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| Sunday, 6 October 2002 |
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Nationalism and academic avatars of the Diaspora Our Civilisation by Michael Roberts "Hybridity" and "globalisation." Magic words. They can generate academic conferences. Salman Rushdie, Homi Bhabha, Gayathri Spivak, Arjun Appadurai, Gyan Prakash, Lata Mani, Gouri Vishwanathan, Akhil Gupta, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Amitav Ghosh, Talal Asad, Pal Ahluwahlia. Magic names for the most part. Drawcards for conferences These names flag the world Asian intellectuals of the diaspora and their cultural productions. Whether empirical, theoretical or literary, their contributions have been striking. They have also gathered legitimacy because they advocate positions deemed politically correct within liberal quarters in the West. Without necessarily implicating every one of those named above, let me summarise some dominant strands of argument in the cultural productions around them. Collectivised in arbitrary fashion, the individuals named above stand as an illustrative sample of a certain politics of identity in the contemporary world. They stand for anti-essentialism and anti-nationalism; for cosmopolitan rationality and its secularism; for the itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie post-modern world of heterogeneity; for the celebration of borderlands, homelessness, de-centred ambiguity, heterogeneity and blurred genres. The birth of such journals as Diaspora, Public Culture, Social Identities and Identity in and around the 1990s is testimony to the power of this strand of emphasis. Take the early programmatic statements presented in such felicitous prose by Arjun Appadurai. He argues for "a genuinely cosmopolitan ethnographic practice" in anthropology in contemporary times, a practice that could cope with the "transnational cultural flows" and the "de-territorialization" of the moment. For this purpose he coined the concept of "ethnoscape" to encapsulate "the landscape of persons who make up the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest-workers, and other moving ... persons.....". This captivating thrust, however, rests on an essentialised picture of anthropology in our own time, that is, the 1970s and '80s. Anthropology as an object is set up by Appadurai as a discipline working with "concepts of culture ... designed for small-scale, well-bounded and stable societies." Its "localizing strategies" and focus on group identities, it is said, are no longer suited for a terrain in which "groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogenous (sic)". This thrust has been extended by Homi Bhabha as he sets his sights upon strands of scholarship that are said to be attached to "the fixed tablet of tradition" and the idea of "homogenous (sic) national cultures." This is a hoary old chestnut that may be an appropriate anthropological dish for the 1920s-to-1960s. Even then I suspect that it would require qualifications. But, for the 1980s? The picture that Appadurai paints was merely one thread within a multi-stranded field. Urban anthropology was a major strand of interest in the late 1970s and was marked by the influence of such figures as J. Clyde Mitchell, Manuel Castells and Pierre Bourdieu. Erving Goffman and Anselm Strauss on the one hand rubbed shoulders with Marshall Sahlins of The domestic mode of production becoming Sahlins of Historical Metaphors on the other. These were but a handful of the several lines of theory in favour at this stage of my anthropological work in and through Adelaide and Australia. Again, from sheer necessity, those colleagues working with spirit cults in Zambia and Zimbabwe, or with deities, demons and ghosts in Sri Lanka, were not circumscribed spatially in their focus. These scholars would be amazed at the suggestion so central to Appadurai's thesis - that the "social life" of the people studied by anthropologists was "largely inertial" so that "fantasy and imagination were residual practices." Even the several Melanesianists in my Anthropology department, who did work within localised communities, would find Appadurai's argument rather Orientalist. As for the Aboriginalists, they too would wonder whether Appadurai has any sense of the journeys of the Dreaming. In all these places the figures of the supernatural world lie at the heart of more than darkness. They ramify through ordinary lives. Thus, even today, on the authority provided by Ananda Wakkumbura, I assert that many Sinhalese believe in the force of as vaha, kata vaha, and ho vaha, the power of the evil eye, word and thought. Indeed, it is remarkable that a person of Indian background, like Appadurai, does not give weight to the liveliness, the avatars and the many incarnations associated with the beings of the Indic world. And what could be more imaginative than a perspective on life that attends to the implications of one's many lives and devotionally listens to stories of the previous lives of the Buddha-to-be retailed in jataka tales in simple Sinhala prose or verse? Caveat Clearly, the summary picture drawn in the second paragraph of this essay is rather a caricature, an oversimplification meant to dramatise and sharpen the outline. All these readings will not fit a particular individual. One of these characterisations may not fit all those named. Indeed, I suspect that several of those named would be quite critical of the arguments espoused by Appadurai or the imputation of "rootlessness" to diasporic migrants by such writers as James Clifford. But the names inscribed in paragraph one are intended to point to an academic circuit marked by "dwelling-in-travel" to use Clifford's phrase. And the cruel summary does sketch out an approximation of the overall cultural form in the global academic circuit, a circuit to whose edges I myself belong. Indeed, as I write, NOW, suddenly, I realise that it is perhaps my very location at the border of a world these intellectuals occupy that gives me the capacity to criticise their centres, fuelled perhaps by jealousy, that powerful imperative. So, borders do provide locations of insight. But I also argue that those who lead "border lives," attach value to "hybridity" and then impose this creation on intellectual-land, create a new centre. I go further. Their insistence on the virtues of the borderland can generate its own dominations and imperialisms of the mind. Indeed, their positions would seem to be an extension of their universe and their selves to encompass the situation of all the migrants of the diaspora. Their habitus, that is, in Pierre Bourdieu's words, a disposition generated by their set of practices, or "durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures, predisposed to function as structuring structures," informs their politics of identity and their valorisation of in-between spaces, border lives, ambiguities, transience, displacement, fluidities, heterogeneity. Their universe of being becomes the Desirable. It is then imposed on the diasporic populations of this world. Context I Most of the intellectuals upon whom I am focusing occupy sites in the reputed establishments of the West, that is, in the lands straddling the Atlantic. This is a space of power, of dominance. As a metaphor of major global processes it has been rightly featured in the titles of such authors as R. R. Palmer (1959-64) and Paul Gilroy (1993). In my parody, it is "Atlanticland". The USA is its predominant axis-cum-hub. Witness the manner in which over the last forty years USA has drawn scholars trained in Britain, from Englishmen to Asians: Victor Turner, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Gananath Obeyesekere, S. J. Tambiah, Peter Stallybrass, the examples are manifold. Within this space of power/knowledge in the field of cultural production, my focus has been narrowed down to the South Asian intellectuals of the diaspora. As the initial sample of names suggest, it is an illustrious circle. But it is the diasporic setting that I now mark as the "condition" that informs their productive work. In other words there is "an elective affinity" (Weber's phrase) between their lifeways and their espousal of heterogeneity, hybridity and the nebulous borderland. Where born to Asian migrants living in USA or Britain, the education of these personnel has been grounded, as it is among generations-deep Americans, in travel. From high school to college to university and postgraduate study, one's secondary school locale is rarely the site of further studies. The high achievers then move often in the furtherance of their careers: Chicago, Seattle, Ann Arbor, Columbia in New York, for instance. Others choose to stay in one spot, but shift their pay packets upwards by threatening to move or applying for jobs elsewhere. A strategic job-interview in T-b-tu can work wonders on local university bureaucrats when the achiever-in-question is a valued commodity producing that most precious commodity, the book at the cutting edge. Others have joined this diasporic circle after proving their mettle at the tertiary level in Western universities. The university circle is a travellers' circuit. Conferences, seminars, networking. These activities imbricate movement into the lives of the high-achiever academics. This was true before the dawn of the computer. The computer has multiplied the circuits of knowledge and information. It has not done away with the travel, one of the valued 'perks' of the field. Thus, good academics dwell-in-travel. Their 'universe of being' is oriented towards routes rather than roots, towards intellectual precocity, gymnastics of the mind, and "being there" at the cutting edge of new intellectual frontiers. Their habitus is that of ferment rather than stillness. The Asian intellectuals of Atlanticland are embedded within this circumstance. Embeddedness sustains habitus. In the old sociological vocabulary such a circumstance would be described as a circuit or network of exchange. This should not be read literally to mean known connections among all elements of the circuit. What this describes is a "discursive formation" in the sense marshalled by Foucault: "so many authors who know or don't know one another, criticize one another, invalidate one another, pillage one another, meet without knowing it and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea." Context II Whatever their diversity there is one sort of ferment they all positively hate: that of the virulent nationalist and the religious fundamentalist, whether Judaic, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist or Christian. In a contemporary world criss-crossed and pockmarked by the atrocities of such extremists, whether Bosnia, Sri Lanka, India, Israel, Rwanda, Afghanistan, the instances are manifold, these Asian intellectuals are among those who man the barriers of verbal resistance. This engagement is not restricted to lands beyond the Atlantic. USA and Britain in the late twentieth century have been beset by the problem of "race relations," as it is called, the tension-ridden 'negotiations' between a dominant White world and a subordinate arena of "Blacks" and colourods. As Asians within this immediate environment, the intellectuals under our lens have invariably addressed the issue in their conversations and taken a stand on the side of those subordinated and marginalised. Such intellectual positions constitute a necessary force in the contemporary world. The satirical hue permeating my essay should not obscure this phenomenon or allow any reader to call into question the depth of their commitment to the liberal humanist protests. In this commitment they are heirs to a long strand of rational secular thought in the Western philosophical firmament. In this sense the very nationalisms and racisms they resist are a condition of their being. It is not that an era without nationalist excess would see the disappearance of this corpus of scholars. It is that the strident forms of fundamentalism and nationalism have produced intellectual counter-movements from a number of settings, one of which is the universe of being around Asian intellectuals, who not only dwell-in-travel, but also have a bifocal orientation associated with their occupational location in Atlanticland on the one hand and their links with South Asia on the other. The habitus of travel and exchange, dwelling in the academic corridors of intellectual turbulence, the duality of orientation towards two poles/horizons, all these structuring conditions align many Asian intellectuals towards the virtues of the interstitial and the hybrid. BUT, one cannot have the "hybrid" and the "interstitial" without the relational 'system' and the relatively 'fixed' categories that are differentiated from each other. If everything is hybrid and fluid, there can be no category hybrid. |
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