Worlding Multiculturalisms

The Politics of Inter-Asian Dwelling

Daniel P. S. Goh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138104136
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317671657
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Worlding multiculturalisms are practices that infuse our arbitrary cultural lives with new things from other cultures in poetic ways to enable us to dwell and be at home with the complexity of the world. In the context of the crisis of multiculturalism in the West and the growing obsolescence of state-based multiculturalism in the postcolonial world, this book offers examples of new practices of worlding multiculturalisms that go beyond issues of immigration, integration and identity.

Contrasting Western and Asian notions of multiculturalism, this book does not focus on state issues, but rather, highlights manifestations of cultural exchange. The chapters draw on cultural studies approaches to document instances of worlding multiculturalisms that bring Asian cultures into conflict, dialogue and settlement with each other. Instances include an Asian American return novel set in Penang, the cultural productions and street performances of democracy marches in Malaysia, the campaigns to reclaim public spaces and citizenship rights by migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, the imaginary vistas opened up by Japanese popular culture consumed throughout Asia, the localisations of casino complexes in Macau and a shopping mall in Seoul, and an old municipal cemetery being defended from urban redevelopment in Singapore. Rather than merely globalizing forms of political diversity, these are instances with the potential to transform social relations and the very terms of cultural exchange.

Worlding Multiculturalisms offers a truly interdisciplinary examination of multiculturalism in action. As such, it will appeal to students and scholars of cultural studies, Asian studies, Asian culture and society, cultural anthropology and sociology and political sociology.

Part I

Inter-subjects

1 “Dreams of colliding worlds”

Worlding multiculturalism in Lawrence Chua’s Gold by the Inch

Chih-ming Wang

Introduction

In a multicultural world order often coded in the discourse of civilizational clash, how do we reconsider multiculturalism in the transnational context, or rather, how do we narrate the geopolitics of multiculturalism as it becomes all too often reified in a national frame? Responding to the call to “world” multiculturalisms, as proposed by Daniel Goh in this volume, as a way to shift the discourse of multiculturalism away from its Eurocentrism and to offer a new sociology of culture to reinvigorate the theory of multiculturalism, this article focuses on Lawrence Chua’s 1998 novel, Gold by the Inch, to provide a transnational viewpoint for rethinking multiculturalism as a liberatory, worlding project, and to inquire what a hybrid, diasporic, and queer Asian American text has to offer for rearticulating the theory of multiculturalism through the disjunctive, inter-Asian, and transpacific histories of neo/post/colonialism.

Written in the first-person narrative, Gold by the Inch describes an Asian American’s exotic, erotic trip to Bangkok and his return to Penang, Malaysia, in search of the memory of his grandmother, who embodies the rooted multiculturalism of Southeast Asia as a nexus of desire, migration, colonialism, and capital, East and West. The text is a poetic and critical weaving of multiple histories—of both the narrator and the region—that hinges upon the quest for queer desire to be fulfilled in the exchange of money and body, and the narrative of return as defined by the inaccessibility of origin. An “Asian American” novel that reaches beyond the geographical frontiers of America and relinquishes the obsession with a resistant and positive identity, Gold by the Inch introduces a decadent, self-reflexive, queer view into the existing discourses of multiculturalism by outlining how the capitalist colonial domination inheres in the eclipse of the multicultural history on the ground, the history of the outcast and the downtrodden. In doing so, it reminds us of the liberatory promise of multiculturalism and how it is linked to the aspirations of queer freedom and labor migration. Moreover, in depicting an Asian American subject as both a quester for roots and a consumer of sex, the text breaks new grounds for Asian American literature, asking us to face the tension of transnational encounters while holding fast to the dream of interethnic alliance. Multiculturalism, cast in this light, is not about embracing an ethnic or cultural origin, but living in a world made of colliding dreams.

Multiculturalism reconsidered

Multiculturalism, as a discourse and policy developed in the North American contexts and elsewhere, is arguably a response to the history of immigration and the minorities’ insistent claims of identity and difference. It has evolved from the liberalist perspective of “tolerance” and “recognition” to accommodate differences—often of indigenous and other minority groups—within and to bestow citizenship rights in the names of equality and justice, accompanied by capitalist attempts at reifying difference and commodifying identity, to the more radical stance of claiming diversity as the fundamental value in any social and cultural formations. Articulated within and against the assumed homogeneity of the national culture, multiculturalism represents an assorted and contested response to the impact of migration that has literally challenged borders of every kind. It also names the necessary and creative practices of living in and with a multifaceted, heterogeneous world. As David Theo Goldberg writes,

Irrepressible traces of heterogeneity, however tenuous, dot any mapping of human histories.… Even in the face of the most extremely repressive forms of imposed homogeneity, the inevitable cultural hybridity that heterogeneity licenses promotes the renewable possibilities of playing novel expression.… This entails (perhaps as an inductive generalization) a commitment to expand and extend possible spaces for articulating heterogeneous multiplication and mixing and to proliferate multiplicity because of the value of heterogeneity. In this sense, heterogeneity is the condition and outcome, the value and challenge, the danger and cost of living freely.

(1994: 28; original emphasis)

Though written almost two decades ago, Goldberg’s statement is worthy of our revisiting because it keeps alive a dynamic doubleness that envisions multiculturalism at once as the condition of life and the dream of an alternative future that one must engage, cultivate, and work towards. More importantly, it envisions the human history as a dynamic process of cross-border interactions and maintains a liberatory promise so often overlooked by the obsession with identity and politics of recognition. Laurent Berlant and Michael Warner have contended that multiculturalism does not have to mean the espousal of identity and authenticity of an ethnic group, but can instead connote “a scene of complex and always changing histories that cannot be reduced rhymingly to a face, a post-modern place, or the heritage of an abandoned space” (1994: 107). As Asian American activist musician Chris Iijima noted, Asian American identity was “meant to be a means to an end rather than an end in itself … it was less a marker of what one was and more a marker of what one believed” (2000: 7). In other words, multiculturalism mattered, not because minority groups (ethnic and other kinds) would receive from it an identity and a chance to share the power long held from them through tokenist representation, but because by gaining access to power and the institutions from which it operates, minority groups will be freed from the shackles of oppression and exclusion, and through these struggles a new world will arise. Angela Davis has contended in The Meaning of Freedom that winning equal access in the fight for freedom and equality is not enough:

If we simply demand equal access for people of color to the military, equal access of women to combat, equal access of gays and lesbians to the military, we end up supporting a superficial multiculturalism that allows the institutions it supposedly transforms to continue to function in the old way.… Instead of transforming dominant culture, dominant culture enlists new sectors to impose itself and perpetuate its way.

(2012: 101)

What is needed, in Davis’s view, is not the market representation of differences offered by capitalism, but true democratic participation to shake capitalist rules. Multiculturalism is about transforming the existing structures of power and about making the world over by unleashing its repressed constituency. At the very least, it is about rediscovering and understanding the colliding histories and dreams that made the world and retaining the hope for social transformation.

Lisa Yoneyama has recently argued that the liberal multiculturalism with which Asian American studies thrived as a celebratory discourse on diversity and identity shares simultaneity with Cold War geopolitics that also posits ethnonational differences as the basis of its knowledge production (i.e., area studies) to cope with the consequence of decolonization. She indicates that “the liberal rendering of the world through the terms of ethno-national cultural differences and diversity has effectively served as a discursive mechanism for the Cold War management of the postwar world” (2012: 296). In other words, while ethnic studies and area studies developed with different agendas, the emphasis on ethno-nationally based identity and difference can be traced to the same Cold War origin that demarcated the postwar, postcolonial world through reified national differences and animated East Asia through the promotion of modernization theory. In his reading of Go for Broke, a 1951 movie about the reformation of Japanese American image from internal enemies to valiant patriots, T. Fujitani explains how Japanese American model minority image “coincides in both logic and historical timing with the construction of a discourse on Japan as the honorary White nation” (2001: 253). In propelling postwar Japan to the height of economic growth in the 1980s, Fujitani argues, modernization theory remade Japan as a “global model minority,” successfully incorporated into the system of global capitalism and coerced into a tutelary relationship with the United States. This tutelary relationship applied to both Asians and Asian Americans in the Cold War era as they struggled to be recognized as hardworking model citizens and obedient loyal allies.

Focusing on the dis/placement of Vietnamese refugees and the accompanying discourse of the gift of freedom, Mimi Thi Nguyen also finds liberal multiculturalism “traceable to Cold War biopolitics and transformed under neoliberalism” (2012: 142), for the survival of the refugees is said to be “indebted” to the liberal empire that both destroyed their home and saved them. Articulated through the discursive junctures of war, salvation, gift, and debt, liberal multiculturalism interlocks the domestic and the transnational, and the geopolitical with the biopolitical. “The gift of freedom” that Nguyen takes to suggest the transpacific transposition of liberal multiculturalism as the exchange of one’s freedom with others’ sacrifices, thus brings together “civic rhetorics and initiatives about diversity, enrichment, and enfranchisement as well as state measures … and programs incorporating immigrants into the civic and capital order” (143). The incorporation of immigrants in turn facilitated the expansion of capital and imperial order in the world.

While these scholars have provided a holistic picture of Asian American transnationality for a penetrating analysis of liberal multiculturalism as politically suspicious, it is crucial to remember that such multiculturalism is exceptional to the United States as an empire and overlooking the complex process of cultural mixing on the ground. It is significant that our understanding of multiculturalism not be confined to the North American focus on racialized subjects seeking upward mobility and assimilation, but rather be attentive to how the mobile subject, known as a diasporic, enables an opening to other multicultural formations through intersected stories of migration.

Immigration is the linchpin for conceiving multiculturalism as both a structural change to come and a fact of change. North American multiculturalism is linked to the diversity of cultures outside North America and thrives on their constant supply of immigrants. The production of ethnicity in North America thus affirms the existence and authenticity of national cultures in the non-Western worlds. It incorporates an imagination of the world codified in a postcolonial, Cold War geopolitical order where ethnicities within correlates with putative countries of origin, setting in motion a transpacific passage to modernity embodied by the figure of Asian American. More importantly, through the elevation of the immigrant as a transnational and multicultural figure in North America, it has come to embody the modernity that Asian countries have yet to arrive. Multiculturalism is thus imagined as a state of development to reach through modernization, rather than an organic formation of the local history. To avoid replicating the implied telos of liberal multiculturalism as a universal, it is important that we shift our attention away from North America to Third World Asia where multicultural dwelling is an everyday practice.

Stories of diasporic return thus constitute a productive point of entry because while the idea of roots can also be a putative origin that one cannot return to—fabricated by loss, nostalgia, inherited memories, and even immediate political needs—the desire for it, as Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller remind us in Rites of Return, exercises “a right to acknowledgement” that can be “directed back toward the past, sideways to detours and alternate trajectories, and as a critique of the present, forward toward the future” (2011: 18). Return not only signifies a nostalgia for things past or a will to reclaim and resettle, but also a passage to knowledge, to the occluded history of dispossession and displacement where “a scene of complex and always changing histories”—irreducible to simple claims of identity—can be brought to bear on new possibilities of recognition and negotiation. Moreover, it foregrounds Asian American as an estranged figure, both inside and outside the local history, to problematize notions of border and belonging. We should resist the urge to read return as the quest for roots, but rather as an unforeseeable encounter with intersected histories and worldly engagements within and beyond the national border to stake a critical view from below for renewing the meaning of multiculturalism.

Focusing on Gold by the Inch, a story about an Asian American returnee’s quest for love and belonging in the capitalist and eroticized Southeast Asia, this article deems multiple and intersected histories of migration as attempts at worlding multiculturalism as creative and critical practices of dwelling, on unfinished routes and uncertain roots. Rob Wilson suggests that worlding is about deworlding and reworlding—namely, the ability to resist and deconstruct the world of Capital that empire feeds us, and the critical sensitivity to produce nuanced and situated tactics to surface alternative imaginings of the world we inhabit. To counter the capitalist vision of globalization, Wilson contends that “Worlding needs to become a kind of trans-critical process of listening to and caring for one’s own life-world as well as the related and emergent species being of others” (2007: 213). What is at stake is the possibility of retrieving and holding present the world that is on the brink of being lost to us, the ability to see beneath the superficial, and the endeavor to dwell in its heterogeneous complexity. Looking at how Chua’s queer protagonist re-charts the world through shards of family history to restore the promise of liberation from the debris of history crushed by Capital, I submit that worlding multiculturalism cannot be an attempt to merely recognize different cultures as equal and incommensurable. Rather, it should be an attempt to explore and expound the worldly meanings of multicultural formations, and the worldly connections one may have with one another, at certain times in the circle of solidarity and collaboration, and at other times in the forms of coercion, exploitation, and domination. Our task is not deciding what worlds to include, but understanding how they are formed and framed by historical forces. As an imagination of worldly linkages in “deep times,”¹ multiculturalism therefore must confront the complexity of roots and the impossibility of returning to them.

Money boys for queer folks: Bangkok

Published in 1998, Gold by the Inch is written in the first-person voice about the narrator’s heady relationship with Thong, a money boy, in Bangkok and his search of grandmother in Penang, Malaysia. It is an unusual “Asian American” novel that finely weaves together a return narrative with a critique of the capitalist-colonial formation of Southeast Asia as a land of desire, labor, and exploitation. The novel begins with the narrator-protagonist’s arrival in Bangkok and his instant courtship with Thong. Their searing romance triggers the narrator’s memories that constitute the novel with multiple flashbacks, especially his relationship with the wealthy Caucasian architect named Jim who ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Inter-subjects
• Part II Empowerments
• Part III Dwellings
• Index