the relationship of one's professional identity or one's subject position to one's organic and macropolitical sense of community?6 How does one's professional being interrupt, inflect, sharpen, or dull one's "worldliness"? For after all, we have to admit that one's professional, scientific, or technocratic subject position does influence one's attitudes to life. Does my primary sense of who I am direct and govern my professional being, or does my professional formation interpret and constitute my primary sense of constituency? Now, given the history of the colonialist inculcation of English in India,7 what are the consequences of the practice of English language and literature in India? My feeling is that unlike engineers or doctors or scientists, persons in the humanities tend to internalize more deeply the cultural and the symbolic ideologies of the colonizer. Literature enjoys a certain intimacy with life that makes this result somewhat inevitable. Just as some of the early Indian poets and versifiers in English wrote mechanically about nightingales in English landscapes, so, too, many of the later practitioners in English language and literature had internalized Western modes of analysis, exegesis, and interpretation. If Dickens's England or the moors of the Bronte sisters become more real in one's imagination than the paddy fields of Thanjavur or the capricious and cacophonous traffic of Madras, then surely one's contemporaneity is in deep peril.8 The problem here is not the Western influence per se, but the gratuitous dominance of the influence. In practical terms, the ascendancy of English in India took place at the expense of the growth and propagation of other languages and literatures in India. Although one did live in a multilingual world, the lingual world provided by English carried with it the privilege of dominance and the reputation of effective globality and internationalism.
Introduction / xvii As Ashis Nandy and many others have argued elaborately,9 it is this belittlement or secondarization of indigenous knowledges and traditions that confirms the dominance of Western modes of thought. The postcolonial intellectual is thus stranded namelessly between her own experience that she cannot name into knowledge and an alien knowledge that has no roots in her being. The professionalization of the study of a foreign linguistic culture drives a wedge between the postcolonial subject's sense of belonging and his thirst for knowledge. This problem took critical shape during some of the debates that went on in India during the sixties. Should Indian writing in English be called English, or Indo-Anglian, or Anglo-Indian literature? Why even write in a foreign tongue?10 Is it even possible to use English ex nihilo, as it were, to represent Indian realities and experiences? The legitimate fear was that one's own cognitive and emotional structures would be annexed and/or betrayed by Western genres and literary stylistics, for after all the use of language is no innocent activity. Take, for example, an Indian writer in English who wants to write about his experiences in a realistic vein, but finds that realism is no longer in vogue in the metropolitan West: the hallmark of legitimate contemporaneity is either minimalism or postmodernism, both of which scoff at the narratological claims of realism. This writer faces a dilemma: should she go contemporary and thus falsify her experiential context, or should she demonstrate solidarity with the "Indianness" of her experience, but face the risk of backwardness? Of course it should be pointed out that realism itself, or for that matter the novel form, is not an indigenous category. But my point is that given the three worlds theory,11 the non-West in its imitation of the West is often forced to play a game the rules of which are devised elsewhere. Lurking seditiously in the mind of the non-Western writer in English is an international audience whose approval is more significant than that of the local readership. The predicament is that of "midnight's children," who cannot lay claim to their own temporality. Can these alienated "children" ever return to their authentic being? In what language will such a return take place, that is, if it is to take place at all? Here I am using the term "language" both literally and figuratively. Thus, English, Hindi, and Urdu are languages in a literal sense, whereas nativism, modernity, and transnationalism are also languages, as figurative and symbolic vehicles of specific ideologies and worldviews. These two meanings of "language" work in an interconnected way in the context of the colonialist-modernist enterprise. Thus, English becomes the instrument of cultural modernization in the context of colonized India, and French in the context of Algeria. Language achieves the effect of what Spivak has termed "epistemic violence" on the cul-
xviii / Introduction tural level (where consciousness and subjectivity are theoretically produced), and language officiates as the cultural counterpart of modernity's political dominance. The two questions, Can India be modern and yet remain true to itself? And is it possible for the Indian writer to represent indigenous realities by way of English? are part of the same problem. Modernity as paradigm and the language of the colonizer situate themselves in a position of pedagogic authority with respect to indigenous knowledges and languages. When a non-Western postcolonial writer uses English or French, who is using whom? Is the writer, despite her resistant intentions, being manipulated by the dominance of the "master language," or is the dominance of the language relativized and decelebrated by the postcolonial perspectivity of the writer? In her essay "The Politics of the Possible," Kumkum Sangari, in her readings of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, offers us the category of "double-coding" as a way to understand a certain kind of postcolonial writing that rests on two traditions.12 But here, too, as Sangari shrewdly argues, "double-coding" isn't an easy answer by itself, for the question still remains, How is the double-coding operated? What is the nature of the relationship between the two codes: even or uneven, hierarchic, dialogic, or symbiotic? Is Rushdie's text simultaneously postcolonial and postmodern, or is it one by virtue of the other?13 It is the authority of experience that eludes peoples whose self-esteem has been damaged by the Manichaean psychology of colonialism.14 If the very authority of one's experience becomes a function of someone else's categories, then one's alienation from one's self takes on a chronic dimension, that is, unless this anthropological-modernist model is smashed utterly. A conversation that took place between a close friend of mine and his mother expresses the same point rather less laboriously. She was basically regretting the fact she hadn't introduced him to the texts of his own religious-philosophic-cultural tradition before'she had introduced him to the great modernist-secular texts of the West. The issue here is that of the politics of influence. If a people are exposed to more than one history (one of which is through colonization and dominance, and the other their own), it remains to be seen how the politics of this conjuncture will get played out. Will the second history block out or usurp the place of what was already there and eventually render impossible the very project of a return to that earlier self? The anxiety that my friend's mother was expressing was that her son's return to his own tradition, should it ever take place, will itself be framed by an extraneous worldview. Even where such critical "returns" are acknowledged, they are done so only to be countervalorized or rebuked for their so-called nativist or fundamentalist underpinnings. The
Introduction / xix polemical situatedness of these critiques as knowledges is deliberately misread by dominant knowledges that are so used to seeing themselves as natural and disinterested. (Take, for example, the Wisconsin v. Yodercase. of 1972 in the United States, which highlights the Amish right to regard their worldview as a form of knowledge as legitimate as that of mainstream modernity. Yoder won.) What concerns me here is the historical reality that, for so many of us of the third world, modernity came through as a powerful critique of our existing selves and systems,ergoas a higher and superior form of knowledge. It was as if we had been made the Socratic Other; hence the pedagogical authority of themodernistwilltoknowledge15hatdemystifiesthenativeofherworldview and corrects her into modernity. The dire consequences for the postcolonial subject are twofold: (1) the capacity to benefit from the critique is at the expense of one's solidarity with one's own traditions, and (2) the acceptance of another culture's provincialism is mandated as the true form of universalism. As Ashis Nandy has argued,16 unlike other epistemologies and value systems, modernity finds it difficult to coexist with other worldviews. Generated in and through dominance, modernity has to universalize itself at the expense of other knowledges and histories. It has to act as a civilizing mission on behalf of the entire world. To put it in a Nietzschean vein, its capacity for dominance is the stuff of its knowledge. As a result of this, the road not taken by postcolonial intellectuals and leaders is that of the indigenous critique, that is, a critique that will not pit belonging and progress as adversarial terms.17 With modernity having been monumentalized as the only form of critical knowledge, Hindus, Muslims, Igbos, and Yorubas are effectively prevented from exercising their own critiques from within lived worlds. My friend's mother, I suggest, is by no means a Luddite who cannot bear the thought of her son's separation from her by way of progress and knowledge.18 Her concern is more profound: How is it that my son, who is so passionately committed to matters epistemological and critical, is able to dismiss his own traditional resources in such active ignorance? The movement away from one's tradition, the intermediate detour,l