Locating Transnational Ideals

Walter Goebel, Saskia Schabio, Walter Goebel, Saskia Schabio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136603877
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

This volume defines versions of the transnational in their historical and cultural specificity. By "locating," the contributors contextualize historical and contemporary understandings of the fluid term "transnational," which vary in relation to the disciplines involved. This kind of historical and geographical "locating" implicitly turns against forms of contemporary transnational euphoria which, inspired by poststructural models of all-encompassing semiospheres, on the one hand, and by visions of the utopian communicative potential of new media like the internet, on the other, see national and ethnic paradigms as easily superseded by transnational agendas. By differentiating between various forms of transnational ideals and ideas in historical and geographical perspective since the Renaissance, the contributors aim to rediscover distinctions -- for instance between transnationalisms and cosmopolitanisms -- which neo-liberal transnational euphoria has tended to erase.

Part I

Defining the Transnational and the Cosmopolitan

1 Globalization, Transnation and Utopia

Bill Ashcroft

Where is the border between an idea and an ideal? Is it perhaps not so much a border as a shifting space, a contact zone of observation and hope? Post-colonial studies has occupied this space for some time, observing the capacity of colonized peoples to take hold of the technologies that may be repressing them and transforming them for their own purposes. Literary writing is a prime example of this, for the use of English has been impelled by a deep utopian desire for liberation. What happens when we direct our attention beyond the post-colonial to the wider region of the globe itself? What does post-colonial analysis have to say? This chapter enters this space of hope with an idea about the agency of peoples in a transnational world that doesn’t shrink from its function as an ideal. This idea is the concept of the transnation, a way of seeing the mobility and agency of peoples beyond the category of the international, beyond the category of the transnational as simply a movement between nations. The transnation begins within the nation. It is not an ontological object but a way of understanding the possibility of ordinary people avoiding, dodging, circumventing the inevitable claims of the state upon them.

To approach this ‘idea/l,’ to discover why post-colonial theory enables us to address global issues, we need first to examine the relationship between post-colonial theory and globalization studies over the past two decades. The cultural turn in globalization studies during the 1990s was due almost entirely to post-colonial analyses of culture. Something quite significant happened during the 1990s in globalization discourse, something that both reinstated the local and confirmed the value of the humanities in understanding globalization itself, particularly the phenomenon of global culture. No longer could globalization be addressed purely in terms of political economy or development theory. The rise of the cultural discourse of globalization, what we may call its ‘cultural turn’, during the 1990s is due almost entirely to the prominence of post-colonial theory and analysis. Global economics has always been cultural, the grounding of capitalism in the culture of imperialism having been a critical feature of European modernity. But the sheer extent and impersonal transnational power of globalization as it developed towards the end of the twentieth century seemed to divorce the cultural from the economic, because it seemed to divorce the local from the global. The language of post-colonialism provided a way of talking about the engagement of the global by the local, particularly local cultures, and, most importantly, provided a greatly nuanced view of globalization that developed from its understanding of the complexities of imperial relationships.

Varied as the discourses of post-colonialism and globalization might be, according to Simon Gikandi,

they have at least two important things in common: they are concerned with explaining forms of social and cultural organization whose ambition is to transcend the boundaries of the nation state, and they seek to provide new vistas for understanding cultural flows that can no longer be explained by a homogenous Eurocentric narrative of development and social change. (Gikandi 2001: 627)

Now this is certainly true, but what makes post-colonial theory so useful is its ability to comprehend the postmodern movement of culture beyond the nation state at the same time as it addresses the particularity of the (largely non-Western) local. It has developed a language for questioning the imperial cartography that has defined global relations since the early modern period. This language needed to be adopted because by the 1990s globalization could no longer be explained in terms of traditional social science models. Globalization constitutes what Appadurai calls “a complex overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models.” (Appadurai 1996: 32) He makes a crucial distinction between older forms of modernity, whose goal was the rationalization of the world in Weberian terms, to the symbolic economy of a new global culture based on reciprocal rather than hierarchical relationships.

While Appadurai talks about the “symbolic economy of the new global culture” (Appadurai 1996: 32) there is no doubt that, as Featherstone says, “part of the attraction of postcolonial theory to questions of globalization lies precisely in its claim that culture, as a social and conceptual category, has escaped ‘the bounded nation state society’ and has become the common property of the world.” (Featherstone 1990: 2) Bhabha makes this point when he stresses that post-colonial theory makes a critical departure from “the traditions of sociology of underdevelopment and dependency theory,” as a mode of analysis, post-colonial theory “disavows any nationalist or nativist pedagogy that sets up the relations of third world and first world in a binary structure of opposition, recognizing that the social boundaries between first and third worlds are far more complex.” (Bhabha 1991: 63)

Why the humanities in general and post-colonial theory in particular became dominant in the descriptions of global culture can be explained in two ways: first, the systematization of post-colonial theory occurred at about the same time as the rise to prominence of globalization studies in the late 1980s. Second, and more importantly, it was around this time that literary and cultural theorists became convinced that the debates on globalization that had dominated disciplines such as sociology and anthropology had become hopelessly mired in the classical narrative of modernity, in dependency theory and in centre/periphery models. It was through cultural practices that difference and hybridity, diffusion and the imaginary, concepts that undermined the Eurocentric narrative of modernity, were most evident. Not surprisingly, the interpolation of post-colonial theory in the analysis of globalization and the mainstreaming of cultural discourse has meant the reappearance of the local, though characteristically, now a local culture much more ambivalent and much more globally inflected than that rural backwater dismissed by modernity.

This post-colonial revolution in globalization discourse took the debate beyond a view of the encounter between local and global as simply abusive and hierarchical. Now we could see two dynamic patterns of interaction accounting for the nature of global flows, the transformation of the global by the local and the circulation of the local in the global. Both of these insert the twin forces of cultural representation and cultural reciprocation within the modernist networks of nation and capital. In both transformation and circulation, structural hierarchies are replaced by a concept of flow between the local and the global.

A strategic feature of this intervention was the critique of the nation. The nation has been a common target for post-colonial studies, as an exclusionary, rather than inclusive political formation, perpetuating colonial power by reinstating the administrative structures of imperial control. In the old global order, the nation was the reality and category that enabled the socialization of subjects, and hence the structuralization of cultures; now, in transnationality, the nation has become an absent structure.

The nation is still an apparatus of enormous symbolic power, but it is also the mechanism that produces “a continual slippage of categories, like sexuality, class affiliation, territorial paranoia, or ‘cultural difference.’” (Bhabha 1994: 140) One of the key assumptions of modernity, and indeed of nations themselves, has been that cultures are, by their nature, national in character. The discovery that culture, as well as capital, can actually flow beyond national boundaries undermines the modern narrative of nation, and the last two decades have seen a concerted attack on the idea of the modern nation state as a repository of culture. Led in large measure by post-colonial theory, the global imaginary has been characterized by heterogeneity, hybridity, fluidity and movement; by the emerging transnational character of culture; by the transformation of the global at the level of the local and the diasporic circulation of local cultures throughout the globe.

However, the nation as an open cultural site, a transnational site, needs to be re-considered principally because of the effects of two cultures: India and China. It is these two societies that will assert the prominence of economies driven by cultural forces in the twenty-first century. And the phenomenon of their emergence may also force us to reconsider the importance of the nation as a cultural phenomenon, a horizontal reality separate from the vertical authority of the state. Culture still escapes the bounded nation state society because pre-modern culture already exceeds the boundaries of the nation state and operates beyond its political strictures through the medium of the local. In this excess lie the seeds of the transnation.

The Transnation as ‘In-Betweenness’

The transnation is more than ‘the international’ or ‘the transnational’, which might more properly be conceived as a relation between states. Transnation is the fluid, migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation. This is possibly most obvious in India where the ‘nation’ is the perpetual scene of translation, but translation is but one example of the movement, the ‘betweenness’ by which the subjects of the transnation are constituted. It is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. Nevertheless, the ‘transnation’ does not refer to an object in political space. It is a way of talking about subjects in their ordinary lives, subjects who live in-between the positivities by which subjectivity is normally constituted.

The transnation is an ‘in-between’ space, which contains no one definitive people, nation or even community, but is everywhere, a space without boundaries. Singaporean critic Rajeev Patke suggests that for a city-state like Singapore, populated by ‘descendants of migrants’ and cut across by globalism, it is only apt that histories, stories, bodies and values exist in “a state of in-betweenness.” (Patke 2002: 113) For him, this in-betweenness can wrest historical objects from the trappings of nostalgia that are so prevalent in Singapore’s urbanscape. Patke is talking about art as a means of disrupting the inexorable pull of national closure and control in the city nation. The title of his essay “To Frame a City” becomes ironic in this context as the nation continually exceeds the frame.

The term ‘in-betweenness’ is a word that circumvents the problematic, organic nature of that most contentious term—‘hybridity’. It also gets closer to the actual contingent and liminal state of all contemporary subjects. But it still suggests location without acknowledging the agency of subjects in their interstitial subjectivity. Reading an interview with James Clifford recently, I came back to the word ‘articulation’ which returns to the subject the principal of agency as it navigates the shoals of traditional and contemporary identity. Rather than an organic hybrid

[t]he whole is more like a cyborg, or a political coalition. The elements are more contingent. A body could have three arms or one arm depending on the context. It can hook elements of its structure onto elements of another structure often in unexpected ways [ . . . ] the whole question of authenticity or inauthenticity is set aside. There is no problem in picking up and rehooking to your structure something that had either been blown off, forgotten, or had been taken off for tactical reasons. You can reconstruct yourself. (Borofsky 2000: 97)

When we use the term ‘articulation’, then, we don’t fall into the trap of thinking of ‘in-betweenness’ as being lost or undecided or absent, as being unheimlich. Clifford showed how the people of the Pacific have perfected the art of cultural articulation, but it is true of all diasporic subjects in this radically moving and migrating world. Reconstructing yourself includes ‘hooking on’ or discarding nationality, tradition, modernity, religion in ways that confound accepted notions of identity. After Appadurai we are inclined to use the terms ‘fluidity’ and ‘flows’ when describing global culture and even diasporic subjectivity itself. But the idea of ‘articulation’ returns us to the rather spasmodic and contingent way in which subjects ‘hook on’ the various subject positions they may occupy, returning us to the very powerful element of individual agency in the process.

Transnation and Diaspora

A route for post-colonial studies lies now in the dispersal and constant movement of diasporic populations who adopt English as a form of cultural articulation. Ironically, the theoretical reappearance of the nation may provide us with a way to cut through the arguments surrounding the concept of diaspora. I say ironically, because this is a community understood as fundamentally absent from the nation, crippled by absence, loss and alienation. But the constitution of the nation as already in some way transnational circumvents this.

The definition of ‘diaspora’ has been a site of contestation since the 1970s. In the very first issue of the journal Diaspora William Safran defined diaspora thus:

The concept of diaspora [can] be applied to expatriate minority communities whose members share several of the following characteristics: 1) they, or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original ‘centre’ to two or more ‘peripheral’ or foreign regions; 2) they retain a collective memory, vision or myth about their original homeland—its physical location, history and achievements; 3) they believe that they are not—and perhaps cannot be—fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulated from it; 4) they regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and the place to which they or their descendents would (or should) eventually return—when conditions are appropriate; 5) they believe they should collectively be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their homeland and to its safety and prosperity; and 6) they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship. (Safran 1991: 83)

This definition, because of its scope, has provided something for every theorist to attack ever since; James Clifford and Paul Gilroy questioned the notion that diasporas are dispersed from a centre, citing the circulatory movements of indigenous groups in the Pacific and the Black populations in the Atlantic; the collective memory of an original homeland has no meaning for the black diaspora in the Americas; the idea that they cannot be fully accepted does not apply to the ‘third wave’ of professional transnational immigrants. The commitment to a homeland decreases rapidly for the second and third generation diaspora. The various aspects of this definition have been contested in one way or another many times over. But Safran provided a valuable service, for he set down a range of criteria upon which diasporic experience could be assessed, and he provided a kind of theoretical sounding board by characterizing the diaspora in a way that has pervaded diasporic studies ever since—as a matter of absence and loss, of alienation and not-at-homeness. Clearly this experience of exile and loss does not adequately describe the experience of all diasporic subjects, nor of any subject all the time. Nor does it accommodate the most pronounced feature of global culture—the rapidly increasing ability to travel back and forth between ‘homes’. Thus the concept of diaspora has been a constant source of argument, and a rapidly changing phenomenon, for the last thirty-five years. Definitions of diaspora simply cannot keep pace with their subject.

What do we do, for instance, with Chinese Australian photographer William Yang? What do we do with Japanese British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, or Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee, or Malaysian-American writer Shirley Lim, or Chinese, Dutch, Indonesian, Australian cultural theorist Ien Ang? The list could go on. It is heavily populated by, but not limited to, artists, filmmakers and writers whose constituency is global. But these are not members of a group who feel displaced, who feel that return is difficult or impossible, who identify in various symbolic or ethnic ways with a diasporic community. They may identify with no ‘nation’, ethnic group, cultural or immigrant group completely, if at all. Yet they announce the vibrant, productive and exciting circulation of global transformations and above all of the creative potential of ‘in-betweenness’.

This sense of empowerment accorded to the transnational subject by the principles of articulation and in-betweenness, the rejection of the central assumption of diaspora studies that diasporic populations are characterized by absence and loss, may appear to overlook that very great number of people who have been exiled from a sense of home. In Paul Gilroy’s terms we may appear to be in danger of assuming that ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Defining the Transnational and the Cosmopolitan
• PART II Historicizing the Transnational and the Cosmopolitan
• PART III Redefining Transnationalism(s) vs. International Commodification
• List of Contributors
• Index