Many of the readings from this section deal with the ways in which culture is produced when marginalized members of society and the nation such as the diasporic subject, the im/migrant, the refugee, the exile, etc., live and engage in the spaces of cultural difference between dominant or hegemonic forms of culture their own positions within geopolitical structures. From theories of the hybrid cultural space that subjects translate through performative acts of negotiation (Bhabha), to the conditions of places or the non-places in supermodernity that mobile subject confront (Augé), to the complex relations of movement and stasis (Clifford), the sites, zones and spaces of cultural difference that these subjects face, translate, negotiate, confront happen at the interstices and borders of nations and “culture”.
In Homi Bhabha’s text, The Location of Culture, Bhabha is concerned with the types of cultural negotiation that happen at the sites “in-between” cultures, or the hybrid cultural space that emerges in “" the overlap and displacement of domains of difference” (7). Experiences of nationness or collectivity, for Bhabha are formed in the “beyond” or in excess of, the sum of the parts of difference. The space as theorized by Bhabha is one of intervention, where the translation of such cultural differences is refigured through performative identity production. However, what is somewhat questionable in Bhabha’s theory of translation through performative negotiation is the ways in which such “negotiations” are taken up and the “parts” of difference that are used and mobilized in such translations. For example, Bhabha praises the reappropriation of the past for the refiguring into the present as an intervention, or “a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation” (7). Bhabha further argues that it is not only a cultural negotiation of the self through identity performance that happens within these interstitial places, but also the political negotiations of collectivity and belonging. Moving to group identity politics, Bhabha points to a similar kind of hybridity that is necessary for collective action versus theories concerning the possibilities of collective will. The heterogeneous and fragmentary ways in which subjects identify and act upon become a “struggle of identifications”, calling for a rethinking of political struggle as “political negotiation” (29). However, while Bhabha’s insistence on the necessary relationship and engagement between theory and practice offers a helpful critique of the time and place distance that the theorist places against their object, a critique similarly made by Augé and Clifford, the performative hybridity that Bhabha proposes as a means for the re-creation of the self seems haphazard in its acknowledgement of the asymmetrical power relations functioning in such translations of cultural difference.
I think the historical genealogy of travel writing and its roots in the European project of Empire during the 19th century that Mary Louise Pratt brings up in her book, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, prove particularly productive in thinking about the conditions of such cultural negotiations. Because Pratt focuses on the space of cultural negotiation as the same space of colonial encounters, or as she terms, the “contact zone”, these relation are historically wrought with a colonialist past and are produced within asymmetrical power relations. According to Pratt, contact zones are the "social space where disparate culture meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination -- like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived across the globe today" (4). Whereas Bhabha seems to present a performative hybridity that finds oppositional or binary relations between oppressor/oppressed or national/ethnic separation as unimportant or irrelevant, Pratt theorizes a space where encounters with different cultures are still lingering with colonialist pasts and power relations. The location for the postcolonial subject who contests the interstitial spaces of culture, can be seen, for Bhabha through readings of literature and art, where "being in the 'beyond', then, is to inhabit an intervening space… to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future on its hither side. In that sense, then, the intervening space 'beyond', becomes a space of intervention in the here and now" (7).
However, these celebrations of hybridity through performance hold the danger of becoming trapped within their own valorization. How does Bhabha cling to this idea of hybridity through performative acts of translation? Put differently, the diasporan subject’s “insurgent act of cultural translation” that, in some ways, necessitates the appropriation of the past, the subject standing in-between tradition and modernity. In such exchanges and negotiations, Bhabha elides similar exchanges of culture in systems of capital. How does Bhabha’s performativity play out in modes of consumption and commodity and what does that mean for acts of translation?
Aiwha Ong, in her work Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, critques valorizations of hybridity for the diasporan subject taken up in postcolonial discourses. Ong writes,
"American studies of diasporan cultures have tended to uphold a more innocent concept of the essential diasporan subject, one that celebrates hybridity, "cultural" border crossing, and the production of difference… who write about displacements in "borderland" areas, emphasize subjects who struggle against adversity and violation by affirming their cultural hybridity and shifting positions in society. The unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects now also clings to diasporan ones, who are invariable assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power. Furthermore, because of the exclusive focus on texts, narrative and subjectivities, we are often left wondering what are the particular local-global structural articulations that materially and symbolically shape these dynamics of victimhood and ferment" (13).
Ong’s critique nicely articulates what is at stake in such theories. If performative acts of identity production from oppressed subjects become inherently tied to a resistance against the state then such politics run the danger of such essentialist constructions of identity and identity politics. The role of such a performativity will be particularly relevant to Chicano politics and the ways in which identity politics are performed and reproduces, both since its theoretical beginnings in the late 1960s and 1970s and the relevance of Chicano politics today concerning border identities. Ironically, in the above quote, Ong’s references Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal Chicano text, Borderlands/La Frontera, as an example of the valorization of cultural crossings and hybridity. Following Ong’s line of thought we might ask, what are the means of production of such a politics of identity and how do such politics fit into systems of capitalist exchange and circulation? For the ways in which identity production and performance could be seen and liberating and resistant, in what ways has it been reinscribed within a kind of liberal multiculturalism, where the status of the immigrant or the Chicano becomes one that is always resistant, or that is called upon to always resist or perform resistance? How do such production become framed as existing outside of capital and current systems of geopolitics? Importantly, how do they become mobilized as representative as the figures for resistance?
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