Transnational Culture, Transnational Identity: The Politics and Ethics of Global Culture Exchange 9780755622870, 9780755631001

Citation preview

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List of Illustrations

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Iason Athanasiadis: Istanbul 2010

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Johana Weber: "Cassandra" from first scene of Hfimintrisma directed by Theodore Terzopoulos

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Dimitris Kalokyris: 0 horos diaspasis ton Somaton (The Space of Bodies' Fracture) 1978 and 2009

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Acknowledgements

This book was a long time in the making, even though it came together in the past year. I have been thinking, and living, transnational culture and identity all my life. T hese essays are a distillation of that thought. Parts of two essays in this book have been previously published: "On Transnational Literacy or, Notes from a Modern Poetics" appeared in Greek in Poitiki 5 (Spring/Summer 2010): 50-62; a shorter version, under the title '"We are all Greeks': T he Case of Three Contemporary Greek Poets," has also been published in Writers Chronicle (May 2011): 34-38. A section of "Speaking in Tongues: T he Grammar of Trans­

national Capital and the Experience of Language" has been published as "Identity, Translation, Transnational Literacy" in 2009 in Man in

India: A Quarter!J International Journal ef Anthropology, Vol. 89 (4): 591597. An earlier version of "Rethinking Rights and the Vision of Cul­ tures 'to Come"' was published in Purushottama Bilimoria and Dina ,\l Kassim, eds, Postcolonial Reason and Its Critique: Deliberations on Gqyatri

SpivakS Thoughts (Oxford, 2012). I want to thank Rasna Dhillon, my initial editor, for encouraging me to imagine these essays as a book, the two readers for their useful comments and the time they spent on the manuscript, and my current editorial team, Maria Marsh and Nadine El-Hadi, for their help in producing it as a book. Emerson College provided the space for finishing it through a sabbatical in the Fall of 2011 and I am grateful for that. Journalist and photographer Iason Athanasiadis, whose extensive and culturally sensitive coverage of the Middle East has won him awards but also landed him in an

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Iranian jail, has gracefully allowed me to use one of his photographs of Istanbul. Dimitris Kalokyris, who is known in Greece for his art as well as his poetry and fiction, has generously provided an image of one of his exquisite art pieces. Constantine Manos, one of the great photographers of the Magnum Group, with multiple exhibitions and many books of his own, has generously provided the cover photo. I am honored that his work is the first thing one sees when picking up this book. Translating Yiorgos Chouliaras's poems has made me acutely aware of language. I am, as always, in awe of his gift with words and credit him for any poetry in my writing. Robert Dulgarian, who has been

reading my work since we were both graduate students at Stanford, has once again applied his acute critical mind to this book and, with Chris­ tina Maranci, he helps me remember histories that must not be forgot­ ten. In Paris, Athens, Spetses, and Boston, Eleni Varikas encourages me to transgress categories of thought I have become too familiar with while :Michael Lowy hones my understanding of Marx and Benja­ min. Flora Gonzalez and Saul Slapikoff fed me delightful feasts when I forgot to eat and listened to my working out of my ideas, always pro­ viding useful feedback. Peter Jeffreys, as the Associate Editor for the Arts and Humanities, has made my first year as editor of the Journal of

Modern Greek Studies easier,

working diligently with me to produce two

issues on time, even as we were both writing our books. My colleagues Nigel Gibson and Yu-Jin Chang are great sources of conversation about work and not only the teaching kind. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Shankar Raman, Diana Henderson, Geeta Patel, Elsa Amanatidou, Shujen Wang, Ilias Kapareliotis, Dusan Bjelic, Othon Iliopoulos, and Bridgit Brown have all been intellectually supportive and offered me breaks when I needed them. Emily Taylor, my research assistant as I was writing this book, has been a find: smart, resourceful, and with impeccable timing for the things I needed to do my work. Every time I visit Athens Odysseas Kollias provides an incompa­ rable home, next to a beautiful sea, with a balcony on which we have all sat many an evening philosophizing about everything, as Greeks are prone to do. Iason Lazaridis's mountain hideaway in Pelion, the moun­ tain of the Muses and where to this day one has the sense of a Centaur

ACKNOWLEDGEMEN'l'S

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hiding in the trees, has become a haven for me and for all the group of friends who make a pilgrimage to it each summer. I am grateful for the care that Constantine Manos and Michael Prodanou provide in Cape Cod, the place they invite me to when they sense I am missing the sea too much. Ioannis Pappos's has been my New York home for years, with his other home, on the tip of that Greek peninsula, a place to hide far from the madding crowd. Rachel Maclnerney and Orla MacCarthy have been delightful friends in Dublin, the place where

this book was first conceived as a book, while Asako Serizawa has been a constant and transcontinental source of intellectual support as well as comfort for the spirit. Panagiotis Karastergiou has taught me at a young age to question everything, to think for myself, and to

fight for what I believe in. He left us too soon: I miss him. In Malaysia and Melbourne Kostas Koundouras and Michelle Lim remind me of what fusion is and not only in the amazing food Michelle cooks. My parents Alexandros Koundouras and Katina Koundoura are the origi­ nal transnational citizens for me, their constant movement between Greece and �.\ustralia the source of my own mobility but also of my rootedness. This book is dedicated to them.

It is difficult to answer the question of where I am from. Clearly not native to any of the places that I live, my accent, usually the occasion for the question of my belonging, is not easily locatable: anywhere I am it marks me as foreign in some kind of way. I have accumulated a series of projected identities over the years in the various places I have lived, serially at first and now concurrently. To Americans I sound English, to Australians I sound American, to Greeks I sound "foreign," not because of my accent but because of my manner. What I sound like to most people clashes with what I look like to them. For Americans, my accent seems dissonant with what they perceive to be my Spanish, Italian, South American, Middle Eastern, hardly ever Greek and certainly never Australian looks. For Australians, I look like some kind of Southern European who sounds American and is unex­ pectedly familiar with Australian expressions. For Greeks, I sound and look Greek but clearly not local, that is, not identifiable with any part of Greece, a place with multiple local accents, where one is identi­ fied by one's regional accent. While this mystery of my nationality shrouds me in the aura of a cosmopolitanism that, on occasion, out of a conscious mimicry, I have embraced, it is an identity that I am not comfortable with. It conceals my immigrant history under the aegis of an intellectual community whose class background I do not histori­ cally share and belong to only through my job. I am not comfortable with the various nationalities that are projected onto me either. To be perceived as some sort of North and/ or South American of some

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European descent in Australia exiles me from the particular history of Australian Greek immigrants I am a part of. It also links me to a history of Europe much different from the one experienced by Aus­ tralians who, despite having an indigenous history, claim a European one, even though they are not part of Europe. At the same time, to be perceived as Spanish or South American, or Chicana or Latina, in the United States makes me an inside outsider there. This is a categoriza­ tion and conflation that I am not comfortable with not only because it does not represent me but also, and primarily, because it elides con­ temporary histories of difference in America in the name of a history of the Americas-the product of an earlier global project-character­ ized by a singular, European, vision. My diaspora Greek's status in Greece, meanwhile, has me be pegged as an outsider in a place where I supposedly belong. These multiple geographies too long a story to tell, I usually claim the airplane as my home. I am always in one on my way to Greece, Australia, and the United States, and, of course, to the various other locations that my work and life take me. Yet the airplane is a metaphor that I am not comfortable with either, and not only because of my long-standing fear of flying. As a means of transportation (since that is what the word metaphor means in Greek) the airplane's bird's-eye view of places (what in spatial theory would be called its panoptic disciplining of space) invokes an epic vision that is too close to the Cartesian foundational fantasy of self-possession and its dependence on an alliance with a strongly marked geographical consciousness. 1 My history of a life lived in multiple locations, and a vision inflected by them, is marked by geography but far from maintaining a stable image of a self, it generates constant difference. The airplane, which links places in a continuum of space through a compression of time without allowing the familiarity of ground travel, is therefore an inade­ quate metaphor for this experience. It is a metaphor that stabilizes dif­ ference, making it the mark of an identity, the locations of whose full coordinates can only be seen from above. In this sense the metaphor of the airplane functions much like the practice of theory, a prac­ tice whose production of spaces and identities, and the politics and power behind this mapping, have been exposed by the postcolonial

INTRODUCTION

3

critique of modernity. l\Iindful of this critique, I use the metaphors of both the airplane and theory to identify my empirical and intellectual home much like I use all the airplanes I board: out of necessity to get me from one place to another. The route, in this instance, takes me from my experience of transnational identity and culture to a book about transnational identity and culture in which that experience is the ground of my theorizing. Its strong link to the tradition of essay writing, whose form has been currently adopted as the personal essay, makes Transnational Culture, Transnational Identity: The Politics and Ethics ef Global Culture Exchange a different kind of academic book. It is not a close study of an author, a concept, or a period. Nor is it a book that coheres or progresses in the conventional cumulative and linear way. Instead, each chapter in the book is an essay that stands on its own. And while each chapter explores a particular aspect of transnational culture and identity and the tools used in their representation, the locations the essays cover are multiple, with the exchanges between and within them performed by a theoretical practice that is aware of its situatedness, of theory's lack of neutrality, of its history of interpretive violence, and of its ability to destroy or create. My aim is to create a model of reading transnational culture by example, that is, through my readings of contemporary texts and the questions of identity and aesthetics, cultural history and present life, globalization and culture that they raise. So much has been written about the implications of the relation­ ship between globalization and culture. The political ones have been directly explored in postcolonial studies, while the aesthetic ones can be found on the margins of the debates on modernism and postmod­ ernism's poetics. Meanwhile, translation studies' concerns with the dif­ ficulty of meaning transmission indirectly allow us to see the ethics at work in global cultural exchange, while in the field of creative writing, with its shifting discourse on craft, we find the empirical effects of the global culture market on writing. Each chapter in Transnational Culture, Transnational Identity: The Politics and Ethics of Global Culture Exchange offers a different snapshot of the history and life of the aesthetic of our moment in modernity, and each situates that moment in the eco­ nomics of the global culture market and the ethics of cultural trans-

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lation while engaging with the cultural politics behind questions of craft. In their identification and characterization of a transnational aesthetic, each chapter attempts to restore to creativity its generative power while articulating a poetics that encompasses the different loca­ tions of contemporary transnational writers. W hen these independent chapters are read as a whole, certain key concepts emerge: the production of social space, the places of mem­ ory, the economics and ethics of the word, the politics of aesthetics. These concepts are the legend for the book's map of the space of transnational writing and they provide key critical points whose inter­ linking provides the unity that coalesces the chapters into a book. Yet the book is not cumulative, that is, it is not built through a horizontal linear movement from chapter to chapter but, rather, results from a constant inside-out movement between chapters: a concept that is the general frame of one chapter is critically engaged with in the par­ ticular examples of another. For example, Walter Benjamin's work on allegory is the critical frame of Chapter 1, "The Spaces of Memory in Transnational Culture," an essay that addresses the question of history in contemporary memoir writing, especially by writers who are classi­ fied as transnational and whose work's politics are allegorized by the rhetoric of temporality of multiculturalism in its local or global form. In Chapter 5, "Reading Lessons: The Writing of Transnational Space," an essay which is a close reading of J. M. Coetzee's 2003 novel Eliza­ beth Costello, Benjaminian allegory is distin!,>uished from the formalists' understanding of allegory as the nature of all reading to found a new practice of reading transnational writing that does not allegorize its politics. Henri Lefebvre's work on space, which is the critical frame­ work of Chapter 5, is engaged with in Chapter 7, "Impossible Spaces/ Familiar Places: The Discourse of Nationalism in the Language of the Transnational," an essay which examines the representational spaces of the nation and their ghostly presence in transnational narratives. At the same time, the rhetoric of temporality of multiculturalism, explored through particular examples in the essays that are Chapters 1 and 4, becomes the frame of Chapter 7's critique of multicultural­

ism's tendencies to be conflated with the transnational. The politics in aesthetics which is the frame of Chapter 2, "Of Dreams and Reality:

IN'fRODUCJ'ION

5

The Politics in Transnational Aesthetics," is exemplified in Chapter 4's, "Rethinking Rights and the Vision of Cultures 'to Come,"' where discussion of the aesthetics in the politics of multiculturalism and the discourse on rights are engaged. This book is not a comprehensive study of transnational culture and its construction of identity. The literary examples are from mul­ tiple countries. Some of the texts are not known outside of their local place of publication in their native language. This is the case with the Greek texts that I translate and write about here. Others are published nationally and internationally in English, the language that dominates translation across the world. Yet geography alone, that is, their origin outside of a national context like the United States, is not the reason I categorize them as transnational. Some texts are from inside a national tradition but are classified as other. But transnational is not a synonym for multicultural literature either. Nor is it a synonym for global or world literature. Rather, the essays in this book identify transnational literature by its forms, its negotiation of time, and its production of a space that does not nostalgically point either to that of the nation or to a future devoid of nations. They situate the texts they engage with in the historical context of their production and point to these texts' particular practices of observation and not only just to the objects of their creative gaze. In other words, the essays engage with how these texts write and not just with what they have written. By their refusal to present the texts that they read only as objects of their own critical gaze, each essay also points to its own practice of observation. In this way, the essays in this book ask the reader to think about the spaces of thought that produce representations but also the spaces that con­ sume them. Through this practice, they reveal the ethics at work in transnational literacy, a critical and creative practice first proposed as necessary for reading contemporary culture by Gayatri Spivak.2 Trans­ national literacy infuses current writing's and critical practice's cosmo­ politan literariness with an understanding of "restricted permeability," that is, the knowledge that there is an "egregious agenda" behind all literal and cultural attempts at translation. 3 That agenda is part of the politics of a global cultural exchange whose language is the lingua franca of global capital in which people, as Max Horkheimer and The-

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odor Adorno, presciently argued in their 194 7 essay on the culture industry, use words and expressions that they "either have ceased to understand at all or use only according to their behavioral functions," thereby rendering words "petrified and alien" with the "violence" done to them "no longer audible in them."4 This book sifts through the ruins of this landscape in an attempt not to transcend it but to identify the social conditions that produced it and to give voice to some of the memories that have been lost in it. Yet this book is neither elegiac nor celebratory. It is a realistic, but not realist, representation of contemporary culture. A realist representa­ tion would be constantly aiming at building bridges from here to there, as J.M. Coetzee tells us in his concise and brilliant representation and critique of realism in the first page of his 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello.5 No bridges are built in Transnational Culture, Transnational Identity: The Politics and Ethics of Global Culture Exchange. The connections between the essays are the result of the space of its production, which is part of the global cultural exchange facilitated by capitalism's current flows, and are ghostly traces of this space. Some of the essays were written in Boston before they were conceived as a book during a short stay in Dublin, at the encouragement of my then editor in London. One essay was written in Melbourne, Australia, another in Athens, Greece, and the final ones in Boston again. All the essays reflect my ongoing intellectual engagement with transnational culture and iden­ tity. It is an engagement whose concerns are not only theoretical, that is, part of the space of the conceived, the space that Henri Lefebvre has illustrated as factitiously separated from the spaces of the lived and perceived under capitalism.6 What began as a primarily theoretical exploration of the role of the intellectual in the age of multinational capital in my graduate work at Stanford became also a historical one in my first book, The Greek Idea: The -Formation of National and Transnational Identities. In that book I worked through the example of the rediscov­ ery of Greece in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by English intellectuals and addressed their role in shaping not only the discourse of western culture's modernity but also the discourse of national and transnational Greekness. In Transnational Culture, Transnational Identity: The Politics and Ethics ef Global Culture Exchange the role of the intel-

INTRODUCTION

7

lectual in multinational capital is a lived experience exploration. Lived experience, the everyday, as we know from Lefebvre, in its internal­ izing of the perceived, the conceived, and the lived, is the starting point for the realization of the possible. The everyday, he persistently argued, is a space, the only space, which brings "wisdom, knowledge, and power to judgment."7 My hope is that I have lived up to the prom­ ise of my everyday in this book.

1 The Spaces of Memory in Transnational Culture

In what language does one write memoirs when there has been no authorized mother tongue? How does one utter a worthwhile 'I recall?' -Jacques Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other

Memory, loss, and memoir As the literary equivalent of memory, the memoir claims that each of us has a story to tell and the potential to introduce complexity, through the individual voice, into the supposedly shared common nar­ rative of history. The current popularity of memoir might give one the impression that we are living in an age where history is made by all and expressed by all: a time when not only those whom Roland Barthes described as the "uncontested owners of the language" can lay claim not only to authorship but also to the shaping of history.1 W hile this fantasy might be worth pursuing if we wanted to maintain the fiction of memoir's intimacy with life, modern capitalist culture makes that rather difficult. It seems that in the modern world we are constantly fending off shock and loss. As Walter Benjamin observes in his much discussed essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," collective, reflective, communal experience has been replaced in modernity by the more solitary lived experience, and, as a result, impressions enter less often into experience, "tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour of one's life." "Perhaps," he goes on to suggest, "the special achieve-

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ment of the shock defense may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents."2 Benjamin, in other words, seems to be implying here that the gains in awareness of a specific memory that the shock defense brings to us are the losses in truth. Joan Did­ ion's claim regarding truth in memoir in relation to fiction (and the unspoken genre of history that haunts this relationship) illustrates the effects of what Benjamin diagnoses as experience in modernity. As she writes in "On Keeping a Notebook," if you remember it, it is true. Constructed as a constellation of the author's recollections, memoir rejects the comforting familiarity of chronological narrative in favor of discrete moments that approach, yet always refuse to coalesce into, a complete picture. At the very least, it is impossible for memoir to be complete, because if it could be, the author would not be writing it, since the complete picture of their life would have to include their death. For the same reason it is also impossible for memoir to give a complete picture of collective experience, a common history, despite the fact that readers tend to interpret most memoirs, especially from transnational writers, as representing their whole community. While memoir cannot recover collective experience for us, much like alle­ gory, it can offer us a critical simulacrum of its loss. Allegory, according to Benjamin, is the formal feature par excel­ lence of the transient and the irretrievable. Unlike symbol, with its holistic, mystical, vision of time, where all is understood to be seen in an instant, allegory points only to the dated and the worldly, to seek­ ing, not seeing.3 In other words, allegory points not to redemption, but only to the Fall itself. Hence its function as an object is critical and mortifying rather than harmonizing and reconciling. Benjamin encapsulates this distinction in The Origin ef German Tragic Drama by claiming that, "whereas in the Symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with ...history as a petrified, primordial landscape."4 Benjamin uses the image of the ruin to help us understand his definition of allegory. Where the sym­ bol points beyond history and towards ontological truths, allegorical form, so dated and lifeless, points towards the ruin's place in what

THL SPACES

or

MEMORY

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Benjamin calls "the now of contemporary actuality." The ruin exists as ruin in the present, accruing more and more fragments, which only serve to intensify its sense of mourning and loss, its persistent yet melancholy denunciation of totality. 5 For Benjamin, ruins are like the formal elements of works of art, whose truth is reached only through the recognition of their transient position as cultural ruins. For him, form decays historically: its truth is its loss, that is, its historical decay. This decay prevents history being read as anything but a collection of disarticulated fragments, set in relation to a totality that is, of course, for the Marxist Benjamin, in the hands of capital.6 This is why, for Benjamin, if the ruin continues to exist after its meanings have been shed or lost, these meanings display themselves as historical, that is, as subject to transitory nature and to politics and power. ,\nd, rather than attempting to recover what was eternal and beautiful about the work, the artist/ critic explores the work as ruin, as failed transient form. This kind of exploration informs Orhan Pamuk's 2005 memoir Istanbul.- Memories and the City (originally published in Turkish in 2003). The city of Istanbul, with its self-referential name, from the Greek rn;; TYJV 11:6A.tv (to/in the city), still referred to by my fellow Greeks as "the

City" without "Constantine" before it, is Pamuk's work of art. It is the object he explores as a ruin, open to him (and us) through history and language, both of which are subject to nature, itself subject to histori­ cal thought. Pamuk carefully plots all of these fragments for us in his detailed descriptions of the history and life of Istanbul, in his read­ ings of its major authors, his account of the Turkification of Istanbul, and of its current life under globalization.7 He turns the city, at least initially, into a symbol of the cosmopolitan reverie of his youth. "To escape the hybrid lettered hell of the city, I conjured up a golden age, a pure and shining moment when the city 'was at peace with itself,' when it was a 'beautiful whole,"' he writes, only to acknowledge later that that was because he had "not yet attuned himself " to the "melancholy that gave the city its gravitas."8 "\X'hy should we expect a city to cure us of our spiritual pains?" he goes on to ask at the end of an almost four hundred page memoir that juxtaposes his memories as a child and young adult with those of the city of Istanbul and names them both as huzun, melancholy.9 The answer to his question of why we have

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expectations of the city is not the one he immediately gives: "because we cannot help loving our city like family." Rather, it is found in his engagement with the city's transient forms: "the ruined old wooden houses; the old Greek neighborhood of Feuer [Phanarion], still half abandoned due to relentless state oppression . .. Topkapi Palace, Suley­ maniye Mosque, and the silhouette of Istanbul's hills, mosques, and churches." These forms listed here, and found throughout Istanbul, are forms of the physical city. Its aesthetic ones, however-the liter­ ary representations of the city by Turkish writers like Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Resad Ekrem K0