Mobility and Travel - Ong & Clifford

In Aiwha Ong’s Flexible Citizenship, the flexibility that certain modern subject are forced to posess as a result of new geographical and social positioning can be related to the “flexibility” that is attributed to modern capitalist accumulation. Rather, the idea of flexible citizenship allows subjects to respond fluidly to changing political and economic activity (6). Even though Ong articulates a fluidity tied to flexible citizenship, Ong makes clear that these practices and exchanges are within structures of meaning surrounding class, nationality, gender, etc., a different grounding than Bhabha acts of production “in the beyond.” Aiwha Ong focus on the relation between the identity production of such flexible citizens and their role within capitalist systems of exchange and circulation offer a different way to think about the space of negotiation, not simply at the “level of culture”. Rather, Ong pushes the construction of narratives and the study of such relations, such as migration studies in relation to the nation and looks at the ways in which “hybrid subject” becomes mobilized. For example, Ong argues that the efforts of poor exploited immigrants of exported labor become racialized proletarian others, participating in the “nation-building” project of the United States.

"Poor immigrants are thus converted from being minorities to be assimilated into the host society into being some kind of universalized lower-class subjects who attain subaltern vindication both from struggling against racism in the United States and from transcending class and political barriers in their home countries" (9).

In the case of the United States, Ong notes that such mobilizations of the migrant figure not only produce an new idea of subjectivity for migrant groups, but also positions them in a very different way from other constructions of race based on mobility (9). This argument is provocative in that it brings to light the relationship between the migrant and other marginalized races in United States culture and the role of mobility in such constructions. How does flexibility work for or against the figure of the migrant in nationalist discourse? If, as Ong argues, their mobility is converted to a universalized proletarian in the field of migration studies, then in what ways does it work in the opposite way, the immigration seen as a threat because of their very mobility? Ong’s model at a more fundamental level, allows for an engagement with the ways in which such individuals accumulate, move and are displaced.  At another level, Ong’s analysis of the flexible subject under late capitalism allows for an account the power systems of class stratification and other societal barriers that affect mobile and non-mobile subjects. What allows some to cross and others not? How do certain societal structures prevent the movement and migration of individuals? This point is important not only as a way to think about the (im)permeability of borders based on societal stratification based on race, class, gender and sexuality, but also in relation to those who frequently cross borders for travel and leisure. The border, as such, becomes articulated and means vastly different things.  Although the positioning of the flexible subject within systems of capital and circulation, the ways in which laborers are articulated within society and the national discourse also becomes important in thinking about these subjects at the level of representation and rights.

            James Clifford takes this complex negotiation between cultures and their global histories of colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, exploration and tourism in his book, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, and looks at the mobility of such subjects. Adding to Ong’s discussion of the power of mobile and non-mobile subjects, Clifford further argues that it is also a matter of travelers’ movement under strong cultural, political and economic conditions, confronting these issues as an anthropological problematic. For Clifford, culture lies at the sites of dwelling and travel, or more broadly, in the relationship between movement and stasis. The relationship between movement and stasis, both physically, in terms of literal displacement and migration, as well as culturally produced  (the ways in which subjects are stuck within a representational essentialism or anthropological space), is one of tension. The relation and subsequent tension between movement and stasis are what’s most at stake in “borderzones” or lands, as conditions allowing/disallowing such movement and the ways in which subjects negotiate those zones.

            Using a model of “dwelling in travel” and “travel in dwelling,” travel is foregrounded as a cultural practice, as transnational routes of travel and displacement produce different knowledge traditions, cultural expression and the emergence of diasporic and migrant cultures (35). Clifford takes this relationship and using it as a mean of looking at the inside/outside of such relations in terms of how anthropology can and should approach such situation. Fieldwork can no longer solely look at the centers, villages and intensive fieldwork when these societies are transnational and global connected in the negotiation of external relationships. Clifford calls for new representation means and strategies, writing,

 “ We need to think comparatively about the distinct routes/roots of tribes, barrios, favellas, immigrant neighborhoods --- embattled histories with crucial community “insides” and regulated traveling ‘outsides’ (Clifford 36).

Clifford offers the theory of shifting locations, allowing one to take into account the many ways in which borders are formed and imposed upon individuals, both physically and otherwise. Clifford uses Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of a “contact zone” as a means to think about the space of such encounters. The argument that locations are “multiple, conjunctural and cross-cutting,” avoids the traps of a guaranteed shared experience or collectivity, while simultaneously opening up sites of “alliance building”, or Bhabha ideas concerning “political negotiation” (Clifford 87).

            Returning to Flexible Citizenship, Ong brings the discussion of such spaces back to the still important role of the state. For in the ways that the tensions and disjuncture are present at the borders of culture and nation, oppressive structures and border-crossing flows, Ong argues that “the nation-state -- along with its juridical-legislative systems, bureaucratic apparatuses, economic entities, modes of governmentality, and war-making capacities – continues to define, discipline, control, and regulate all kinds of populations, whether in movement or in residence" (15). Even though the differences of stasis of movement are productive in the ways in which such oppressed groups are studied and articulated, Ong allows for a bridge to think about the ways that individuals are positioned and controlled within state apparatuses and capitalist structures.

            In a further engagement with Clifford, Aiwha Ong offers a reading Clifford’s project as one that “attempts to shape their own cosmopolitan intellectual commitment” (13). Ong draws on Clifford’s project in order to think critically about the relationship between the diasporan subject and the cosmopolitan intellectual. Because Clifford uses the idea of “traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in traveling,” which is a very compelling idea, he is able to take in diverse subjects with specific histories and a range of cultural practices. This grouping can also be seen in a variety of other work dealing with such spaces of cultural difference and mobility.  The kind of move made by Clifford can also be seen in other works such as Marc Augé’s Non-Places, where travelers, both cosmopolitan citizens and displaced people cohabit a space of transition and temporaneity or in Appadurai’s “Sovereignty without Territory: Notes for a Postnational Geography,” where the multiple identifications that communities possess form translocalities not rooted in the nation-state, a locality that both cosmopolitan citizens and marginalized subject inhabitants. What is the relation between the two figures and how do they affect one another? Put differently, if certain mechanisms of power enable or disable mobility, then how are the diverse populations within these transnational systems shaped by the relations of global inequality? As both the cosmopolitan citizen and marginalized mobile subject are articulated at both the global and local level, how can we think about the ways in which they engage in the production of one another? 

Negotiations - Bhabha, Ong, Pratt

            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 19^th 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?

Week 2: Notes on a Postnational Geography

Arjun Appadurai’s essay “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes on a Postnational Geography,” offers a close examination of territoriality, a central problem facing the modern nation-state.  If the basis of the nation-state has historically been territorial sovereignty, defined as a capacity for jurisdictional governance or state control of civil society, then territory, as defined by Appadurai, is in a state of crisis as the globalized construction of locality signals a disruption in the relationship between the nation and the state. The globalized construction of locality with weak or nonexistent ties to the nation-state is being produced through global flows of capital, labor, information and people. Although disjunctive, these flows produce ties to communities not rooted in the nation-state. Using the term translocalities, for the multiple identifications that these communities possess and perhaps even thrive off, the disjunctures that these global and local phenomena produce pose a significant threat to the territoriality of the nation-state and its claims to sovereignty. This is the framework that Appadurai sets up as he begins to map the disjunctures between space, place, citizenship, and nationhood, proposing a new kind of cartography that thinks beyond the nation-state and instead a global economy or geography based on difference. 

            In this project of mapping difference and disjuncture, Appadurai marks two kinds of translocalities: one that is produced through the marginalization or abandonment of communities by the nation-state such as border-sites and conflict zones and the plural community or cities produced by something like cosmopolitanism. These two translocalities, however seem to have very different relations to the nation-state. More importantly, what is the relationship between these two translocalities? Is the translocality of the pluralist cosmopolitan city reliant on the translocality of those marginalized from the nation-state in terms of their exploitative positions? What is the role of cosmopolitan geopolitical discourses and how do they affect these disjunctive spaces?

Week 1: Introduction (part 1 of 2)

In Politics and the Other Scene, Etienne Balibar looks at the universalims that structure ideas of the nation and the rights that are greanted under citizenship. In the first chapter, “Three Concepts of Politics,” Balibar  discusses the “autonomy of politics” in that it exists “only to the extent that subjects are the source and ultimate reference of emancipation for each other” (Politics and the Other Scene, 4).

Tracing the thought that Balibar refers to as “the autonomy of politics” is that first, individuals are given Natural Right. However, as Balibar immediately points out, the Natural Rights that are allotted to people (or more specifically citizens), although Natural, become a set of rights that must be “won” or “gained”. Put differently, the maintenance of one’s own rights falls upon the individual and is their own responsibility. In addition, since these rights are not merely God-given or unconditional, but must be “won”, the Individual Rights of Man are only possible through a collective struggle or if won collectively. This line of thought, Balibar continues provides the framework for the nation and its constructions of citizenship.  The Natural Rights given to individuals become the same right that must be collectively won or gain, so that both the “natural” and the “earned” rights are both one and the same. The natural rights given to Man or Humanity are also the same rights that must be earned or won as a collective of citizens.  Balibar writes, “In this way, we move from the self-determination of the people to the autonomy of politics itself” (4). 

Put differently, “it is always-already time to demand emancipation for oneself and for others,” yet at the same time, it must always be something that, through systems and institutions that guarantee these rights to its citizens, it must also be protected and gained for every human equally. Being a citizen is equal to being human. Balibar writes, “To be a citizen, it is sufficient simply to be a human being, ohne Eigenschaften” (4). The space in-between the “natural” and “earned” rights that the construction of the nation seem to provide individuals with is precisely the area that Balibar confronts. The “other scene” of politics, then, becomes a space that lies outside of the scene of politics that is most apparent or that are structured by the discourse surrounding the construction of these universalisms, but the “other scene” also seems to function as the scene of the other.

What is the status for those who reside outside of citizenship? More important for my own interest, what is at stake in the in-between space of human and citizen? What is at stake in construction of identity of those who live in such spaces? This text is important for my research in that it poses similar questions. This idea that rights need to be won or gained, if carried out further, expand to an evolutionary or Darwinian idea of the struggle for existence as a universal truth. The implications of such universalisms on individual rights become particularly important if carried out to this degree. What is at stake in speaking of such a universal where life, basic life, is always already a universal struggle for existence?