Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists.

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TRAVELING THEORIES TRAVELING THEORISTS

Edited by James Clifford Vivek Dhareshwar

Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse & The Center Cultural Studies WG S.C:

for

Inscriptions is an occasional volume brought out by the Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse and the Center for Cultural Studies. (ISSN 0899-666)

Volume 5: Traveling Theories: Traveling Theorists,

1989

Volume Editors: James Clifford, Vivek Dhareshwar Editorial Committee:

Faith Beckett,

James Clifford, Vivek

Dhareshwar, Mary E. John.

Special thanks to Geoff Batchen, Satish Deshpande, and Vicki Kirby for their work on the "Predicaments of Theory" Conference Committee. Word Processing: Diana Luellen Copy Editor: Deborah Cary Work Study: Roia Ferragallo Cultural Studies: Meg Kaminski

For individual copies of Inscriptions, send $5.00 ($10.00 for institutions), payable to U. C. Regents in U.S. dollars. Subscriptions for 2 volumes $7.50 (students and unemployed), $12.00 (employed), $18.00 (institutions).

© 1989 Center for Cultural Studies, Oakes College, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064.

CONTENTS Preface Lata Mani

Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception

Vicente L. Rafael

Imagination and Imagery: Filipino Nationalism in the 19th Century

ZS

Postcolonial Feminists in the Western Intellectual Field: Anthropologists and Native Informants?

49

Locating the Anthropological Subject: Postcolonial Anthropologists in Other Places

75

Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism

86

Mary E. John

David Scott

Elizabeth Grosz

Vicki Kirby

Corporeographies

103

Elliott Butler-Evans

Beyond Essentialism: Rethinking Afro-American Cultural Theory

121

Vivek Dhareshwar

Toward a Narrative Epistemology of the Postcolonial Predicament

135

Bell Hooks

Critical Interrogation: Talking Race, Resisting Racism

159

Vicente M. Diaz

Restless Na(rra)tives

165

James Clifford

Notes on Theory and Travel

a

Commentaries

PREFACE Theory, by definition, is more

than a local act. While it is

enmeshed in specific traditions and locales, and while it is marked by the site and condition of its production, its purview is extensive, generalizing, comparative. If theories no longer totalize, they do travel. Indeed, in their diverse rootings and uprootings, theories are constantly translated, appropriated, contested, grafted. Theory travels; so do theorists. In the late twentieth century the producers and audiences of theory can no longer be situated in a more-or-less stable map of "First World" and "Third World" places. This very mobility and movement gives rise to unresolved questions, in need of systematic examination. How can we conceive of the complex predicaments of theories and theorists both in terms of location (in travel and intercultural translation) and in terms of the accountability and self-positioning of the theorist? What conditions govern the export and import of theories

in changing post- and neo-colonial situations? What are the crucial inequalities of power and experience? How do theorists ("cosmopolitan,""postcolonial,""postmodern,""engaged," etc.) negotiate the assymetries, discrepancies in their travel among different audiences, languages, histories? What counts as "theory" in specific traditions? What are its "proper" idioms? Who counts as a "theorist?" mt

vent

These are some of the questions that inspired a conference, "Predicaments of Theory" (February 11-12, 1989) organized by the Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse and the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The papers collected here originated in that gathering. The conference grew out of concrete dilemmas faced by graduate students working on their dissertations—dilemmas of authority and self-positioning, questions raised by the divergent agendas of politics and theory, the claims of discrepant audiences and rhetorics. It soon became apparent that the problems were of more than local significance. As academic writers

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Preface

originating from, and looking toward, diverse places on the postcolonial map, many of us have found ourselves both empowered and hemmed in by the theories we depend on to frame and develop our research. Predicaments of theory have often presented themselves as issues of location, with the term "location" implying spatio-temporal, political, and epistemological determinants. In recent feminist theory, for example, the concept of location or positionality has emerged as a critical response to the pressures of cultural, sexual and class differences within the category "Woman." (Important discussions by Rich, Lorde, Mohanty, Haraway and de Lauretis, among others, are cited in the essays collected here.) Other important theoretical currents— deconstructive, Foucauldian, neo-pragmatist, post- modern—have alerted us to the dangers of totalizing claims as well as to necessary tensions between global and specific discourses. At the same time, a growing number of critics (for example, Ahmad, Spivak, Said, Trinh, Sangari) have been led to ask whether these theories are not themselves historically and culturally located, in danger of reiterating the very gestures of Western humanism that they circumscribed so effectively. We hoped that the conference would take up some of the following topics: —Eurocentrism in major theoretical traditions.

—The authority of "First World" critiques of authority. —Chronotopes for theories. —Effects of export, import, and the local implantation of "metropolitan" theories. —Tensions between anti-essentialist critiques and claims of collective political action. —Elite theories and the representation of the subaltern. —Theory as storytelling, and vice-versa. —Legitimation of theories in specific political and historical contexts. —Tactics of both using and subverting major systems of representation and explanation. Of course, no single conference could do justice to such a range of questions and problems. The essays in this volume focus on a number of overlapping themes, sometimes at the cost of neglecting others no

Preface

vii

less important. Several of the papers cluster around issues of location and audience, the movement of scholars and intellectuals in colonial and postcolonial spaces. Why is it the case that one goes elsewhere to "theorize" a problem, or to imagine a national identity? How are “sanctioned ignorances" maintained and challenged in purportedly international discourses such as those of anthropology or feminism? How are the specific ambivalences of local and cosmopolitan attachments to be understood? What are the continuing claims of "home," “nationality,” "the return" for traveling theorists? Several of the essays specifically confront the constraints and possibilities of a "postcolonial" context for scholarship. Several grapple with the complex issue of essentialism. How can the anti-essentialism of much current theory be used to question dominant visions and to historicize representations of complex identities, bodies and experiences? And what are the dangers of making anti-essentialism into a kind of theoretical absolute? How, strategically, is an essence (origin, nature, universality) identified, rejected, embraced? Are there contexts in which histories or

identities need to be taken as unproblematic? Questions: a sense of implication and entanglement rather than of purity or escape. The essays presented at the "Predicaments of Theory" conference are printed here in revised form. Only one paper is missing, Cornel West's "Demystifying Theory: the Challenge of 'Third World’ Oppositional Practices," which was committed elsewhere. West's paper directly addressed institutional forces influencing the recent influx of traveling theories into the United States, especially from Europe. It discussed the connections and lack of connections between academic theorists and oppositional politics within and outside North American universities, and defended an engaged theoretical practice of "demystification." These are a few of the missing perspectives in this volume, which, we insist, is partial and preliminary. The three "Commentaries" following the conference papers provide additional critical perspectives on a complex and evolving field of problems. —the Editors

MULTIPLE MEDIATIONS: FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP IN THE AGE OF MULTINATIONAL RECEPTION Lata Mani ..." unusual knowing," a cognitive practice, a form of consciousness that is not primordial, universal, or coextensive with human thought.... but historically determined and yet subjectively and politically assumed. —Teresa de Lauretis, "Eccentric Subjects" Feminist Studies, March 1990.

On the acupuncturist's table, Berkeley, California, July 1988:

I am lying in wait for the complex verbal negotiation that attends each visit to my acupuncturist. I want a diagnosis—a definable illness with a definite cure. My acupuncturist is disdainful of this desire for clarity and resolution and insists on treating my body as a zone in which energies rise and fall, sometimes rebelliously, at other times gracefully, and once even, as he put it, "stroppily." As I ponder the frustrating untranslatability of his idiom, he asks the dreaded question: "So what is your

Ph.D. thesis about?" I stare at the infrared lamp and wonder which version to present. The various responses I have elicited over the years race through my mind like a film running at high speed. My usual strategy is to assess the cultural politics of those addressing me (such as I can discern them), the tenor of the question (is this a serious inquiry or merely a polite one?), and my frame of mind at the time (do I want to educate, be patronised, or try to avoid both by being vague, but thereby risking the impression that I know not what I am doing?). I did not, however, have time for such musings. I was trapped under the beagle eye of my doctor of needles

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Mani

who, having taken my pulse, was awaiting a reply. So I blurted out what I consider my "no-nonsense" description: "I am working on the debate between colonial officials, missionaries and the indigenous male elite on sati (widow burning) in colonial India."

I felt weak, as though it had been a confession extorted from me after intense cross-examination. I sighed inwardly. Meanwhile, my declaration had provoked what turned out to be a half-hour lecture on the dilemmas of cross-cultural understanding. He said that such practices would always be difficult for Westerners to comprehend, hastily adding that it was important not to impose alien values and that sati probably had a particular significance within Indian culture which it would be enlightening for Westerners to understand. At this point he turned away from my foot into which he had just finished inserting needles, and asked, "So how do you understand widow burning?" I felt myself stiffen. He had thrown me a challenge that would require a command performance in colonial and postcolonial history and discourse, one that I did not feel equal to at the time. So I said evasively, "It's a long story and I'm trying to sort it out." "Good," said the genial man in the white coat tapping my arm. Not waiting for a response, he continued, "Of course, you are westernized and your ideas have probably changed from living here. I wonder what women in India feel about it?" So saying, he left the room. I was furious. I had not interrupted his liberal, relativist, patronising

discourse and was, as a result, caught in its pincer movement: an apparent but ultimately repressive tolerance, a desire for "true" knowledge, and a demand for authenticity that was impossible to meet, given that any agreement between us, however fragile and superficial, would immediately make me westernised: not like "them" but like "him." I wished for the millionth time that I had been working on a less contentious topic, one that unlike sati, had not served as metonym for Indian society itself—or had had the panache to wag my finger like him and say, "Read my book and you'll find out."

«

Multiple Mediations

3

Contemporary theory in feminism and in the humanities has brought a critical self-consciousness to bear both on the place and mode of enunciation—who speaks and how; and on reception—how is an emancipation interpreted and why. As claims to universality and objectivity have been shown to be the alibis of a largely masculinist, heterosexist, and white Western subject, both readers and writers have had to confront their particularity and history. Gender, race, class, sexuality, and historical experience specify hitherto unmarked bodies, deeply compromising the fictions of unified subjects and disinterested knowledges. . Such developments—or should we say acknowledgements—require an attentiveness to the theoretical and political impulses that shape our projects and an openness to the inevitable fact that different agendas may govern their reception. Needless to say, there have always been multiple investments and diverse audiences. Our accounting of these phenomena

today simply attests to the successful struggles for discursive spaces of those overlapping and hitherto marginalised groups: women, Third World people, gay men and lesbians. Institutional concessions to the heterogeneity of the social landscape have prompted the emergence of new fields of study, for instance, ethnic studies and women's studies, within U.S. universities. They have also given new momentum to interdisciplinary work. The current mobilization of talents and energies around "culture studies" is a case in point.! The revolt of the particular against that masquerading as the general, of what Donna Haraway has called "situated" as against "disembodied knowledges," has sharply brought into focus theoretical and political

! The relative rapidity with which the concept of "culture studies" has found institutional support compared to ethnic or women's studies should give us pause. Bell Hooks (Gloria Watkins) and Gayatri C. Spivak have recently mapped out what is at stake intellectually and politically in the kinds of theoretical and curricular agendas being privileged in and excluded from the institutionalisation of "Third World" or "culture studies." Bell Hooks,

"Critical Integration: Talking Race, Resisting Racism," Conference on Feminisms and Cultural Imperialism: The Politics of Difference, Comell University, April 22-23 1989; Gayatri C. Spivak, "Post-Coloniality and the Field of Value," Conference on Feminisms and Cultural Imperialism: The Politics of Difference, Comell University, April 22-23,

1989.

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questions regarding positionality and identity.2 This issue has probably been most fully developed within feminism.» Feminists have called for a revised politics of location—"revised" because unlike its initial articulation, the relation between experience and knowledge is now seen to be not one of correspondence but one fraught with history, contingency, and struggle.4 These terms powerfully suggest some of the 2 Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of a Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14:3 (Fall 1988), pp. 575-599. See also "Reading Buchi Emecheta: Contests for Women's Experience in Women's Studies," Inscriptions 3/4, Special Issue "Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Discourse" (1988),

pp. 107-123. 3 Within Euro-American feminism, the debate on the relationship between experience and

knowledge is located within a critique of the racism and white centeredness of dominant feminism on the one hand and its replication of elements of colonial discourse on the other. There is a rich literature on the former and a growing body of material on the latter. Chernie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1981); Bell Hooks, Ain’t ] a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston, South End Press, 1981); and Barbara Smith (ed.),

Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York,, Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), are significant texts in the first category. Gayatri Spivak, "French Feminism in an International Frame," Yale French Studies 62 (1981), pp. 154-184; and Chandra

Mohanty,

"Under Westem

Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,"

Boundary 2 (Spring/Fall 1984), pp. 333-358 (revised Feminist Review, Autumn 1988, pp. 60-88); Mamia Lazreg, "Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on

Women in Algeria," Feminist Studies 14 (Spring 1988), pp. 81-107; Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman Native Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), are key texts in the latter. As a whole, however, as Norma Alarcon, Aida Hurtado, and Chela Sandoval have

recently argued, the critique of white feminism has been taken up very unevenly and has failed to fundamentally transform dominant feminist thinking. Norma Alarcon, "The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism," in Hector Calderon and Jose D. Saldivar (eds.), Chicano Criticism in a Social Context (Duke University Press, 1989, forthcoming); Aida Hurtado, "Relating to Privilege: Seduction and

Rejection in the Subordination of White Women and Women of Color," Signs (Summer 1989), pp. 833-855; Chela Sandoval, "U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness," in “Oppositional Consciousness in the PostModem World," Ph.D. dissertation in progress, University of Califomia. 4E lly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Feminist Perspectives on Racism and Anti-Semitism (New York, Long Haul Press, 1984); Mab

Segrest, My Mama's Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture (Ithaca, Firebrand Books, 1985); Adrienne Rich, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location (1984), "Blood ,Bread and Poetry (New York, Norton, 1986,) pp. 210-231; Chandra Mohanty and Biddy Martin, "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got To Do With It?" in Teresa de

Lauretis (Ed.) Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 191-212; see also Teresa de Lauretis' essay in the same volume,"Feminist

Multiple Mediations

5

problems of positionality as they confront me: a postcolonial Third World feminist working on India in the United States. «

Chandra Mohanty defines the politics of location as "the historical, geographic, cultural, psychic and imaginative boundaries which provide the ground for political definition and self definition."> "Location" in her terms is not a fixed point but a "temporality of struggle,"® characterised by multiple locations and nonsynchronous processes of movement "between cultures, languages, and complex configurations of meaning and power." / These processes, in Mohanty's view, enable "a paradoxical continuity of self, mapping and ...political location...[M]y location forces and enables specific modes of reading and knowing the dominant. The struggles I choose to engage in are then the intensification of these modes of knowing."8 This definition of the space of politics very nicely illuminates the dynamics of how my conception of a project on the debate on sati in colonial India bears such traces of movement between cultures, and configurations of meaning, multiple locations, and specific modes of knowing. My research examines colonial official, missionary, and indigenous elite discourses on sati in Great Britain and India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.? I investigate the conditions of production and the burden of each of these discourses, the intersections, differences, and tensions between them, and the competing and overlapping ways in which they were deployed. Among other things, I argue that a specifically colonial discourse on India framed the debate on sati,

Studies/Critical

Studies: Issues, Terms

and Contexts,"

pp.1-19 and her "Eccentric

Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness," op. cit; Caren Kaplan, "Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,"

Cultural Critique (Spring 1987), pp. 187-198. SChandra Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters, Locating the Politics of Experience," Copyright 1 (Fall 1987), pp. 31.

6 Jbid., p. 40. T [bid., p. 42. 8 Ibid. 9 Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonical India, 1780-1833,"

Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1989.

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producing troubling consequences for how "the woman's question" in India was to be posed thereafter, whether by Indian nationalists or Western feminists. One of the things that has prompted and sustained my energy through hours of archival plodding and reels of dizzying microfilm has been a conviction of the contemporary ideological and political legacy of such debates on women and culture. I have always been aware that this legacy has had a differential trajectory in India and in, for example, the U.S. or Great Britain, that the relation of this earlier discourse to contemporary knowledges—popular and specialist—about India in the West, was different from its relation to the contemporary self-knowledge of Indians. It is the contours of this difference that this paper will now explore. The following remarks come from having presented my work to groups in the U.S., Great Britain, and India and discovering that the audiences in these places seized on entirely different aspects of my work as politically significant, !0 The responses in turn have caused me to reflect on how (following Mohanty) moving between different "configurations of meaning and power" prompts different "modes of knowing." 11 They have also required me to squarely confront a problem not adequately theorized in discussions of positionality or of the function of theory or criticism: the politics of simultaneously negotiating not multiple but discrepant audiences, different "temporalities of struggle." 12 «

"Colonial" or eurocentric discourses on India—and on the Third World more generally—have an abiding presence in the U.S. and Great 10 The presentations whose reception I analyse below drew on material that was published as "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique (Fall 1987), pp. 119-156; also forthcoming in Kum Kum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Reconstructing Woman: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi, Kali, 1989). 11 Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters," op. cit., p. 42

12 Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters," op. cit., pp. 40-42. See also Edward Said, "Traveling Theory," The World,the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, Harvard, 1983), pp. 226-247; "Intellectuals in the Post Colonial World," Salmagundi, (Spring/Summer 1986), pp. 45-64. In the latter, Said raises the problem of discrepant experiences and constituencies but develops instead a case for foregrounding the shared intellectual and political terrain produced by colonialism.

Multiple

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Britain, the two Western countries with which I am most familiar. Television documentaries, scholarly writing, and popular wisdom circulate such notions as the centrality of religion (whether framed as the essential "spirituality" of the East or as the dominance of caste),!3 the antiquity of Indian "culture" and the victimization of women. These ideas "hail" those of us living here with a systematicity that, over time, makes them truly oppressive. As a Marxist-feminist who had come to feminism in India, I initially responded to the predominance of culturalist understandings of Indian society with surprise and bemusement at the ignorance these understandings betrayed. I assumed that a similar ignorance must account for my having so often to explain the supposed anomaly of being an Indian feminist. The repetition of such incidents as the encounter with my acupuncturist, the dynamics of which I would barely have been able to fathom when I first got here, compelled me to think seriously about the prehistory of such knowledges about India and Indian women. I brought this new sensibility to bear on reading the debate on sati. It has been, I believe, by and large productive. For although I have read many of the same documents as other historians—Indian and non-Indian—an alertness to how British colonialism may have shaped knowledge about colonised society has turned up unexpected disjunctures, contests, and determinations, for instance, over what constitutes "tradition." Given a context in which elements of this nineteenth-century discourse continue to circulate—on occasion virtually unreconstructed—and in the service of British racism and U.S. cultural imperialism, I consider excavation of the colonial prehistory of such ideas as a political gesture. By and large, most discussions that followed presentations of my work in the U.S. or Great Britain tended to focus on the contemporary replications, resonances or rearticulations of what I had sketched. In Great Britain, for instance, we explored how the British state manipulates women's "oppression" in Indian and Pakistani "culture" to legitimate virginity tests, immigration controls, and policing of Asian marriages and 13£o¢ discussions of the dominance of concepts of caste and religion within South Asian anthropology and history see Arjun Appadurai, "Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” Cultural Anthropology 3:1 February 1988), 36-49; Ronald Inden, "Orientalist Constructions of India," Modern Asian Studies 20:3 (1986), pp. 401-446; Nicholas Dirks, "Castes of Mind:

State and Society in India's History and Historiography,” unpublished mss.

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family life. This "civilising" racist British state has placed black feminists in Great Britain in a position analogous to the nineteenth-century Indian male social reformers who defended "culture" and "women" in a similarly overdetermined context.!4 The significant difference between then and now is that black feminists (unlike many male nationalists) have insisted on keeping women at the center of the struggle, refusing to let themselves become mere pawns in a contest between the state and community. They have charted a complex strategy. On the one hand, they have challenged the self-serving appropriation of "women's issues" by a racist British state. Simultaneously, they have resisted both the "protection" of men in the black community when it has come with a defence of practices oppressive to women and the white feminist attempts to rescue them from patriarchy. In short, black feminists in Great Britian have refused "salvation," whether by the state in the name of civilised modernity, by black men on behalf of tradition and community integrity, or by white feminists in the interest of ethnocentric versions of women's liberation. In this context, discussions following my presentations explored, among other things, questions of rhetoric and strategy: how to argue for women's rights in ways that were not complicit in any way with patriarchal, racist, or ethnocentric formulations of the issues. Thus, given that the British state draws on key elements of nineteenth-century discourses on India to further its own current projects, my delineation of the colonial dimension of these discourses was seen to have an openly political character. In India, however, this dimension of my project was interpreted quite differently, primarily as an academic and historical argument. To some extent, this is not surprising. Notions of "timeless textual traditions” or the essential spirituality of Indian society have a different afterlife in the

14 Black in the British context is a political category that includes people of Afro-Carribean and Asian descent. For a sense of the debate among British black feminists and activist, see Pratibha Parmar, "Gender, Race and Class: Asian Women in Resistance," Centre for

Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London, Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 236-275; Valerie Amos et al. (eds.), "Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives," Feminist Review 17 (Autumn 1984); Kum Kum

Bhavnani and Margaret Coulson, "Transforming Socialist Feminism: The Challenge of Racism" Feminist Review 23 (June 1986) pp. 81-92; S. Grewal et al. (eds.), Charting the

Journey, Writings by Black and Third World Women (London, Sheba, 1988). Debates on specific political issues can be followed through Spare Rib and the feminist anti-imperialist monthly Outwrite.

Multiple Mediations

9

Indian public domain. Quite simply, they are not, as in Great Britain, critical to the elaboration of hegemony. Certainly, development policies explicitly embrace the logic of modernity, Brahmanical texts have come to represent quintessential Hinduism, and the colonial legacy of making religious scriptures the basis of civil law enormously complicates feminist projects of legal reform. However, notions like "timeless traditions" function most often to inspire literature from the Indian Tourist Development Corporation or to feed the fantasy life of petitbourgeois middle- and high-caste Indians regarding the glory of ancient India (read, "of their own lineage"). Except in the case of Government of India documentaries on tribal peoples, or sometimes in relation to remote rural areas, there does not exist a serious convention of representing Indian citizens as lacking agency, inhabiting a timeless zone, and immobilised by "tradition." Indeed, this kind of analysis would be difficult to sustain, given that the authority of the Indian state has been continually challenged since independence, and is bolstered today not by a democratic consensus but through a brutal and increasingly unashamed use of violence. The Indian context thus presents a sharp contrast to the West; naming something "colonial" in India has, accordingly, a different import. It becomes a question of periodization rather than a crucial move in developing an oppositional, anti-imperialist critical practice. Such a reading is further comprehensible because, in a palpable, existential sense, when one is in India, colonialism does indeed seem like a thing long past. Despite India's economically dependent status in the world economy and its willful exploitation by multinationals and international agencies like the World Bank, "the West" as ideological and political presence articulates with such a density of indigenous institutions, discourses, histories, and practices that its identity as "Western" is refracted and not always salient. This is not to say that Indians are naive about the impact of the West. (There was, for example, little confusion about the ultimate culpability of Union Carbide, USA, in the Bhopal industrial disaster.) What I am suggesting is that, unlike many nations in the Carribean or in Central America, in India it is not the boot of imperialism that is felt as an identifiable weight upon one's neck. The pressure one feels compelled to resist is rather that of the nation state, dominant social and political institutions, and religious fundamentalisms of various kinds. No doubt, the activities of the nation state are

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themselves related in complex ways to regional and global geopolitical trends, but it is the local face of this international phenomenon against which one is moved to struggle. It comes as no surprise, then, that in India, the "political" dimension of my work is seen to be expressed primarily in my engagement with nationalism, the limited parameters within which nationalists posed the question of women's status, the marginality of women to nineteenthcentury discussions supposedly about them, and the legacy of colonialism in contemporary discussion of women's issues. This last point was made in my presentation in relation to the recent controversy over reform of Islamic law provoked by the Shahbano decision. The case was one in which the Supreme Court had upheld the application of a Muslim woman, Shahbano, for lifelong maintenance from her exhusband. The Supreme Court's verdict became a rallying point for many Muslims who felt that the court had, contrary to its claims, violated Islamic law and thus undermined the only legal protection Indian Muslims enjoyed as a religious minority.15 In analysing the case, it was possible to point out how, in this, as in many instances in the nineteenth century, contests over women's rights were being debated as contests over scriptural interpretation and as struggles over a community's autonomy and right to self-determination. While these terms do not exhaust the arguments made in relation to the case, they point to significant parallels between nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates on women.!6 Suffice it to say that the case, more than any theoretical

15 Fora good introduction and critical discussion of issues raised by the case see Asghar Ali Engineer, The Shahbano Controversy (Bombay, Orient Longman, 1987). Unfortunately excluded from the volume is an excellent interview with Shahbano by Jyoti Punwani, "The Strange Case of Shahbano," The Sunday Observer (November 24, 1985),

p. 4. For feminist analyses of the case and its repercussions, see Madhu Kishwar, "ProWoman or Anti-Muslim? The Shahbano Controversy," Manushi 32 (1986), pp. 4-13, and

Zakhia Pathak and Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan, "'Shahbano’,” Signs (Spring 1989), pp. 558-582. 16 For an initial exploration of themes of continuity see my "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," pp. 53-156. It is important to stress here that my interest

in such continuities is in analysing the ways in which they may constrain the form and content of contemporary discussions of the woman's question. I do not assume that the persistence of certain discursive elements has the same meaning, significance, or effect as in the nineteenth century, since they are available for different kinds of appropriation by different social forces.

Multiple

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argument about "colonial discourse," served to convey some of the political impulses of my project. Even here, however, the "colonial" dimension was of academic import. The burden of the discussion, not inappropriately, fell to the practical problems of building coalitions between Hindu and Muslim women in the wake of the divisiveness produced by the Shahbano decision and the growth of communalism in Indian politics. «

These differing receptions of my work in Great Britain and India have raised.questions regarding the relationship between "experience" and "theory," one's geographical location and the formulation of one's projects. It seems to me that travelling to the U.S. and living under its regimes of truth regarding India and the Third World more generally have intensified for me, in Mohanty's phrase, certain "modes of knowing." The disjunctions between how I saw myself and the kinds of knowledge about me that I kept bumping into in the West opened up new questions for social and political inquiry. Reading Edward Said's Orientalism in this context was enormously productive and energizing.!7 It contextualised the phenomena, discourses, and attitudes I was encountering and helped me in the task of situating personal experiences within a historical problematic. It quickened my impulse to take more seriously than I had previously been inclined to, colonial official and missionary discourses on India. My interest in these discourses was not merely that of a historian of ideas but that of someone curious about the history of the present. I can only wonder at how my project might have been fashioned in the absence of this experience of travel to different "configurations of meaning and power."18 In this regard, I found it significant that an Indian friend of mine once remarked that the full force of Said's argument in Orientalism had come home to her only after spending time in Europe. Prior to this,

17 Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York, Vintage, 1979).

18 Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters, op. cit., p. 42.

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she had believed, and this is a fairly common perception in India, that Said was perhaps overstating his case, stretching a point. 19 It seems to me that the politics and epistemology of different readings such as these dramatizes the dilemma of postcolonial intellectuals working on the Third World in the West. One diagnosis of this situation accuses such intellectuals of inauthenticity or ideological contamination. This charge may be levelled by First World intellectuals demanding a spurious authenticity of their Third World colleagues; it often works to challenge the latters' credibility by implying that their politics are exceptional and ungeneralizable. This analysis may, however, be shared by Third World intellectuals working in the Third World. The criticism in this instance may be rooted in the not always unwarranted but ultimately simplistic assumption that intellectuals abroad must necessarily be selling out.20 Alternately, assertions about ideological contamination often function as a shorthand, alluding to the genuine and complex problems of positionality: Problems are, in my view, not clarified by such a moralistic formulation of the issues. 21 In the face of this discourse of authenticity, some Third World intellectuals working in the First World have reterritorialized themselves as hybrid. This strategy is compelling when such a demonstration of hybridity becomes, as in Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands, an enabling moment for the possibility of a collective politics attentive to difference

19 There may be many reasons for such a resistance to Said's Orientalism, some more persuasive than others. First there is the theoretical resistance of those working within an objectivist paradigm to said's social constructionist approach. Then there is the question of

the scope of said's argument. Many Indian readers, for example, felt that the book's value for them was seriously limited by its primary focus on the West and its lack of analysis of internal class and power relations in colonised territories. My point here, then, is not that there are no grounds for a critique of Orientalism but rather that in India the political and ideological impetus of Said's project has generally not been apprehended as compelling, a response tied to both geographical location and historical experience. 20 This position is simplistic because it overgeneralises and also because one does not, of course, have to leave home to sell out.

21 th addition to such questions as how location in the First or Third World shapes even what constitutes a "problem,"

a comparative analysis of the relation of location to

intellectual production will have to address the real assymetries in the material and institutional conditions of scholarship in these spaces. A fuller discussion of these issues is, alas, beyond the scope of this paper.

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and contradiction. 22 When, however, the elaboration of hybridity becomes an end in itself, serving only to undo binary oppositions, it runs the risk of dodging entirely the question of location. To this one must say, "Necessary but insufficient.” Finally, for those of us from the geographical Third World who have an elsewhere to return to, there is the possibility of adopting a tactic that would separate projects into what is appropriate or inappropriate to do “while one is in the West." Here again we have a prescription that may make sense for specific political and practical reasons. On the other hand, this strategy has the potential for sidestepping the issue. It implicitly conceives of the West and non-West as autonomous spaces and thereby evades the thorny issue of their intersections and mutual implications. 23

How, then, would I proceed to delineate, in my own case, the potential and limits of my location, working on the Third World in the belly of the First? For one thing, it seems to me that the mode of knowing enabled by the experience of existing between discursive systems makes it difficult for me to isolate "colonialism" as a distinct historical period with little claim on the present. Consequently, I have tried to train myself to look for discontinuities in apparently smooth surfaces and for continuities across the dominant and oppositional. Secondly, the deadening essentialism of much historical and contemporary representation of the Third World has confirmed for me, albeit in a different way, a lesson learnt earlier from Marxism: an abiding suspicion of primarily cultural explanations of social phenomena. At the same time, perhaps not paradoxically, experiences of such a persistent privileging of "culture" have in turn compelled me to take very seriously the domain so designated. What counts as "culture"? How is culture conceived and represented? With what consequences? In short, I have been persuaded of the need to open to critical reflection the vexed and

22 Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La

Frontera:

The New Mestiza

(San Francisco,

Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987). A different strategy for resisting the demand for authenticity is elaborated by Gayatri C. Spivak in "Post-Coloniality and the Field of Value,” op. cit. 23 For an important and persuasive argument about the dangers of relativism and pluralism inherent in conceiving of the West and Third World as radically separate spaces, see Satya Mohanty, "Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political Criticism,” Yale Journal

of Criticism 2:2 (Spring 1989), pp. 1-31.

14.

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complex issue of the relationship between colonialism and questions of culture. This is a problem that is, to my mind, yet to be adequately thematized in the literature on colonialism in India. Historiography on nineteenthcentury India, for instance, has produced sophisticated analysis of the impact of colonialism on India's economy and politics but has paid comparatively little attention to its impact on culture or on conceptions of culture. Perhaps the ways in which I may be tempted to frame the problem will be marked by the fact that it became an issue for me as a result of my experience of Great Britain and the U.S. It may be that I accent the colonial rather more heavily than my imagined counterpart, the feminist writer in India. But as I reflect on what moves me, I also need to be aware that I now inescapably participate in multiple conversations, not all of which overlap. As for the gains of being situated in the interstices, only time will tell. In the meantime, it seems to me that my attempt to specify location might also be fruitfully undertaken in conversation with feminists in India. After all, the dangers of reading the local as global are potentially present both in India and in the West: in the former through minimising colonialism, in the latter through aggrandizing it. «

The difficulties of straddling different temporalities of struggle cannot, however, always be resolved through listening for and talking about our specificities. There are political moments which pose limits to the possibility of conceiving of international feminist exchange as negotiated dialogues which, while they may alternately diverge and intersect, are ultimately benign and non-contradictory.

On September 22, 1987, Roop Kanwar died on the funeral pyre of her husband in Deorala, Rajasthan. The incident has sparked off a nationwide controversy on sati in India, unearthed the information that there have been at least thirty-eight widow immolations in Rajasthan since independence, and dragged out of the closet vociferous supporters of the practice. In this recent case, the government of India vacillated in

24 This holds whether the exchange is between First and Third World women or between Third World women in the First World and Third World women in the Third World.

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taking action against family members found to have coerced Roop, state officials were present along with an estimated 300,000 others at an event “honouring” the episode thirteen days after the burning, and when the state finally banned glorification of sati, the response was too little, too late.

Meanwhile, a massive debate on sati had been set in motion, with opponents and defenders staking out their claims in terms that were in many ways remarkably reminiscent of the nineteenth-century controversy which is the subject of my own research. As in the colonial period, issues of scriptural interpretation, the so-called traditional nature of sati, its barbarity, the role of the state, women's social conditioning, and the question of the widow's consent all emerged as key items in the

debate.25

Four positions were discernible in the discussions that followed upon Roop Kanwar's death. Each of them is more elaborate than my characterisation of them suggests, but my purpose here is merely to sketch in broad strokes the discursive space that was constituted, referring readers to others who have analysed them more thoroughly. 26 There was, firstly, a "liberal" position, critical of sati as "traditional," "religious" and barbaric and arguing that the incident represented the

failure of the project of modernization. Secondly, and opposed to the first position, was the conservative, pro-sati lobby, which valorized sati's "traditional" and "religious" status and argued that the rationality of the practice was necessarily inaccessible to westernized, urban Indians. Ostensibly critical of both these positions, although reserving the burden of its critique for the former and ultimately aligning itself with the latter, was a third stance developed by Ashis Nandy. Nandy, a trenchant critic of the philosophies of modernization and development, castigated

25 Fora comparative discussion of nineteenth-century discourse and the initial reporting of the Roop Kanwar story by major English-language dailies, see Lata Mani, "Sati in the Media: Then and Now," The Indian Post:Post Script (October 25, 1987).

26 There is a wealth of material on the Roop Kanwar incident and my footnotes are necessarily selective. See, especially, Sujata Patel and Krishna Kumar, "Defenders of Sati," Economic and Political Weekly (January 23, 1988), pp. 129-130, and Kum Kum

Sangari, "Perpetuating the Myth,” Seminar, Special Issue on Sati (February 1988), pp. 2430.

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liberal condemnation of sati as the response of a rootless, decultured urban bourgeoisie, unable, if not unwilling, to comprehend the masses. We may agree with Nandy that the incomprehension of sati expressed by the liberal media required examination and critique: After all, sati is only one among many practices exploitative of women. In a sense, contemporary liberal incomprehension parallels nineteenth-century "horror." Both cast sati simultaneously as an exceptional practice and one that is emblematic of society as a whole. The sense of its exceptionalism emerges in analyses of sati which treat it in isolation from women's subordination in general, while its emblematic status is dramatized in the way in which the incident has provoked anxiety about the nature and extent of India's social progress. This, however, is not the direction in which Nandy develops his argument. Nandy's ire is directed mainly at what he perceives as the "Western" modes of denouncing sati reproduced by "modernists." Nandy exhibits particular scorn for feminists, whom he groups among the modernists, overlooking the important distinctions between feminist and liberal critiques of the practice. What is even more curious, though, is that Nandy's critique of the colonial mentality of these modernists itself reproduces three key moves of colonial discourse. Nandy reaffirms the "tradition"/"modernity" dichotomy in analysing the practice and replicates the colonial oppositions: "glorious past /degraded present" and "authentic/inauthentic sati." He brings the latter two together in his positive evaluation of the original, mythological sati, said to express women's sacred and magical powers, as against his negative description of contemporary widow burning which, he claims, is merely the product of a dehumanised market morality. 27 The fourth, and to my mind, genuinely anti-imperialist position (even though, unlike Nandy's, it was not articulated as such) was that taken by

27 Ashis Nandy, "The Sociology of Sati," Indian Express (October 5, 1987), and "The Human Factor,” The Illustrated Weekly of India (January 17, 1988), pp. 20-23. For excellent critiques of Nandy’s position, see Patel and Kumar, op. cit., Sangari, op. cit., and Pamela Philipose and Teesta Setalvad, "Demystifying Sati," The Illustrated Weekly of India (March 13, 1988), pp. 40-41. For Nandy's response, "Sati in Kaliyuga," Economic and Political Weekly (September 17, 1988). See, in addition, Veena Das, "Strange Response," Illustrated Weekly of India (February 28, 1988), pp. 30-32, which shares

some of the problems discermible in Ashis Nandy's position.

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feminists. Not surprisingly, concern for women's lives was very much at the center of feminist discourse. Feminists insisted that Roop Kanwar's death should be understood in context of the general subordination of women in Indian society, challenged attempts to frame the issue as one of tradition or religion, and located the Deorala incident within postindependent political and economic developments in Rajasthan.28 Feminists also pointed to the modernity of the incident and to the character of the pro-sati lobby, whose members were urban, educated men in their 20s and 30s. For example, in their excellent article in Manushi, Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita argued that Deorala was not a rural backwater but rather a prosperous town with electricity, tap water, and a seventy per cent literacy rate.29 Further, they pointed out that Roop Kanwar was a city-educated woman, while her husband had a degree in science, and her father-in-law, one of the abettors, was a schoolteacher. In addition to the insufficiency of derisively analysing sati as "traditional," feminists pointed out that such a ploy would play into the hands of pro-sati traditionalists. Religious arguments were similarly exposed as serving to legitimate the oppression of women. Again, Kishwar and Vanita described how the daily rituals around the spot where the burning had taken place ressembled victory celebrations, not religious devotion. In arguing that cries of "religion" could not absolve anyone of murder, Indira Jaising put it thus: "Just as the personal is political, the religious is secular where women are concern "30 Finally, feminists warned against the danger of demanding more stringent laws and greater state intervention, the recurring pleas of liberal opponents of sati. They highlighted the appalling lack of will demonstrated by the state in prosecuting Roop's in-laws and the possibility that the state would merely abuse the greater powers that would accrue to it. Such fears have largely been realised. Local police have used their powers to harass journalists and others investigating the

28 See Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon's editorial, "The Problem,” Seminar, op. cit. pp. 12-13; "Tradition vs. Misconceptions,” Interview with Romila Thapar by Madhu Kishwar

and Ruth Vanita, Manushi (Sep.-Dec.1987), pp. 2-14. For sati in Rajasthan, see Sudesh

Vaid, "Politics of Widow Immolation," Seminar, op. cit., pp. 20-23. 29 Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, "The Burning of Roop Kanwar," Manushi, op. cit.,

pp. 15-25. 30 Indira Jaising, "Women, Religion and the Law,” The Lawyers Collective (December 1987), p. 4.

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case, and despite the law against abetting and glorifying sati, an estimated 8,000 people gathered at Deorala in September 1988 to "celebrate" the one-year anniversary of the death of Roop Kanwar.3! And perhaps worst of all, one of the provisions of the legislative act on sati makes its victims liable to punishment: women who attempt sati are hereafter to be subject to fine or imprisonment! The events of the past eighteen months have radically changed the Indian context for my work. Widow burning is no longer, as it had been when I began, a "historical" problem but is very much a charged and explosive contemporary issue. Although my own discussion here has focused mostly on feminist arguments, such arguments are, alas, marginal to the current debate. The discursive space is principally being defined by the conservatives and liberals. The former are more active in mobilising a constituency and have support within the ruling party, which in its precarious hold of power is more wedded to securing votes than to upholding fundamental rights of any kind. This context raises serious questions about the appropriateness of certain issues I was to have developed in my thesis. How, for instance, might my critique of the civilising mission be appropriated in the current situation? Part of my argument has been to show, in some detail, what is occluded in the following statement which represents a dominant story about colonialism and the question of woman: "We came, we saw, we were horrified, we intervened." Taking the instance of sati, whose abolition by the British in 1829 supposedly illuminates, par excellence, the legitimacy of this account, I have tried to suggest that the story is much more complicated. Among other things, I point out that legislative prohibition of sati was preceded by its legalisation, a procedure that involved British officials in determining and

enforcing a colonial version of the practice deemed traditional and authentic; that intervention in sati provided grounds for intervention in civil society; and that a fundamental ambivalence to sati structured colonial attitudes to the practice.32 I argue that missionary involvement in Sati was similarly complex and ambivalent, with horror being reserved 31 Pankaj Pachauni, "Tuming a Blind Eye: Glorification of Sati Continues Despite the Law," /ndia Today (October 15, 1988), pp. 38-39. 32 Some of these arguments are elaborated in my "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” op. cit., pp. 119-135.

Multiple

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primarily for fundraising material produced for a British public. My point is that ultimately, for both officials and missionaries, women were not really at issue. Woman rather provided ground for the development of other agendas. I make a related argument about nineteenth century indigenous discourses on sati. I argue that they developed within the constraints of a discourse on Indian society privileged by the British, that ambivalence to the practice is discernible even among those passionately opposed to sati, and that here, too, concern for women seems secondary to concern for "tradition" or for the general good of society. Women thus appear as

obstacles to societal reform and as individuals who must be prepared to take up the duties of modern life with its own requirements of good wife and mother. My argument, then, has called into question the overly positive evaluation of the civilising impulses of colonialism and the modemising desires of proto-nationalism and nationalism—not because women did not gain from them, but because neither policy seemed to me to be selfless and benign in its espousal of—or even centrally concerend with—women's rights. How will such a critique of colonialist and nationalist arguments against sati resonate in India today? Is there any danger that my critique of the terms of these arguments will be read reductively as support for sati? Authorial intention, it is generally conceded, guarantees nothing. Considerable care will be necessary in framing my discussion in such a way that only a deliberate misreading can appropriate my arguments to reactionary ends. In addition, perhaps in my discussion of the nineteenthcentury debate on sati I should also explicitly engage the contemporary moment so as to clarify how once again, with the single exception of feminists and some progressives, arguments about women's rights have provided the basis for a further entrenchment of patriarchy in the name of "tradition"33 and for the arrogation of greater powers to the state in the name of "modernity." I was lucky to be in India in the aftermath of Deorala. Lucky because, in and of themselves, newspaper clippings and magazine articles could

33 This point has been made by many feminists, including Kum "Perpetuating the Myth," op. cit.

Kum

Sangani,

20

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not have conveyed to me the political temperature there. Grasping the situation required the cumulative experience of countless conversations with friends, family members, and neighbours; chance encounters on buses and trains; reports from feminists and civil libertarians who had travelled to Deorala; public meetings; and accounts of group discussions held in schools, colleges, and political and community organisations. Much of this would obviously be unavailable in print. My combined impressions strongly suggest that great care will have to be exercised in making such arguments as a critique of the Western civilising mission. The possible implications of other issues, such as exploration of the question of women's agency, appear to be even more treacherous. The problem of women's agency occupies a paradoxical position in feminist thinking in that, despite being a central concern, it remains poorly theorized. This is equally true of poststructuralist theory which, while being critical of the bourgeois conception of agency as the free will of an autonomous self, has yet to produce an alternative formulation. The widow's will has been a recurring theme in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates on sati. Here, discussion of agency is framed around the limited and analytically unhelpful binary opposition of coercion and consent. Those defending sati have, then as now, made claims about the "voluntary" nature of the act. Against this, opponents of sati have emphasized coercion and questioned the meaning of consent. In the earlier debate, consent was sometimes conceived as impossible by definition: Women were simply deemed incapable of it. At other times, the issue was formulated more broadly in terms of women's social position and of the meagre alternatives available to women. For instance, it was pointed out that one could hardly speak of consent when widowhood imposed its own regimes of misery. By and large, those against sati today have developed this latter argument, feminists far more consistently than liberals. In the colonial situation, this dualistic conception of agency led to women's being cross-examined at the pyre and permitted to burn if they declared their action to be voluntary. A static conception of agency intersected with the assumption of religious hegemony to marginalise the ways in which women actively negotiated and struggled against the social and familial constraints placed upon them. Nowhere is this more evident than in colonial eyewitness accounts

Multiple

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21

of sati which consistently effaced signs of women's agency in struggle, resistance, and coercion.

I have long felt anxious about how a broader consideration of questions of women's agency is foreclosed by its reductive translation into an issue of whether or not the widow went willingly. Limited discussion of women's agency in this way makes it difficult to simultaneously engage women's systematic subordination and the ways in which women negotiate oppressive, even determining social conditions.35 I know that part of my own concern with these questions comes from a sense of the extent to which Third World peoples are consistently represented as lacking agency in eurocentric discourses. I also know that my concern comes from a conviction that structures of domination are best understood if we can grasp how we remain subjects even in the moments in which we are being intimately and viciously oppressed. The discourse of woman as victim has been invaluable to feminism. But if it is not employed with care or in conjunction with a dynamic conception of agency, it leaves us with reductive representations of women as primarily beings who are passive and acted upon. What is forsaken here is the notion of women's oppression as a complex and contradictory social process. It is crucial to stress in this regard that when Indian feminists speak of woman as victim it is in a complex material sense. Woman as victim does not appear as that common figure of eurocentric feminist discourse that Chandra Mohanty has so nicely identified: the Third World woman as "always, already victim."29 It is also important to note that emphasizing women's systematic subordination rather than debating questions of agency, Indian feminists

347

have analysed such accounts in "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in

Colonial India, 1780-1833," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1989. See

especially Chapter 6, "The Female Subject, The Colonial Gaze: Eyewitness Accounts of Satie. 35 Among feminists developing such a complex conception of agency are Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Resistance, Factory Women in Malaysia (New York, SUNY, 1987) and Linda Gordon, Heroes of their Own Lives, The Politics and History of

Family Violence (New York, Penguin, 1989). 36 Mohanty, "Under Westem Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” op. cit., pp. 333-346 and passim.

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are specifically attempting to counter right-wing discourse that falsely proposes women's total freedom.37 Questions of agency provoke issues at the heart of feminism. But in raising them, in the current Indian context, one walks a tightrope. Firstly, given the dominant discourse on sati, to claim that women are subjects even in their coercion is to court the possibility of misappropriation by the right wing. Secondly, current legislation on sati, by making women attempting sati liable to punishment, implicitly conceives of them as "free agents." The law states that any such punishment must take account of the circumstances in which the woman's decision was taken. But given that the legal and political institutions routinely punish victims instead of perpetrators, why should we trust that this proviso will not work against women? In the short term, then, it seems safest to counter the notion of woman as free agent by emphasizing her victimization. However, unless we include in this a complex sense of agency, we run the risk of producing a discourse that sets women up to be saved. This would situate women within feminist analysis in ways that are similar to women's positioning within colonialist or nationalistic discourses. The example of women's agency is a particularly good instance of the dilemmas confronted in simultaneously attempting to speak within different historical moments and to discrepant audiences. What might be a valuable pushing of the limits of current rethinking of agency in AngloAmerican feminism, may, if not done with extreme care, be an unhelpful, if not disastrous move in the Indian context. If criticism is to be "worldly" (Said)38, or "situated" (Haraway)? or engaged, it must take account of the worlds in which it speaks. Perhaps to Bruce Robbins'

37 Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan is one of the few Indian feminists to have explicitly explored the problem of the widow's subjectivity in the context of sati. In an interesting and provocative article, she argues that the "methodological impasse" generated by the "coercion-consent” framework can be avoided if the question of the widow's subjectivity is engaged via an exploration of "both the phenomenology of pain and a politics that recognizes pain as constitutive of the subject." See "The Subject of Sati: Pain and Death in the Contemporary Discourse on Sati," Yale Journal of Criticism (forthcoming). 38 Edward Said, "Secular Criticism," The World the Text and the Critic, op. cit., pp. 31-

53. 39H araway, "Situated Knowledges," op. cit.

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suggestion in "The Politics of Theory,” that theory is a "when" not a "what," we should also add the notion of a "where."40

Acknowledgements Kum Kum Bhavnani, Vivek Dhareshwar, Ruth Frankenberg, Mary

John, and Kamala Visveswaran have all left the imprint of their critical readings on the final version of this paper. I am also indebted to Indian feminists and progressives whose political insight and imaginative interventions in the contemporary debate on widow burning have been both inspiring and instructive.

40 Bruce Robbins, "The Politics of Theory,” Social Text (Winter 1987/88), p. 5.

IMAGINATION AND IMAGERY: FILIPINO NATIONALISM IN THE 19TH CENTURY Vicente L. Rafael —for Carol Dahl

Benedict Anderson has written perceptively on nationalism as a cultural artifact.! Like all artifacts, it is overdetermined, reducible neither to an ideological effect nor to a pathological symptom of modernity. Instead, ideas of nationhood are informed by paradox and contradiction. For example, Anderson points out that despite their relatively recent invention, nations are thought to be quite archaic and timeless. In the same way that a nation is conceived to be both contingent and natural, it is also regarded as simultaneously universal"—in the modern world, everyone can, should, will "have" a nationality as he or she has a gender"—and particular "such that by definition, "Greek" nationality is sui generis."2 To see nationalism as a cultural artifact is to argue against attempts at essentializing it. Anderson claims that nationalism can be better understood as obliquely analogous to such categories as religion and kinship. Membership in a nation draws on the vocabulary of filiation whereby one comes to understand him or herself in relation to ancestors long gone and generations yet to be born. In addressing pasts and futures, nationalism resituates identity with reference to death, one's own as well as others’. Herein lies nationalism's affective appeal, that which makes it possible to sacrifice oneself for the "motherland." It lends to the

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: New Left Books, 1983), pp. 11-15. Further references appear in

the text.

2 Ibid., p. 14.

26

~=Rafael

accident of birth the sense of continuity and converts mortality into something that is meant for as much as it is realized by one. By placing one in a certain relationship to death and generativity, nationalist discourse therefore frames the arbitrariness of existence. "It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny."3 However, while nationalism tends to mine the idioms of kinship and religion, the historical conditions of its emergence undermine the logic and stability of these inherited categories. This is underlined by Anderson when he defines nations as "imagined communities." Built on the rubble of traditional polities, the nation invokes a radically secular subjectivity that sets it apart from its predecessors. Dynastic states presumed power and privilege as functions of the purity of bloodlines guaranteed by a divine order. Colonial states as dynastic states in drag replicate the obsession with hierarchy by reorganizing social and epistemological categories according to a metaphysics of race and progress. By contrast, the nation envisions a more egalitiarian community. "Regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship."4 It thus reveals the mutability of all sorts of hierarchies. Rather than take power for granted as natural and inherited, nationalism asks about "rights" and thereby opens up the problem of representation: Who has the right to speak for whom, and under what circumstances? To speak of nations as imagined communities is to posit national identities as explicitly fictional, not in the sense of being "false," but in the sense of being constituted in and through a vernacular language. It is for this reason that nations are thought to be inclusive and open-ended, yet limited and bounded (thus the endless irony, as Anderson points out, of the category "naturalized citizen"). The vernacular matrix of national identity is, however, historically determined. Any language, given the right conditions, can serve as a vernacular insofar as it is able to produce the identity of its speakers in ways that feel both constructed and appropriate to them. Because they are historical, vernaculars are never pure. They are rather the result of an indeterminate series of usages, translations and mis-translations, and interested codifications. If language

3 Jbid., p. 18. 4 Ibid., p. 16. 5 Ibid., p. 140.

Imagination

and

Imagery

27

localizes identity, to imagine a community in the vernacular would be to represent subjectivities in process: Divided, fragmentary, and changeable. Indeed, it is arguably such explicitly impure and unstable imaginings that lend nationalism its modernity. The modernity of nationalism can also be seen in the peculiar way that it posits a "community in anonymity." As Anderson points out, belonging to a nation need never entail face-to-face contact with its members. Instead, one's sense of belonging is mediated by a complex set of symbols and events that cohere within the temporal rhythm of clock and.calender. Nationalist consciousness thus presupposes the secularization of time—time as "transverse (and horizontal) marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment but by temporal coincidence"®-- as one of its conditions of possibility.’ Time as coincidence rather than apocalyptic punctuation was historically made possible by, among other things, the rise of print capitalism which promoted print vernaculars and the emergence of newspapers and novels as the dominant means for delineating and particularizing the social and cultural field of a nation. Unfolding in "empty, homogenous time," novels and newspapers in the vernacular provided a space for the juxtapositon of previously unrelated events, people, and objects. As commodities, their circulation was dependent on the workings of the market while their production relied on the technology of print. In the sense that it was shaped by the exigencies of print-capitalism and print-vernacular, one could think of nationalist (like bourgeois) consciousness as mechanically reproducible. Hence, while the vernacular provided the medium for imagining "continuity-indiscontinuity" where the nation was concerned, the technical and temporal context within which nationalism emerged suggests the presence of another moment in the imagination of nationhood, one that might escape the boundaries set by the vernacular. Rather than result in the consolidation of a particular, autonomous identity, such a moment would posit the possibility of the mechanical proliferation and indeterminate circulation of identities. Not only would it then point to the workings of the imagination in bringing about a sense of community; it

6 Ibid., p. 30. 7 [bid., p. 28-40.

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Rafael

might also indicate the risk in such imaginings, including the failure of imagination itself. I want to suggest not only that nationalism is inherently conflictual, caught between dynastic/colonial modes of apprehension on the one hand and the possibilities of an egalitarian, postcolonial existence on the other, but also that the means for imagining nationhood may at times be at odds with the very nature of the images that are reproduced. I propose this not as a general theory about nationalism but as a conceptual hook for reflecting on the particular historical moment I'm concerned with: the formative period of Filipino nationalism in the late nineteenth century. The early Filipino nationalists were a remarkable group. For the most part they were members of an emergent bourgeoisie educated in the universities of the colonial capital of Manila and European cities such as Madrid, Paris, and Berlin. They were well-travelled and multilingual, though Spanish was the preferred lingua franca. And they were all males who self-consciously referred to themselves as ilustrados, literally, "enlightened." From the 1880s to the middle of the 1890s they engaged in campaigns calling for the reform of the economic, political, and educational conditions in the Philippines. Because of the hazards of colonial censorship and threats of imprisonment, the site of their political activities eventually shifted to the more liberal Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona. Known in Philippine historiography as the Propaganda Movement, their political efforts varied widely in scope. Among other things, they organized among Filipino expatriates and Europeans sympathetic to Philippine problems; wrote novels as well as philological, ethnological, and historical studies of the colony; and publicized nationalist causes in the liberal Spanish press and, from 1889-1895, in their own propaganda newspaper, La Solidaridad. Such causes initially had an assimilationist nature: the granting of Spanish citizenship to Filipino colonial subjects by way of equal application of the Spanish civil law to the colony and Filipino representation to the Spanish parliament. But as assimilationist hopes dimmed by the mid-1890s the more prominent leaders of the

Imagination

and

Imagery

29

sae Sige Movement began to favor Philippine independence from Spain. A crucial feature of the nationalist movement was the ilustrado critique of the Catholic Church, a key institution in the history of Spanish colonialism. 9 Filipino nationalists were particularly antagonized by the enormous influence of the Spanish friars whom they held as chiefly accountable for the colony's backwardness. They saw the friars as forces of reaction, and with good reason, for they regarded Filipinos as inferior to Spaniards, liberalism and learning as threats to the power of the Church, and the ilustrados themselves as subversives. It would be difficult to overstate the political and symbolic import of the Spanish friars for the Filipino ilustrados. In nationalist writings, they were seen as figures of denial and agents of exclusion, hoarders of wealth and women, purveyors of religious fetishism, and merchants of ritual practices and devotional paraphernalia. 10

8 Some of the ilustrados had joined the revolution against Spain by 1897, while others rejected armed struggle altogether. Nonetheless, most of the ilustrados sought to control the short-lived Philippine Republic in Malolos in 1898, but when war against the United States broke out in 1899, some of them fought while others collaborated with the U.S. With the war's end in 1902, nearly all of the ilustrados and their descendants eagerly participated in the expanded American colonial bureaucracy. And when Japanese forces occupied the Philippines between 1942 and 1945, most of the second -generation ilustrados collaborated with the Occupation government in varying degrees of willingness. With independence in 1946, they faced a peasant-led, Communist-supported uprising known as the Huk Revolt, and with massive aid from the United States quashed the revolt and consolidated their hold over the economy and politics of the new republic. Indeed, the ancestors of former president Ferdinand Marcos and current president Corazon Aquino were both part of the ilustrado tradition. For a concise but incisive overview of ilustrado history, see Benedict Anderson, "Cacique Democracy and the Philippines: Origins and Dreams," New Left Review, 169, (May-June 1988), pp. 3-31. The most comprehensive account of the early stages of ilustrado nationalism can be found in John Schumacher, S.J.,

The Propaganda Movement, (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1973). See also Renato Constatino, The Philippines: A Past Revisted, (Manila: By the author, 1975). 9 See John Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565-1700, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959); and Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule, (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1988). 10 For some of the more representative anti-friar polemics, see Graciano Lopez-Jaena, "Fray Botod, in Disursos y articulos varios Barcelona: Imprenta Iberia de Francisco Fossas, 1891), pp. 203-227; the pamphlets of Marcelo H. del Pilar, La soberania monacal

and La frailocracia; and in many of the writings of Jose Rizal, especially the two novels,

30

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The Jesuit historian John Schumacher rightly notes that without the Spanish clergy, Filipino nationalism would have taken a different course.!1 The friars occupied a near-totalizing significance in the minds of the ilustrados and came to represent the negative limit in the formation of nationalist consciousness in the late nineteenth century. In this sense we can think of them as mirror images of Filipino nationalists. Indeed, the intensely negative tenor of anti-friar rhetoric among the ilustrados was a way of recognizing the Spanish clergy as the source of their own divided identity. For as the Filipinos repeatedly pointed out, the friars were themselves doubled, split between spiritual and material concerns. Despite their vows of celibacy, they were accused of using the confessional to prey on the gullibility of women and thus monopolize access to their bodies and minds.12 As figurative fathers, they were invested with phallic authority yet were often snidely referred to by the ilustrados as "men in skirts" and "soured nurses."!3 Representatives of Catholic monotheism, the friars nonetheless acted like pagan priests (babaylan), encouraging the substitution of faith with the fetishistic regard for an endless array of religious images among the populace. Though mortals, they behaved like gods (diosdiosan); and despite their vows of poverty, they lived lavish lives akin to that of oriental despots. Spanish fathers were thus seen by the ilustrados as figures not only of denial but also of excess. They were imagined, that is, as going beyond their proper roles and traditional boundaries. Translating between languages and moving between cultures, the Spanish fathers seemed like retrograde versions of the youthful nationalists. The former were thought to monopolize the language of power and the circulation of money and women, thus threatening to cut the latter off from access to their own future. Given the oedipal texture of ilustrado anxieties, it is not

Noli me

tangere (Berlin: 1887) and El Filibusterismo (Ghent: 1891).

See also

Schumacher, Propaganda Movement, (cited in fn. 8) pp. 271-277.

11¢chumacher, op. cit., pp. 272-278. 12 See, for example, Rizal, "Sa Mga Kababayang Dalaga sa Malolos," in Escritos Politicos y Historicos de Jose Rizal, Manila: National Centennial Commission, 1961), pp. 55-65; and Lopez-Jaena, "Fray Botod." (cited in fn. 10).

13 Cited in Leon Ma. Guerrero, The First Filipino: A Biography of Jose Rizal (Manila: National Historical Commission, 1974), pp. 82,115.

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surprising to see that the future they imagined and desired took on a specifically feminine shape. Anderson writes, "amor patriae does not differ...from other affections, in which there is always an element of fond imagining....What the eye is to the lover...language...is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at the mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships imagined, and futures dreamed."!4 In the context of nineteenth-century Philippine nationalism, the association of language with sight and mother with nation is highly suggestive. As we've seen, Spanish fathers figured the negative moment in the production of ilustrado consciousness. Mothers, however, tended to play a far more ambivalent role in nationalist thinking. To the extent that they were imagined to be the source of the vernacular with which to articulate nationhood, real mothers tended to be conflated with figurative mothers, such as "Mother Spain" or "Mother Philippines." Tlustrado sons expressed their relationship to the "motherland" (whether Spain in the early assimilationist phase of nationalist history or the Philippines in the later more separatist period) in familial terms. Equating love of nation with love of mother idealized the former in terms of the latter. Thus could sacrifice and loss appear necessary and reasonable: These were ways for sons to reciprocate the affections of mothers, real or imagined, by acting as their protectors. 15 The love of country was thus far from disinterested inasmuch as it engendered, in the double sense of the term, the idea of the nation. By doing so, nationalist discourse reflected as much as it refracted domestic politics. One way of getting a sense of the complexity of interests informing amor patriae is by taking a look at some of the writings of Jose Rizal (1861-1896), undoubtedly the most prominent and articulate of the ilustrados and the national hero of the Republic of the Philippines. 16 Writing to his mother from Berlin in 1886, Rizal tells her:

14 Anderson, op. cit., p. 140. 15 Again, see Rizal, "Sa Mga Kababayang Dalaga" and Lopez-Jeana, "Fray Botod" (cited above). 16 The standard biographies of Rizal include W.E. Retana, Vidas y escritos del Dr. Jose Rizal, (Madrid: Victoriano Suarez, 1907); Carlos Quirino, The Great Malayan, (Manila:

Philippine Educational Company, 1940); Rafael Palma, Biografia de Rizal, (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1949); and Guerrero, The First Filipino, (cited above).

32

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I've continually dreamed of you and sometimes the dream repeats itself in a single night. I would not like to be superstitious...but I like to believe that you are thinking constantly of me and this makes my mind reproduce what goes on in yours for after all my brain is part of yours and this is not strange because while I am asleep here, you are awake there, etc. etc.17 "You're at the center of my thoughts," Rizal seems to be telling his mother so that her images return to him as if unwilled. Biographers of Rizal have noted the close ties shared by mother and son. The letter above is one example of their intimacy. Yet, Rizal accounts for the involuntary repetition of his dreams by attributing it to his mother's constant thoughts of him. His dreams are the "reproductions" of her waking thoughts, which in turn are invariably about him. His mother thus comes across as a repository for images of himself. Dreaming of her is a way of reproducing those images but in displaced fashion so that they involve not only memories of her but images of her thinking about him as well. The involuntary nature of such imaging suggests the workings of a kind of mechanical memory—one that escapes conscious intentionality—that draws on the labor of the mother's thoughts.

The image of the mother as both the source of memories and a mechanism for the reproduction of images about the self is in fact a recurrent motif in much of Rizal's writings. In an early autobiographical fragment entitled "My First Reminiscence,” Rizal talks about his mother as his first teacher of Spanish, painstakingly correcting his pronunciation

17 One Hundred Letters of Jose Rizal (Manila: Philippine Historical Society, Alonso y Quintos (1825-1911) was bom elite. Rizal describes her as "a woman

to his Parents, Brothers, Sisters and Relatives, 1959), p. 312. Rizal's mother, Dona Teodora to a family of principales -- the Filipino colonial of more than average education,” having been

schooled at the convent-run Colegio de Santa Rosa in Manila at a time when literacy among men, much less than women, was rather low in the colony. The son's relationship with his mother was such that when her eyesight began.to deteriorate in the early 1880s, Rizal

decided to study ophthalmology in order to cure her. In his novels and journalistic writings, Rizal often alludes to his mother’s influence on his political education. Curiously and for reasons that remain unclear to me, Rizal rarely ever spoke of, much less

communicated with, his father, Don Francisco Mercado. See Guerrero, The First Filipino, pp. 18: 30-32.

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and grammar, 18 His mother also translates stories for him from Spanish to Tagalog. The one he recalls in particular involved the story of an old moth telling its offspring not to fly too closely to the flame of a lamp lest it burn its wings. The younger moth nonetheless is attracted to the light and disobeys the older one's counsel. Flying too close to the flame, it plunges to death. While his mother translates this story for him, Rizal recalls being distracted by the sight of moths flitting around the flame of their kerosene lamp. What is odd is that he fails to listen to the story, yet remembers its lesson: My mother continued her reading...(but) the fate of the two insects interested me intensely. The light agitated its golden tongue on one side, a singed moth in one of these movements fell into oil, clapped its wings for some time and then died. That assumed for me the proportion of a great event and as a strange phenomenon that I have always observed in me when something excites me. It seemed to me that the flame and the moths (in the story) were moving far away, very far, and my mother's voice acquired a strange, sepulchral timbre. My mother finished the fable. I was not listening; all my attention, all my thoughts were concentrated on the fate of the moths,

young, dead and full of illusions.19 In this memory, Rizal's mother is less the origin of language than a figure who translates, as well as one who teaches the boy about the hazards of translation. The moral of the mother's fable lies in the passage from Spanish to Tagalog, from listening to obedience. The failure to translate from one to another brings up the possibility of death, figured in the fate of the errant moths. Yet, Rizal learns these lessons not only despite but also because of the fact that he's distracted by the flickering light of the kerosene lamp. Hence, his first memory is split between two images: that of his mother and that of the light from the lamp. Each marks the significance of the other. For just as the light 18 | have been unable to find the Spanish original of this text. I have instead used the English translation (by Encarnacion Alzona) found in Reminiscenses and Travel of Jose Rizal (Manila: National Historical Institute, 1977), pp. 35-37.

19 Thid., pp. 36-37.

34 ~=—Rafael makes it possible for Rizal's mother to translate the story, the story illuminates, as it were, the dangers that the light poses to translation. Indeed, by fastening onto the light, Rizal fails to listen and so disobeys his mother. But disobedience still brings with it the knowledge of death, the very same knowledge that was already implied in the mother's fable. Rizal's first memory is anything but innocent. Rather, it is about the difference between Spanish and Tagalog, story and experience, obedience and transgression. By bringing to surface two seemingly opposed images—mother and light—it also shows these images to be inherently divided. The mother is both a storyteller intent on imparting a lesson and a kind of machine for translation. The light from the lamp is both a metaphor for knowledge and its attendant risks as well as a mechanism that allows reading to take place. Small wonder, then, that Rizal ends his narrative on a note of ambivalence. On the one hand, he recalls the "sweet lessons" taught to him by his mother standing out amidst the "bitter lessons" learned in adult life. On the other hand, he continues "...with the heart of a child (to) believe that light is the most beautiful thing...and that it is worthy for a man to sacrifice his life for it. |

"20

What are the effects of seeing the nation as either "mother" or "light"? What difference does it make to imagine nationhood either as a gendered metaphor or as an impersonal machine that generates memories of individual and collective images? To address these questions, I want to turn to an essay Rizal wrote shortly after arriving in Europe. It is appropriately enough entitled "El

Amor Patrio," "The Love of Country." Published in 1882 when Rizal was barely twenty-one years old, this essay established Rizal's notoriety

among both Filipinos and Spanish colonial officials.2! Much of the imagery and logic of Rizal's later writings are foreshadowed in this essay. And because Rizal's style of imagining nationhood was regarded as exemplary among his contemporaries and future nationalists, the essay is worth following at some length.

20 Ibid., pp. 37. 21 The Spanish text is found in Prosa por Jose Rizal (Manila: Commission, 1961),

pp.12-17.

National Centennial

Imagination

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Rizal begins by invoking the timeless universality of nationhood. "From the cultured Europeans" to the enslaved Africans, from the ancient to the modern peoples of the world: ..all have had and have an idol (idolo)—beautiful, brilliant, sublime, but implacable, fierce and demanding --whom they have called Motherland (Patria)...she is in the thoughts of everyone, and like the light enclosed in clear crystal, she goes forth in the most vivid splendor. "22

Nationhood is seen to be transhistorical. This is why the motherland can be regarded as both idol and light, an image that unifies opposed terms and the means for producing such images. For the patriot, however, the ideality of the patria comes through in direct relationship to her absence. The motherland is "ever more idolized in proportion to one's...distance from her."23 One imagines the patria only in missing her. And missing her is, in turn, indissociable from recalling one's first memories of childhood: ...there in our country are our first memories (recuerdos) of childhood, a happy ode, known only in childhood, from whose traces spring forth the flower of innocence and happiness; because there slumbers a whole past and future to be hoped; because in her forests and in her meadows, on every tree, on every blade, on every flower, you see engraved (grabado) the memory of a being you love, as her breath in perfumed breeze, her song in the murmur of the fountains, her smile in the rainbow of the sky, or her sighs in the confused moans of the night wind.74

Here, the love one feels for the patria is conveyed by what we might call a rhetoric of mourning. Mourning implies a process of working through, then setting apart one's memories of a lost object or person from one's experience of them while still alive. In doing so one is able to reconcile oneself to the fact of loss. Such a reconciliation is accomplished through the idealization of the person or object. Put

22 Tbid., p. 12. 23 [bid., p. 13. 24 Ibid.

36 ~=6Rafael

another way, mourning succeeds when what one remembers is an image of what was lost, no longer the lost object itself.25 Mourning thus entails the reproduction of stereotypical images of the lost object. In such a context, memory attaches itself not to direct experience but to its mediated versions. The distance between the patriot and the patria enables the former to establish the latter as an image of loss as well as the space for locating loss as such. Worth noting is the specific way by which such imaging takes place. The "memory of a being you love" is said by Rizal to be "engraved" (grabado) on the motherland's body. The engraving of these images on the patria, like the imprinting of a vernacular in a novel or newspaper, brings to mind the mechanical process of standardizaton and reproduction of a vernacular that precipitates nationalist consciousness. Hence, the sense of loss that occasions the imagination of nationhood is localized by a certain style and process of imaging. As in Rizal's dream about his mother, the patriot misses the motherland and so constitutes her absence as that which brings about the presence of a self who remembers others who remember him: It is because you see there with the eyes of your imagination under the tranquil roof of your old home, a family who remembers you and awaits you...whatever her name...we love her always, as the child loves his mother...26 Nationalism as a kind of mourning is built on remembering as a reciprocal act. This is why the recollection of the patria is thought by Rizal as a form of return, both in the sense of giving and a journeying back. The circulation of memory between patriot and motherland binds together the living with the dead, culture with nature, innocence with mortality. Hence to the question, "Why is it that people are compelled to retum to their country?, Rizal responds, "Is it gratitude; is it affection for

25 The classic formulation of mourning is found in Sigmund Freud, "Mouring and Melancholia,” in General Psychological Theory, translated by Joan Riviere (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 164-180. See also the useful explication under "Work of

Mouming" in J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), pp. 485-486. 26 Rizal, Prosa, p. 13.

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everything that reminds us of something of the first days of our own life, the land where our ancestors are sleeping...2"27 It is almost as if an undecipherable violence underwrites—or at least subtends—the clarity and availability of the motherland's body to the patriot's memory traces. The land described above is one that resists all attempts at human and divine inscription. Instead, it is thought to be the site of a series of actions freed from intentions, of images that exceed the localizing pull of the vernacular. Depersonalized and degendered, it becomes sheer automaticity, "the avalanche or the cascade, matters of perpetual motion and endless menace." The nation can therefore be imagined as that which threatens the very workings of the imagination. It is perhaps this possibility that seizes Rizal when he speaks about the patria not only as the storehouse of fond memories but also as the source of a certain disease:

Probably these beauties or tender remembrances fortify the bond that unties us to the land of our birth, engendering sweet feelings of well-being when we are in our country, or profound melancholia when we are far away from it, the origin of a cruel disease called nostalgia. Oh! never sadden the stranger who arrives at our shores; do not awaken in him vivid memories of his country, of the comfort (delicias) of his home, because then unfortunately, you will evoke in him this disease, a tenacious phantom (tenaz fantasma) that will not abandon him until he

sees his native soil or the borders of his tomb.28 The love of country brings with it both pleasure and dread. In imagining a community, one also risks contracting nostalgia, a "disease" provoked by the emergence of unbounded images. Such images threaten to run rampant like phantoms, simultaneously inhabiting the realm of the living and the dead, moving between the boundaries of absence and presence. They thus signal the failure of mourning. To be gripped by nostalgia is to see loss converted neither to memory nor reciprocity. Instead, loss comes across as the unsublatable experience of being haunted. Hence, while the nation can be thought of as an absence reconstituted in the vernacular of mourning, it could also exist, as in the

27 Ibid., p. 14. 28 Ibid.

38

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hightly charged passage above, as a ghostly presence. In the latter case, the nation suggests intimacy as it escapes localization. As a phantom, it is neither mother nor machine but a restless image which remains eccentric and heterogenous to native imaginings. In Rizal, therefore, the compulsion to return to the motherland takes on an added complexity. Not only is it an expression of love and gratitude, a memorialization of innocence sanctifying mortality; it can also be the result of sporadic haunting which drives the patriot to "his native soil or the boundaries of his tomb." Laying to rest these ghostly images unleashed by the "disease" of nostalgia brings up the question of death and hence the possibility that for Rizal remains unthinkable. Towards the latter portion of his essay, Rizal draws back from conjuring further apparitions of the nation and instead returns to those familiar and "pious sentiments" (piadoso sentimiento). As we have seen, such sentiments hinge on reciprocity and mourning: Some have sacrificed for her their youth, their pleasures, others have dedicated to her the splendors of their genius; others shed their blood; all have died, bequeathing to their motherland an immense fortune: liberty and glory. And what has she done for them? She mourns them, and proudly presents them to the world, to posterity and to her children to serve as examples.2? Once more, the nation is gendered and domesticated within the circle of sacrifice and the idealization of loss that binds the child-patriot to its motherland. By doing so, the patriot not only expresses his love but also reverses the relationship of dependency between mother and child. He posits his future authority over her, imagining himself and others like him as potential patrons, "bequeathing" to the patria the legacy of freedom. In this way, the motherland inherits from her sons an "immense fortune"—a surplus of symbolic wealth with which to nurture future sons. Offspring and lover, the patriot is now also father to the nation. It is thus wholly without irony that Filipinos have regarded Rizal as the "father" of Philippine nationalism and that one of his biographers has referred to him as the "first Filipino."

29 Ibid., pp. 16-17.

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The dialectic of filiation, however, doesn't always work in the way I've described above. This is because the familial discourse for engendering nationhood runs up against the conditions of mechanical reproduction—those conditions stressed by Anderson which allow for this vernacularization of images. In Rizal, such images draw their power from their inherent instability. Maternal and mechanical images can slide into as much as stand against one another. And the entire process of sorting out such images could, at certain moments, enter into a crisis of imaging when the "disease" of nostalgia hits the patriot, unleashing the proliferation of ghostly images. To return to the motherland thus incurs the risk of being stranded in a zone of images that drift away from the text of nationalist imagination. It is to face the possibility of seeing the products of one's work assume an existence unmoored to and unrecognizable from one's original intentions. Rizal's attempt to reimagine community in terms of mourning and reciprocity not only allows him to repress such ghostly images but it also enables him to posit a patriarchal basis for nationhood. Yet such a move is provisional. In the history of Philippine nationalism, the ghosts would keep coming back. The tension between imagination and imagery is dispersed over the field of nationalist writings.20 However, it recurs in a somewhat puzzling way in a medium related to but distinct from print vernacular— that of photography. Whereas nationalist texts articulate national identity with reference to the absent figure of the motherland, photographs bring forth the image of the nation with reference to the absent bodies of patriots. Yet, texts and photographs differ in their ways of imaging. Whereas one involves the setting forth and working through of the contradictions and divisions of national identity, the other entails rendering such contradictions obvious, that is, visible and therefore tangential to conceptualization. In what follows, I offer a preliminary discussion of the curious role of photography in nationalist discourse.

I want to begin by once again turning to Rizal. Rizal's letters and diaries give us a sense of how commonplace photographs had become

30 See for example Vicente L. Rafael, "Language, Identity and Gender in Rizal's Noli, in Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs (RIMA) 18 (Winter 1984), pp. 110-140.

40 _ =Rafael

among late nineteenth century Filipino bourgeoisie.3! Rizal routinely mentions the exchange of photographs as tokens of affection among friends and family. Rizal himself kept at least two large photo albums and regularly had his portraits taken in Europe for the benefit of his family and aquaintances.32 Pictures were gifts by which the recipient could remember the giver in his or her absence. In this sense, they supplemented the work of mourning, providing one with a memory trace of the other. "My father and my mother should have their pictures taken and sent to me," Rizal writes from Madrid in 1883. "At least in that way I shall always have their figures before me and (they) would not be erased from my memory."33 Rizal's older brother informs Rizal in another letter, "I picked up in Manila your five photographs and have delivered each one to its owner."34 Rizal's mother, Dona Teodora, writes to her son, "We had our group picture taken to send to you so that you will not get sad. We talked about your great desire to see our pictures."35 Rizal to his fellow ilustrado, Mariano Ponce, from London: "At present I cannot send you my photograph because I have none; the only one I have was taken sometime ago and I wish to present you with a new one."36, and to a German friend in Berlin: "I take the liberty of sending you now my

31 The earliest mention of photography in the Philippines occurs in 1841 when a Spanish official named Sinibaldo de Mas began to photograph members of the Spanish community

to supplement his income. Stereoscopic photos of a Philippine tribal group, the Tinguianes, taken about 1860 by an unknown French traveller are the earliest known surviving photographs in the archipelago. By the latter 1860s, several photo studios had been established in the capital city of Manila as well as in a few provincial capitals where Filipino principales had their portraits taken. The information above, schematic as it is, comes from the catalogue written by John Silva for the exhibition he curated, "Colonial Philippines: Photographs, 1860-1910," at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, May 9-July 11, 1987. As I indicate in the text below, a history of photography in the Philippines is yet to be written. 32 Two of Rizal's photo albums can be found at the Rizaliana section of the Lopez Memorial Museum in Manila. 33 One Hundred Letters, p. 67.

34 Letters Between Rizal and Family Members, vol. I, Book 1, 1876-1896 (Manila: National Heroes Commission, 1964), p. 97.

35 Ibid, p. 134. 36 Reminiscenses and Travels, p. 301.

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picture and I beg you to send me yours."37 Leonor Rivera, Rizal's cousin and one-time fiance, writes an inscription on the back of her photograph: "To my unforgettable and most beloved lover, this photograph is dedicated. Your devoted Leonor."38 And Rizal in his Madrid diary of January 1883 writes of refusing another ilustrado's request to show his collection of photographs "because these were gifts and had dedications, "while a couple of weeks later he "merrily" engages two sisters in conversation over the same picture.39 And years later while exiled in Dapitan, he writes to his sister somewhat impatiently, "You have not sent me my album of pictures."40 What is interesting about these passages is how flat and unremarkable they are. Among Filipinos, photographs seemed to elicit,at most, formulaic inscriptions of affection, passing remarks, and marginal notes in letters and diaries rather than sustained disquisitions on their aesthetic value or political significance as had been the case among nineteenthcentury European and American writers on photography. This is perhaps one reason that a history of photography in the Philippines is yet to be written. Photographs have seemed so obvious to those who took and exchanged them that they have become barely visible to historians of Philippine nationalism. The photographs of ilustrados persist as perhaps the most concrete evidence of their existence; yet they also seem to be the most troublesome of documents. While they permit the tracing and enumeration of their details, photographic images discourage the generalization of their meanings. Silent and elusive, they also appear unchanging. Meant for private consumption, these photographs nevertheless attracted public interest because of the history of their referrents. How, then ,to understand images of bodies that seem to demand as they evade historical interpretation? When I started thinking about photography and nationalism, I thought it might be possible to find a link between pictorial and textual images— that perhaps one could be made to illuminate the other. It is possible to

37 Miscellaneous Correspondence, vol.II, Book 4, 1877-1896 (Manila:

Commission, 1963), p. 91.

National Heroes

38 Enistolario Rizalino, vol.4, 1892-1896, edited by Teodoro M. Kalaw (Manila: Bureau

of Printing, 1936), between pages 50 and 51. 39 Reminiscenses and Travels, pp. 88-89; 91. 40 One Hundred Letters, p. 487.

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do so, but only to a point. Take, for example, the photograph of Rizal with two other ilustrado propagandists in Madrid, Marcelo H. del Pilar and Mariano Ponce (Figure 1). One could think of this photograph as part of a larger attempt at nationalist self-fashioning. By posing in European clothes, Pilar and Ponce appear tendentiously out of context. Their photographed bodies take visible exception to Spanish racial stereotypes such as were current in the latter nineteenth century. These stereotypes amounted to the infantilization of native Filipinos. The women were regarded as gullible and excessively accommodating to foreigners, while the men were said to be "lacking even the beard which is the sign of virility in a race.... "Bodies without clothes, brains without ideas...an inanimate heap of human entities.'"41 By contrast, the photograph in Figure 1 shows the seriousness of expression on the ilustrados' faces that makes one think of collected interiors in command of their exterior representations, of rational minds holding together bodies in studied repose. The photograph specifies with remarkable precision the boundaries of those bodies, fixing their limits and proportions in ways that other forms of representation would be unable to do.

We might also read a similar process of self-fashioning at work in another photograph of Rizal, this time with the Filipino painter Juan Luna and ilustrado Valentin Ventura posing in Paris in between their fencing exercises (Figure 2). While attending the Paris Exposition of 1889, Rizal and his fellow Filipinos saw a Wild West show featuring native American Indians performing various skills on horseback. Impressed not only by their daring but also at the enthusiastic applause they received from the crowd, the Filipinos decided to form a mutual-aid association and call it Los Indios Bravos. Rizal himself had suggested the name, thinking to subvert the racist designation indio used by the Spaniards to refer to native Filipinos.42 Referring to themselves as "brave Indians" coincided with their interest in fencing, gymnastics, martial arts, and weightlifting—again, ways of marking their bodies apart from colonial categories. Posing with their swords planted firmly between their legs,

41 This passage comes from one of the best-known racist tracts of the latter nineteenth century, "Ellos y nosotros," by Pablo Feced (a.k.a. Quioquiap), cited in Schumacher, Propaganda Movement, p. 56. 42 Schumacher, Propaganda Movement, pp. 213-214;

120.

Guerrero, The First Filipino, p.

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Fig. I. José Rizal, M.H. del Pilar, and Mariano Ponce, Madrid, 1890

Fig. 2. "Los Indios Bravos," 1889, Paris

43

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the Indios Bravos display a masculine alternative to what they conceived to be the menacingly androgynous and corrupt regime of the Spanish friars. That image of masculine solidarity is further suggested by the barely visible figure of a woman—Paz Pardo de Tavera, the wife of Luna—-situated in the background, at the margins of the frame, as if to signal the sexual hierarchy that patriotism reinstitutes. Considered along with the first photograph, this picture has the effect of remapping the body of the colonized subject in ways that peel away from the grid of colonial assumptions. Both photographs reproduce alternative identities in the precise manner by which they trace the physical differences between Filipinos and Spaniards even as they evoke the translation and transvaluation of clothing and sensibility from one to the other. These pictures and others like them could be understood as continuing the project of articulating a nationalist identity predicated on demarcating the boundaries of the imagined body—whether that of the motherland's or of the patriot's. Exchanged and circulated among friends and family, such photographs were ways of intimating a community built on the absence of their members. It would therefore seem appropriate to read these photographs historically and politically as images that promote a radical estrangement between colonizer and colonized that would in time become the basis for Philippine independence. Such readings do not exhaust the contents of these and other pictures. Again, it is worth recalling that Filipinos did not write about photography as such or about particular photographs except to register their receipt and delivery. There is therefore no textual evidence upon which we can verify our readings of these pictures, just as there is no definitive context into which we can enclose the photographic images that would make them the product of the intentions of their referrent. There is instead an irreducible there-ness to these images that remains unaltered from the

particular moment they were taken. While they exist as residues of prior imaginings, both public and private, they also resist conversion to other images, allowing only for their mechanical duplication. Captions and commentaries may alter their significance within the discursive field of colonialism and nationalism, but they do not alter their appearance. In this sense, photographs are prototypical of mechanically reproducible imagery. They lead a life linked to, yet radically attenuated from, the

Imagination

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objects they represent. They are the "afterlife" of these objects, but only in the sense of being their dematerialized repetition rather than their material transformation. Such images forge bonds of intimacy without yielding their autonomy. Photographs of patriots thus seem both appropriate and anomalous. Whereas nationalist writings imagined a new community through a vernacular history of love and the reconciliatory labor of sacrifice, photographs of nationalists hover over their texts, instantly imaging, with no more work than the click of the shutter, identities that can circulate and reproduce but which cannot translate. We can see the peculiar nature of photographic images in the portraits of Rizal. Shortly before and long after Rizal's death by firing squad on charges of fomenting the Philippine Revolution of 1896, Rizal's pictures took on an iconic value among many Filipinos. One in particular taken in Madrid in 1890 became widely reproduced (Figure 3). Numerous smaller copies were circulated with the outbreak of the revolution carrying the following legend on the reverse: Doctor Jose Rizal! Shot in Manila, 30 December 1896. Tyranny snatched you away from us!...But what she will never do is to erase you from the hearts of your countrymen. When the Philippines is able to decide its own destiny, she will know how to erect an altar to your memory in the temple of immortality and to put your name in letters of gold in the eternal pages of history. For now, you must satisfy yourself with the ardent worship (culto fervoroso) that each Filipino devotes to you from the depths of their souls.43

Yet, there is also a sense in which the process of imaging the nation through Rizal's photographs differed from that of imaging it through his writings. Precisely because of their conflictual nature, Rizal's writings leave something hidden and potentially unknown. For this reason, one can engage them dialectically in terms of the ways they enact the history of nationalist imagination. Or one can treat them, as most biographers of

43 See Retana, Vidas y escritos, illustration no. 13, unpaginated.

46

= Rafael

Fig. 3. José Rizal, Madrid, 1989

Rizal have done often with the sponsorship of the Philippine state, as sacred texts whose meaning has always been prefigured and whose significance current history confirms. Rizal's photographs, however, expose Rizal as an image on a flat surface that is seen rather than read. Unlike his writings, Rizal's photographic images do not entail the expenditure of work over time that would lend itself to the metaphorics of sacrifice and loss. Instead, they are reproduced automatically so that their dissemination becomes difficult if not impossible to control. Consequently, Rizal's images could cross boundaries of class, gender, and language to become a national symbol by the turn of the century despite, indeed, the fact that they remained autonomous and unassimilated. His photographs served as the basis for the Rizal monument built in Manila in 1912 (under the auspices of the U.S. colonial state) and similar other monuments that have since been erected in virtually all Philippine towns. These, along with nearly all

representations of Rizal, show him in the European clothes that he wore in his pictures so that he appears consistently out of place in a tropical setting. Just as interesting is the fact that such an anomaly has remained largely uncommented upon by Filipinos.

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The oddness of his images lies in this: They project him as the "father" of the nation but in ways that lead eventually to the flattening of his legacy. Since Rizal's death, his photographic likeness has adorned everything from stamps to currency notes, matchboxes to amulets, bookcovers to postcards. Like "tenacious phantoms," his images have

clung to the national consciousness.44 However, unlike the uncontrollable imaging induced by nostalgia for the motherland, Rizal's images do not seem to produce anxiety or even pathos. That is, they mark the boundaries of an imagined community but do so without effort. Again, this has to do with the way such images drastically abbreviate the work of memory and imagination. Rizal's photographs conjure up the nation by circumventing the history of its imaging. They seem familiar to the extent that they remain alien—so alien as to become unremarkable. They thus suggest something of the extra-linguistic nature of photographic images: Existing on the border of colonial and national history, they recall the difference between imagination and imagery, between a "community in anonymity" and the anonymity that haunts community. Postcript What do I, an immigrant Filipino living in the U.S.A. at the end of the twentieth century see in these photographs of the "first Filipinos” taken in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century? Precious little that would, without the mediation of their words, link me with them as part of a community in the making. But it's precisely the tenuousness of that communication that returns me again and again to their images, suggesting to me the contours of my desire (for interpretation, for identification) as much as the sheer distance between their past and mine.

Thus do such photographs seem to suggest instances in the formation of identity which escape the vernacularizing pull of nationalist discourse. As such, they also point to another place where the link between language and power is attenuated, a space between the personal and the political, not yet (or ever?) within the reach of theory and translation.

44 Guerrero, The First Filipino, pp. 421-422.

POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISTS IN THE WESTERN INTELLECTUAL FIELD: ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND NATIVE INFORMANTS? Mary E. John What makes us decide we have to re-educate ourselves, even those of us with "good" educations? —Adrienne Rich, Notes Toward a Politics of Location As for how I came to be in Delhi, these were for reasons. . . that have more to do with an "unexamined hfe”... —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Interview

What we are grappling with today—in the first world and "elsewhere"—is not only the model of the "universal" intellectual but also the model of the "specific" intellectual. Michel Foucault has quite possibly been the latter's most persuasive proponent. He has argued for a mode of political activity based on a specific relation to local power through expertise. More importantly, the particularities of such an intellectual's field of specialization can connect with the general functioning of the production of truth, with the university playing a privileged role: (T]ransverse connections have been able to develop between different areas of knowledge, from one focus of politicisation to another: magistrates and psychiatrists, doctors and social workers, laboratory workers and sociologists have been able, each in his own field and through mutual exchange and

49

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John support, to participate in a global process of politicisation of

intellectuals.! What further questions could one raise about the specificity of such specific intellectuals? I have in mind not just their social and intellectual history but also their very site of enunciation, their location and audience—issues which in Foucault's scheme of things (for all the attention he once paid to the formation of enunciative modalities) remain unexamined. What might it mean for me—a Third World feminist whose current institutional home is in the first—to take the following commitment seriously? [A]t every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is....1 have always been concerned with linking together as tightly as possible the historical and theoretical analysis of power relations, institutions and knowledge, to the movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into question in

reality.2 It has become almost commonplace to engage in such a confrontation by positioning oneself along the axes of race, class and gender—in my case, this would yield the inventory: upper middle class, heterosexual woman, Indian national. Its ritual aspect has increasingly become dissatisfying; but more importantly, the pointillistic and static connotation of "positions," however multiple and contradictory they may be, can sometimes elide the need to confront "what one is" through a more extensive questioning of the intrications of one's history within History. The ironies that accompany the following effort of reconsidering my present identity as a graduate student here in the U. S., this country placed at the culmination of History, should not be lost on anyone. But perhaps this is one way to make a connection between one's claims as a "specific" feminist intellectual and the realisation that one's site of enunciation is both a home and a historical choice.

1 Michel Foucault, "The Political Function of Intellectuals," trans. Colin Gordon, Radical Philosophy no. 17 (1977), p. 12. 2 Michel Foucault, "Politics and Ethics:

An Interview,” trans. Catherine Porter, in The

Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow (ed.) (New York:

emphasis added.

Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 374,

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Departure

Let me begin, then, with a sketch of an Indian intellectual's formation and her choice to come westward, make the West her site of enunciation. Such a decision is, no doubt, overdetermined by class aspirations. Though the characterization of the economy of a colonial society like India's has been the subject of unflagging debate (are we semifeudal, capitalist, something else?), the nature of its middle class— the composition of the petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia—has not been studied with the same zeal as our mode of production. A common point of reference is the peculiar nature of our creation as a class under colonial rule, beginning in the eighteenth century. Here is a standard description: The British attempted as part of their educational policy to create a class comparable to their own, so that it might assist them in the administration of the country and help in the development of its internal resources, necessary for the payment of the increasing imports of British manufacture . . . were implanted in the country without a comparable development in its economy and social institutions.> The main reason why this description is so standard is that it takes the social structure of the West as its norm. Keeping the beginnings of the British middle classes as backdrop—where the rapid expansion in trade and industry threw up a concomitant group of professionals—the discrepancy of the Indian case stands out in sharp silhouette. Our antecedents emerged within an economy that, far from creating an autonomous home market, was being subjected to a colonial machinery for the development of Empire elsewhere. Of course, it should go without saying that the Indian middle classes were (and are) a composite and heterogeneous group, landed and mercantilist, as much as professional and administrative. It is a sign of my own bias that I am expressly concentrating on the sliver of the middle class which we have come to designate the intelligentsia—indeed, to construe matters more narrowly still, on those within the intellectual field structured by academic institutions.

3 BB. Misra, The Indian Middle Classes, Their Growth in Modern Times New York, Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 10-11.

(London,

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At least amongst the intellectual avant garde, it has become more common to question the notion of development, with its underlying implication of holding up Western history as the only model of progress. And yet, in listening to a discussion on the self-conceptions of the Indian

intelligentsia today—here between the Indian art critic Geeta Kapur and the Sri Lankan feminist Laleen Jayamanne—one is forced to wonder what kind of rupture these intervening centuries and the achievement of political independence have wrought. Drawing upon a distinction between socio-economic and cultural processes of modernization, cultural processes are lauded for being "several steps ahead," "not hav[ing] to bear the burden of 'underdevelopment' or remain backward with regard to the ‘developed’ world,” a "congenial and hopeful situation for so-called ‘developing’ countries."4 While the use of scare quotes is meant to question evaluations of development, these critics actually end up subscribing to them wholeheartedly, thus enacting a deep schizophrenia. A pious wish that matters were otherwise would be out of place. We should simply acknowledge the extent to which connections can be drawn between Macaulay's group of "interpreters" in his famous Minute on Education of 1835, and the contemporary professional middle class, a class now investing in a Western education to qualify for membership within the new international cultural bourgeoisie. In Ashis Nandy's words, therefore, the modern West is less a geographical or temporal category than a psychological space (and surely a social, economic and cultural space as well): "The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside: in structures and in minds."® What name, then, might one give to such a configuration of "the West"

as a transnational category, capable of extending beyond geographical determinations and creating new and specific loci of power/knowledge?

If the historical formation of the class that effectively came to direct the Indian nation is often alluded to, so is the conspicuous presence of 4 "Discussing Modemity, "Third World,’ and The Man Who Envied Women" with Laleen Jayamanne, Geeta Kapur and Yvonne Rainer, Art and Text 3/4, (1987), p.44. 5 See H. Sharp, Selections from the Educational Records, Part I, 1781-1839.

In

Macaulay's formulation, this class was defined by its differential status: "a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govem—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in morals and in intellect.” (p.116, emphasis added.) It would be worth investigating how this differential identity has changed. 6 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. xii.

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women amongst its professional ranks. Indeed, one of the legacies of the Indian nationalist movement is that middle- and upper-class women have been far less invisible within academic and public institutions than their counterparts in the geographical West. To give a particularly striking historical example, two women graduated from Calcutta University in 1883, before women in Britain were granted academic credentials. Or think of Toru Dutt (1856-77), who published her first book of verse translations A Sheaf Gleaned from French Fields at the age of twenty. That this was by no means an uncomplicated process of westernization is evident, particularly when it was precisely such women who were subjected to profoundly modem reinventions of tradition in the battle for a national culture.” In the oft-cited case of Bengal, for example, Partha Chatterjee has referred to the literal domestication of the nationalist project within the home, combined with a general demand for formal education amongst middle class women: Formal education became not only acceptable, but in fact a requirement for the new bhadramahila (respectable woman), when it was demonstrated that it was possible for a woman to acquire the cultural refinements afforded by modern education without jeopardising her place at home, i.e. without becoming a memsahib (Englishwoman).8 How to unravel specific mobilisations around "technologies of

gender," to use Teresa de Lauretis' description,? in such a complex web of contending forces and scrambled discourses of modernity and 7 For varying assessments of this process based on different historical periods and levels of analysis see Lata Mani, "The Construction of Women as Tradition in Nineteenth Century Bengal,” in Cultural Critique, Special Issue: The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse II no. 7 (Fall 1987); Veena Maxumdar "The Social Reform Movement in India from Ranade to Nehru," in Indian Women from Purdah to Modernity, B. R. Nanda (ed.) (New Delhi, 1976); Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 18491905 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Partha Chatterjee, "Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonised Women—The Contest in India," forthcoming in

American Ethnologist. 8 "Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonised Women—the Contest in India," p. 16.

9 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), especially chapters one and two.

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tradition? I am not sure. Dealing as we are with a vastly uneven and unequal exchange between patriarchies, it is tempting to conclude, as Kumari Jayawardena has done, that

revolutionary alternatives or radical social changes did not become an essential part of the demands of the nationalist movement at any stage of the long struggle for independence, and a revolutionary feminist consciousness did not arise within the movement for national liberation.10 At this preliminary stage in my own reflections, I am ready to recognise moments of continuity between my own history and this crude sketch of History. Looking back on my intellectual formation as a "daughter of independence," I am struck by the extent to which I could take the presence of women as peers and teachers for granted, even as powerful and diverse struggles by women were taking place, but overwhelmingly outside academic walls. There can be no question that men are still far more likely than women to know the prestige and privileges professional qualifications bring.!! Even so, some of the more ambitious amongst us do push for inclusion within the new international class and, given the often impossible complexities of our personal identities, can experience as a special lure the promise of an independence from gender and culture which this class holds out. Given the continuing satellite status of Third World educational systems, the subsequent move to a U.S. academic institution is then but a culmination of processes already in place at home, the geographical West representing the obvious goal in the pursuit of excellence. Indeed, a closer look at my own generation of academic women, bom well after Indian independence, reveals new twists in the mixed legacy of modernity and tradition. If earlier generations wrestled much more Closely with the hub of "tradition" bequeathed by the nineteenth century, marking their subjectivity in terms of degrees of containment within its

10 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World,(London: Zed Books and India: Kali Press for Women, 1986), p. 107-108. 1 See Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, Daughters of Independence, Gender, Caste and Class in India, (London and New Delhi: Zed Press, 1986), especially chapter 17 "Education: The Path to Emancipation?” for first person accounts by Indian women with professional occupations.

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frames—the home, religiosity, caste, and so on!2 —"the West" has now come to norm our questions and desires in a far less circuitous way. I might only be arguing for a shift in the complex of forces, one that has been possible at least partly because of refurbished Western connections in India's educational system since the electronic revolution and the dwarfing of Great Britain by the U. S. as "our" present metropolis. The promises of the new class are more completely emblazoned in the languages of English and the sciences than ever before. Education is more obviously a process by which we learn to avow and remember certain knowledges and devalue and forget others. We grow up repudiating the local and the personal in favor of what will get us ahead and away—thus coming of age within an intellectual field that by no means arbitrarily creates disinterest and oversight in some areas while directing desire elsewhere. It is within such an interlocking mechanism for the production of knowledges and "sanctioned ignorances"!3 that our subjectivities are forged—one that makes our transition to first world institutions quite possibly amongst the smoothest within the Third World

system. What happens to us after we come West? In her powerful and arresting essay, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location," the U.S. feminist Adrienne Rich addresses her Dutch audience with the question of a woman's "struggle for accountability," as she put it. Her "notes" consist of a series of accounts by a feminist who, while deeply disloyal to the civilization that continues to place her in the oppressive position of

12 An excellent example of such a view of an Indian woman's subjectivity is Rama Mehta's The Western Educated Hindu Woman

(New York:

Asia Publishing House,

1970). 13 The term "sanctioned ignorance" comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's powerful critique of Michel Foucault's position as a self-contained Wester intellectual. She focuses on his "blind spot" conceming the techniques for the appropriation of space that ravaged the colonies during precisely the same historical period that held his attention, but for other matters. His excavations remained with the new inventions of power-in-spacing in the European theater alone—in prisons, asylums and hospitals, through Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. See her essay "Can the Subaltem Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.) (Urbana and Chicago: University of Dlinois Press, 1988), p. 271-313. Her point is well taken. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to stop with production of sanctioned ignorances amongst Westem intellectuals (where they are, after all, hardly surprising), but to examine our own.

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Woman, found that she could no longer quote Virginia Woolf's statement, "As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." 14 Taking my cue from her example, the subsequent reflections might have been entitled "Notes Toward a Politics of Arrival." In contrast to Rich's more aphoristic style, these "notes" have been collected within scenarios, in the form of real and imaginary sites of questioning and selfquestioning around three plausible subject positions. As much impositions as inventions, they are uncertain explorations around the problematics, possibilities, and disturbances that this new institutional home has thrown up. None of them is complete or consistent, nor could it be. These scenarios also feed off one another and have been held apart as an enabling device for foregrounding questions that might otherwise get lost. In what follows—not unlike what has come before—the problems with the "I" and "we" slots are obvious. Each of them asserts too much: the "I" too much authenticity, the political becoming purely personal, and the "we" too much commonality, when the identity of this "we" is precisely what needs to be discovered and demonstrated, not assumed. The strategy of shifting uneasily between them is a poor one; but perhaps it is indicative of where I/we stand. Immigrants Often I have caught myself wondering what it would be like to make this country into a permanent home—almost everyone presumes that I have come to stay. After all, isn't this the most common scenario for anyone headed West? Just a brief glance at the history of worldwide immigration into the U.S. reveals the fact that by 1920, "women outnumbered men among West Indians, Bohemians and Jews, and in the

decades following World War II the majority of all immigrants were women."!5 This picture is surprising; it is, however, also a little misleading in that the great unevenness in U. S. immigration history remains largely invisible. Since we do not have a good sense of the contradictory logics operative for different women, it is crucial to hold

14 "Notes Toward a Politics of Location," in Blood, Bread and Poetry, Selected Prose,

1979-1985 (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986), p. 211. 15 Immigrant Women, Maxine Schwartz Seller (ed.) (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), p. 5.

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onto the distinctness amongst the variety of reasons which have been offered so far: the creation of a service-oriented labor market more “attractive” to Third World women; the post-war change in immigration laws which gave preference to relatives of communities that had initially been predominantly male; the reopening of the U. S. to immigrants from Asia, after they had been subjected to immigration exclusion laws in the first decades of this century; the desire to escape forms of economic, political, and religious oppression shared amongst men and women as well as those unique to female experience. The choice of the term itself is telling—not emigrant, but immigrant. ,/ One comes across less about where women have come from and much more about what women have come to—here the language of arrival has been truly valorized. Thus, in a collection of oral histories by women who made their way to the U.S. over the course of this century, barely one-tenth of its three hundred pages have been brought together under the heading "Why They Came." It is rather their modes of survival in this new land that are extensively addressed.1© Moreover, essays by new arrivals are often to be found mixed with those whose ancestors were brought as slaves centuries ago, those whose lands were taken away, and the descendants of immigrants. This Bridge Called My Back, for example, intersperses the experiences of newly immigrant women with Native Americans, Blacks, Chicanas, and Asian-Americans. Surely this has something to do with America's raison d'etre as an immigrant nation itheextreme difficulty of "keeping faith with the continuity of our journeys," as Adrienne Rich put it)—its inexorable demand that people reconstitute their identities within its borders alone.

At the same time, however, it has become obvious that the U.S. is not simply heading towards the "melting pot," if it ever was. With the rise of the "new ethnicities" in the social ferment of the ‘60s, what is visible

now is the enormous complexity of its internally colonised communities, leading to very particular fears and uncertainties. As the Cuban immigrant Mirtha Quintanales put it, in reference to the complex hybrid and hyphenated identities emerging amongst domestic Third World

women:

16 Immigrant Women.

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John [not all Third World women are "women of color"—if by this

concept we mean exclusively "non-white." And not all women of color are really Third World—f this term is used in reference to underdeveloped or developing societies .... Yet if we extend the concept of Third World to include internally "colonised" racial and ethnic minority groups in this country, so many different kinds of groups could conceivably be included, that the crucial issue of social and institutional racism and its historic tie to slavery in the U.S. could get diluted, lost in the shuffle . . . . I don't know what to think anymore. Things begin to get even more complicated when I begin to consider that many of us who identify as "Third World" or "Women of Color," have grown up as or are fast becoming "middle class" and highly educated, and therefore more privileged than many of our white, poor, working class sisters.!7 Quintanales' worry is a powerful expression of the predicament of a politics of identity amongst U.S. minority women today, when the multiple axes of oppression themselves resist easy definition. Within such intertwining processes of complexity and dilution, it is crucial not to generalize about the reasons and motivations for the kind of dislocation that coming to this country entails. While many recent immigrant women, particularly lesbian women of color, may well see themselves, in Cherrie Moraga's phrase, as "refugees of a world on fire,"18 how might I position myself as an aspiring intellectual, and one, moreover, who shares the advantages of heterosexual privilege? Arguably, most Indian women arrive on these shores as the wives of green card-holding professional men. Only a small percentage come singly; even fewer recognise or question their socialization into "compulsory heterosexuality." Whether married or not, the majority have educational and professional ambitions of their own. It becomes all the more urgent in such a context, therefore, to examine as sharply as possible just what kind of immigrants postcolonial Indians like myself—

17 Mirtha Quintanales, "I Paid Very Hard for My Immigrant Ignorance,” in This Bridge Called My Back, p. 151, emphasis added.

18 This

Bridge Called My Back, Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherrie Moraga

and Gloria Anzaldua (eds.) (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983).

This phrase is the title of Moraga's foreword to the second edition.

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neither exiles nor refugees—would be. As a recent addition to the present wave of overwhelmingly urban and highly educated graduate students entering the U. S., I was not even aware of the battles against racism faced by early Indian labor immigrants after the turn of the century, and not simply because they only numbered a few thousand. !9 For, as a potential academic, I inhabit a different social space, one which also sets me apart from the victims of New Jersey's "dot-busters."20 Indeed, I might well be led to believe that the promises of universalism that brought me here will not let me down; and I will, moreover, reap the benefits of the civil rights and feminist movements that preceded me. Through which routes and at what point does a vastly different sensibility creep in, as I look at the uneasy co-existence of confident public identities coupled with a tendency to ethnicize and privatize the rest, including gender relations, amongst Indian professionals in this country? In his detailed study of Asian immigration into the U. S., Ronald Takaki has emphasized the danger in perpetuating the myth of the "model minority," the manner in which Asian Americans are being celebrated (and, perhaps, also resented) in America. Even while there is

19 The relatively insignificant numbers of these immigrants, overwhelmingly Sikh, (but called "Hindus" or "ragheads,") was due to systematic racial discrimination by the U.S. government and the INS. This was backed by a strong, predominantly working class movement for "Asiatic Exclusion” that was securely in place by the time of their arrival of the Canadian and U.S. West coast. The first immigrants were men, with women only joining in considerable numbers after 1946. There is now a growing body of literature on their history in this country—see for example, Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India, Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven and London:

Yale University Press,

1988); South Asians in North America, An Annotated and Selected Bibliography, Jane Singh (ed.), Occasional Paper No. 14 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Sucheta Mazumdar, "Punjabi Agricultural Workers in Califomia, 1905-1945," in Labor Immigration under Capitalism, Edna Bonacich and Lucie Cheng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 549-578.

At a total of around fifteen hundred prior to World War II, the Indian-American community has grown from ten thousand in 1965, when immigration laws against Asians were first repealed, to well over half a million in the following twenty years. 20 According to newspaper reports, a group calling itself the "dot-busters" (the "dot" referring to the practice amongst Indian women to wear a red spot or bindi on their foreheads), claimed responsibility for a series of assaults on businesses and individuals

from the Indian community in Jersey City, beginning in October 1987. In some reports, the assailants were identified as belonging to Jersey City's other minority communities.

Their demand was that "Indians get out of town."

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no doubt in my mind that as far as the advantages of a first world educational system and the very real need of financial security are concerned, I could not be better off, the other side of the picture remains to be explored. Takaki refers to "a glass ceiling" in the high-tech job market—"a barrier through which management positions can only by seen, but not reached, by Asian Americans"2! —and there is no reason to suppose that academia should turn out to be more benign. At some stage, then, I will discover the deep cracks of marginality in an identity sheathed by the significant, but by no means exclusive, determinations of class privilege. Such realisations have, in fact, led many Indians to becoming highly effective "specific intellectuals," in the Foucauldian sense, linking up with local struggles both within and outside university politics. In order to be able to insert the contemporary postcolonial intellectual within the larger immigrant scenario, it should be obvious by now that dislocations and alterities be marked carefully, not conflating precesses that to my mind are discrepant. What I would hold in tension with each other are the general dislocations characteristic of the widespread migrations of Third World peoples who have been heading westward before and after decolonization; the more specific "brain drain" amongst the professional classes and intelligentsia which received a new impetus since the 1960's, particularly in the U.S.; and the experiences of dislocation more unique to women, that I take to be the subject of feminism. It is my belief that a good many post-colonial women, including self-identified feminists, find themselves gazing and coming westward for reasons that cannot be rendered intelligible in the language of a presumed or proposed international feminism alone. Discrepant dislocations do, nonetheless, produce unintended effects: For some of us, the dislocation from a sheltered Indian middle class environment, where a consciousness of privilege predominates, to a milieu as highly sexualized, and with such intensified and refined technologies of gender as this one, does lead to the espousal of a more explicitly feminist politics. What might earlier have passed as privilege now becomes recognizable as disavowal and “sanctioned ignorance," demanding a reconstitution and renarration of identity all its own. Of 21 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, A History of Asian Americans

(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989), p. 476.

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course, I do not for a moment mean to imply that it is this particular dislocation from the safety and blindnesses of "home" that is most conducive to feminism. The feelings of "extreme dislocation, ‘craziness’ and terror" which Rich has linked to the "leap of self-definition needed to create an autonomous feminist analysis"22 does not usually require that we come this far—hence my urge to hold dislocations apart.

As immigrant feminists, predominantly, though by no means only, in

the social sciences and humanities23 , what kind of political functions in our new locations might we take on, what kind of "specific intellectuals" might we become? At the cost of an apparent digression, let us look more closely at what Foucault's conception of the specific intellectual entails. In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's view, the danger lurking in this model—particularly as Foucault articulated it in conversation with Gilles Deleuze24 —lies in its unrecognized specifity. In his constant distancing from questions of representation (Foucault's hope being that the "oppressed" will be able to speak for themselves, with intellectuals ideally only performing a relaying function between groups and struggles)—Spivak finds denegation, an abdication of responsibility. The specificity that is to take the place of an older Western universalistic humanism is no less geopolitically delimited, though it still masquerades as something more: Having invoked Maoism, Vietnam, and immigration restrictions, Foucault gives out an impression of geographical discontinuity while passing over the effects of the imperialism and the international division of labor elsewhere. In other words, Foucault's model of an alliance politics between heterogeneous groups can be

realised only within the First World.

22 Adrienne Rich, "Disloyal to Civilisation: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia,” in (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1979), p. 290.

23 Here is an interesting aside conceming the differential working out of the power webs between the sciences and technology, on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities, on the other, in terms of the relative proportions of Indian women students in

these disciplines: While the number of such women in India (as in the U. S.) decreases sharply from the humanities to the "hard" sciences, the select group making its way here is stratified in the opposite direction—most of my female peers graduate with degrees in engineering, medicine, the sciences and economics.

24 Michel Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power,” in Language, Counter- Memory, Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews, Donald F. Bouchard (ed.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 205-217.

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If we are to take seriously Spivak's demands for less transparency and more attention to representation, perhaps the best place to start is not by pointing out how easy it is for Western intellectuals to forget the advantages of “hard currency" and a "strong passport"25 but to turn our gaze upon ourselves. Is she suggesting that the model of an alliance politics works best when we are immigrants and can thus perform representative functions here in our own right? Furthermore, how might we include our Third World status within our First World location? If ~ our Third World identities are to play a directly representative role—that is to say, reflecting the demands and needs of a new U.S. domestic minority—will we participate, however unintentionally, in the diluting process Quintanales highlighted so well? Anthropology

in Reverse

My second scenario is in certain senses an extension of the first. If I have been sketching the pull of the universalist and "unmarked" attractions that bring many of us here and have hinted at the dilemmas around identity and community that immigrant women face, this section contains notes on a deepened appreciation for the kind of identity politics that has come to characterize U.S. feminism in the ‘80s: a pervasive interrogation of the sanctioned ignorances that universalistic assumptions have contained. Why have I called it an anthropology in reverse? / Chiefly because this scenario of a "politics of arrival"—unlike the previous one, has questions of return on its horizon—is fueled by the anticipation of return. For if Rich is right to challenge Woolf's claim that to her as a woman, her country is the whole world, we have a choice to make and to be accountable for. What sort of experiences, what sort of "fieldnotes" would I wish to see carried back to a Third World nation like India? As David Scott has pointed out so clearly in his essay in this volume, the anthropologist by definition must leave home, but only to be able to retum to it. It is "there" wherever home is, that the writing—that skilled act of translation from this culture into the idiom of the other—is done. However, given the history of the institution of anthropology (the West leaving home to know the rest) and the relations of power that have brought me here, is the notion of a reverse anthropology intelligible at

25 "Can the Subaltem Speak?", p. 273.

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all? For one thing, what is this "other culture" into which I might translate the "truths" of this one? Unlike the Western anthropologist who has to undergo specialized training to ready herself for fieldwork in a distant place, one that her culture does not prepare her for, isn't it clear that in sharp contrast everything can collude to bring us westward, and hardly for anthropological reasons? Inspite of—or within—these obvious contradictions, let the following scenario on the heterogeneity of first world feminists be held within a reverse anthropological frame, fragile and dissembling though it might be. These notes, or rather, “fieldnotes," are questions that await their transcription elsewhere.

One of feminism's central demands has been to break out of universalistic assumptions and realize that it takes a very particular perspective—"trained on a determinate and particular field of experience"26 —10 render visible the contradictory statuses of women and men. It would, however, be extremely misleading to claim that it is women, and not men, who perceive "technologies of gender," because women are so directly affected by them. Being and knowing have never been immediately connected; as Donna Haraway has put it, "[iJdentity, including self-identity does not produce science; critical positioning does .."27 Far from being a priori, the connection between women and | knowledges about them is a result, struggled for, constantly | renegotiated, and learnt anew. Perhaps another way of posing this is to say simply that feminism is a politics before it is an epistemology—where questions of representation must deal with who speaks for whom as much as with what is being said. Indeed, feminism could be described as a narrative about the discovery of representation itself—from the prior moment when women's identity as women was either largely accepted or disregarded to a time of making it their subject, politically and interpretatively. Men need to cultivate the necessary vision "to learn how to see faithfully from

26 Michele le Deuff, "Women and Philosophy,” in Radical Philosophy_\7 (1977), quoted in Meaghan Morris, "A-mazing Grace: Notes on Mary Daly's Poetics, "in The Pirate's Fiancee, Feminism, Reading , Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988), p. 43. 27 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site

of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14:3 (1988), p. 15.

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another's point of view;"28 indeed, this may be the only way men can recognize their own implication and accountability within the gendering process. Such considerations still make men's place within feminism "an impossible one," as Stephen Heath put it so well. "Their voices and actions, not ours. . . Women are the subjects of feminism, its initiators. .. the move and join from being a woman to being a feminist is the grasp of that subjecthood."29 I agree, particularly since "the move and join" between female experience and feminism turns out to be as hard as it is necessary. Female experience is not simple "there" and whole, waiting to be organized, but more likely to be contradictory, at once too scrutinized and opaque. And yet, or rather, for precisely these reasons, women must represent themselves. But to which women am I referring? It goes without saying that the "West" arrives on other shores in monochromatic terms; it travels elsewhere considerably whitened. Indian school and college students learn considerably more about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington than the American institution of slavery; and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., possibly plays the analogous role that Gandhi does here. The histories of oppression of black women and women of color on this soil are nowhere. What would it be like to read Harriet Jacobs or This Bridge Called My Back in India? There is also another side that we do not see—a white woman's attempts to come to terms with her complicities and sanctioned ignorances, of "unlearning her privilege as loss," as Spivak phrased it in a different context. It has been astounding to discover the degree to which U. S. feminists today are not primarily addressing men but one another. The position of men in feminism is perhaps less a matter of concern than the relationships between the identity politics of different groups of women, to the point that these questions could be setting the conditions for Western feminism's future.30 28 Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges, p. 11.

29 Stephen Heath, "Male Feminism, " in Dalhousie Review 64:2 (1986), p. 270. A little further on he briefly engages with the possibility that men take up their very masculinity in response to feminism's challenge ("Pomography is the theory and rape the practice"), But he subsequently shies away and the essay becomes more noisy. It is as though the shift

form "universal" to "masculine," though easy to name, is still being resisted. range of examples within the U. S. see Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology, The Metaethics

30 Fora

of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); B. Ruby Rich "Feminism and

Sexuality in the 1980s," Review Essay, Feminist Studies, 12:3 (Fall 1986); This Bridge

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"Let's face it. Iam a marked women, but not everybody knows my name." So begins Hortense Spillers in an essay that unravels the negativity at the heart of a black woman's identity, an identity buried within the overdeterminations and simplifications wrought by too many names: “In order to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip away through layers of attenuated meanings, made in excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order."31 Spillers must break open the presuppositions embedded in the officially sanctioned truths of the Moynihan Report dealing with the “pathological” status of the "matriarchal" black family: no father to speak of, and the fault lying squarely on the power of the female line. Her search for legibility in the history of Afro-Americans —through the narratives of the first captives, the conditions of "Middle Passage," and subsequent slavery—doesn't remain with the revelation of the complete breakdown of anything that might resemble the family structure in such situations, but of bodies reduced to "hieroglyphics of the flesh,” indecipherable in their gendering. Beyond being the target of rape, the African female was subjected to forms of torture one would have thought the prerogative amongst men; as a means for reproduction, she was more a piece of property than a wife or a mother. Thus, "the problematizing of gender places her outside the traditional symbolics of the female. . . leading to a radically different text of female empowerment."32 Female empowerment emerges only through a process of remembering, a necessarily inventive tracing of the history of Afro-American women within the violence of colonialism and slavery.

Called My Back; Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Barbara Smith (eds.) Yours in Struggle,

Three Perspectives on Anti-semitism and Racism (New York: Long Haul Press, 1974). This kind of cross-questioning is taking place elsewhere as well: The Nigerian critic Chikwenye Okonjo Ogumyemi, addresses Buchi Emecheta in London, white feminists, and, more interestingly, Alice Walker, in her essay "Womanism: The dynamics of the contemporary Black female novel in English," Signs 11 (Autumn 1985), p. 63-80. Gayatri Spivak, the diasporic woman abroad, is questioned by university women in India in an interview in The Book Review, 11:3 (May/June 1987).

31 Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics (Summer 1987), p. 65.

32 Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe, p. 80.

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On a different register, white women in the U.S. have had to be interrogated on the extent of racism within the women's movement, discovering the degree to which their very choice of listening or remaining deaf to women of color was a part of their race privilege. It is one thing for Spillers to come to terms with the imbrication of her history within History, quite another for a white woman to learn where her location and the best of educations have brought her. As Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty have put it, it is not so much a question whether "white" or "Western" feminisms are relevant to women of color or Third World women, but a challenge of the assumption that "the terms of a totalizing feminist discourse are adequate to the task of articulating the situation of white women in the West."33 Martin and Mohanty choose to focus on Minnie Bruce Pratt's autobiographical essay, written in astonishment and pain, as she tries to unmake an identity so pervasively woven out of the sanctioned ignorances and official knowledges that come from being middle class, white and Southern. Over and over again, she questions every truth that she has held, such as her oblivion to the history of race, those "old lies and ways of living, habitual, familiar, comfortable, fitting us like a skin."34 Like Spillers, Pratt's narrative too is a stripping away, though from her position of accountablitity, it goes right down to the frightening possibility that the culture she was raised in may embody nothing worth saving. Such a mode of self-questioning sometimes runs the danger of implying a desire for an impossible position of innocence. But Martin and Mohanty's fine reading emphasizes the absence of any simple linear progression in Pratt's narrative, her constant shifting, her refusal to remain with rigid stabilities. As they also continue to point out 33 Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "What's Home Got to Do with It?" in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, Teresa de Lauretis (ed.) (Indiana: Bloomington University Press, 1986), p. 193, emphasis original. Other examples of feminists who have treated the question of racism are Marilyn Frye, "On Being White: Thinking toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy,” in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, New York: The Crossing Press, 1983, p. 110-127; also Adrienne Rich "Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia." For a critical response to Rich see Doris Davenport "The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third Wold

Wimmin," in This Bridge Called My Back, p. 85-90. 34 Minnie Bruce Pratt, "Identity:

Skin Blood

Heart,” in Yours in Struggle, Three

Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Feminism and Racism, Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith (eds.), (New York: Long Haul Press), p. 39. Further references to this

essay will be made in the main text.

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only one aspect of experience is given a unifying and originating function in the text: that is, her lesbianism and love for other women, which has motivated and continues to motivate her efforts to reconceptualise and recreate both herself and her home.35 These qualities are striking, as is Pratt's ability to avoid the pitfalls of high, arid abstraction and guilt-ridden self-absorption. I have been overwhelmed by the relentless quality of the interrogation Pratt undertakes: the weaving of her personal history within History is so fraught with loss, precisely because so much of her identity has been bound up with the habit of considering her culture "as the culmination of history, as the logical extension of what has gone before." (p. 19). On the one hand, we are strongly reminded of the shift in perspective necessary to bring technologies of gender into view—of what it takes to pull back from the lure of universality—and to imagine a different dislocation from the fixity of woman. On the other hand, what could remain subdued in the earlier discussion of gender and has become so sharply foregrounded here is the question of History, showing how women's narratives have been written within and against History's delineations. To be a "specific intellectual" in the context of contemporary U. S. feminisms thus goes way beyond what Foucault might have envisaged: One's "local" position within the First World tums out to demand extended levels of accountablity, even before more "global" configurations are broached. Native

Informants

It is difficult, from this vantage point, to imagine what a "transference" of these experiences to a different geo-political location would be like, in the mode of an anthropology gone awry; and I have learnt to desist from offering ventriloquilistic fantasies, of speaking from a location where I am not, even as memories and imaginations take me there. At the same time, there is an important sense in which the foregoing considerations do re-emerge in my third—and final—scenario

35 "What's Home Got to Do with It?” p. 202.

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for a Third World feminist like myself: "the native informant." It might be staged by the "hunger of memory"36 or, as in the example by Trinh T. Minh-ha, from being interpellated by difference: My audience expects and demands it. Otherwise people would feel as if they have been cheated: We did not come here to hear a Third World member speak about the first world. We came to listen to that voice of difference likely to bring us what we can’t have, and to divert us from the monotony of sameness.>/ Contrary to the assumptions that brought some of us here, we may thus find ourselves forced to contend with our places of departure, asked to function as native informants from “elsewhere.” From what position of authority would we then speak? The very attempt to become such cultural representatives, the falterings of our memory, could lead to a different realization: the need for an.examination of the historical, institutional, and social relations that have, in fact, produced subjects also quite unlike "the native informant" of old. As is well known, scholarship on distant Third World spaces is by no means absent from the First World's intellectual field. The discipline of feminist anthropology contains a rich and varied history, of women— predominantly white—who have brought the lives of other women—

predominantly Third World—to First World ears.38

Feminist

anthropology itself is an offshoot of the larger anthropological discipline, which in turn has been but one of many modes of knowledge production by which the "East" was rendered into an object to be laid bare and understood at every level. This is where, to my mind, the full paradox of the "sanctioned ignorances" amongst postcolonial women can come into view. How might one account for the discrepancy between the exorbitant writing on other non-Western cultures—sometimes including, sometimes effacing women—that has been the hallmark of the West, and

our emergence as postcolonial subjects, produced by the kind of Western oriented education to which I alluded earlier? It would be deceptive only

36 |take this phrase from the title of Richard Rodriguez’ book.

37 Trinh T. Minh-ha, "Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue" in Feminist Review 25 (March 1987), emphasis original. 38 For a recent and comprehensive account of its history see Henrietta Moore, Feminism and Anthropology, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

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to focus on the proliferation of discourses, while losing sight of the incitements to ignorance which have accompanied them, indeed, intrinsically structured the precondition to knowledge. Let me back up a bit and try to pinpoint the issues as I see them. We are witnessing the emergence of Third World feminists like myself, eager to delve into archives or engage in fieldwork in order to lay claim to a lost and repudiated history. We also perform indispensable tasks in the critical evaluation of our discursive inheritance of the lives of women who inhabit non-First World places. Thus, for example, Chandra Mohanty has convincingly demonstrated how too many contemporary accounts are scored through by an "ethnocentric universalism," the tendency of presuming "women" as a category of analysis:

The homogeneity of women as a group is produced not on the basis of biological essentials, but rather on the basis of secondary sociological and anthropological universals.29 On the one hand, these analyses tend to assume a universal "woman," both analytically and politically, thus also generating prescriptions on the issues around which all women should organize. On the other hand, as Mohanty goes on to demonstrate, since what separates the lives of such women from the self-conception of the feminist researcher is equally obvious and glaring, a difference is also supplied: the "Third World difference." Indeed, Mohanty goes so far as to suggest that the true subjects of these histories are the researchers themselves. From a different perspective, Spivak has urged against acts of obliteration—the insidiousness of conflating the Third Worldism of the indigenous elite woman abroad with the range of women who, whether deeply imbricated in the circuits of capitalism or not, do not speak on a First World

stage.40 The need for such critiques is urgent and undeniable—I am only trying to stress the nature of the difference betweeen the researcher and 39 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Westem Eyes: Feminist Scholorship and Colonial Discourses," Boundary 2 (1985), p.337.

40 See her fine essay, "Who Claims Alterity?’ in Remaking History, Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (eds.), Discussion in Contemporary Culture 4, Dia Art Foundation (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), p. 269-292, and "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

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the researched more emphatically than Spivak and Mohanty do. For as Mohanty herself has pointed out, the researchers in question are not only Westemers:

[E]ven though I am dealing with feminists who identify themselves as culturally or geographically from the "West," what I say about the[ir] analytical strategies or implicit principles holds for anyone...whether Third World women in the West, or Third World women in the Third World writing for the West 41 Mohanty's general indictment of ethnocentric universalism may sound dated to some ears—it is, after all, a problem that has been increasingly acknowledged and genuinely felt, even if the task of producing more differentiated and multi-coordinated analyses still remains more of an aim than an accomplishment. I am more narrowly concerned here with the less obvious aspect of her critique. For what she seems to be highlighting in the passage I just quoted is the institutional production and reproduction of the "West" as an effective site of enunciation, and

not just in the geographical West alone, but through non-Western subjects who are facing West, if not centrally located within it. Even in the very attempt to speak our difference from the West, institutions bind us to Western locations: For one thing, only a tiny percentage of crucial archival materials remain in, or have been brought back to, non-First World centers—knowledges are overwhelmingly stored in Western libraries. (This also effectively prevents those who are unable to gain access to the financial resources and cultural credentials necessary for travel here, from believing that they could be undertaking first-rate academic research.) Speaking more than ten years ago about the condition of students from Arab and Islamic nations, Edward Said remarked that

no Arab or Islamic scholar can afford to ignore what goes on in scholarly journals, institutes, and universities in the United States and Europe; the converse is not true. .. . The predictable result of all this is that [the] Oriental student (and Oriental professor) still want[s] to come and sit at the feet of American 41 "Under Westem Eyes,” p. 336, emphasis added.

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Orientalists. . in his relations with his superiors, the European or American Orientalists, he will remain only a "native informant."42 The force of this rendition lies at least partly in that it is not specific to the intellectual relations between the Middle East and the West, and that it continues to be true. What I am trying to come to terms with here is the elusive complexity of our relation with the West: A relation that has set "us" up as an object of knowledge, while simultaneously rendering us especially susceptible to disappearing into universality when there is a chance, i.e. coming westward. It would be easy to conceptualize this relationship purely epistemologically. As Partha Chatterjee has put it, one is quite simply "always a Western anthropologist, modern, enlightened, self-conscious, (and it does not matter what his nationality or the colour of his skin happens to be.)"43 Or, more accurately in this case, I would be a peculiar mix of anthropologist and native informant, a shuttling of identities and locations in order to claim a history that faces West. But too much is left out of the picture if we remain with the following formulation: "It is the epistemic privilege which has become the last bastion of global supremacy for the cultural values of Westem societies. . while assiduously denying at the same time that it has anything to do with cultural evaluations," the Cunning of Reason.“4 This is where the struggles of Pratt and Spillers in the second scenario may offer a different perspective on our situation—neither author could view the negativity at the heart of identity as a purely philosophical problem. Thus, though Pratt and Spillers would surely concur with Barbara Johnson that "if identities are lost through acts of negation, they are also acquired thereby, and the restoration of what has been denied cannot be accomplished through simple affirmation,"4> they would place this more squarely within the terrain of history. For Spillers it is a 42 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978, p. 323-324. 43

Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World,

A Derivative

Discourse (London: Zed Press, 1986), p. 17.

44 Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, p. 17. 45 Barbara Johnson, "Introduction" to A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 4.

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matter of discerning the roles played by white men, white women, and black men in the narratives on and by black women, and of the possible redemption of the historically severed relations between fathers, mothers and daughters in the black community. We, too, must learn more about the co-constructed histories of British and Indian women in all their surprising detail, including the imbricated history of Western feminism within imperialism.46 In these and other ways, we will, no doubt, acknowledge the intricacy of our relation with the West and its enabling constraints. I would also like to sharpen this interrogation of "the West" as an institutional site of enunciation, and my own sense of having “disappeared,” around concerns that might be peculiar to my own subject formation. I have been brought up short, for instance, by my complete

inability to be a specific intellectual and carry out a discussion like this one in an Indian language. Whatever the complexities of India's linguistic heritage, this, to my mind, is sanctioned ignorance. Enunciation, understood as the very possibility of raising such questions, is ineluctably bound up with the hegemony of English (the cultural capital of German and French notwithstanding), and the depth of my intellectual development within it, right up to this present effort to name my condition. While having become the bearer of conceptuality, and History's language now, English is a language with which only a section of professional Indian women are conversant. Thus, such a realisation comes into play long before the more basic aspect of literacy is brought into view. It should not be conflated, therefore, with the following response to Gail Omvedt, an American who has been living and working in parts of the Indian State of Maharashtra since 1974, by Kaminibai, an illiterate agricultural laborer. Omvedt had been interviewing Kaminibai in order to write about political organisations amongst women in rural areas. When the value of such a study was impressed upon her, she replied

46 As Janaki Nair has shown, studies amongst feminists (not only located in the West)

veer more closely toward an affirmative recuperation of the role of Englishwomen in India. "Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen's Writings, 1813-1940," unpublished mss..

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Yes, but will she write to us? She'll write something worth reading and writing, but it will be in thin small letters and we won't be able to read it, not at all, there will be no profit or loss

to us.47 At the same time, the possible lesson for me is that Kaminibai's cynicism could well be generalised to a much wider group of Indian women, by no means illiterate, for whom this essay's thin small letters are also neither profit nor loss. Furthermore, what might be the best way to name the irreducibility of the difference in my agency and Omvedt's—the difference between the politics surrounding a white woman's decision to make her home in a postcolonial nation such as India, and a politics of retum?

Coming from a very different set of considerations, think of the discrepancy between my relation to the transnational entity I have been calling the West, and to India's neighbors, whether in the Middle East

and Africa, or in Southeast Asia. Many of them have had significant Indian immigrant populations; even in such cases there has been no effective intellectual pull to attend to the histories and theories by women living there. In my travels so far, these countries have literally only figured as stopovers on the way. This, too, is sanctioned ignorance. What set of determinations—with geo-politics at its center—would we have to bring into play in order to confront the sanctioned ignorances that have framed our identities and sites of enunciation as postcolonial feminists, ones which would make the potential of "specific intellectuals" within an international feminism more plausible?

Acknowledgements This essay grew out of conversations with many friends, especially Faith Beckett, Satish Deshpande, Vivek Dhareshwar, Ruth Frankenberg,

Lata Mani, David Scott, Yumi Yang. I am grateful for their suggestions and support. I would also like to thank Profs. Donna Haraway and Teresa de Lauretis for their valuable comments on an earlier draft.

47 Gail Omvedt, We Will Smash this Prison, Indian Women in Struggle (London: Zed Press, 1980), p. 18.

LOCATING THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SUBJECT: POSTCOLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN OTHER PLACES David Scott "You are so fortunate, you get to see the world..." Indeed, indeed, sirs, I have seen the world.

—Derek Walcott, The Fortunate Traveller

The moder discipline of anthropology once belonged to America and Europe. Now it no longer does. Or at least not precisely. Not in a simple way. There are not only American and European anthropologists or departments of anthropology. Now indeed, just what constitutes "America" and "Eurepe"— and thus "American" and "European"— is itself increasingly indistinct. It is even less clear what constitutes the “nations,” "nationalities," and "cultures" of the so-called Third World. The presumed borders, in other words, of essential community are not as they might have appeared in the nineteenth or even early twentieth century. Part of the reason for this no doubt has to do with the extraordinary demographic movements of colonial and postcolonial peoples in the mid- to late-twentieth century. The postcolonial is now, in Derek Walcott's felicitously ironic phrase, a "fortunate traveller." However, even as we recognise this irreversible redistribution of the postcolonial map (one which Louise Bennett has so inimitably satirized

in such poems as "Colonization in Reverse"), !we should not lose sight of the fact that these movements are rather one way than the other. Colonial and postcolonial peoples were/are going west. And if these

1 Louise Bennett, Jamaica Labrish (Kingston: Sangster, 1966), pp. 179-180.

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movements are provocatively challenging the hitherto pristine image of the West, hybridizing it (if I might so put it), it is to be wondered whether they are really tarnishing its allure. So that anthropology, as discipline, may well be said to have travelled, and already in more senses than one. One may now speak (if still not with an equal certainty) of "indigenous" anthropologies and

anthropologists.2 But is this visible discipline of anthropology (with its authorizing institutions, privileged object domains, prescriptive methodologies, and canonical texts) co-extensive with what we might call the concept of anthropology, its generative and genealogically specifiable idea of itself? And does this concept which inhabits the anthropological endeavour, with its peculiar linking of travel, difference, dialogue, and knowledge, move as readily across borders as the discipline that formalises it? Or does it still belong to the hegemonic figure of America and Europe (that is to say, to a sort of "social imaginary" of the West) in a profound if yet uncertain way? This interests me because the question I want to ask is whether the postcolonial, once (and indeed still)—as subaltern—so decidedly the silent object of this practice of composing knowledges and of its idea, can become—as intellectual—its subject? Can the postcolonial (intellectual) accede to anthropology as discipline and to its concept, its idea of itself? What I wish to do in the following pages is to sketch, if in an admittedly provisional way, something of the terrain of these questions. Locating

the Anthropological

Subject

The interruption of the placid surface of theory by the heterogeneous claims of marginal voices has forced upon our attention the fact that disciplinary and theoretical practices establish—and are marked by—not only object positions but also subject positions. The kind of subject proper to a practice is not something external but rather is produced 2 See the important volume edited by Hussein Fahim, /ndigenous Anthropology in NonWestern Countries (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1982). In some sense, one might

read the various essays in this text as asserting a political and, if you will, explicitly “nationalist” claim on the discipline of anthropology. My own question emerges where the “nation” itself, both narratively and geographically defined, is no longer an unproblematic assumption.

Locating

the

Anthropological

Subject

gE|

within the practice. Insofar as practices remain rooted at the point of their production, the location of these subject positions— epistemological, institutional, geographical—need not be problematised. When, however, the borders of practices are crossed such that different kinds of subjects come to occupy the positions authoritatively claimed for the practices, the question arises whether and to what extent these locations are fixed, and how and under what circumstances they are subject to displacement or at least to distention and dissonance. Certainly from a variety of marginal(ized) positions—feminist, minority, postcolonial, etc.—theory is now being required to name, or at least reflexively problematise, the voice (and thus the history and forms of identity) that speaks through its discourse. In the particular dialogical relation that its practice constructs, anthropology likewise produces subject as well as object positions— positions framed by the specific problematic its discourse constitutes: cultural difference. -The subject that establishes within its gaze a field of objects to be observed, questioned, translated, and finally represented in another place at another time is neither anonymous nor placeless. It always occupies intersections of privilege at once epistemological, political, and geographical. To be sure, in recent years anthropology has been called (and has called itself) into question on grounds that seek to make visible these intersections. But at least one skeptical commentator has recently maintained that the "problematic of the observer" has been "remarkably underanalyzed" in the "revisionist anthropological current."

The question Who speaks? For what and to whom? remains muted.> For what interests me here is the question of the postcolonial anthropologist in the making of a postcolonial anthropology.

Let me note to begin with that the distinction between the discipline and concept of anthropology that Iemploy here is a necessarily tentative one. I suggest, however, that it may have some provisional strategic value in taking one's postcolonial gauge in the contemporary crisis of anthropological affairs. The collapse of any but a possible administrative coherence in the chaotic career of anthropology and the postcolonial challenge which has now brought its very future as a

3 Edward Said, "Representing the Colonized: Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989), p. 212.

Anthropology's Interlocutors,” Critical

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practice or instrument of uncommon knowledge into question have, as it were, (re)opened a wedge between the formal or proper name of Anthropology and the disseminated moments that have been historically gathered together by/within it. Certainly it is this wedge of space which has both formed and forced the possibility of the recent moves in contemporary anthropological discourse. The distinction attempts to relive in a more explicit formulation the constantly repressed or elided or marginalized tension between anthropology as a "science of culture" with delimited and specifiable object domains (kinship, ritual, etc.) and anthropology as a hermeneutics of knowledge that works what Geertz has so nicely called a "constant dialectical tacking” across a field or fields of difference.4 By means of it I want to emphasise that it is not so much the uncommon knowledge itself that is distinctive of anthropology as the movement, the idea of displacement, of mediation, which invests it and through which that knowledge

is constituted.

(After all, what is uncommon

is only

uncommon in terms of something else that is not.) The anthropological journey—like all true journeys—entails a continuously recursive movement or drift: at once a departure and a return in which knowledge is always at least double—simultaneously knowledge of something other and self-knowledge, and each but a term in the invention of the other. This idea of a knowledge that must always emerge within a play of figure and ground (in which, as Stanley Diamond has insisted, contrast is the only way of seeing) is, it seems to me, the distinctive edge of any anthropological endeavor.” And it is this movement, I want to argue, of going and returning that organizes the epistemological and geographical disposition of the anthropological gaze. This movement, however (and needless to say), has never been an innocent or unmarked one. The very possibility of the anthropological journey has been linked to the historical occasion of Western European expansion. And this occasion has not only enabled, facilitated and authorized the specific anthropological problematic of difference (that is,

of what counts as difference) but also established its epistemological 4 See Clifford Geertz, "Found in Translation:

On the Social History of the Moral

Imagination” in Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983). ST am thinking particularly of his "Anthropology in Question” in Jn Search of the Primitive (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1974).

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standpoint. This entailed return that marks the idea—the generative concept—of anthropology, has already embedded in it—as the insignia, so to speak, of the historical circumstance that gave birth to it and that (still) authorizes it—the insinuated presence of the social imaginary of the West. For if anthropology, in the constitution of its knowledges, privileges a tacking between places, this tacking has still always been between the West and elsewhere. And if this has often been more implicit than not in ethnographic texts (and for precisely the reason that anthropology has been a deeply Western enterprise implicitly constructing for itself Western subject positions whose absence from the surface of the text was the very sign of their authority), it was certainly an explicit element in the inaugural self-consciousness. We might recall Franz Boas's statement in his seminal essay of 1904, "The History of Anthropology,” that the goal of this new comparative science is "to make us...understand the roots from which our civilization has sprung...."© Thus, in the play of contrast, of figure and ground, through which it establishes itself, the anthropological cogito is always returning to the West. The Postcolonial Anthropologist in Other Places

But now there enters the postcolonial intellectual in the discrete guise of the anthropologist—a slightly reconstituted figure, with acquired languages and books and "a hunger of journeys," and to whom anthropology appears, at least at one level, a broad critical enterprise. Now if anthropology is but a "science" with discrete "objects" and "methods," the postcolonial need only accede to its discipline. But how is one to participate in that tacking and displacement that is its distinctive idea? Certainly the epistemological assumptions embedded in Boas's programmatic statement, his "us understand" and his "our civilization," seem to define in some sense the location from which the anthropological subject speaks, the center of gravity of the anthropological cogito. So then must the postcolonial anthropologist enter upon this location? Or can she/he break with it, this location that privileges the social imaginary of the West? For if the hermeneutical movement of anthropological cognition is one in which the West is constituted as the locus of selfknowledge, how does the postcolonial anthropologist position

6 Science 20 (21 October 1904), pp. 513-524.

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her/himself in relation to it? Because, of course, the postcolonial presents us with a figure who has acceded to the languages of the West, to the sublime categories of its discourses, and even in this increasingly "post-national" world, to its cities and institutions. But not to its power or to its legend. How might this vitiate the postcolonial intellectual's engagement in the anthropological endeavour? Moreover, even with this assumption of languages, of cities, how profoundly do they displace other modalities of (postcolonial) identification? Those, for instance, that mark historical experience in the solidary representation of the "Third World." By raising in different ways the problem of "place" and the nonWestern anthropologist, both Talal Asad and Arjun Appadurai have suggested that to undermine the asymmetry in anthropological practice many more such anthropologists should study Western societies.’ This, to be sure, is a step in the right direction inasmuch as it subverts the pervasive notion that the non-Western subject can speak only within the terms of his/her own culture. Moreover, it privileges in some degree the possibility of a tacking back and forth between cultural spaces. At the same time, it would seem to fix and repeat the colonially established territorial boundaries within which the postcolonial is encouraged to move: center/periphery—and typically, the center of neocolonial governance and the periphery of origin. European and American anthropologists continue to go where they please, while the postcolonial stays home or else goes West. One wonders whether there might not be a more engaging problematic to be encountered where the postcolonial intellectual from Papua New Guinea goes, not to Philadelphia but to Bombay or Kingston or Accra. This question of the postcolonial intellectual in other—that is to say, postcolonial—places raises the problem of the location of the "subject" in a distinctive and defamiliarizing way. Because in that crossing of borders that is constitutive of the anthropological endeavour, the postcolonial intellectual stands in an ambiguous place: neither "inside" nor "outside," but occupying a "between" always open on both sides to 7 See Talal Asad, "A Comment on the Idea of Non-Westem Anthropology," in Hussein Fahim ed., Indigenous Anthropology in Non-Western Countries (Durham: Carolina Academic Press); and Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory," Cultural Anthropology 3:1 (February 1988).

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contestation. The location of the postcolonial anthropologist in other (subaltern) places turns on an intersection of identity, privilege, and the imaginary of the West. This dilemma is nicely illustrated in Amitav Ghosh's tale "The Imam and the Indian,"8 an account of an Indian's encounter with two men in an Egyptian village—one, the village Imam, and the other, a sort of village jest known to all as Khamees the Rat. The story unfolds through three discrete encounters: between Indian and Imam; between Indian and Khamees the Rat; and between Indian and Imam again (with Khamees the Rat playing a facilitating role). Each encounter is a stage, in the narrative's economy, in the progressive deterioration of the Indian's relations with members of the village. What interests me are the encounters with the Imam. The Indian goes to Egypt in search of Tradition. He is, after all, an anthropologist. He goes to meet the village Imam to ask about his herbs—i.e., Tradition. The Imam, however, marginalized by changes in the village, does not take kindly to the Indian's inquiries. Don't you have herbs in your country, too, he wants to know. Well go and study those. And he promptly produces a box of syringes and phials to show that he himself has no more use for herbs. Sometime after, the Indian and the Imam meet again. By this time it has been widely circulated in the village (apparently by the well-informed and mischievous Khamees the Rat) that in the Indian's country the people worship cows and, worse, burn rather than bury their dead. The Imam uses this information to ridicule the Indian—but, interestingly, not to assert the superiority of his own culture—or rather not simply. He invokes an imagined West as sovereign and as sovereign measure. In the midst of a gathering crowd, he confronts the Indian: Why do you allow backward custom? like that?.... You've advanced they are.

it? Can't you see that it's a primitive and Are you savages that you permit something even been to the West; you've seen how Now tell me: have you ever seen them

burning their dead??

8 Granta 20 (Winter 1986), pp. 135-146. 9 Tbid., p. 144.

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And this "West" of the Imam's is a place not of such things as herbs but of military technology and scientific knowledge. Invoking this figure of power, the Imam continues, incensed: They don't burn their dead in the West. They're not ignorant people. They're advanced, they're educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and bombs. 10

At this the now intimidated Indian, confused and angry, searching for words in a language he has only recently learned, shouts back: "We have them too....We have guns and tanks and bombs. And they're better than anything you have—we're way ahead of you." 11 And so it goes on. The Indian/narrator, turning away now from the scene he has thus enacted, comments on these "delegates from two superseded civilizations vying with each other to lay claim to the violence of the West." "West" for them both is a kind of shared imaginary, a place elsewhere but producing its allure everywhere, which informs, indeed constitutes, the nature of their relationship with each other. "We were both traveling, he and I: we were traveling in the West." Moreover, the Indian perceives his own position as discrepant. The Imam wouldn't have dared say such things had he been a Westerner because: ....1 would have had around me the protective aura of an inherited expertise in the technology of violence. That aura would have surrounded me, I thought, with a sheet of clear glass, like a bullet-proof screen; or perhaps it would have worked as a talisman, like a press card, armed with which I could have gone off to what were said to be the most terrible places in the world that month, to gaze and wonder. And then perhaps I too would have had enough material for a book which would have had for its epigraph the line, The horror! The horror! —for the virtue of a sheet a glass is that it does not require one to look within, 12

10 ppia. 11 ppig.

12 Tpid., pp. 145-146.

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The point that I want to draw attention to here is not that anthropology is a kind of Conradian theatre (which I think it is not), nor that Western anthropologists are protected by a transparent sheet of glass (which I can hardly imagine they are). Rather what I want to notice is the way the imaginary West interrupts and mediates the intersection (or collision) of postcolonial identities and histories. The history of colonialism and neocolonialism is probably such that this is inevitable—two pathetic figures invoking the imaginary West under the fabled light of an Eastern sky. The position of the post-colonial anthropologist in other postcolonial places is necessarily an ambivalent one: "not you/like you,” in Trinh Minh-ha's phrase. 13 The "doctor" as Indian is "like us"; for after all, he has Tradition, too—herbs (and much else besides, like worshipping cows and burning the dead). But the Indian as "doctor" wants to set that aside, to arrogate to himself the seeming empty unmarked space of investigative subject; he wishes to enact the subject of that (pre) figured anthropological journey, someone who, from the space of the absence of Tradition, goes in search of its plenitude and authenticity to inquire of it, to inscribe it. That empty space of power bears, of course, the inescapable historical imprimatur of the West. And I would propose that it is precisely this imposture that the Imam—bitten by the erasure of his own authoritative position in the village, and that too in the name of a West he must increasingly negotiate, with his syringes and phials— wants to unmask in his adversarial challenges. The issue, of course, is not to erase the West as though to restore to its others some ancient pre-colonial unity, as though, indeed, the West were erasable. The issue, it seems to me, is rather to establish a reflexively marked practice of dialogical exchange that might enable the postcolonial intellectual to speak to postcolonials elsewhere (subalterns, but intellectuals too) through those shared-but-different histories and shared-but-different identities. The issue for a postcolonial's postcolonial anthropology, or at least one kind of it, is to reconstitute the map so as to engage in a tacking between postcolonial spaces, a recursive movement of figure and ground in which that West—so much the

13 See Trinh T. Minh-ha, "Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference,” /nscriptions 3/4 (1988).

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sovereign legend of the colonial imagination—is at once interrogated and displaced, interrupted and critiqued. In these pages, I have attempted to do no more than direct our attention to an area of anthropological reflection which has been the object of comparatively little critical concern: the postcolonial anthropologist in other postcolonial places. Certainly, one of the themes that repeats itself through some of the contributions to this volume (and which found a "sounding," so to speak, at the conference out of which they grew) !4 is that just as Theory does not occupy an empty or ahistorical space, so the subject positions problematised within its discourse are themselves not unmarked. And these markings have implications for the articulation of minority/marginalized positionalities. One instance of these positions —with locations that are simultaneously several—is that of "postcolonial" intellectual subject. And if the "task" of the postcolonial intellectual is, as Gayatri Spivak!5 would have it, to radically "unlearn" that privilege which makes her/him wittingly or unwittingly complicitous with the subject positions of "Western" theory, then surely the postcolonial anthropologist crossing several borders at once must find a different set of quadrants to map that oscillation which is the "traveller's eye." 16

Acknowledgements

This is a revised version of a paper of the same title given at the "Predicaments of Theory" Conference. I should like to thank those participants who responded to it in various ways. Earlier drafts were read by Teshome Gabriel and Martin Blythe. Its writing was framed by an ongoing discussion with Vivek Dhareshwar, Mary John, and Satish Deshpande, whom I particularly thank.

14 7 am thinkng particularly of the papers by Lata Mani, Mary John, and Vivek Dhareshwar.

15 See Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow-Sacrifice, Wedge 7/8 (Winter/Spring 1985), p. 120. 6 The phrase is, again, Derek Walcott's, taken from the poem "The Fortunate Traveller"

(in the volume The Fortunate Traveller [New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981]). The line from which it comes, significant for the oscillation that I have tried to emphasize, runs:

"Like a telescope reversed, the traveller's eye...." (p. 89)

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF ESSENTIALISM Elizabeth Grosz

Feminist theory is necessarily implicated in a series of complex negotiations between a number of tense and antagonistic forces that are often unrecognised and unelaborated. It is a self-conscious reaction on the one hand to the overwhelming masculinity of privileged and historically dominant knowledges, acting as a kind of counterweight to the imbalances resulting from the male monopoly of the production and reception of knowledges. On the other hand, it is also a response to the broad political aims and objectives of feminist struggles. Feminist theory is thus bound to two kinds of goals, two commitments or undertakings that exist only in an uneasy and problematic relationship. This tension means that feminists have had to tread a fine line either between intellectual rigour (as it has been defined in male terms) and political commitment (as feminists see it) — that is, between the risks posed by patriarchal recuperation and those of a conceptual sloppiness inadequate to the long-term needs of feminist struggles — or between acceptance in male terms and commitment to women's terms. The ways in which feminists have engaged in the various projects of constructing or fabricating a knowledge appropriate to women—while keeping an eye on male academic traditions as well as on feminist politics—have left many open to criticism from both directions: From the point of view of masculine conceptions of theory evaluation, including notions of objectivity, disinterested scholarship, and intellectual rigour, feminist theory is accused of a motivated, self-

interested, "biased" approach, in which pregiven commitments are simply confirmed rather than objectively demonstrated;! and from the

1 For an account of the challenges feminist theory has posed to male conceptions of objectivity, particularly in science, see E. A. Grosz and M. de Lepervanche, "Feminism

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point of view of (some) feminist "activists" feminist theory is accused of playing male power games, of participating in and contributing to the very forms of male dominance feminism should be trying to combat. It is not altogether surprising that underlying both criticisms is a common demand for a purity of position—an intellectual purity in the one case (a purity from social and political factors that mitigate or interfere with the goals of scholarly research) and a political purity in the other (a purity from the influence of patriarchal and masculinist values). Maledominated theories require the disavowal of the sociopolitical values implicit in the production of all knowledges and the creation of a supposedly value-free knowledge, while feminist political purists require the disavowal of the pervasive masculinity of privileged knowledges and social practices, including feminist forms.

In spite of the sometimes puerile and often naive extremism of both types of objection, they do nevertheless articulate a real concern for feminist theory, highlighting an untheorised locus in its self-formation: By what criteria are feminists to judge not only male theory but also feminist theory? If the criteria by which theory has been judged up to now are masculine, how can new criteria be formulated? Can such criteria adequately satisfy the dual requirements of intellectual or conceptual rigour as well as political engagement? Is it possible to produce theory that compromises neither its political nor its intellectual credibility? In what ways is feminist theory to legitimise itself in theoretical and political terms? These questions are neither idle nor frivolous. They are of direct relevance to the ways in which feminist theory is assessed, and may help to clarify a number of issues that have polarised feminist theorists in unproductive ways. In this brief note, I would like to use a major dispute between feminist

theorists—the debate between so-called feminisms of equality and feminisms of difference—to raise the question of the dual commitments of feminist theory and the need to devise appropriate criteria for its assessment. Is the concept of sexual difference a breakthrough term in contesting patriarchal conceptions of women and femininity? Or is it a reassertion of the patriarchal containment of women? Is the concept essentialist, or is it an upheaval of patriarchal knowledges? and Science," in Crossing Boundaries. Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges, eds. B. Caine, E.A. Brosz, and M. de Lepervanche. (Sydney: Allena dn Unwin, 1988).

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Essentialism and its Cognates Feminists have developed a range of terms and criteria of intellectual assessment over the past twenty or so years that aim to affirm, consolidate, and explain the political goals and ambitions of feminist struggles. These terms have tended to act as unquestioned values and as intellectual guidelines in assessing both male-dominated and feministoriented theories. Among the most frequent and powerful of these terms are those centred around the question of the nature of women (and men)—essentialism, biologism, naturalism, and universalism. While these terms are closely related to each other, sharing a common concem for the fixity and limits definitionally imposed on women, it is also important to be aware of the sometime subtle differences between them in order to appreciate the ways in which they have been used by and against feminists. These terms are commonly used in partriarchal discourses to justify women's social subordination and their secondary positions relative to men in patriarchal society. Essentialism, a term that is rarely defined or explained explicitly in feminist contexts, refers to the attribution of a fixed essence to women. Women's essence is assumed to be given and universal and is usually,

though not necessarily, identified with women's biology and "natural" characteristics. Essentialism usually entails biologism and naturalism, but there are cases in which women's essence is seen to reside not in nature or biology but in certain given psychological characteristics— nurturance, empathy, supportiveness, noncompetitiveness and so on. Or women's essence may be attributed to certain activities and procedures (which may or may not be dictated by biology) observable in social practices, intuitiveness, emotional responses, concern and commitment to helping others, etc. Essentialism entails the belief that those characteristics defined as women's essence are shared in common by all women at all times: It implies a limit on the variations and possibilities of change—lIt is not possible for a subject to act in a manner contrary to her nature. Essentialism thus refers to the existence of fixed characteristics,

given attributes, and ahistorical functions that limit the possibilities of change and thus of social reorganisation.

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Biologism is a particular form of essentialism in which women's essence is defined in terms of women's biological capacities. Biologism is usually based on some form of reductionism: Social and cultural factors are the effects of biologically given causes. In particular, biologism usually ties women closely to the functions of reproduction and nurturance, although it may also limit women's social possibilities through the use of evidence from neurology, neurophysiology and endocrinology. Biologism is thus an attempt to limit women's social and psychological capacities according to biologically established limits. It asserts, for example, that women are weaker in physical strength than men; that women are, by their biological natures, more emotional than men; and so on. Insofar as biology is assumed to constitute an unalterable bedrock of identity, the attribution of biologistic characteristics amounts to a permanent form of social containment for women. Naturalism is also a form of essentialism in which a fixed nature is postulated for women. Once again, this nature is usually given biological form, but this is by no means an invariant. Naturalism may be asserted on theological or on ontological rather than on biological grounds. For example, it may be claimed that women's nature is derived from God-given attributes that are not explicable or observable simply in biological terms. Or, following Sartrean existentialism or Freudian psychoanalysis, there are, as it were, ontological invariants that distinguish the two sexes in, for example, the claim that the human subject is somehow naturally free or that the subject's social position is a function of his or her genital morphology. More commonly, however, naturalism presumes the equivalence of biological and natural properties. While also closely related to essentialism, biologism, and naturalism, universalism need not be based on innate or fixed characteristics. It is usually justified in terms of some essential or biological characteristics, but universalism may be conceived in purely social terms. It refers to the attributions of invariant social categories, functions, and activities to which all women in all cultures are assigned. This may be the result of biology or ontology, but just as frequently, it may reflect universal social or cultural requirements, such as the sexual division of labour or the prohibition of incest. Unlike essentialism, biologism, or naturalism, in which not only the similarities but also the differences between women

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may be accounted for (race and class characteristics can also be explained in naturalist, biologist, or essentialist terms), universalism tends to suggest only the commonness of all women at all times and in all social contexts. By definition, it can only assert similarities, what is shared in common by all women, and what homogenises women as a category. These four terms are frequently elided: Each has commonly served as a shorthand formula for the others. In charging theories with these conceptual commitments, feminists assert that they are necessarily complicit in reproducing patriarchal values. In claiming that women's current social roles and positions are the effects of their essence, nature, biology, or universal social position, these theories are guilty of rendering such roles and positions unalterable and necessary and thus of providing them with a powerful political justification. They rationalise and neutralise the prevailing sexual division of social roles by assuming that these roles are the only, or the best, possibilities, given the confines of the nature, essence, or biology of the two sexes. These commitments entail a range of other serious problems: They are necessarily ahistorical; they confuse social relations with fixed attributes; they see these fixed attributes as inherent limitations to social change; and they refuse to take seriously the historical and geographical differences between women— differences between women across different cultures as well as within a single culture. It is not surprising that these terms have become labels for danger zones or theoretical pitfalls in feminist assessments of patriarchal theory. One could be sure that the theories one analysed were tinged with patriarchal values whenever a trace of them could be discerned. They are the critical touchstones of assessment, self-evident guidelines for evaluating patriarchal theories and the patriarchal residues or adherences of feminist theories. These terms seem unquestionably problematic; they indicate, at least at first glance, a rare harmony between the principles of feminist politics and those of intellectual rigour, for they are problematic in both political and theoretical terms. Yet their value as criteria of critical evaluation for feminist as well as patriarchal theory is not as clear as it might seem.

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Sexual Identity Sexual Difference Among the most central and contested issues in contemporary feminist theory are the terms in which women's social, sexual, and cultural positions are to be understood. This kind of question is, moreover, crucially positioned at the heart of the conflict between feminist politics and the requirements of patriarchal knowledges. Is woman to be attributed an identity and sociocultural position in terms that make it possible for women to be conceived as men's equals? Or is woman's identity to be conceived in terms entirely different from those associated with and provided by men? This question implies two other related questions: Are the frameworks of prevailing patriarchal knowledges capable of bestowing on women the same basic capacities, skills, and attributes they have posited for men? And if so, are these frameworks adequate for characterising not only what women share in common with men (what makes both sexes human) but also what particularises women and distinguishes them from men?

The positions of a number of pioneer feminists in the history of second wave feminism, including, among others, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Eva Figes, Kate Millett, Shulamith

Firestone, and

Germaine Greer, could be described as egalitarian. This broad position assumes that the liberation of women from patriarchal constraints entailed opening up social, economic, political, and sexual positions previously occupied only by men. These theorists in different ways believed that women have been unfairly excluded from positions of social value and status normally occupied by men. Women in patriarchy were regarded as socially, intellectually and physically inferior to men, a consequence of various discriminatory, sexist practices, practices that illegitimately presumed women were unsuited for or incapable of assuming certain positions. This belief was fostered not only by oppressive external constraints but also by women's own compliance with and internalisation of patriarchal sexual stereotypes. Egalitarian feminists—among whom we should include, in spite of their differences, liberal and socialist feminists—were reacting to the largely naturalist and biologist presumptions on which much of social and political theory is based. If it is in women's nature to be passive, compliant, nurturing, this is a "natural" index, guide, or limit to the

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organisation of society. Defenders of patriarchal social order assume that social and cultural relations should conform and be conducive to "(human) nature. " The goal is not an augmentation and reorganisation of "nature" but simply its confirmation. The divisions and inequalities between the sexes were seen as the effects of a nature that should not be tampered with. This provides a ready-made justification for the most conservative and misogynist of social relations: They are treated as if they were the effects of nature alone. Egalitarian feminists claim that women are as able as men to do what men do. The fact that women were not regarded as men's equals was, they claim, the result not of nature but of patriarchal ideologies, discriminatory socialisation practices, social stereotyping, and roleplaying. Women's social roles were, in other words, the result of culture not nature, of social organisation rather than biological determinants, and were thus capable of being changed. Indeed, if women's social roles are dictated by nature, feminism itself becomes impossible, for resistance to nature is, in one sense at least, impossible. Feminism is founded on the belief that women are capable of achievements other than those recognised and rewarded by patriarchy, other than those to which women's nature’ has hitherto confined them. As a category, women were consistently underrepresented in positions of social authority and status and overrepresented in socially subordinate positions. Girls systematically underachieve and are inadequately prepared for social success, while boys’ social roles maximise their social potential. Feminism began largely as a struggle for a greater share of the patriarchal pie and equal access to social, economic, sexual, and intellectual opportunities. The early feminists of equality were bound up in what Kristeva has called "the logic of identification," an identification with the values, norms, goals, and methods devised and validated by men. In its beginnings, the women's movement, as the struggle of suffragists and of existential feminists, aspired to gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history. In this sense, the movement, while immediately universalist, is also deeply rooted in the sociopolitical life of nations. The political demands of women; the struggles for equal pay for equal work, for taking power in social institutions on an equal footing with men; the rejection, when necessary, of the attributes traditionally considered feminine or maternal

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insofar as they are deemed incompatible with insertion in that historical— all are part of the logic of identification with certain values: not with the ideological (these are combatted, and rightly so, as reactionary) but, rather, with the logical and ontological values of a rationality dominant in the nation-state.2

In place of the essentialist and naturalist containment of women, feminists of equality affirm women's potential for equal intelligence, ability, and social value. Underlying the belief in the need to eliminate or restructure the social constraints imposed on women is a belief that the "raw materials" of socialisation are fundamentally the same for both sexes: each has analogous biological or natural potential, which is unequally developed because the social roles imposed on the two sexes are unequal. If social roles could be readjusted or radically restructured, if the two sexes could be resocialised, they could be rendered equal. The differences between the sexes would be no more significant that the differences between individuals. These feminist arguments for an egalitarian treatment of the two sexes were no doubt threatening to patriarchs insofar as the sex roles the latter presumed were natural could be blurred through social means; women could become "unfeminine," men "unmasculine;" and the sovereignty of the nuclear family, marriage, monogamy, and the sexual division of labour would be undermined. Where it was necessary to recognise the changeable nature of sex roles and social stereotypes, as feminists of equality advocated, this was not, however, sufficient to ensure women's freedom from sexual oppression. The more successful egalitarian programs became, the more apparent it was that the political agenda included a number of serious drawbacks: 1. The project of sexual equality takes male achievements, values and standards as the norms to which women should also aspire. At most, then, women can achieve an equality with men only within a system whose overall value is unquestioned and whose power remains unrecognised. Women strive, then, to become the same as men, in a

sense, "masculinised." 2. To achieve an equality between the sexes, women's specific needs and interests—what distinguishes them from men—must be minimised

2 Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," Signs 7:1 (1981), pp. 18-19.

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and their commonness or humanity stressed. (This may, for example, explain the strong antipathy to maternity amongst a number of egalitarian feminists, a resistance to the idea that women's corporeality and sexuality make a difference to the kinds of consciousness or subjects they could become.) 3. Policies and laws codifying women's legal rights to equality—antidiscriminatory and equal opportunity legislation—have tended to operate as much against women as in their interest: Men, for example, have been able as much as women to use antidiscrimination or equal opportunity regulations to secure their own positions. 4. In this sense, equality becomes a vacuous concept insofar as it reduces all specificities, including those that serve to distinguish the positions of the oppressed from those of the oppressor. One can be considered equal only insofar as the history of the oppression of specific groups is effaced.4 5. Struggles for equality between the sexes are easily reduced to struggles around a more generalised and neutralised social justice. This has enabled a number of men to claim that they too are oppressed by patriarchal social role, and are unable to express their more "feminine" side. The struggles of women against patriarchy are too easily identified with a movement of reaction against a general "dehumanisation" in which men may unproblematically represent women in struggles for greater or more authentic forms of humanity.

3 Kristeva makes this point forcefully in her analysis of the "two generations of feminists" outlined in her paper, "Women's Time.” She refers to de Beauvoir's antimatemal position,

a position also analysed in Catriona Mackenzie's paper, "Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophy and/or the Female Body" in Feminist Challenges, Social and Political Theory, 1986. 4 This is Kristeva's understanding of the effects of a fundamental egalitarianism; produces, among other things, the oppressive structure of anti-Semitism:

which

assimilationism

entails the repression of the specific history of oppression directed towards the Jew. This is why Sartre's position in Anti-Semite and Jew, in spite of his intentions, is anti-semitic. As Kristeva suggests:...the specific character of women could only appear as nonessential or even nonexistent to the totalizing and even totalitarian spirit of this ideology. We begin to see that this same egalitarian and in fact censuring treatment has been imposed, from Enlightenment Humanism through socialism, on religious specificities and, in particular, on Jews. (Kristeva, op.cit., p.21)

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6. The project of creating equality between the sexes can be socially guaranteed, if it can, only in the realm of public and civic life. And even if some kind of domestic equality is possible, an equality at the level of sexual and particularly reproductive relations seems impossible insofar as they are untouched by egalitarianism. 7. Most significantly, even if the two sexes behave in the same ways, perform the same duties and play the same roles, the social meanings of their activities remain unchallenged. Until this structure of shared meanings is problematised, equality in anything but a formal sense remains impossible. Try as it may, a feminism of equality is unable to adequately theorise sexual and reproductive equality. And this, in turn, results in its inability to adequately theorise women's specific positions within the social and symbolic order. Kristeva makes clear the link between sexual and symbolic functioning: -

Sexual difference—which is at once biological, physiological, and relative to reproduction—is translated by and translates a difference in the relation of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social contract: a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language and meaning. The sharpest and most subtle point of feminist subversion brought about by the new generation will henceforth be situated on the terrain of the inseparable conjunction of the sexual and the symbolic, in order to try to discover, first, the specificity of the female, and then,

in the end, that of each individual.9

In opposition to egalitarian feminism, a feminism based on the acknowledgement of women's specificities and oriented to the attainment of autonomy for women has emerged over the past ten years or more. From the point of view of a feminism of equality, feminisms of difference seem strangely reminiscent of the position of defenders of patriarchy:

Both stress women's

differences from men.

However,

before too readily identifying them, it is vital to ask how this difference is conceived and, perhaps more importantly, who it is that defines this

5 Kristeva, op. cit., p. 21.

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difference and for whom. For patriarchs, difference is understood in terms of inequality, distinction, or opposition, a sexual difference modelled on negative, binary, or oppositional structures within which only one of the two terms has any autonomy; the other is defined only by the negation of the first. Only sameness or identity can ensure equality. In the case of feminists of difference, however, difference is seen not as difference from a pregiven norm, but as pure difference, difference in itself, difference with no identity. This kind of difference implies the autonomy of the terms between which the difference may be drawn and thus their radical incommensurability. Difference viewed as distinction implies the pre-evaluation of one of the terms from which the difference of the other is drawn; pure difference refuses to privilege either term. For feminists, to claim women's difference from men is to reflect existing definitions and categories, redefining oneself and the world according to women's own perspectives. The right to equality entails the right to be the same as men, while struggles around the autonomy imply the right to either consider oneself equal to another or reject the terms by which equality is measured and to define oneself in different terms. It entails the right to be and to act differently. The concept of difference is used by a number of contemporary feminist theorists, including Luce Irigaray, Jane Gallop, and Héléne Cixous. It implies, among other things, the following: 1. Difference suggests major transformation of the social and symbolic order, which, in patriarchy, is founded by a movement of universalisation of the singular (male) identity. Difference cannot be readily accommodated in a system that reduces all difference to distinction and all identity to sameness.

2. Difference resists the homogenisation of separate political struggles/ insofar as it implies not only women's differences from men, and from

© This difference between difference and distinction is suggested by Derrida in his conception of difference, which is partly based on his reading of Saussure's notion of pure difference in language. Although Derrida does not make use of this terminology himself, Anthony Wilden's careful gloss on these terms helps to clarify many of the issues at stake

in Derrida’s as well as in feminist conceptions of difference. See Chapter 8 of Anthony Wilden's System and Structure. Essays in Communication and Exchange (London: Tonistock, 1972).

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each other, but also women's differences from other oppressed groups. It is not at all that clear that, for example, struggles against racism will necessarily be politically allied with women's struggles or, conversely, that feminism will overcome forms of racist domination. This, of course, does not preclude the existence of common interests shared by various oppressed groups, and thus the possibility of alliances over specific issues; it simply means that these alliances have no prior necessity. 3. Struggles around the attainment of women's autonomy imply that men's struggles against patriarchy, while possibly allied with women's in some circumstances, cannot be identified with them. In acknowledging their sexual specificity, men's challenge to patriarchy is necessarily different from women's, which entails producing an identity and sexual specificity for themselves.

4. The notion of difference affects women's definitions not only of themselves but also of the world. This implies not only that social practices must be subjected to feminist critique and reorganisation but also that the very structures of representation, meaning, and knowledge must be subjected to a thoroughgoing transformation of their patriarchal alignments. A politics of difference implies the right to define oneself, others, and the world according to one's own interests. The

Difference

That Makes

a Difference

Feminists involved in the project of establishing women's sexual differences from men have been subjected to wide-ranging criticisms coming from both feminist directions: They face the same general dilemma confronting any feminist position which remains critical of the frameworks of patriarchal knowledges yet must rely on their resources. From the point of view of traditional, male-governed scholarly norms, their work appears utopian, idealistic, romantic, polemic, fictional—but above all, without substantial content or solid evidence and justification. From the point of view of other forms of feminism—particularly from Marxist or socialist feminism—it appears essentialist and universalist. In the one case, these feminists are accused of straying too far from biological and scientifically validated information; and in the other, of sticking too closely to biological evidence. It seems that both these

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criticisms misunderstand the status of claims made by many feminists of difference, judging them in terms inappropriate to their approach. Charges of essentialism, universalism, and naturalism are predictable responses on the part of feminists concerned with the idea of women's social construction. Thus, any attempt to define or designate woman or femininity is in danger of relying on commitments that generalise on the basis of the particular and reduce social construction to biological preformation. Any theory of femininity, any definition of woman in general, any description that abstracts from the particular historical, cultural, ethnic, and class positions of particular women verges perilously close to essentialism. Toril Moi provides a typical response to a feminism of difference in her critique of Irigaray's notion of women or the feminine: ..any attempt to formulate a general theory of femininity will be metaphysical. This is precisely Irigaray's dilemma: Having shown that so far femininity has been produced exclusively in relation to the logic of the same, she falls for the temptation to produce her own positive theory of femininity. But, as we es seen, to define "woman" is necessarily to essentialize her. This, however, leads to a paradox: If women cannot be characterised in any general way, if all there is to femininity is socially produced, how can feminism be taken seriously? What justifies the assumption that women are oppressed as a sex? What, indeed, does it mean to talk about women as a category? If we are not justified in taking women as category, what political grounding does feminism have? Feminism is placed in an unenviable position: Either it clings to feminist principles, which entail its avoidance of essentialist and universalist categories, in which case its rationale as a political struggle centred around women is problematised; or it accepts the limitations patriarchy imposes on its conceptual schemas and models and abandons the attempt to provide autonomous, self-defined terms in which to describe women and femininity. Are these the only choices available to feminist theory—an adherence to essentialist doctrines, or the dissolution of feminist 7 Toril Moi, Sexual Textual Politics. p. 139.

Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985),

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struggles into localised, regional, specific struggles representing the interests of particular women or groups of women? Posed in this way, the dilemma facing feminists involves a conflict between the goals of intellectual rigour (avoidance of the conceptual errors of essentialism and universalism) and feminist political struggles (struggles that are directed towards the liberation of women as women). But is this really a choice feminists must face? Is it a matter of preference for one goal over the other? Or can the linkages between theory and political practice be understood differently so that the criteria of intellectual evaluation are more "politicised" and the goals of political struggle are more "theoretised"?

Gayatri Spivak sums up this dilemma well in her understanding of concepts and theoretical principles, not as guidelines, rules, principles, or blueprints for struggle but as tools and weapons of struggle. It is no longer a matter of maintaining a theroretical purity at the cost of political principles; nor is it simply a matter of the ad hoc adoption of theoretical principles according to momentary needs or whims. It is a question of negotiating a path between always impure positions—seeing that politics is always/already bound up with what it contests (including theories)— and that theories are always implicated in various political struggles (whether this is acknowledged or not): You pick up the universal that will give you the power to fight against the other side and what you are throwing away by doing that is your theoretical purity. Whereas the great custodians of the anti-universal are obliged therefore simply to act in the interest of a great narrative, the narrative of exploitation while they keep themselves clean by not committing themselves to anything... . [T]hey are run by a great narrative even as they are busy protecting their theoretical purity by repudiating essentialism. The choice, in other words, is not between maintaining a politically pure theoretical position (and leaving the murkier questions of political involvement unasked) and espousing a politically tenuous one which 8 Gayatri Spivak, "Criticism, Feminism, and the Insitution," Thesis Eleven, (1984/85),

no. 10/11, p. 184.

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may be more pragmatically effective in securing social change. The alternatives faced by feminist theorists are all in some sense "impure" and "implicated" in patriarchy. There can be no feminist position that is not in some way or other involved in patriarchal power relations; it is hard to see how this is either possible or desirable, for a purity from patriarchal "contamination" entails feminism's incommensurability with patriarchy and thus the inability to criticise it. Feminists are not faced with pure and impure options. All options are in their various ways bound by the constraints of patriarchal power. The crucial political questions are, Which commitments remain, in spite of their patriarchal alignments, of use to feminists in their political struggles? What kinds of feminist strategy do they make possible or hinder? and What are the costs and benefits of holding these commitments? In other words, the decision about whether to "use" essentialism or to somehow remain beyond it (even if these extremes were possible) is a question of calculation, not a self-evident certainty. In challenging the domination of patriarchal models that rely on essentialism, naturalism, biologism, or universalism, egalitarian feminists have pointed to the crucial role these assumptions play in making change difficult to conceive or undertake: as such, they support, rationalise, and underpin existing power relations between the sexes. But in assuming that feminists take on essentialist or universalist assumptions (if they do, which is not always clear) in the same way as patriarchs, instead of attempting to understand the ways in which essentialism and its cognates can function as strategic terms, this silences and neutralises the most powerful of feminist theoretical weapons— feminism's ability to use patriarchy and phallocratism against themselves, its ability to take up positions ostensibly opposed to feminism and to use them for feminist goals. ...1 think it is absolutely on target to take a stand against the discourses of essentialism, universalism as it comes to terms with the universal—of classical German philosophy or the universal as the white upper class male...etc. but strategically we cannot. Even as we talk about feminist practice, or privileging practice over theory, we are universalising. Since the moment of essentialising, universalising, saying yes to the onto-phenomenological question, is irreducible, let us at least

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situate it at the moment; let us become vigilant about our own practice and use it as much as we can rather than make the totally counter-productive gesture of repudiating it....?

In other words, if feminism cannot maintain its political purity from patriarchal frameworks, methods, and presumptions, its implication in them needs to be acknowledged instead of being disavowed. Moreover, this (historically) necessary binding by patriarchal terms is the very condition of feminism's effectivity in countering and displacing the effects of patriarchy: its emersion in patriarchal practices (including those surrounding the production of theory) is the condition of its effective critique of and movement beyond them. This emersion provides not only the conditions under which feminism can become familiar with what it criticises but also the very means by which patriarchal dominance can be challenged.

9 Spivak, op. cit.

CORPOREOGRAPHIES Vicki Kirby

I want to begin by conjuring the image of a man who is participating in the Hindu ritual festival of Thaipusam. What can be said about such an image? Detailing an ethnographic contextual-isation will not prove helpful for its reading, at least not in terms of what focuses my own particular fascination. For even if I could presume to elaborate the cultural significance of this festival within Hinduism, as it is expressed in a specific geographical location and as it is understood by this particular man whom I have isolated, such an explanatory narrative would still not answer my curiosity. This is because I am not so much interested in the orthodox question of what this man makes of his ritual action as I am in asking what this ritual action has apparently made of him. Or to put it another way, it is not this man's cultural mind-frame upon which my prurient inquiry fastens. Rather, it is the enigma of his body that attracts my interest: his tongue, his neck, his belly and hands, and then the substance of his viscera and lungs, their surfaces and depths, his blood and the strange information that it must carry. This particular man is part of a religious procession. He is walking a considerable distance with many others who are similarly regaled within what could be described as a type of elaborate, metal scaffolding. The infrastructural support for these constructions is the devotee's own body. Myriad metal spokes are driven into the skin and through the vital organs. The hands may also be pierced and even the tongue immobilised by long spikes thrust through the face, lips, and neck. To be thus impaled by any one of these metal prongs would prove at least painful for most of us, if not lethal. Bleeding, scarring, and serious internal injury would be the predictable results of such self-abuse. And yet for the serious participant, none of these effects is realised. Indeed, whatever the belief system—structural frame or cultural text, call it what

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you will—through which this man's body is ciphered and located as "being" in the world, one can only presume that this information also informs the very matter of his body's material constitution, even at the level of data in and between cells. For this body does not show any evidence that its boundaries have been breached. Its interior and exterior surfaces, the skin and membranes that divide as they connect the complexity of its parts, have not functioned as borders which separate one thing from another. And this confounding of the inside/outside division also confounds the very notion of an essential integrity, relying as it does on a border that will secure one body as an entity separable from another. Indeed, this image is provocative precisely because it problematises orthodox understandings of just what a body is. The body—that universal, biological stuff of human matter—that "something shared" that

the social sciences assume is the common ground for all their inquiries— is somewhat qualified here. The devotee would seem to share his body's peculiarly plastic articulation with other devotees. However, this cultural/ritual incorporation is not generalisable. And yet, because medical discourse arbitrates the final truth of a body, social scientists have tended to delimit their field of investigation to the interpretation and contextualisation of bodies. In other words, they stop short of asking how it is that the cultural context that surrounds a body seems also to somehow inhabit it. Ironically perhaps, the acknowledgement that there are remarkably different cultural interpretations of the body can nevertheless still presume an essential, universal body that is just as variously explained. This disciplinarisation of what can be asked relegates the discussion of certain curious (because difficult to interpret) observations to the safe

containment of "corridor talk" or dinner party anecdote. This means that such observations are not given legitimacy by being acknowledged as curious within conventional, ethnographic representation. And here, I do not want to suggest too quickly that such omissions be taken as evidence for alterity's unrepresentableness. The announcement that Western modes of knowledge and representation have reached their explanatory limit is interrupted in this cautionary hesitation from Blanchot, who says:

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There is an "I do not know" that is at the limit of knowledge but that belongs to knowledge. We always pronounce it too early, still knowing all—or too late, when I no longer know that I do not know...! I want to propose here that what counts as knowledge operates via an economy of representation that requires, as a necessity, that this lapse in the otherwise careful intellectual rigour of the ethnographer take place: that is, Knowledge itself is predicated on a strategic oversight.

To illustrate and clarify what I mean, I will substitute the spectacle of my original, exotic example with one that is more immediate if less dramatic: R.S.I. (Repetitive Strain Injury, or "kangaroo paw"), an Australian "disease." You will see the problem already. How can you have such a thing as an Australian disease? As this disease has incurred the largest number of compensation claims in Australia's history, it is a question whose significance has come to exceed my own personal curiosity. This affliction is purportedly a product of word processing and other repetitive work practices. Firstly and very briefly, the symptoms are usually felt as intense pain in the shoulders, arms, wrists, and hands. The victim suffers varying degrees of incapacitation. The arms may have to be supported in a sling, the wrists and hands strapped in splints. This condition may last for years, and the body's restrictions become permanent. Work becomes impossible, and the personal life of R.S.I. sufferers is seriously impaired. Understandably, employers are dubious and financially unsympathetic when they learn that R.S.I. doesn't seem to occur elsewhere in the world. This suspicion is exacerbated when many of their employees, although trussed in splints and armbraces, are nevertheless diagnosed by the medical profession as malingerers. Ergonomists argue that it's an engineering problem. They claim results from such things as the adjustment of chair and desk heights and the resetting of keyboard angles. Against this, psychologists have proven, at least to their own satisfaction, that it is an attitudinal syndrome, even

offering to conduct personality tests in order to anticipate the bad-risk

1M. Blanchot, cited in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, M. C. Taylor (ed.) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 1.

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employee. And yet, whatever is proffered as the actual etiology of this disease, no one has been able to explain why workers experiencing what seem to be identical conditions in different industries do not also suffer from it. I should also mention here that victims of R.S.I. show a tendency to fall into significant social categories that articulate with sex and/or class (usually female and/or working class). A battery of disciplinary regimes has seized upon this strange phenomenon to pronounce the truth of the body that manifests it. That each interpretation undercuts the claims of another is not in itself especially significant. What is of specific interest, however, is that given this fact, nowhere in the vast and competing literature on R.S.I. has any mention been made of the common assumption that underpins all of these discourses, for a strict nature/culture division organises these interpretations into the predictable either/or of the mind/body split. Consequently, only two questions are then possible: Is this disease a real (because biologically determined) phenomenon, or is it just thought (erroneously) to be so? This award of compensation will be more or less difficult depending upon which side of this division the explanation is located. It is clearly then, a politically inflected conceptual opposition.

The binary logic by which these regimes of truth have been structured is threatened by the ambiguities of R.S.I.'s symptomatology, hence the rush to explain and thereby contain the phenomenon as an expression of either body or mind. Ironically then, despite the appearance of engaged disputation between different and competing discourses, the motivating anxiety to find a singular solution could be said to derive from a shared apprehension; namely, that their apparent differences are actually the articulation of a common logic. All these discourses assume that the body is the naturalised material given of human substance, a body that mind, as culture or psychology, in this case, merely interprets. If we could concede for a moment that the body might fruitfully be considered instead as a social site, we would have a very different horizon of possibilities to think with. For a start, the body could then be understood as the manifold expression of a generalised intertextuality in which biological discourse, another cultural discourse, is but one of myriad constituting discourses. Dangerous stuff this, given that the body is so often made to operate as the naturalised and therefore passive

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ground for cultural and political analysis. But why is it that so many disciplines evidence an essential necessity to organise knowledge around a mind/body split, one that would seem to uncritically refigure Marxism's base/superstructure problematic? And why, against this, is it politically significant to argue that the body is always/already culture's dynamic effect? In the rest of this paper, I will attempt to address these questions and try to explain why, although seemingly marginal, I consider them central to the concerns of this conference.

I will begin with the proposition that the different corporeal ambiguities just described may be exemplary of something as yet unthought rather than anomalies to be rendered commensurate with one discourse or another. Retaining this possibility, and keeping in mind that both examples are represented as phenomena specific to particular cultures, the experience that anthropologists must labour to re-produce or evoke for their readers becomes a very difficult one to represent if it is also to embrace these peculiar cases. One of the aims of ethnography is to achieve what Clifford Geertz calls "the postcard effect of being there." However, Geertz argues that ethnographers have only recently discovered what mathematicians and poets have known for a long time, namely, "the inadequacy of words to experience and their tendency to lead off only into other words." Although he concedes that what the anthropologist faces is "a task at which no one ever does more than not utterly fail," he does make a commitment to the value of attempting "to convey in words ‘what it is like’ to be somewhere specific in the lifeline of the world,” because "...it is above all a rendering of the actual, a vitality phrased."2 Although many of us may want to agree with the desirability of and pragmatic necessity for Geertz's conclusion here, an understanding of just what it is that determines the task's difficulty deserves further elaboration. Geertz is just one among a now growing number of theorists and anthropologists who directly engage with the problematic issue of ethnographic writing and cultural representation. (A convenient anthology of this type of work appeared in the pathfinding book Writing

2 C. Geertz, "Being Here:

1987), p. 103.

Whose Life Is It Anyway," ZYZZYYA, vol. III, no. 4 (Winter

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Culture. Anthropology's credulous appeal to an empirical reality whose facts might effectively arbitrate the truth of ethnography is called into question by such writers. Indeed, for these writers the weight of the problem falls on the suffix "-graphy" in the ethnographer's craft. The ethnographer makes reference to an extra-textual world which must nevertheless be re-presented through textual practices. The battery of tropological conventions that organise a text, its coherence and narrative resolution, or the rhetorical means by which an author establishes his or her authorising presence or "writerly identity"—these writing strategies suggest that anthropology is a literary craft rather than the transparent medium of things as they are "in the field." Against this apparent iconoclasm, defenders of the faith, such as Michael Carrithers, here specifically reproving Geertz's claims, will respond that ...whereas the canon of a fictional realist might be to achieve verisimilitude, ethnographers adhere to quite a different standard. In their writing the touchstone must be fidelity to what they experienced and learned about others, and much of what they write has to be verifiably true. . . .a very different matter than the plausibility or inner harmony we ask of realist fiction. Ethnographic scholarship possesses a standard to which individuals may respond with different capacities, but it possesses a standard all the same.4

Requisite to preserving the possibility of "a veridical or interpretive success" is the clean separation of the literary and rhetorical form from the detail of its factual, ethnographic content. For it can then be maintained that the truth resides outside the discourse that merely represents it. But it is precisely this separation that is now being contested. The constitutive role of the author in the making of ethnographic texts confounds claims of scientific objectivity, and further to this, it 3 See J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetic and Politics of

Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). 4M. Carrithers, ‘The Anthropologist as Author: Geertz's "Works and Lives," Anthropology Today 4 (August 1988), p. 22.

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undermines the political authority that motivates such claims. If the mimetic force of scientific rhetoric is found to be a textual construction, then perhaps less inhibited writing genres that strive to evoke rather than repeat the fieldwork experience can legitimately be entertained. A literary and theoretical reflexivity that is avowedly subjective can then elicit the poetic dimension of ethnography—the dialogical gaming of negotiated meanings, the experimental use of fiction and autobiographical accounts that risk self-irony, the self-conscious attempt to convey the fieldwork experience as a series of broken fragments rather than a coherent narrative, and so on. James Clifford concisely explains that such types of writing are grappling with the realization that, ‘Ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial —committed and incomplete."5 Clifford also anticipates a possible misreading of this turn from objectivity to romantic or modernist subjectivism. He insists that "...to recognize the poetic dimension of ethnography does not require that one give up facts and accurate accounting for the supposed free play of poetry. ‘Poetry’...can be historical, precise, objective."6 Clifford goes on to say that although ethnography is always writing, it is not "only literature."

This valuable reconceptualisation of the ethnographic project

inaugurates the possibility of thinking differently about cultural difference. By questioning the objectivity/subjectivity split through the revaluation of the negative side of this binary logic, the orthodoxy of the canon's rigid economy is challenged. The strategic rehabilitation or attempted reversal of determinate negation (here subjectivity) provides a space from which to question the necessary interrelationship between the different sides of the binary. This experimentation with new and imaginative writing styles and strategies is considered preferable because it more honestly negotiates "(()he gap between engaging others where they are and representing them where they aren't. . . “7 Or, to put this another way, it seems perhaps more politically and ethically able to answer Geertz's question, "What

5 J, Clifford, "Introduction" in Writing Culture, p. 7. 6 Tbid., p. 26. 7 C. Geertz, op. cit., p. 96.

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happens to reality when it is shipped abroad?"8 However, this concern to enlist innovative writing strategies that seem better to express what was previously excluded can unwittingly operate to defer the crucial question of cultural difference. For in itself, the turn towards negation is still caught within the self-same logic that it appears to contest: the desire to re-present the fieldwork situation as mimesis is refigured in the desire to evoke something of its experiential complexity. Indeed, inhabiting the very word evocation—that suggestive calling up of what could not simply be repeated—is the seductive lure of an uncanny proximity that only sound appears to embody. It is as if we are really getting closer. What needs to be asked here, rather than simply assumed, however, is: What are we supposed to be getting closer to? It would seem that confessing "...the inadequacy of words to experience" predicates "experience" as the unproblematic stuff of this recollected immediacy. Indeed, experience is thereby installed as a horizon of intersubjectivity, a presence now deferred. To be more precise, the supposed shared matter that has been made to naturalise such a claim continues to be the inert, passive material of the body itself—that universal tabula rasa upon which culture is thought to be inscribed. If objectivity was previously problematised as having a privileged relation to "the Real," now subjectivity, via experience, has reclaimed the same foundational ground for another, if more subtle form of universalisation. In the economy of signification—that system through which meaning (value) is organised—a mode of thought has here been preserved by being merely reversed, just as if the face of a coin had been flipped from head to tail. The coin remains the same, and so does the economy that gives it value. It should be remembered that the problem with a binary is not that there are only two conceptualisations possible, nor simply that one side is not valued as is the other, although this provides us with a clue to the problem. Rather to describe a binary as the articulation of a selfsame logic is to acknowledge that there was only ever one term and that difference was therefore only apparent. In contrast, the attempt to think difference differently must begin by positing the possibility of (at least) two terms.

8 Ibid.

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When ethnographic representation inscripts alterity/difference into this binary, even though reversing it, alterity again risks being rendered transparent. The West generously gives it voice while still conserving itself as sovereign subject. If we grant that History is always greater than our personal benevolence and intellectual perspicacity, it is important to retain a certain caution as we turn, or are made to turn, towards "otherness." Western Reason, now that it is called upon to justify an inherent phallocentrism and ethnocentrism, will unfortunately be able to manage the crises, with no fundamental changes, if alterity is so easily recuperated. Given this, the following intervention is motivated by the belief that the anxiety that this predicament generates should not be facilitated but should instead be sustained and intensified.

My initial strategy is a simple one that has been much rehearsed within conventional, contestatory political practice, namely, the attempt to radicalise the familiar. Invariably, the task is to challenge an assumption that has been naturalised and therefore neutralised in order to acknowledge the political investments that such an oversight contains. However, the task accrues a heavier burden when it poses a question that underwrites all of the previous ones; that is, when it questions the interrelationship between truth, representation and subjectivity. A Derridean interrogation of this involvement requestions and revalues just where the political takes place, and it is because of this that deconstruction has incurred the wrath of critics from both the Left and the Right. What these guardians of political orthodoxy are defending is their common assumption that a certain foundational ground must guarantee all political practice and that this "given" cannot itselfbe given up. In response to this oppositional coalition, Derrida has commented as follows: It is in the interest of one side and the other to represent deconstruction as tuming inward and an enclosure by the limits of language, whereas in fact deconstruction begins by deconstructing logocentrism, the linguistics of the word, and this very enclosure itself. On one side and the other, people get

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~=Kirby impatient when they see that deconstructive practices are also

and first of all political and institutional practices.? I want to pick up this last point and try to suggest how a deconstuctive approach might usefully further our thinking about difference and representation. At least it can begin to loosen this content/form split through which the problem is usually considered.

Focusing on representation then, the dual meanings of the word that are often conflated include its sense of "speaking for," as in the case of a political leader who is representing the interests of his or her constituents, and its sense of re-presentation or substitution. These meanings are often run together because the notion of mediation underscores them both. As a consequence, the ethical and political motivation behind questions of representation in both its senses will similarly concern the possible conflict of interests between the mediator and the mediated. This expresses an obvious political asymmetry that is considerable because unavoidable. To put this simply, because something is standing between one thing and another, the transfer of information must inevitably entail a distortion. With specific regard to ethnography as cultural representation, writing is here understood to be parasitically dependent upon an originary because of prior experience or reality. Writing must therefore reconstitute and transform this moment through its very distanciation from that moment. In other words, it must mediate a complex immediacy, just as Geertz implies in his comment, "the inadequacy of words to experience." However, this understanding of writing/representation as transportation or derivation, as something that, to paraphrase Geertz, renders the actual or phrases the vital, remains within the comfortable belief that language is primarily an instrument of communication. Following from this, it makes perfect sense to assume that intending, self-present subjects exchange or negotiate meanings via the separable process of language's signifying operation. By divorcing language from the constitution of subjectivity, the pressing political consideration can be reduced to the question of who controls the

oy Derrida, "But beyond...(Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon),” trans. P. Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1986), p. 168.

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instrument of representation, or who can therefore exert power over others. According to this view, the mediator and the mediated occupy subject positions that are interchangeable, at least in principle, thus assuming the possibility of eventual social justice. Against this, a deconstructive reading refigures the subject as an effect of language. The subject does not precede language, for it is always/already articulated by a political field of signification that includes it. "Language" in this sense now exceeds its common understanding as speech or writing. The more common conceptualisations of language assume that an empirical enclosure, thematic integrity, or intelligible unity can be decided. Saussure anticipated that linguistics would one day be subsumed to a much more general science, one that he termed "semiology.”" And Derrida's "grammatology" tries to think this "writing in the general sense." Derrida's "Writing," or “archi-ecriture,” is a catachretical marker—a metaphor without a literal referent, standing in for a concept that is the condition of conceptuality. As this notion undercuts the appeal to an extratextual signified as the final guarantee of meaning, it cannot be recruited for hermeneutics.

Given this, the

charge—and it is more often made than not—that Derrida's intellectual and political focus does not escape the written text is entirely misguided. As Derrida says:

..an hour's reading, beginning on any page of any one of the texts I have published over the last twenty years, should suffice for you to realize that text, as I use the word, is not the book. No more than writing or trace, it is not limited to the paper which you cover with your graphism. 10

"Language,"or "writing in this generalised sense," offers us a way to conceptualise why there can be no outside of such a text because everything is always/already the manifestation of "writing's" political articulation. Consequently, the problematic of representation can no longer be confined to its consideration as mediation, because both the subject who investigates and the object investigated are always/already confounded within a "writing" that constitutes their differences. When representation is conceptualised as an intervention between one discrete

10 Jhid., p. 167.

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thing and another, the logical economy that underwrites and constructs these divisions cannot be radically called into question. Indeed, if reasoning is itself founded on the violence of such bipolar divisions, with an implicit negation and mastery of contradictories, it is understandable, unfortunately, why it just doesn't "make sense” to, question this logic. However, if difference cannot be thought unless we broach this autologic circle, we need to learn how to "stop making sense” in quite the same way. Faced with this impossible prospect, Luce Irigaray asks: "How do we speak the other without subordinating it again to the one? What method could even render this question perceptible?" She notes: A perpetually unrecognized {méconnu} law prescribes all realizations of language(s) {toutes réalisations de langage(s)}, all production of discourse, all constitution of language {langue}, according to the necessities of one perspective, one point of view, one economy: the necessities of man, supposed to represent the human race....It seems that this self-evident truth {évidence}, which is at once immediate and inscribed in our entire tradition, has to remain occulted, has to function as the radically blind point of entry of the subject into the universe of speech {dire}. To open one's eyes here amounts to extreme imprudence, a folly as yet unheard of, a violence that calls for the mobilization of all kinds of arguments....!1 As there can be no "outside of text,” Irigaray is not simply conjuring with the notion that certain unfortunate, because powerless, subjects have been denied reasonable access to language and representation. Her argument is much more profound in its implications. Through a Derridean recognition of textual materiality, subjectivity is here understood to be a function of a political economy, produced by its constitutive force and the violence of the principle of noncontradiction. As Irigaray explains this:

Wy Irigaray, "The Language of Man," trans. E. G. Carlston, forthcoming in Cultural Critique 13 (Fall, 1989).

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--yeS or no, not yes and no at the same time, at least ostensibly....Alternatives that are then measured, tempered, temporalized, and determined in the hierarchical mode: the assumption always being that the contradiction can be resolved in the right term, [can come to a proper conclusion].12

The meaning of this reconceptualisation of "materiality" as textual production should not be interpreted as a more refined reworking of the notion of ideology, for ideology presumes a rationalist conception of the subject and argues that social change derives from the radicalisation of consciousness. According to this model, culture is understood to constitute a consciousness that is indifferently embodied in the uncontested ground of biology's determinations. That this view is firmly entrenched is evident in the example of Anglo-American feminism's need to carefully divide sex from gender. This behaviourist model of the passive body, socialised and conditioned in culture, erases the body as itself an active site where the process of signification must in-form a lived experience and where mind and body are not so readily separated. Michel Foucault's valuable intervention against Marxism's base/superstructure model of materiality/ideality, especially as it specifically addresses the body as a problematic, is helpful here. Although his thesis is of course quite different from a deconstructive approach, his insistence that the body is discursively constituted enhances a different understanding of materiality. At the end of The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Foucault makes this argument quite clearly when he says: ...we must not refer a history of sexuality to the agency of sex; but rather show how "sex" is historically subordinate to sexuality. We must not place sex on the side of reality, and sexuality on that of confused ideas and illusions; sexuality is a very real historical formation; it is what gave rise to the notion of sex, as a speculative element necessary to its operation. We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power,

12 Ipid.

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Kirby on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. 13

In other words, Foucault is encouraging us not to think of a body that precedes its entanglement within discursive regimes. Rather, he invites us to try to entertain the possibility that as the body is constituted or produced within discursivity, then so is it thereby rendered as a materiality. The body in this model is, in its entirety, a materiality that is a cultural construct. The culture/materiality binary is here quite confounded.

What would it mean then, following these interventions against orthodox understandings of materiality, to bring the body back from its exile? Certainly, the humanist (Western, white, male) commitment to an a priori universal of human nature, refigured here as universal embodiment (the ground of shared experience no less), would at least have to acknowledge the limitations of its singular perspective. Sexual, cultural, class, and other differences would be understood to matter, indeed to be the very matter of entirely different subjectivities, and therefore of entirely different knowledges because they are differently embodied. That these differences are grounded in the body does not introduce an extratextual

referent,

although

it does

insist upon

a different

understanding of the materiality of reference. I have not departed from a deconstructive strategy in this claim, for even Derrida himself insists that It is totally false to suggest that deconstruction is a suspension of reference...deconstruction tries to show that the question of reference is much more complex and problematic than

traditional theories supposed.14 Any claim that presumes that reference must imply a universal is certainly being denied here: however, this need not necessarily result in a 13 yy. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley, (New York, Vintage Books, 1980), p. 157.

14 J, Derrida, "Deconstruction and the other: An Interview with Richard Keamey,” in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, ed. R. Kearney, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 123.

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profound sense of alarm. If reference has had to shed something of its immutable stability, this means that even what was presumed to be the material "given" of cultural analysis is contestable and changeable because it, too, is a construct. Although much post-structuralist thought provides us with an enabling critique of these more insidious, because invisible investments of humanism, it does not follow from this that essentialism is necessarily targeted in quite the same way. Certainly, essentialising discourses that claim to represent the identity of otherness, in whatever guise, must effect an allegiance with a binary and exclusionary model of power that affirms the same violent structures that generate the original asymmetry. It is inadvertently the expression of a political system that will only tolerate difference as negation. Minority and oppressed groups are thereby made to celebrate an inherited burden of meaning as if it articulates the accurate expression of their own, intrinsic reality. However, inasmuch as essentialism does provide us with axiomatic categories for more conventional forms of political action—forms that must retain some sort of referential commitment to the experience of a collectivity—it is not simply wrong. Subjects are in-corporated within the violence of these representational systems and do experience their restraints and empowerments. I want to argue that the experience of a collectivity is a form of reference that is real-ised in the shared embodiment of signification. Against this, although not in opposition to it, each subject should be understood to occupy a particular location between myriad competing and contradictory discourses in the larger web of sociality's text. Consequently, the peculiar, constitutive contradictions that articulate a single, specific subject must necessarily be different from that collectivity even as they include the meanings that identify it. This entails the embodiment of a difference that defies the principle of noncontradiction because essentialism does not exclude antiessentialism: They are mutually implicated because lived at one and the same time. In arecent article, "Ethnic Identity and Post-Structuralist Difference," R. Radhakrishnan searches for an "axial connection” between members

of minority and oppressed groups and what locates their differences from

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each other. Referring specifically to the constituency of "the ethnic," Radhakrishnan describes ethnicity as occupying ...quite literally a "pre-post" -erous space where it has to actualise, enfranchize, and empower its own "identity" and coextensively engage in the deconstruction of the very logic of "identity. . . wel

I want to argue that the body is that "pre-post-erous space," the site of a corporeography that conjoins the dynamic political economy of signification—its written surface and writing instrument. Clearly, the notion of embodiment and experience that I am trying to think here cannot be capitalised for consciousness within the colloquial notion of "subjectivity" as unmediated self-affection. In other words, it can't be mastered and normalised for Truth or Knowledge. Rather, it is a way to begin to think the complexity of the political field, to grant the possibility that different truths and knowledges can obtain at the same time. It offers a reconceptualisation of what we might understand as the politics of location, as the co-location of differences lived in embodiment, and how we might resist refiguring the other in our own image because there is much that is simply no longer comprehensible. Of course, we cannot identify and interpret difference in order to master it. This was the point of Blanchot's earlier admonition. Indeed, our complicity with totalising regimes of truth that universalise and therefore deny difference is one of the things that many post-structuralist theories have insisted is an irreducible fact. If we can sustain the anxiety that comes from the recognition that we violate whenever we interpret and identify, and if we do not move too quickly into the space of a general equivalence, then a horizon of different because previously "unthinkable" possibilities begins to emerge. For example, rather than attempting to penetrate the a-nomalous bodies that I described in the beginning of this talk in order to enlist them into a binary logic that they

15 R. Radhakrishnan,

"Ethnic Identity and Post-Structuralist Differance," Cultural

Critique, no. 6 (Spring, 1987), p. 199.

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clearly defy, why not acknowledge this resistance and interrogate how an oppositional logic cannot accommodate their peculiarities.

Finally, although we are all forced to universalise and to deny difference, the violation that this entails will not be forgotten if it is understood as a necessity to be acknowledged rather than as a paralysing predicament to be solved.

Acknowledgements This paper was written with the assistance of a fellowship from the American Association of University Women. I would like to acknowledge the encouraging conversations with Ros Diprose that helped me collect my thoughts.

BEYOND ESSENTIALISM: RETHINKING AFRO-AMERICAN CULTURAL THEORY Elliott Butler-Evans

The recent emergence of Afro-American cultural theory and practice as a legitimate area of intellectual inquiry is arguably one of the most significant events in the area of literary and cultural theory within the past decades. Nearly all major universities offer, quite often within traditional literature and English programs, upper division and graduate level course in Afro-American literature and theory, have on their faculties at least one member who claims Afro-American literature as an area of specialization, and incorporate into their genre and period courses works by AfroAmerican writers. The Modern Language Association's recent meeting in New Orleans featured numerous papers on Afro-American literature; and major academic presses, among them Harvard, Oxford, and Chicago, have published the works of young black scholars whose works are characterized by rigorous scholarship and theoretical sophistication. Moreover, scholars such as Harold Bloom and Barbara Johnson have, through their institutional bases and exciting interventions, inserted minority discourse into the broader academic community. The euphoria surrounding these developments was perhaps most succinctly stated recently by Jonathan Culler: The introduction of Afro-American writing to literature courses owes much to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright became canonical authors, but at the same time the Black Power movement energized the Black Arts movement, with its quest to identify a Black Aesthetic. . . . In the 1980s, however, two factors combined to change the situation: on the one hand, the remarkable efflorescence of black women's writing, which had been neglected by the men promoting the Black Aesthetic,

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reopened the question of the black tradition; on the other hand, the efforts of critics such as Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to bring contemporary theoretical concerns to the reading of black literature effected an intervention of black writing in contemporary theoretical debates. Even though large numbers of blacks and members of minority groups have not been hired by literature factulties, the role of Afro-American and Third World writing in literary studies has been transformed.!

One might very well quarrel with Culler's reading of the interventions of black writers. The argument that women had been excluded from the Afro-American literary "tradition," while largely true is somewhat reductionist. Some women, among them Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara, and Sonia Sanchez, not only wrote within that tradition but also were among its major spokespersons. Nor is there evidence that the theoretical projects launched by Gates and Baker "effected an intervention of black writing in contemporary theoretical debates." The Gates-Baker interventions might be more clearly understood as incorporated alternative practices, to use Raymond Williams's felicitous phrase.2 The truth of the matter is that the study of Afro-American culture and theory, while receiving belated recognition, is still largely a marginal intellectual pursuit in most academic departments. Culler's claim that it has somehow transformed literary studies is somewhat hyperbolic. It is not my objective, however, to launch a captious attack on Professor Culler's reading of the current state of Afro-American letters. Nor is it my intention to engage in still another of those acrimonious exchanges that have focused on what might be loosely called the politics of Afro-American cultural theory. Rather, I wish to interrogate some of the ideological and philosophical assumptions underpinning recent theoretical discourse on Afro-American texts. I would argue that it largely rewrites the nationalist essentialism from which it apparently distances itself. In doing so, it would seem, that discourse is not only silent about

1 Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), pp. 32-33. 2 See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1977).

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its own political agenda but also wholly inadequate as an effective tool for the interpretation of contemporary Afro-American literature.

Perhaps one of the most significant achievements of current practices in minority critical discourse is its impressive success in rescuing that discourse from the seemingly inexorable banality into which it would readily descend. A critical enterprise that would focus on the repetition and reinscription of certain binary oppositions—white/black, dominant/marginal, oppressor/oppressed—would in due time exhaust itself. The current experiments conducted by theorists with the numerous post-structuralisms, therefore, provide innovative and exciting modes of deconstructing hegemonic narratives and exploring marginal discourses. Central to these critical enterprises, however, in spite of the rather deft appropriation, modification, and deployment of post-structuralist frames of reference, is the predication of a black essence and its necessary corollaries: the creation of a tradition and the formation of a canon. It is as if two projects—one committed to the deployment of recent developments in theory, the other to a politics of strategic essentializing—stand in a relationship of tensions. Minority critics can quite brilliantly read dominant narratives as structured by a desire for power, exploring the manner in which the semiotic strategies of hegemonic texts suppress difference and support hegemony. They convincingly show that dominant narratives are intertextually implicated in other discourses of domination and involved in the reproduction of the late capitalist mode of production. The same rigorous reading of "minority" discourse, however, is largely nonexistent. Overdetermined by ideological agendas, critics who focus on nondominant texts generally address the manner in which these texts valorize, validate, and express some true essence of the existential modalities of the group. Within a broader social and political context, Barbara Harlow cites Maxime Rodinson's analysis of this phenomenon: Ideology always goes for the simplest solution. It does not argue that an oppressed people is to be defended because it is oppressed and to the exact extent to which it is oppressed. On the contrary, the oppressed are sanctified and every aspect of their actions, their culture, their past, present, and future

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behavior is presented as admirable. Direct or indirect narcissism takes over and the fact that the oppressed are oppressed becomes less important that the admirable way they are themselves. The slightest criticism is seen as criminal sacrilege. In particular, it becomes quite inconceivable that the oppressed might be oppressing others. In an ideological conception, such an admission would imply that the object of admiration was flawed and hence in some sense deserving of past or present oppression.3 Perhaps the starting point for Afro-American critics, or any other marginal critics, should be some awareness of the real situation which generates their scholarship. The rhetoric and mythologies of oppositionality that characterize discussion of Afro-American cultural production and critical discourse greatly obscure the material context in which that discourse is produced. The problem with this perception of the role of the Afro-American critic was recently very ably addressed by Cornel West. West argues that the empowerment of a specific class of critic and the implications of their discourse in dominant ideology are central to recent critical developments. {Afro-American

literary

critics]

become

the academic

superintendents of a segment of an expanded canon or a separate canon. Such supervisory power over Afro-American literary culture—including its significant consulting activities and sometimes patronage relations to powerful white academic critics and publishers—not only ensures slots for black literary scholars in highly competitive English departments. More important, these slots are themselves held up as evidence for the success of prevailing ideologies of pluralism. Such talk of success masks the ever growing power of universities over American literary culture, and more specifically, the increasing

3 Cited in Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York and London: Methuen,

1987), p. 29. Original source: Maxime Rodinson, Introduction to People Without a Country: the Kurds and Kurdistan ed. Gerard Chaliland (London: Zed Press, 1980), p. 5. (Emphasis mine).

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authority of black literary professional managers over AfroAmerican literary practices and products.4 Perhaps one might begin by heeding Raymond Williams's caution of the need to arrive at "a non-metaphysical and non-subjectivist explanation of emergent cultural practice."5 A significant starting point for such an enterprise would be an investigation of the semiotic infrastructure upon which a race or ethnic specific discourse is constructed. Ideologies of difference, underpinned by specific strategies of representation, structure form and content of narrative. Irene Portis Winner, employing a model drawn from Lotman's paradigms of textual modalities, has argued that the semiotic construction of ethnicity is dependent upon the inscription of certain patterns in binary oppositions, e.g., we/they, our world/their world, inner world/outer world.® This practice is significantly marked in Afro-American fictive and theoretical discourse by the discursive construction of an opposition between "blackness" and "whiteness" as epistemological categories. Within both theoretical and fictive discourse, this has taken the form of the appropriation of the forms of everyday life of ordinary black people and the representation of them as authentic. This might take the form of representation of rituals, attempted reproductions of "black speech," and a somewhat broad ethnographic picture of black culture. From this textual strategy is generated an ideology of authenticity, in which "real black life" is seen as contained within the existential modalities of peasant and working-class black life as it is mediated by writers largely of the middle class. The construction of "whiteness" is even more complex. Teresa de Laruetis has commented on the problematic Afrocentric/Eurocentric opposition that generally characterizes nonhegemonic discourse in the United States and the manner in which such a reductionist opposition ignores "the histories of internal colonization, not to mention various forms of class, sexual, and religious oppression, within Europe and

4 Cornel West, "Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation," The Yale

Journal of Criticism 1 no. 1 (Fall 1987). 5 Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), p. 42. 6 Irene Portis Winner, "Ethnicity, Modemity, and the Theory of Culture Texts,” in The

Semiotics of Culture, Irene Portis Winner and Jean Umiker Sebeok ed. (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1979), pp. 103-147.

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within each country of Europe."” Yet in the programmatic texts and theoretical treatises of the past sixty years, such has been the major approach in Afro-American cultural practice. What Hazel Carby called the "romanticization of the fold" and I have referred to as an ideology of authenticity is parasitic on such an opposition. "Whiteness" is inscribed as a sign of difference, or as hostile threatening force. It may take the form of caricature, as in the works of Richard Wright or much of the writings of the Black Aesthetic period, or the embodiment of deficiency, as in Toni Morrison's works, in which deracination, false consciousness, and spiritual imperfection are invariably associated with fair skin. What needs to be explored more thoroughly is the manner in which such fictive and theoretical projects obviously structure any critical discourse on Afro-American fiction and elide complex ideological issues. One might start, for example, by interrogating and problematizing the very concept of an Afro-American literature as a unified, ideologically coherent homogeneous body of discourses. While individual AfroAmerican writers have been engaged in their arts for more than three hundred years, the concept of an Afro-American literature is a recent historical invention. Even Wright's "Blueprint for Negro Literature,” a text often mistakenly read as the master narrative of the Black Aesthetic, actually focuses on the writings of blacks rather than black writing and argues for a need to transcend such writing 8 Moreover, there needs to be a more rigorous examination of early narratives outside of the totalizing concept of race and within the admittedly uncomfortable problematics of caste and class. It seems that many of the slave Narratives, particularly those of Equiano and Douglas, for example, might be reread in the context of the appropriation of racial discourse to promote certain caste and class interests. In the same light, vernacular theories, the construction of blues matrices, and the insistence on expressive aspects of an "always already” black culture are in need of radical deconstruction. Vernacular theories implicitly argue for the

7 Teresa de Lauretis, "Displacing Hegemonic Discourses: Reflections on Feminist Theory in the 1980s," /nscriptions, nos. 3/4 (1988, p. 127. 8 See Richard Wnght, "Blueprint for Negro Literature,” in Richard Wright Reader, Ellen

Wright and Michel Fabre ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).

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interchangeability of the oral and the written. But this is, in fact,

problematic.9

Allow me, however, to address for a moment an equally serious problem with some current critical practices. What I am most concerned with is the methodological inadequacy of these practices as critical tools for the interpretation of contemporary literature. While I would not wholly embrace Ishmael Reed's assertion that Afro-American literary criticism is fifty years behind Afro-American cultural practice, I would agree that the two are moving in entirely different directions. Before addressing these issues, however, I would like to briefly discuss two developments in "black situations" outside the United States and their implications for similar situations in this country and the issues I am raising here. In a paper recently presented to the English Department at the University of Minnesota, Manthia Diawara presented a critique of Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike's attempts to formulate a theory of African literature in which "family resemblances are pragmatically employed to decide which of any doubtful or borderline cases should be included within the indisputable canon of African literature." Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike argued that only works done by and for Africans and written in African languages can constitute the canon of African literature. The end result is the discursive construction of an African essence and the exclusion from the canon of the works of writers who do not reflect that essence. Diawara challenges that notion of an "authentic 9 Houston Baker claims a semiotic basis for his argument about the blues matrix. But his formulation glosses over a basic premise of the semiotic discourse it purports to embrace. Addressing the problem of the interchangeability of semiotic systems, Emile Benveniste

argues: The first principle [of semiotics] can be stated as the principle of nonredundancy between systems. Semiotic systems are not "synonymous." We are not able to "say the same thing” with words that we can say with music, as they are systems with different bases. In other words, two semiotic systems of different types cannot be

mutually interchangeable. In the example cited, speech and music have as a common trait the production of sounds and the fact that they appeal to hearing; but this relationship does not prevail in view of the difference in nature between their

respective units and their types of operation. ... See Emile Benveniste, "The Semiology of Language,” in Semiotics: An Introductory

Anthology, Robert E. Innis (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1985), p. 235.

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literary canon” by deconstructing the ideological premises upon which it is predicated. He argues: One must not always assume that there is a homogeneity of culture and literature in Africa which one can. . .oppose to European literature. Such categories as African literature, "family resemblance," African tradition, African ethos, etc. by assuming the cultural unity of Africans, leave unsaid the diversity of desires and the desire for diversity. . . 10

Stuart Hall, addressing the production and reception of black film in Britain, recently advanced an analogous argument. In England, where the signifier "black" was generally used to designate a non-European immigrant population, "black" in Hall's view became "hegemonic over other ethnic/racial identities." Calling for "a new cultural politics that engages rather than suppresses difference," Hall posits the end of the "innocent notion of the essential black subject." He argues: What is at issue here is the recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences, and cultural identities which compose the category "black"; that is that "black is essentially a politically and socially constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed, trans-cultural or transcendental categories and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature. What this brings into play is the recognition of the immense diversity and differentation of the historical and cultural experience of black subjects. This inevitably entails a weakening or fading of the notion of "race" or some composite notion of race around the term black will either guarantee the effectivity of any cultural practice or determine in any sense its

final value.11

I would argue that the positions entertained by Diawara and Hall present a framework through which we might rethink Afro-American cultural production. While I have indicated elsewhere that the ideological

10 Manthia Diawara, "Canon Formation in African Literature," a paper presented to the English Department, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, January 19, 1989. 11 Stuart Hall, "New Ethnicities," CA Documents 7, "Black Film, British Cinema," p.

28.

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environment surrounding the Black Aesthetic was conducive to the production within literature of a unified black subject, !2 the material context for the development of such a discourse no longer exists. The eruption of feminine desire has generated a new politics that must embrace both race and gender; black sociologists speak of the declining significance of race and the emergence of more rigid class distinctions; the Jackson campaign was characterized by the foregrounding of a multiethnic or Rainbow coalition; and the recent debate over naming—that might very well replace "black" with African American—-signifies a not too subtle shift from an emphasis on race to a mythology of ethnicity. All of these factors may very well force us to rethink both the politics of everyday life and the politics of cultural criticism and production. It is the latter, however, with which I am immediately concerned here. When one encounters the narratives of Charles Johnson, Gayl Jones,

Ishmael Reed, Toni Cade Bambara, and others, one is confronted with texts that reject the linear marratives that have generally characterized writings by Afro-Americans. These writers problematize the concept of a monologic, homogeneous Afro-American literature, and their novels often become the site of the playing out of a multiplicity of diverse and heterogeneous body of desires. What occurs in their narratives is what Hal Foster, in his appropriation of Roland Barthes, sees as the passage from "work" to “text.” In distinguishing between the two, Foster writes: I use those terms heuristically: [the modernist] work to suggest an aesthetic, symbolic whole sealed by an origin (i.e., the author) and an end (i.e., a represented reality or transcendent meaning) and [the postmodernist] text to suggest an a-aesthetic, "multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash." The difference between the two rests finally on this: for the work the sign is a stable unit of signifier and signified (with the referent assured, or in abstraction, bracketed), whereas the text reflects on the

12 See Elliott Butler-Evans, "Narrativizing the Black Zone: Semiotic Strategies in Black Aesthetic Discourse," The American Journal of Semiotics 6, no. 1 (1988-89), pp. 19-35.

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contemporary dissolution of the sign and the released play of signifiers.13 It is this movement from "work" to "text" that essentialist critical theories are incapable of addressing. The "text" refuses coherence, is not primarily engaged in reflecting an extratextual black culture, and is not generally focused on situating itself within a blues matrix or yielding itself to vernacular theories. Reproducing its historical moment, it is irrational and idiosyncratic, signalling a break with traditional notions of Afro-American cultural expression.

A text that extensively deploys postmodern narrative strategies, Alice Walker's "Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells," a short story in the collection You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, received only limited critical treatment, largely because of the sensationalism surrounding the publication of The Color Purple. Yet it is a paradigmatic black feminist text. It blurs the lines between autobiography, fiction, and the essay; reifies specific historical moments as metaphorical constructs; employs metafictional strategies that call attention to its textuality; and resists ideological closure, presenting instead an interrogative textual modality that invites the reader to resolve the argument it presents, !4 The story focuses on the impact of an apparent rape on the friendship of two women: an "I," the nameless narrator whose personal history—a black Georgia native, an engaged writer, civil rights activist, and general advocate for liberal causes—generally parallels Walker's political involvements and commitments, and Luna, a young white woman. Luna reveals to the narrator that while engaged in the civil rights work in the South during the 1960s she was raped by Freddie Pye, a black fellow civil rights worker. Several years later, upon awakening in an apartment that she shared with Luna, the black woman observes Freddie Pye

13 Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), p. 129.

14 My reference to an "interrogative textual modality” is taken from Catherine Belsey, who discusses thre textual modalities in terms of how the reader is situated in relationship to the text. In the declarative mode, associated with classic realism, the reader is a passive consumer

of the text's ideology;

the imperative mode,

generally

identified

with

propaganda, invites the reader to engage in a given action; and in the interrogative mode, the text refuses closure by "[inviting] an answer or answers to the questions it poses." See Catherine Belsey, (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), pp. 91-93.

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leaving Luna's bedroom. These two incidents constitute the textual dominant, determining the focus of the narrative and the ideological issues it foregrounds, tensions and fragmentations experienced by black women attempting to reconcile the politics of race and that of gender. The racial memory that informs the black woman's psychic character allows her to be anchored in the world. Through it she achieves a personal and collective identity that is in conflict with her friendship with Luna. In narrating her fieldwork in the South with Luna, she reveals the strong race-identified aspect of her character: This month with Luna of approaching new black people every day taught me something about myself I had always suspected: I thought black people superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them. . . .Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday-school class and grin for television over their "victory," i.e., the death of four small black girls. Any atrocity, any time, was expected from them. On the other hand, it never occurred to me that black people could treat Luna and me with anything but warmth and concem. 15

The race-gender tension is intensified as the "I" of the narrative identifies her situation with that of black women in general, breaking the fictional frame and directly inviting the reader to enter a dialogic relationship with the narrative. The realist frame of the narrative is broken so as to allow the reader to confront the ideological issues being mapped out in the text: Who knows what the black woman thinks of rape? Who has asked her? Who cares? Who has even properly acknowledged that she and not the white woman in this story is the most likely victim of rape? Whenever interracial rape is mentioned, a black woman's first thought is to protect the lives of her brothers, her

15 Alice Walker, "Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells,” in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 88.

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father, her sons, her lover. A history of lynching has bred this reflex in her.16 In this passage we see the fundamental tension between subject positions based on gender and race. The text's strong identification with women's experience is relentlessly complicated by an insistent racial problematic. Racial ideology is reinforced by the narrator's metonymic reconstruction of the violence directed against blacks during the 1960s. Evocations of the assassinations of King, Malcolm X, and the Kennedys represent the suppression of black hopes during that period. Overall, the story foregrounds the conflict inherent in a politics that would merge race and gender. Moving from the general issue of race and gender to a focus on the particular Freddie-Luna incident, the narrator again explores history as a metonymic construct that might be useful in exploring the text's ideology. Two historical moments are evoked and "read" within the context of their ideological implications: the moment of the Black Power movement and the anti-lynching efforts of Ida B. Wells. Upon being informed by Luna of the alleged assault, the narrator responds with anger and repulsion. The immediate context in which she views the act is that of some of the extremist statements that characterized black nationalist rhetoric of the 1960s. This was the time before Eldridge Cleaver wrote of being a rapist/revolutionary; "practicing" on black women before moving on to whites. It was also . . . before LeRoi Jones wrote the advice to young black insurrectionaries. . . . "Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. . . ." It was clear that he meant this literally and also as: to rape a white girl is to rape her father. It was the misogynous cruelty of this latter meaning that was habitually lost on black men (on men in general, actually) but nearly always perceived and rejected by women of any color.!7 This representation of Jones and Cleaver assigns of a political movement hostile to women enables the narrator to identify with women as an

16 7pid., (p. 93). 17 Tpid. (p. 91).

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oppressed group. The concluding sentence of the passage is particularly significant, for it goes beyond commentary and argues that essentially different ethical and moral perspectives determined the respective male and female responses. The issue, however, is not brought to closure. Turning to the autobiography of Ida B. Wells, the narrator invokes a second historical moment and personage that enters a dialogic yet contestatory relationship with her first citation. It is Wells, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century crusader against the lynching of black men, who appears in a "vision" to the narrator and warns: "Write Nothing. Nothing at all. It will be used against black men and therefore against all of us. Eldridge Cleaver and LeRoi Jones don't know who they're dealing with. But you remember. You are dealing with people who brought their children to witness the murder of black human beings, falsely accused of rape. . . "18 Through these inscriptions of two different historical moments, the text foregrounds its dominant ideological problematic: the need to resolve tensions generated by competing loyalties, one focused on racial solidarity, the other addressing the oppression of women. Yet the resolution of this conflict is left to the reader. The tension remains unresolved as the narrator presents her argument but refuses to state an ideological position. This interrogative mode is further reinforced by the manner in which the narrative unfolds. Identifying herself as a writer, the narrator foregrounds the story's textuality and constructs it as a dialogue between her and the reader. The ideological issues, then, are simultaneously represented in two contexts: one that is "fictional" and one a commentary that situates the fictional in the context of the real. This is particularly evident when mediations of the narrator, historical references, and the "story" intersect. In a final moment of metafictionality, the narrator moves outside the text and focuses on it as written discourse. In doing so, she poses three possible readings of the events represented: (1) a reflection on the possible handling of of the rape incident in a society in which racism was

18 7pid. (p. 94).

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not a factor, (2) the imaginary construction of a scenario in which Freddie's second visit to Luna did not involve a. sexual encounter, and (3) a conversation with a male friend who suggests that Freddie may have been an agent provocateur, hired by the Central Intelligence Agency to discredit the civil rights movement.

All of these possibilities are left for the reader to explore. The story simply maps out within a fictional space ideological issues confronted by black women who must embrace a politics of both race and gender. What the text addresses and leaves largely unresolved is the manner in which the multiple positions black women occupy result in irresolution. This issue is at the core of black women's political emergence, and "Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells," through its brilliant deployment of post-modernist narrative strategies, invites the reader to enter debate on the question. Narratives such as "Advancing Luna. . ." present contemporary Critical practices with their most demanding challenges. Overdetermined by the political issues of their moments, they cannot be contained by interpretive strategies that privilege blues matrices, vernacular theories, and expressive concepts of culture, all of which are implicated in ahistorical and essentialist notions of a transcendent black culture. Fictional narratives such as "Advancing Luna. . ." become sites in which differences are theorized and foregrounded and the very nature of narrative is problematized.

TOWARD A NARRATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE POSTCOLONIAL PREDICAMENT Vivek Dhareshwar

Le Détour n'est ruse profitable que si le Retour le féconde: non pas retour au réve d'origine, a 1'Un immobile de I'Etre, mais retour au point d'intrication, dont on s'était détourné par force; c'est 1a qu'il faut a la fin mettre en oeuvre les composantes de la Relation, ou périr. —Edouard Glissant™ In order to clarify the relationship of theory with those procedures that produce it as well as those that are its objects of study, the most relevant way would be a Storytelling discourse ... Stories slowly appear as a work of displacements, relating to a logic of metonymy. Is it not then time to recognize the theoretical legitimacy of narrative, which is then to be looked upon not as some ineradicable remnant (or a remnant still to be eradicated) but rather as a necessary form for a theory of practices? In this hypothesis, a narrative theory would be indissociable from any theory of practices, for it would be its precondition as well as its production. —Michel de Certeau

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But, all the same, the accumulation of dreams, projects, or notes must weigh upon what one writes in the present . —Jacques Derrida

To pose the question of identity at the intersection of theory and narrative is to invent a zone, a threshold, which, belonging to neither, takes shape only in the critical negotiation between the two. This essay is concerned with the need for inventing an idiom for postcolonial identity; it attempts a negotiation between metropolitan theories and postcolonial narratives. The problematic that frames the rather unsystematic reflections offered here is the political and epistemological relationship between theory and narrative, between theoretical identity and narrative identity. But this frame itself will be overlaid with, become an allegory of, or be inscribed into a whole range of issues: post-colonial self-fashioning and the limits of the postcolonial space in the First World; the politics of cultural descriptions and of self-descriptions; the tension between the epistemic authority of theory (its revisionary claims) and non- or pre-theoretical politics, the social identity of intellectuals (I will be concerned primarily with postcolonial intellectuals), and the role that theory plays in the elaboration of their affiliations; and lastly, the problems involved in selfpositioning or self-implicating discourses. The problematic of identity,

* Edouard Glissant, Le Discours Antillais (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981), p. 36.

Selections from this important book have been recently translated as Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989). Where available, I have used Dash's translation, except when the translation

seemed misleading. This is the case with the passage quoted above which Dash translates: "Diversion in not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by reversion: not a retum to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish.” (p. 26) The choice of "diversion" and "reversion" instead of the obvious "detour" and "retum" seems particularly unjustified given the dominant connotation of the first two in contemporary usage. And the rendering of the deliberately abstract concept "la Relation” by "creolization" is equally problematic. I hope the broader significance of these concepts will become clear in my use of them below.

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then, has no single description; one must approach it by showing the intersections between issues that may appear to be discrete. This essay is an attempt to draw a line through a cluster of dots; the line often breaks off to be taken up elsewhere. Narrative epistemology, which is neither a new discipline nor a new method, comes into being as an active and critical negotiation and mutual interruption of theory and narrative. In this process of negotiation and interruption, "links, discontinuities are established between problematics, questionings, places, memories decomposed and recomposed."! Theory and Narrative The problematics that I am trying to pull together under the rather awkward (perhaps even oxymoronic sounding) name "narrative epistemology" have their provenance in the recent "turn toward narrative." It is not possible here to outline the complex story of this "turn toward narrative."2 Instead, let me discuss some of the heterogeneous theoretical and political impulses that have made such a "turn" both possible and desirable. Drawing out the significance of Greimasian narrative semiotics, Fredric Jameson thinks that it "argues for something like the primacy of narrativity." "Narrativity,” he goes on to explain,

. . iS here something a little more than a new object of study, or even a privileged, or the privileged, object of study; were this a question of philosophical or metaphysical propositions, the implication would be that of the primacy of narrative as a mode of thinking, or of a claim as to the profound narrativity of all thinking, including the apparently cognitive or abstractspecialized.3 The reason for Jameson's cautious formulation ("Were this a question of. . .") is that it would not do to make narrative the basis of yet another

1 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 117.

2 The phrase is taken from Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. xvi. Fredric Jameson, "Foreword" to A. J. Greimas, On Meaning, trans. Paul J. Perron and

Frank H. Collin.

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foundationalism. However, to regard narrative as something more than an object of study is to complicate the relationship between theory and narrative. Instead of a simple opposition between theory and narrative, between figure and concept, Jameson argues for "a more complex dialectic between the narrative and the cognitive."4

In this dialectic there is no absolute priority of the cognitive over the narrative, and vice versa: In the negotiation between the two, “the one is ceaselessly displaced by the other, until this last, become dominant in its turn, is ripe for its own inverse and reciprocal humiliation." A difficulty remains, however. What gets left out in Jameson's account of the apparently reciprocal transaction between theory and narrative is the epistemic authority of the metalanguage of theory. Jameson is aware of the problem but thinks that it resolves itself when we grasp the "twofold or amphibious reality” of ideology: That "ideology" in the narrower sense is a mass of opinions, concepts, or pseudoconcepts, "worldviews," "values," and the like, is commonly accepted; that these vaguely specified conceptual entities also always have a range of narrative embodiments, that is, indeed, that they are all in one way or another buried narratives, may be less widely understood and may also open up a much wider range of exploration than the now well-worn conceptual dimension of the ideology concept. Yet it was not to replace the cognitive by the narrative that my proposal was made but rather to coordinate both by way of a definition that insisted on their necessary alternation: Ideology is then whatever in its very structure is susceptible of taking on a cognitive and a narrative form alternately.6 [emphasis added] In offering what seems to me a rich characterization of ideology, Jameson has simply shifted the problem onto another plane. I recognize the usefulness of this new conception of ideology for analyzing narrative texts. And, of course, most routine analysis of texts consists in rewriting (or, to use Jameson's term, transcoding) the narrative text in the language of theory. 4 Jameson, "Foreword," p. xi. Jameson, "Foreword," p. xiii. Jameson, "Foreword," p. xiii.

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The problem of the metalanguage of theory arose, however, because the revalorized sense of narrative could not be accommodated within the Jamesonian view of the relationship between theory and narrative. In that view, theory is what unravels the "strategies of containment” operative in narratives, reveals the imaginary of narrative, rewrites (or transcodes) the character-systems or subject-positions mobilized in the narrative in terms of social positionings or social identities. A first step toward, if not reversing, at least destabilizing, this model would be to raise the possibility of a narrative unravelling of theoretical identities. To put it another way, how can one get at the "strategies of containment" operative in theory which determine its field of possibilities; how to grasp the social imaginary of theory that structures and orients the subject-position of those who identify with the theory? The trouble here, of course, is not that these questions cannot be asked of theory, but that the form in which they are posed open up an infinite regress. How else, then, might we conceive of a narrative unravelling of theoretical identity?

We need to think of the relationship between theory (or structure or morphology) and narrative other than as an alternation, other than as a version of the Wittgensteinian rabbit/duck puzzle. We (here I am speaking of the "ordinary consciousness") inhabit both narrative space and theoretical space. Our identities are structured by the tension between the theoretical moment and the narrative movement. Roland Barthes, discussing Proust's (and his own) search for a "third form" which would be neither theory nor narrative, explains this tension in terms of Jakobson's celebrated distinction between metaphor and metonymy:

Metaphor sustains any discourse which asks: "What is it? What does it mean?"—the real question of any Essay [which stands for theory here]. Metonymy, on the contrary, asks another question: "What can follow from what I say? What can be engendered by the episode I am telling?"; this is the Novel's question. Jakobson cited the experiment conducted in a classroom, where schoolchildren were asked to react to the word hut; some said that a hut was like a cabin (metaphor), others that it had burned down(metonymy). Proust is a divided subject, like Jakobson's class; he knows that each incident in

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life can give rise either to a commentary (an interpretation) or to an affabulation which produces or imagines the narrative before and after: to interpret is to take the Critical path, to argue theory (siding against Sainte-Beuve); to think incidents and impressions, to describe their developments, is on the contrary to weave a Narrative, however loosely, however gradually.’

In exploring Proust's “hesitation' between Essay and Novel, and in positing, if only as a hypothesis, a "third form" which would be neither Essay nor Novel, or both at once, Barthes is alerting us (and himself) to the reifying powers of critical language or what he elsewhere calls "figures of system." Barthes is struck by the apparent paradox of even a "language-system of demystification, of criticism, which in principle aims at de-leeching language, itself becom[ing] a stickiness by which the militant subject becomes a (happy) parasite of a specific type of discourse."8 Barthes’ examples of such systems are Marxism and psychoanalysis.

The same criticism, however, can be extended to what has now come to be called theory, for what Barthes is trying capture are certain operations of theoretical forms. Thus, Barthes suggests that we make an inventory of "figures of system" analogous to "figures of rhetoric." These "figures of system," he explains, . ..would have the same function, from one system to the next (thus we would be dealing with a 'form'): to assure the system in advance as to the answer one could make to its propositions; in other words, to integrate into its own code, into its own language, the resistances [my emphasis] to that code, to that language: to explain these resistances, according to one's own system of explanation. . . 2

What Barthes offers us here is a precise formulation of the totalizing tendency of theoretical vocabulary. A theory tends to be totalizing not because—or not necessarily because—of the scope of its subject matter

7 Roland Barthes, "Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure...," The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), pp. 278-279. 8 Roland Barthes, "The Image," The Rustle of Language, p. 353.

9 Roland Barthes, "The Image," p. 353.

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nor because of the structures that it deploys. It tends to be totalizing when it effects a reduction of all that resists it and recodes that resistance into its own language. Let, for the time being, narrative stand for what resists theory in this negotiation between theory and narrative. The fact that the figures of system (whatever may be the system in question—Marxism, psychoanalysis, or deconstruction) have a tendency to totalize does not mean we should simply reject them; in fact, we cannot do without them, any more than we can do without "figures of rhetoric.” That is why I said earlier that it is nota matter of choosing between theoretical identity and narrative identity, for to do so would be to dissolve the tension between the theoretical moment and the Narrative movement: The result would be aphasia. As Barbara Johnson reminds us: What has gone unnoticed in theoretical discussion of Jakobson's article is that behind the metaphor/metonymy distinction lies the much more serious distinction between speech and aphasia, between silence and the capacity to articulate one's own voice. To privilege either metaphor [theory] or metonymy [narrative] is thus to run the risk of producing an increasingly aphasic critical discourse. 10 Johnson is discussing Zora Neale Hurston's attempt to "narrate both the appeal and injustice of universalization, in a voice that assumes and articulates its own, ever-differing self-difference" (emphasis mine). To conceive of identity as self-difference, to articulate one's own voice not as an expression of self-identity but as self-difference, the narrative must come to terms with the appeal and injustice of universality, that is, with theory. Dominant culture institutes theory and a certain theoretical identity as a norm of universality which assigns difference as deviation from this norm, as nonparticipation in universality. But to claim a narrative identity is not simply to refuse this norm in favor of an acceptance of the identity of difference, but to come to terms with the

"appeal," “the seductions" of universality "through a progressive de-

10 Barbara Johnson, "Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God,”" A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p.

104.

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universalization"—a completed."11

process

that

"can

never,

universally,

be

If in an epistemological sense there is no question of privileging one over the other, politically the relationship between narrative and theory thus turns out to be a complex process of contestation, convergence, and divergence. That this is the case becomes even more clear if we turn to the situation of contemporary theory. By "theory" I refer to the discursive/intellectual field that emerged in the late 1960's and

consolidated itself institutionally in the past two decades.12 There is, on the face of it, something paradoxical in characterizing theory as either universalizing or overtotalizing, since this theory emerged as a critique of the universalizing humanism of the West and of totalizing theories such as Marxism. But as I remarked previously in my discussion of Barthes, the paradox is only apparent. The figures of the new theory too have been totalizing, have been, that is, effecting a reduction of narrative and recoding the resistance to them in their own language. This has given rise to considerable unease or anxiety amongst feminists, minority theorists, and postcolonials—precisely those who were formerly excluded from the discourse of universality and who had hoped to use the de-universalizing thrust of theory to invent an idiom for identity, to produce knowledge that would be /ocal and noncentralized; that would not, unlike a reductive humanism, fatally impose itself as the model for the subjects of knowledge. The vocabulary and the argumentative strategies (in Barthes’ phrase "figures of the system") that theory invented in order to critique the founding concepts of Western humanism have now tended to become foundational themselves. There is, of course, considerable pleasure and mastery in becoming, as Barthes puts it, the happy parasite of such discourse, in claiming, that is, an identity that fully coheres with the normative force of theory. But to claim such an identity is to really make, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, a storyline out of the figures of the

11 Barbara Johnson, "Metaphor, Metonymy and Voice...," pp. 171, 172.

12 For a characterization of both the institution of theory and the predicament that it finds itself in, see my "The Predicament of Theory," in Theory Between the Disciplines: Authority/Vision/Politics, ed. Martin Kreiswirth and Mark Cheetham (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, forthcoming, June 1990).

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system—for example, undecidability as the name for "woman,"!3 decentered subjectivity as post-modern reality, dissemination as “immigritude" (my word for the whole narrative of displacement which has become a normative experience in metropolitan politics of cultural descriptions). To “naturalize" the figures of the system in this way is to attempt a reduction of narrative, understood here as the whole field of contingencies and historical coagulations that resist such reduction. On the other hand, one cannot—in the name of some ascetic antiintellectualism—teject theory as such, since its figures and vocabularies have also enabled the formerly disempowered to invent a space from which to contest imposed descriptions. We are confronting a problem here that has no straightforward theoretical resolution: namely, when is it legitimate to submit one's beliefs, descriptions, practices to the revisionary claims of theory; when does that revisionary force become authoritarian and totalizing? For an initial clarification of.the problem, let us turn to Edward Said's seminal essay, "Traveling Theory." In that essay Said proposes something like a chronotope of theory to map the trajectory of its travel in space and in time:

I am arguing . . . that we distinguish theory from critical consciousness by saying that the latter is a sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory, and this means that theory has to be grasped in the place and time out of which it emerges as part of that time, working in and for it, responding to it; then consequently, that first place can be measured against subsequent places where the theory turns up for use. The critical consciousness is the awareness of the differences between situations, awareness too of the fact that no system or theory exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported. This mapping, Said goes on to suggest, would enable us to resist theory's tendency to closure by putting it in tension with experiences that are discrepant with its prior aims and claims, its prior area of effectivity: 13 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Feminism and Deconstruction, Again: Negotiating with Unacknowledged Masculism,” in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 206-213.

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[C]ritical consciousness is awareness of the resistances to theory, reactions to it elicited by those concrete experiences or interpretations with which it is in conflict. . . . [I]t is the critic's job to provide resistances to theory, to open it up to historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just beyond the interpretive area necessarily designated in advance and thereafter circumscribed by every

theory.!4 [emphasis added] Looked at from the perspective of the relationship of the theorist to the theory he or she is using, from the perspective, in other words, of the location in theory, Said's strategy of narrativizing he travel of theory raises a serious problem. Can one make sense of a "critical consciousness" somehow hovering above theory? Let me clarify lest this objection be mistaken for terminological squeamishness. Said's strategy would pose no problems if we were dealing with the history of a theory that made no epistemic claims on us, whose problematics and normative presuppositions did not govern us—in short, if we were dealing with a dead theory. But if we are, so to speak, standing within theory and if our interrogation of it cannot be immune from its "theory-effect," we cannot have recourse to a critical consciousness that remains outside of theory's field of effectivity. So the task, which Said formulates so lucidly, of providing resistances to theory while remaining within its field of effectivity and using the power of its figures requires a different strategy. I have been setting it up as the negotiation between theory and narrative, between theoretical identity and narrative identity. Let me try to specify it further by explicitly addressing the problematic of postcolonial identity. The traveling problems of contemporary theory have a special significance for postcolonial intellectuals who have traveled to the metropolis to see how their part of the world gets mapped. Despite the fact that theory has enabled the emergence of a postcolonial space in the intellectual field of the First World, there has been no significant attempt on the part of the metropolitan theorists to address the asymmetry, the "silent and incorporated disparity," as Said puts it, "that persists in

14 Edward Said, "Traveling Theory,” The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 241-242.

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variety of forms" between the former colonies and the metropolises. Said formulates this asymmetry as: "They, the colonials, must always take us, the European conquerors, into account: for us, however, they are an episode we experienced, before we went on to other things." 15 For Said, this asymmetry is reflected in the fact that there have been no full-scale studies of the effects of colonialism on metropolitan culture. What should be more disturbing, especially to postcolonial intellectuals working in the field of theory, is the fact that there has been no significant attempt to understand the effects of colonialism on every aspect of the social and cultural life of the former colonies. Without such an understanding, it is not clear what the prefix in postcolonial signifies, unless, of course, one takes it to indicate a chronological break, an empirical cut. The task of making theory travel to postcolonial spaces (rather than confining oneself to "representing" the latter) thus requires an examination of the relationship between the object of theory and the political objectives of postcolonial intellectuals working within the field of theory. Ata very abstract level, the issue has to do with the question: What is at stake for postcolonial intellectuals in the institution of theory? What sort of knowledges are "we" aiming to produce by participating in this First World institution? What does it mean for "us" to be located in the institution of theory, with its specific structuring of positions and address? Western or First World theorists privilege their subject-positions unreflectively, for they do not (cannot?) theorize the background practices and the institutional authority that enables their theoretical productions, their "statements." Postcolonials cannot help noticing the conditions of possibility of their theory. We do, however, insert ourselves in that discursive space, thereby assuming a subject-position that necessarily suppresses the questions we need to ask, the questions which, however vague or unarticulated they may be, led us in the first place to an encounter with metropolitan theories. How, then, to regain

the history of those questions, to narrate the trajectory of that accedence?

15 Edward Said, "Intellectuals in the Post-colonial World,” Salmagundi, 70-71 (SpringSummer 1986), p. 58.

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We need to probe and define our relationship to the place we come from, the place that we know all too well to have a history, a history from which we are trying, unwittingly or otherwise, to escape, but of which we are inescapably a part. The kind of political identity—which is inseparable from the kind of work we undertake—we seek to question, form, or make possible, is bound up with our positioning in the symbolic or propositional space of the nstitutions of the First World. To remain at a distance, to keep alive those other questions, is a difficult task, but one that remains to be carried out if the invention of postcolonial space is to remain the political horizon of our theoretical or intellectual work, if we are not to lose sight of, or render transparent, the opacities of the other spaces, the exigencies of the other temporalities. The issue is not merely or, even, not at all, one of theoretical distance or distance from theory. Rather, what is at stake is the possibility and necessity of an entirely different theoretical practice. Postcolonial

Self-fashioning

One's interpretation of a particular narrative (in the narrow sense) depends on the poetics of narrative one is employing. A structuralist/ post-structuralist poetics of a certain kind—for example, Greimasian or de Manian—would consider questions about narrative self-fashioning to be irrelevant or invalid. A Greimasian reading would be interested in constructing a model of the text to show how the various linguistic elements in it are interarticulated. A de Manian reading would show how the rhetoric of the text consistently undoes the thematic/constative claims of the text. But a strictly Greimasian or a strictly de Manian reading would rigorously exclude questions of agency or any question that, in the terms of their respective theories, involves considering extra- or nonlinguistic entities.

Questions regarding self-fashioning would, on the face of it, appear to be throwbacks to the now discredited concerns of humanist theories. I would claim that that is not necessarily the case. For, in raising issues like narrative self-fashioning, I am not trying to relate the narratives solely to the intentions of the author, nor am I concerned with explaining the narrative events by the biographical facts of the author. I am, however, interested in constructing a poetics of narrative that takes account of the agency of the author not to reduce the narrative to the

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intentions of the author but to insert the text and the author into the larger poesis of the culture itself. This does not involve positing a unified subject; on the contrary, the purpose is to explain the different subjectpositions and their cultural logics. I do not wish to claim that such a task is necessary for all narratives. Narrative is not a homogeneous category. There is, in any case, no a priori way of discovering what questions it is useful to ask a given narrative or a cluster of narratives. The Greimasian logics and pragmatics of narrative and the de Manian insights into the rhetorics of literary and philosophical texts are formal theories that are applicable to any narrative (and, in the case of de Man, philosophical) texts. But they do not by themselves raise any substantive questions regarding the sociohistorical semiosis and poesis of texts. The poststructuralist attention to écriture has certainly displaced the metaphysical and humanistic approaches to narratives. But it has not freed us from the obligation to rethink and reformulate questions of identity and power that are at the heart of cultural poesis and semiosis. Narratives are now produced, circulated, and consumed within a cultural habitus and social space. Narratives are part of cultural poesis and social semiosis. Therefore, the social and cultural problematics are not simply reflected in them: They take part in the articulation of those problematics. One of the central problematics in the colonial/postoclonial context is that of self-fashioning. The literature—and other intellectual and cultural products—in the postcolonial social space is concerned with narrativizing the problematic of self-fashioning. But this problematic is not only an object of intellectual concern. For a postcolonial writer (or intellectual), the problematic of self-fashioning is not only an object of inquiry; it is at the same time a self-interrogation. And that is one of the reasons—I will come to the other related reasons in a moment—that the question of agency cannot be ignored.

To be a subject, as Lacan and Foucault have shown, is at the same time to undergo subjection. Being a colonial subject meant (means) being formed by what Edouard Glissant terms "la Relation" 16__a term

16 Glissant never attempts to define this term. Without giving it a negative or positive connotation, he uses it to analyze the effects of colonialism on all aspects—linguistic, intersubjective, economic, artistic, etc.—of Martinique society. J. Michael Dash translates

it sometimes as "creolization" and sometimes as "cross-cultural." The latter term is clearly inadequate as it implies an exchange between cultures existing separately, whereas Glissant

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that designates the several ways in which the metropolitan culture dominates the colonies or the former colonies. The very abstractness of the term "la Relation" serves in a way to indicate the founding nature, as it were, of the asymmetries, their persistence and constant reproduction, between the two terms of the relation. In fact, the two terms cannot be thought of as relating to each other externally. The two terms do not refer to geographical entities; "la Relation" has its symbolic effectiveness, its force-field in the (post) colonial space. It is what structures the colonial habitus. A Poetics of Detour

The interpellation of the colonial subject qua subject takes place within the colonial habitus—the symbolic structures embedded _ in the colonial institutions and practices that subject the colonized to an internalization of the asymmetries, both material and ideological, between metropolis and colony. !7 It is not that a preformed subject is inserted into or subjected to "la Relation." Rather, the subject-positions are the effects of "la Relation." That is why one can speak of the colonial subject, his/her desire, as being turned towards the metropolitan gaze. The gaze describes and prescribes. It is, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, a command. But the command would not be a command without the desire to obey. The language of command and obedience, however, should not mislead us into seeing the structure of "la Relation" in terms of the master/slave dialectic. The two terms of "la Relation” are not to be conceived of as two distinct selves locked in a mortal combat. "La Relation" inheres in or subtends the subject-positions of the colonial subject, but even there not as two distinct moments or positions. I have discussed "la Relation" in very abstract terms, inevitably because, in a certain sense, the violence inherent in the (self-)constitution of the colonial subject is due to the abstract quality of the asymmetry. The "epistemic violence" involved in the constitution of the colonial subject as the self-consolidating Other of

is trying to convey a process that is constitutive of the enunciation of cultural difference. Creolization, in the broader sense of cultural hybridity, is certainly valid in some contexts. But again, creolization is also one of the effects of "la Relation” that Glissant analyses. So it seems to me that there are good reasons to retain the abstractness of the term by translating it simply as "the Relation." 17 For a more detailed treatment, see my "Self-fashioning, Colonial Habitus and Double

Exclusion: V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men," Criticism, 1:31 (Winter 1989), pp. 75-102.

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the West is an abstract violence.!8 Therefore, the identity achieved by colonial subjects often has the quality of an abstraction; it is the result of a process of dis-location, of detour. The experience of detour, of being forced to turn away, however, has its effects on the colonial subject's relationship to his or her language; to the landscapes; to, in short, the whole local narratives that had embodied the colonial subject's subjective space. To chart the experience of detour is to mark the disjunctive effects of the epistemic violence on the inventions of postcolonial identity. The work of postcolonial intellectuals has been a poetics (in the sense of making, doing, participating, saying) of detour, a constant negotiation with the structures of violence and violation. There is a paradoxical sense in which one can see these structures of violence as having been enabling structures, especially for postcolonial intellectuals. Having been subjected to the theories and narratives of the West, the postcolonial intellectuals’ access—however limited—to the institutional and symbolic space of the metropolis has given them the means to deconstruct those theories and narratives. But this access—and the kind of work it has enabled—has turned out to be a further instance of the detour. For the frame of reference for colonial intellectuals has always been the metropolitan culture; intellectually, being colonized meant having to view themselves from the symbolic positions in the metropolis, whether or not they were actually located there. As Derek Walcott once put it: The urge towards the metropolitan language was the same as political deference to its center, but the danger lay in confusing, even imitating the problems of the metropolis by pretensions to its power, its styles, its art, its ideas, and its concept of what we are. 19 The situation has radically changed since Walcott wrote this in 1970. What has not changed are the institutional and discursive asymmetries 18 On "epistemic violence” (and the related notion "negotation with the structures of violence"), see Gayatri Spivak, "The Rani of Sirmur,” in Europe and Its Others, Vol. 2, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Essex: University of Essex Press, 1985); “Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence

Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 9 Derek Walcott, "What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1970), p. 27.

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between the metropolis and the former colonies. Even a discourse that claims to deconstruct the West's constructions of the Other has to still circulate in the discursive space, of the West; it remains positioned in that discursive space and its problematics get defined by the structure of address available in that space. The consequence of this intellectual detour—which is neither entirely voluntary nor entirely involuntary—has been that in the postcolonial space itself decolonization has come to seem, to adapt a phrase from Wilson Harris, more legendary than true.29 To interrogate the identity of postcolonial intellectuals, then, is to ask: What sort of knowledges are they aiming to produce? How is this production tied to their location— geographic and symbolic? Starting with some speculations regarding theories and narratives of self-fashioning in the colonial or postcolonial context, Ihave ended up with questions about the identity of postcolonial intellectuals. Along the way, my reflections, I hope, have made clear the connection—more or less contingent, more or less necessary—between theorizing or narrativizing identity and how that activity is part of what is being theorized or narrativized. What makes the connection—methodologically at least—more or less necessary or more or less contingent is that although one need not see such an activity as self-implicating or self-

20 Discussing the detours of the radical intellectuals from the Caribbean (Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Frantz Fanon), Glissant notes: "Enfin, les intellectuels antillais ont mis 4

profit cette nécessité du Detour pour aller quelque part, c'est-a-dire lier en la circonstances la solution possible de l'insoluble a des résolutions pratiquées par d'autres peuples." Le Discours Antillais, pp. 34-35 [Ultimately, Caribbean intellectuals have taken advantage of the necessity of detour to go somewhere: that is, in such circumstances, to link a possible solution of the insoluble to the resolution other people have achieved." Caribbean Discourse, p. 23 (translation modified)] As his moving discussion of Fanon's detour makes clear, Glissant is not simply deploring the detour of intellectuals. He is drawing out the consequences of detour even in cases where it has been productive, has, as he puts it, led us somewhere. "La parole poétique de Césaire, l'acte politique de Fanon nous ont menés quelque part, autorisant par détour que nous revenions au seul lieu ob nos problém nous guettent." p. 36 ["The poetic word of Césaire, the political act of Fanon, led us somewhere, authorizing by detour the retum to the point where our problem lay in wait for us." p. 25 (translation modified)] The poignancy and the urgency of Glissant's discussion of these two Martinican intellectuals who have inspired anti-colonial struggles everywhere in the world derive from his sense that, as far as Martinique is concerned, his own "le discours du discours (le retour sur soi)" may have "come too late and that as a community

we have lost the meaning of our own voice" (p. 12). Martinique still remains a department of France.

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positioning, nevertheless it will be so. This essay can be seen as autobiographical only in that complicated sense. To say it is autobiographical is to open up or recognize a problematic, not to close it or explain it.

It is possible to theorize/narrativize "la Relation" in ways other than through questions of identity—for example, through social or cultural history, through analysis of popular culture, through institutional analysis, through political economy. And these ways are no less necessary. To confront "la Relation" through the question of identity or postcolonial self-fashioning, however, is not only to confront it at a level where it is most opaque, hidden, or elusive but also, more importantly, to find oneself in something of a predicament. If the production of colonial identity is marked by “la Relation," how can one deconstruct it through theories that reiterate the detour set in motion by "la Relation"? The question becomes all the more pressing when one rejects any recourse to relativism or to essentialism. The problem here is not one of figuring out how to understand or preserve a pregiven "non-Western" cultural identity ("Indian" or "Caribbean" or "African") while having to deploy "Western" theories. The very concept of "la Relation" designates a space that emerges as a result of what Gayatri Spivak calls "epistemic violence." Or, in Homi Bhabha's terms, "la Relation" designates a hybridized space (that is why earlier on we refused to understand it in terms of master/slave or self/other model). How, then, do we reformulate the question of identity? Or does the problem of identity simply disappear once one acknowledges the hybridity of colonial space? Is the problematic of identity, in other words, essentially tied to essentialism, such that it is only in need of antimetaphysical therapy? The critique of essentialism that we associate with contemporary theory has been invaluable in clarifying the intellectual confusions of authenticity. There has been, however, something like an overkill in the process of articulating that critique. Or, rather, the overkill has come about because there really has been no systematic attempt to map the scope of the critique. Its force is considered to apply to all claims involving identity. Some theorists have expressed their unease about the way the critique of essentialism has tended to subvert the categories of resistance such as "women" and "race." They have tried to salvage such

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categories by defending what they call "strategic essentialism."2! The problem with that concept is, of course, that it is unable to specify the difference between the strategic and nonstrategic use of essentialism. Whatever argument is going to justify strategic essentialism should be available to the nonstrategic version as well, unless one constructs a version of essentialism to which no one is likely to subscribe. The foundationalist project of discovering what Richard Rorty calls "the final vocabulary" that tells us once and for all what we are, that project is indeed essentialist and needs to be deconstructed. However, as Rorty rightly cautions us: "To say that there is no such thing as intrinsic nature is not to say that the intrinsic nature of reality has turned out, surprisingly enough, to be extrinsic."22 The critique of essentialism, it seems to me, has been interpreted as making both of the above claims. If the critique of essentialism did not imply some ideal of nonessentialist (non)identity (whatever that may be) or, at any rate, a nonessentialist way of being, it is not clear why anyone would want to be essentialist even for strategic reasons. The strategic essentialist subscribes in principle to the critique of essentialism and the unspecified and unspecifiable ideal that it posits but feels that to act on that ideal would mean deserting struggles of resistance organized around essentialist categories. Strategic essentialism turns out to be an awkward resolution of a false problem generated by the theorist's attempt to use the vocabularies and figures of theory as foundational. It is this neofoundationalism that makes postcolonial theorists wary of any issues that involve questions of identity. A Poetics of Re-turn?

The negotiation between metropolitan theory and postcolonial narrative is itself an instance of the detour that the postcolonials have been living, that has been their destiny. Speaking of his own "destiny," while offering both a revaluation and a prospective of his own work, Jacques Derrida says, "But with destiny, which is a singular way of not being free, what interests me, precisely, is this intersection of chance and

21 The concept was introduced by Gayatri Spivak. She has addressed the problem most usefully in "Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution: An Interview with Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak," Thesis Eleven, 10/11 (1984/850), pp. 184-186. 22 Richard Rorty, Contingensy, Irony and Solidarity, p. 8.

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necessity, the ‘life line,’ the very language of one's own life, even if it is never pure." He claims that his involvement with philosophy has been a "detour" in his search for "something" which he calls "idiomatic writing" and which "literature accommodates more easily than philosophy." The definition of "idiomatic writing" that Derrida goes on to offer is worth quoting in full, since it allows me to inscribe into it my own problematic of inventing an idiom for identity. So, Derrida on the meaning of "idiomatic": A property you cannot appropriate; it somehow marks you without belonging to you. It appears only to others, never to you. . . not the attributes of an "ego," but rather, the accentuated flourish, that is, the musical flourish of your own most unreadable history. I'm not speaking about a style, but of an intersection of singularities, of manners of living, voices, writing, of what you carry with you, what you can never leave behind. What I write resembles, by my account, a dotted

outline of a book to be written, in what I call—at least for me— the “old new language,” the most archaic and the newest, unheard of, and thereby at present unreadable. . . . Such a book would be quite another thing; nonetheless, it would bear some resemblance to this train of thought. In any case, it is an interminable remembering, still seeking its own form: it would be not only my story, but also that of the culture, of language, of families, and above all, of Algeria. . . 23

This passage is remarkable for at least two reasons. First, Derrida is attempting here to invent a space, indicate a direction, for raising the problematic of identity, when it had seemed that the whole deconstructive critique of self-presence, propriety, and "properness" made "identity" irredeemably essentialist. Second, I read this passage in the context of and as a response to the predicament that theory finds itself in—a predicament that Derrida himself has characterized as resulting "from the invention of the same and from the possible, from the invention that

23 Jacques Derrida, "An Interview with Derrida,” in Derrida and Différance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bemasconi (Evanston: Northwestem University Press, 1988), pp. 73-

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is always possible."24 In the essay from which I take this characterization, Derrida seeks to break out of this economy of the same by invoking “an entirely other that can no longer be confused with the God or Man of onto-theology or with any of the figures of the configuration (the subject, consciousness, the unconscious, the self, man or woman and so on)."25 But Derrida had also sought to show how deconstruction could be inventive in the sociohistorical field. We were not told how the latter could come about, and the former—the invocation of the entirely Other—was a repetition of the figures or morphologies of deconstruction—an invention of the same.

However, in his conception

of an idiomatic writing as a story of intersecting singularities, of an identity that would be "mine" without belonging to me, we can glimpse a different way of staging the predicament and the way out of it. The problematic of postcolonial identity, then, does not involve a search for essences. Nor does it involve a desire to escape the hybridization that is the result of the global process of "la Relation." To raise the problematic of postcolonial self-fashioning, to fashion an idiom of postcolonial identity, is to initiate a poetics of what Glissant calls "retour" (re-turn). How do we articulate what this requires when we are still involved in the poetics of detour? The question of postcolonial self-fashioning brings us to another spiral in the negotiation between theory and narrative. If a theory of narrative self-fashioning must begin with Stephen Greenblatt's question, "Why would anyone submit to another's narrative at all?"26 could one propose that a narrative of theoretical identity or self-fashioning must begin with, Why would anyone submit to another's theory at all? Both theory and narrative, as technologies of representation, are technologies of identity.27 Both are involved in the process of description and 24 Jacques Derrida, "Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989),

p. 60. I have discussed this essay and Derrida's invocation of the Other in my "The Predicament of Theory.” 25 5acques Derrida, "Psyche: Inventions of the Other," p. 61.

Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 237. The terminology is, of course, Foucauldian; however, I began to entertain the

possibility of raising such a question after reading Teresa de Lauretis’ discussion of theory as a technology of gender in the title essay of her Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana Press, 1987), p. 19.

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redescription. If theory, in the philosophical sense, has been an attempt to find the "final vocabulary" that would tell us, once and for all, who we are, narrative is the whole process of self-fashioning or "selfcreation" through which one "becomes autonomous by redescribing the sources of heteronomous descriptions."28 The sources of these heteronomous descriptions, Rorty suggests, could be either people or ideas. Proust, for example, freed himself from the authority figures he had encountered by redescribing and recontextualizing those figures and their descriptions of him. The antimetaphysicians such as Nietzsche or Heidegger were redescribing entities such as "Europe" and "the Enlightenment." Both Proust and the antimetaphysicians were engaged in "replacing inherited with self-made contingencies." Rorty, however, prefers the Proustian attempt to rearrange little contingencies and urges us to give up rearranging big things like "Europe." For him, selffashioning is, or should be, a private affair. This is not the place to criticize Rorty's distinction between private and public. What I find useful in Rorty are his ideas of "redescription" and "contextualization"

which are not tied to that distinction. The distinction between private and public is hard to draw especially in those cases when the attempt to reinvent oneself by freeing oneself from other people's narratives makes one realize that those narratives are powerful because they are institutionally embedded.22 When V. S. Naipaul writes that as a schoolboy "I had no idea of history—it was hard to attach something as grand as history to our island,"39 he is attesting to the power of narrative—in this case, the power of History as the Metanarrative of the West. Postcolonials have yet to come to terms with all the implications of their subjection to that Narrative (which initiated their detour) even though the Metanarrative and the hegemonic power of the West that had made the Narrative stick are increasingly contested. In the intellectual field of the First World today, theory has come to stand for that contestation. Postcolonial intellectuals have a special interest in and a special affinity for theory, since the language of 28 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. 100. 29 As Hayden White puts it in his discussion of Jameson: "[T]he crucial problem from the perspective of political struggle is not whose story is the best or truest but who has the power to make his story stick as the one that others will choose to live by or in.” "Getting Out of History: Jameson's Redemption of Narrative,” The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 167. 30v. 5s. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 143.

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that theory allowed them to redescribe and recontextualize the hegemonic narratives of the West. If that affinity has come to seem problematic to me, it is not because the interests of theory are sutured to the economic and political interests of the West, but because the identification with the figures of theory seems to be preempting any inquiry into what it means to talk about postcolonial space. I have been using the term "detour" to designate the sociohistorical experience of postcolonials. Detour can also be used as a privileged name for the whole movement of delay, relay, delegation, differance, discontinuity, dissemination, etc., which theory has deployed to undermine the metaphysics of presence or logocentrism. But to make the latter detour a storyline and thus to recuperate or recode the narrative of the former "detour" is to close off any inquiry into the effects of "la Relation" in the cultural institutional space of the former colonies. The West may indeed have contracted into the west; however, to confine

theory to a mapping of that contraction is to refuse to theorize/narrativize not only the impasses but also the uncertain possibilities in the postcolonial space. So instead of celebrating the pleasures of finding themselves in the tropics of metropolitan theory by theoretically recuperating the narratives of their detour, postcolonial theorists must narrativize the dissonance of that detour, and out of that dissonance, outline a new theory, a new practice of theory that would initiate a poetics of re-turn, which will undoubtedly be as complex and ambiguous as the poetics of detour that the postcolonials have been living, narrating, and theorizing. For, without such a poetics, we are left with the question that Derek Walcott asks himself: What if the lines I cast bulge into a book that has caught nothing? Wasn't it privilege to have judged one's work by the glare of greater minds, though the spool of days that midsummer's reel rewinds Comes bobbling back with its question, its empty hook?31

31 Derek Walcott, Midsummer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), p. 29.

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Acknowledgements Based on my presentation at the "Predicaments of Theory" conference, this is, in large part, an extract from the introductory chapter of my dissertation, "Detours: Theory, Narrative and the Inventions of PostColonial Identity." I would like to thank James Clifford, Satish Deshpande and Mary E. John for their help and encouragement.

CRITICAL INTERROGATION: TALKING RACE, RESISTING RACISM Bell Hooks

Within black street culture, fresh is a word used to express esthetic evaluation of the unnamed forces behind a style, a concept, that adds something new to our way of seeing—enhancing the visual experience of the look, the gaze. In Radiance from the Waters, art historian Sylvia Boone writes about the place of neku, freshness as one of the core concepts within the esthetic culture of the Mende peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia. A critical cultural tension emerges between this African sense of "freshness" and the African-American esthetic. Different cultural locations evoke links, sensibilities, and longings contained within diverse structures of representation and meaning. These connections raise issues regarding race and culture similar to those James Clifford writes about in his recent book, The Predicament of Culture. Appearing at a time when race is the "hot" topic, the "in" subject, these two works offer new insight and direction. They subvert and disrupt, challenging us to think critically about race and culture, about esthetics. Anyone witnessing the current cultural and academic focus on race has to note the new way race is being talked about, as though it were in no way linked to cultural practices that reinforce and perpetuate racism, creating a gap between attitudes and actions. There is even a new terminology to signal the shift in direction: the buzz words are difference, the Other, hegemony, ethnography. It's not that these words were not always around, but that now they are in style. Words like Other and difference are taking the place of commonly known words deemed uncool or too simplistic, words like oppression, exploitation, and domination. Black and white in some circles are becoming definite nonos, perpetuating what some folks see as stale and meaningless binary oppositions. Separated from a political and historical context, ethnicity is being reconstituted as the new frontier, accessible to all, no passes or

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permits necessary, where attention can now be focused on the production of a privileged, commodifiable discourse in which race becomes synonymous with culture. There would be no need, however, for any unruly radical black folks to raise critical objections to the phenomenon if all this passionate focus on race were not so neatly divorced from a recognition of racism, of the continuing domination of blacks by whites, and (to use some of those out-of-date, uncool terms) of the continued suffering and pain in black life. Powerful expressions of these contradictions are found in popular culture, ranging from the seemingly innocuous to the aggressively racist. Just recently, for instance, in Vogue magazine, there was an article wherein the writer referred to Tracy Chapman's Buckwheat hairdo. In terms of today's ethnic cool, I imagine the writer thought he sounded cute, like he was in the know. Excuse me! Buckwheat has never been recovered by black people as a positive representation of their reality. But let's not stop there. Opening the February issue of Interview, I read, "Yoko: Life After Lennon." Ono is talking about Japan's economy when suddenly interviewer Kevin Sessums asks: "What is it about Japanese women, Oriental women, that Caucasian men find so fascinating?" Nothing in the text suggests that Ono responds critically to this line of questioning. Ono's answer begins, "Maybe the Western man is intriguing to the Oriental woman. . . ." Sessum's response: "Maybe Oriental women are just better in bed. They know more positions." Is the insertion that tells the readers that Ono "laughs" intended to mediate this racist remark, to make the remark appear nouveau ethnic cool? The point is that neither of these comments reflect a critical consciousness about race. And come on, Yoko Ono, you know better! For on the very next page, Ono cuts to the heart of the matter: I did about five interviews yesterday because the documentary Imagine is opening in Europe. . . . Anyway, I woke up this morning with this kind of pain that I had never realized before. I said to myself, How dare they! Every time I have an interview I am asked this question: "The world hated you. You've been called the Dragon Lady for the past twenty years. How do you feel about it? Why do you think that happened?" You know what that is like? It's like somebody battering a woman and

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then saying, "All of us battered you, but why do you think we did it?" I'm the one responsible for telling them why I was battered? Well let them tell me. They're the ones who did it. The other side of it was Asian-bashing—it was as simple as that. Precisely. Later that same day, I walked to the local bookstore (and I live in a small town) and picked up a new book on film and television—Boxed In—in which the white male author, Mark Crispin Miller, talks about images of blacks (in a way) presented as enlightened critique, as though he had some special understanding of the way “black Others" see themselves. I didn't stop there. I went on to the drama section and actually sat down and read Alfred Uhry's Pulitzer Prize-winning Driving Miss Daisy —an integrated play by a white playwright. I had been told that the play was about a sexual relationship between the two main characters. Well, it is not. No! The play just hints at the possibility that white Miss Daisy and her black chauffeur are sweet on each other. Reading the play, it was easy to see the way it relies on those old stereotypes about Southern black men lusting after white ladies to titllate, without interrogating these images. Whether blatantly racist or condescending to represent the Other, these examples (and there are many more) give an idea of the attitudes underlying popular culture. And in many ways, a certain unconsciousness about these attitudes has also characterized—even informed—intellectual inquiry into race and racism. To begin, what does it mean when primarily white men and women are producing the

discourse around Otherness? Years ago, when I first left my segregated neighborhood for college, it seemed that the vast majority of college liberal whites were confused: on the one hand, eager to make connections with black people, and on the other, uncertain about the nature of the contract. They were,

however, confident that they were not racists. Wasn't their desire for contact proof that they had transcended racism? As the black liberation struggle waned, feminism emerged as a new terrain of radical politics. By the early ‘80s, women of color, particularly black women, were challenging the assumption of shared oppression based on gender. After

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a period of resistance, individual white women began to discuss the issues of racism—developing “unlearning racism" workshops —and feminist scholars called attention to the work of black novelists and

poets. Black male literary critics joined the discussion, at times appropriating the subject in ways that made it appear as though they—and not black women—had been at the forefront demanding consideration of these topics. And as male scholars from various backgrounds and disciplines focused more on culture, particularly popular culture—post-colonial discourse and the work of Third World scholars and critics began to receive widespread attention. The upshot of all this has been the unprecedented support among scholars and intellectuals for the inclusion of the Other—in theory. Yes! Everyone seems to be clamoring for "difference," only too few seem to want any difference that is about changing policy or that supports active engagement and struggle (another no-no word; recently a member of the new radical chic announced to me her sense that "struggle" is a tired term, and she's just not into it). Too often, it seems, the point is to promote the appearance of difference within intellectual discourse, a "celebration" that fails to ask who's sponsoring the party and who is extending the invitations. For who is controlling this new discourse? Who is getting hired to teach it, and where? Who is getting paid to write about it? One change in direction that would be real cool would be the production of a discourse on race that interrogates whiteness. It would just be so interesting for all those white folks who are giving blacks their take on blackness to let them know what's going on with whiteness. In far too much contemporary writing—though there are some outstanding exceptions—race is always an issue of Otherness that is not white; it is black, brown, yellow, red, purple even. Yet only a persistent, rigorous, and informed critique of whiteness could really determine what forces of denial, fear, and competition are responsible for creating fundamental gaps between professed political commitment to eradicating racism and the participation in the construction of a discourse on race that perpetuates racial domination. Many scholars, critics, and writers preface their work by stating that they are white, as though mere

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acknowledgment of this fact were sufficient, as though it conveyed all

we need to know of standpoint, motivation, direction. I think back to my

graduate years when many of the feminist professors fiercely resisted the insistence that it was important to examine race and racism. Now many of these very same women are producing scholarship focusing on race and gender. What process enabled their perspectives to shift? Understanding that process is important for the development of solidarity; it can enhance awareness of the epistemological shifts that enable all of us to move in new and oppositional directions. Yet none of these women write articles reflecting on their critical process, showing how their attitudes have changed.

Let's take a look at a recent front-page spread in the New York Times Book Review (1/8/89) featuring historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's new work, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Talking about her work, Fox-Genovese "conceded that it felt a bit odd at times to be a white woman writing about black women. ‘On the other hand,’ she said, 'I am deeply committed to the idea that we all have to be able to study any subject provided we are honest.'" While valorizing the notion of intellectual freedom, the comment obscures the more crucial issues involved when a member of a privileged group "interprets" the reality of members of a less powerful, exploited, and oppressed group.

Given a framework of domination, let's look at some concrete negative manifestations that occur when these issues are not addressed. First of all, let's acknowledge that few nonwhite scholars are being awarded grants to investigate and study all aspects of white culture from a standpoint of "difference"; doesn't this indicate just how tightly the colonizer-colonized paradigm continues to frame the discourse on race and the "Other"? At the same time, just as it has been necessary for black critical thinkers to challenge the idea that black people are inherently oppositional, are born with critical consciousness about domination and the will to resist, white thinkers must question their assumption that the decision to write about race and difference necessarily certifies antiracist behavior. And third, isn't it time to look closely at how and why work by white scholars about nonwhite people receives more attention and acclaim than similar work produced by nonwhite scholars (while at the same time, the latter's work is devalued—for being too "angry"—even

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as it's appropriated)? Many people who are into Clifford's work have never read Boone, for instance. Finally, the tendency to overvalue work by white scholars, coupled with the suggestion that such work constitutes the only relevant discourse, evades the issue of potential inaccessible locations, spaces white theorists cannot occupy. Without reinscribing an essentialist standpoint, it is crucial that we neither ignore nor deny that such locations exist. If much of the recent work on race grows out of a sincere commitment to cultural transformation, there is serious need for immediate and persistent self-critique. Committed cultural critics— whether white or black, scholars or artists—or both—can produce work that opposes structures of domination, that presents possibilities for a transformed future by willingly interrogating their own work on esthetic and political grounds. This interrogation itself becomes an act of critical intervention, fundamentally fostering an attitude of vigilance rather than denial.

(Reprinted, with minor revisions, from Art

Forum, May 1989, 18-20.)

RESTLESS

NA(RRA)TIVES

Vicente M. Diaz

The Predicaments of Theory conference held in Santa Cruz, California, proved to be an inspiration for this brief meditation on "Native Informants." The spirits infused here, and the spirits expunged—for the conference was also a source of perspiration—were embodied in all of the papers and their discussions. Nevertheless, I draw directly from the presentations by Mary John, Vicente Rafael and, indirectly, from David Scott's paper and Cornel West's oral presentation, "Demystifying Theory." I also wish to thank Marita Sturken, John Hartigan, Ron Eglash, Judi Martinez, Donna Haraway and Jim Clifford for their comments. Names

and

Places

Reflecting on a "scientific research project on high blood pressure” in the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, anthropologist Martha C. Ward ponders the significance of local names and places and their apparent indifference to her presence. In her reflexive ethnography, Nest in the

Wind, Ward writes: "All places, however bereft of identifying characteristics to me, have a name."! Names and more, Ward elaborates: ..every place has a name, an owner, and traditional stories about its special spirits or genealogical history. Pohnpeian eyes see gardens, boundaries, and a complex system of land tenure where I see only jungle. (p. 30) 1 Martha C. Ward, Nest in the Wind (Illinois: Waveland Press, 1989) p. 30.

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Within this contending field of visions, entangled in the predicament of the anthropologist's line of sight, lurks a particular native—the "informant." This native is already framed by a special historical interest—a desire to see what natives like Pohnpeians see in the naming of their landscapes and the possible values such local visions would have in a global collection of different "cultures."2 Interested in the "stories" surrounding a specific Pohnpeian topography, Ward records an exchange with one native informant, a person she describes as her “instructor.” In the transaction the anthropologistis taken aback: The native: "What was the first job that God instructed Adam to do? Name everything!" Ward protests: "...God had obviously meant for Adam to name (only) animate objects, such as plants and animals..." Native (according to Ward): "(go) reread the Genesis account and report back when (you) acquire greater wisdom. " (p. 30) The native informant who emerges from the bush also happens to be, ironically and appropriately enough, a lay minister, a folk leader who, with a host of other Pohnpeians, will insist rather piously that "of course, we are Christians now." (p.36) Global

Narratives

For the anthropologist, the value of the exchange with the native informant lies in its role as local anecdote in the service of a global anthropo-logical knowledge and commentary. "Native informants” are taken as guides into the proper meanings of local stories so that (and over which) a wider commentary on Man—tere, cultural relativism—can be 2 James Clifford writes: "The concept of culture used by anthropologists was, of course, invented by European theorists to account for the collective articulations of human diversity.” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 273. See also his "Collecting Art and Culture” in the same volume.

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certified. In Ward's narrative the native informant is christened “instructor” of trained scholars. And, however localized the lesson, the idea of the native-as-teacher serves as an allegory for the value that a cultural relativism (and a female scholarship, in Ward's story) might hold for and against the rigid social sciences. The value of native informant/teacher underwrites Ward's embattled relationship with her colleague Floyd, resident psychologist on the interdisciplinary project of which Ward is a member. A "good husband, good father, good Christian, good citizen of the United States," Floyd combines a staunch belief in the universality of “western pyschological sciences" with his "first law that women naturally waited on men." Floyd and Ward spend "many happy hours debating cultural relativity and matrilineal clans." But if getting him to appreciate cultural relativity is difficult enough, it is the concept of "matrilineal descent" that is most “horrifying and appalling to Floyd." Matrilineal descent—the reckoning of one's clan membership (hence, one's source of authority) through the

mother's lineage—is a perfectly reasonable way to organize kinship, according to Ward, especially since "people can always be certain who their mother is but never certain who their father is." But the problem, she tells us, is that Floyd hears "matriarchy" everytime she says "matrilineality." The thought "struck at the center of his moral code."3 In the parlay set up by the female anthropologist with the male social scientist, invocations of native informants—local guides in an exotic jungle of cultural differences—provide necessary material ("canon fodder") for challenging established codes of knowlege and morality.4

3 How might we begin to address the historical claims and political stakes surrounding an absolute certainty over the knowledge of one's mother? We may compare and contrast Floyd's apparent fear of the mother's body as origin of authority and privilege with the late 19th-century Filipino "Ilustrado's” invocation of "madre patria" as authority for resisting Spanish colonial control (see Vicente Rafael's essay in this volume.) But as the Ilustrado needs a mother’s body to produce the narrative of the self as 'Father of the country"--Jose Rizal, for instance--so a good mother and good wife are required for Floyd as "good" husband, father, American, Christian, etc. Is there a simultaneous fear of and desire for

the mother’s body necessarily at play in the historical production of these respective male selves? Can we read similar (Oedipal?) posturings in a current anthropological interest that articulates and distinguishes between Pohnpeian "matriarchy" and "matrilineality"? 4 For an introduction to the idea of "culture-as-critique," see George Marcus and Michael Fisher's Anthropology As Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human

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For Ward, the native can teach the white teacher that Western systems of self-knowledge are inadequate for an understanding of humanity. But with invocation comes elision. A concrete native sensibility—one grounded in the complexity of Christian conversion as much as in matrilineality—is lost in the specific entanglement of Ward's reflective and critical desire to unravel western codes. Today, when Ward remembers Floyd "every time I teach these concepts in an introductory anthropology class" (p. 18), an historical native position gets subsumed by the larger project of christening freshmen into the teachings of cultural anthropology. Like the anthropologist interested in challenging established moral codes, I, too, am interested by the ways natives see gardens, stories, and boundaries where outsiders see only jungles. But as namesake to, and inheritor of family stories about, my maternal grandfather—a native Pohnpeian and early "convert" who, as a child, acted as a translator between his mother's clan and the Spanish Capuchins in the 1880's—I am inclined to reread the verbal exchange between anthropologist and native. The encounter between Ward and her native informant/instructor yields more than the story of natives-as-informants (guides to the local) for a global commentary. Beyond simply serving as a local anecdote in the service of anthropological knowledge, the brief encounter points to other cultural and historical positions in what Donna Haraway calls the "textual bush of (native informant's) experiences."> At issue is the alterity of a native’s own re-positioning of external and global ideas, an alterity produced, we might say, in a simulation of sameness. The "other" is a good Christian! In an ironic twist, anthropology's affixation and localization of Pohnpeian stories is subverted in a Pohnpeian affixation and localization of a powerful global story of Christianity.

Rereading the exchange between the anthropologist and her native instructor, I hope to glean a few words of wisdom from a selfproclaimed Native Christian.

Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and James Clifford and George Marcus' Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 5 This is Donna Haraway's phrase in "Reading Buchi Emecheta: Contests for Women's Experience" in Inscriptions Nos. 3/4, (1988), p. 109.

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Convers(at)ions

The exchange between the anthropologist and the native informant can be read to blur not only the distinction between wisdom and ignorance, but also that between global theories and local stories. The Pohnpeian insistence on his "conversion" is less the effect of a tragic penetration (or, in an earlier history, a heroic rescue of "savages") by Christian missions in Oceania than an articulation of an identity —a native "convers(at)ion" with Christianity. To see conversion simply as the effect of a tragic or heroic global spread of Christianity, the assimilation of different peoples around the world into a Judeo-Christian heritage, would be to privilege the Euro-American actor as cause and effect, beginning and end, of History. It would be a "totalizing claim," as Mary John notes in her paper in this volume, one that would "leave too much out of the picture." What tends to get left out of historical and anthropological global stories are indigenous stakes and positions, "cultural and political transactions,” as James Clifford notes, "[that are] not all or nothing conversions or resistances" to "western" encroachment.’ Just as the native informant isn't simply a local function of a global anthropological discourse, the Christian native informant cannot be seen as the "converted" effect of an exclusively active JudeoChristian mission history.8

Since I have earlier invoked the spirit of my mother's father, renamed Miguel Dela Concepcion by the Spanish Capuchins in 1883, I'll relate the appropriate circumstances of his story as I have learned it from family narratives and other sources. One of the first Pohnpeians converted to Catholicism, "Lolo" Miguel and his mother traveled north from their home in Kiti to the village of Kolonia (in the chiefdom Net) where the newly arrived Capuchins had been welcomed. The story of Miguel's role as a guide and a translator for the Capuchins and a specific faction of Pohnpeians, and his subsequent departure from Pohnpei to pursue an education in the Philippines, is rooted in an interplay among village, 6 For a sustained analysis of conversion as colonial and counter- colonial discursive play, and for a discussion of “local history” as discursive localizations of external ideas, see Vicente Rafael's Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 7 Clifford, “Identity in Mashpee,” in The Predicament of Culture, p. 342.

8 This much is acknowledged by Ward.

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family, and personal power struggles in Kiti in the mid-to-late 19th century. An old Pohnpeian proverb has it that "Pohnpeians are not one people."? Indeed, since time immemorial, the five chiefdoms of the island have been in constant battle amongst themselves. It is precisely in the contexts of these squabbles, that first the Protestant, then the Catholic missions were "welcomed" by various competing chiefdoms. Each understood the benefits of having one or another Christian sect located within its boundary. But the strategic value of embracing the Christian missions was also exploited within the chiefdoms themselves.

In a power check within Kiti alone, for instance, Nahnmwarki (chief) Mensila sought to insure his newly acquired power over his predecessors’ (Nahnmwarki Ejikaia's) upstart clan by inviting the Catholics to establish a mission in Kiti. The elder Ejikaia had, years before, wooed the Protestants and had made it mandatory for all Kiti dwellers to convert. Mensila knew that such a "conversion" had not only consolidated Ejikaia's own power, but that it furnished the necessary materials for his descendants to reassert their political claims. Mensila, as with other "second-generation leaders," according to historian David Hanlon, was "unable to accept the political submission which (his) baptism (to Protestantism) would entail." 10 For Mensila and his cohorts

the value of the Catholic mission lay beyond the cargo of goods that arrived with each new ship. Catholicism's value for this particular group of Kitians was as a strategic counter to Ejikaia's and his progeny's stake in the Protestant mission.

Key agents in this narrative, my great grandmother, baptized Teresita, and her son Miguel, were probably sent by Mensila up to Kolonia to monitor the Spaniards. In the written and spoken annals of Pohnpeian history there is a revealing incident involving a young native translator who escorts a

9 Saul H. Riesenberg and John L. Fisher,

"Some Ponapean Proverbs,” Journal of

American Folklore 68:9-18, 1955.

10 David Hanlon, Upon a Stone Altar: A History of the Island of Pohnpei to 1890 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988), p. 203.

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group of Spaniards back to Kolonia from a visit to Kiti.!1 Enroute to Kolonia by canoe, the boy and his Spanish Catholic entourage were ambushed by warriors from the neighboring chiefdom of Madolehnimw. Madolenihmw, long an enemy of Net (in which was located the village of Kolonia), had recently "gone Protestant" in response to Kolonia's acceptance of the Catholic mission. Whereas the warriors of Madolenihmw killed the Spaniards, they not only spared the young translator's life, but in fact offered a feast in his honor and out of respect for the Nahnmwarki Mensila of Kiti (the boy's kinship ties) with whom Madolenihmw had no immediate conflict. The treatment of the boy, according to Hanlon, was a "politically astute gesture," that among other nee meneass the war parties from Kiti sent to search for the boy."! While the boy (Is he my grandfather?) had personal stakes for acting as interlocuter between a certain faction in Kiti and the proselytizing Spaniards, it turns out that he himself was used as a safety measure by Madolenihmw warriors to maintain peace between chiefdoms. Such is the feel of only one set of historical convers(at)ions in only one part of the island of Pohnpei.

11 My sources are the following: 1) Hanlon, p. 186, and unpublished fieldnotes; 2) A. Cabeza Pereiro, Las Isla de Ponape: Geografia, Etnografia, Historia. (Manila: TipoLitografia de Chofre Y Comp., 1895) pp. 178-179; 3)"Resena Historica de la MIssion de los Religiosos Capuchinos en las Islas Carolinas Orientales, 1886-1895." in Documentos Relativos a la Micronesia, (Guam: University of Guam Micronesian Area Research Center, 1974); and 4), private correspondences, Josefina Dela Concepcion Diaz and Father Paulino

Cantero, S.J, Catholic Mission, Ponape, Caroline Islands, January 11, 1983.

12 There is a disparity between the historical (written) record and local (oral) lore concerning the name of the boy in question. Where Cabeza Pereiro identifies and describes the boy as "un chiquillo carolino Ilamado Miguel, que educaban los PP. Capuchinos...," Hanlon, through his sources—well-known Kitian storytellers—identifies the boy as one "Joaquin." Where my family had once been certain, on the basis of Pereira's Geografia, Etnografia y Historia, that the boy in question was in fact Miguel (or "Miguelito,” as he had been called by the Capuchins), we are now no longer sure in light of the authority of this recently publicized "popular story" from Kiti as recorded by Hanlon. The irony in this state of confusion lies in the fact that we are currently unable to identify the exact relationship between my grandfather Miguel and this person Joaquin, precisely because the Spanish Fathers had found it necessary to record only Miguel's mother's Christian name (Teresita). In a way we might say that we can never be certain of her (and Miguel's) genealogical lineage, outside of the claims made by a variety of interested families, priests and historians.

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The

Diaz

Politics of Co-constructed

Identities

Mary John suggests that we consider certain "processes of subjectification,” or, "co-constructions,” as she calls them,

that take

place in between "produced knowledges and sanctioned ignorances." In her example of the intellectual formation of middle-class Indian women in the U.S., she notes that "gaining an education is not merely an abstract process of attaining competence within a universalist discourse and assenting to its indifferent rules. It is a process by which we learn to avow and remember some knowledges and disavow and forget others. Learning is as much to learn the English language, for example, as to forget one's native tongue.” In the exchange between Ward and her native informant/instructor/ lay minister, there is such a "co-constructive” device in the native reminder of a conversion ("of course we are Christians") and its temporality ("now"). As I've suggested, the reminder tells less a History of indigenous Pohnpeian assimilation and/or deicide than of a series of historical intercourses, transactions between local and Judeo-Christian identities that act to blur their distinctions and to create powerful positions

from which to speak. !3 In reminding the "expert" of his own religion, the native not only foregrounds the processes of subjectification but also reconsolidates a native agency now invested with all the powers that accompany a "convers(at)ion" with Christianity. This transaction, I suggest, is galvanized by its pious style. The piety displayed in the native's reminder is reminiscent of what Michael Goodich sees as "pehavior drawn from the lives of the saints" which, by the 13th Century, along with the refinement of "the sermon,” had become "the 13 Elsewhere I'm exploring the politics of the paradox I call "identifying-to-avoididentification." In a working manuscript entitled 'Repositioning the Missionary: Confronting the Can(n)onization of Fr. Luis de SanVitores through Oral Traditions," I aim to show multiple contestations in spite of (perhaps because of) the full endorsement for the effort to canonize the "Father of the Marianas Mission" by present-day Chamorros. Moreover, the full endorsement by the 20th-century inhabitants continues an historical process by which "indigenous selves" sought reconsolidation and refuge within the very system that, over three hundred years ago, sought to destroy them. I am interested in how

the phenomenon of submitting to a patron saint can be understood not only to construct a place of refuge but to secure, as Rafael says in this volume, powerful "protocols of address.”

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stock-in-trade of the successful preacher."!4 With holiness and sermon in pocket, doubling as native informant, the "converted" native lay minister simulates what Stephan of Bourbon describes as "the successful preacher (who) relies on...stirring examples of piety in order to impress the minds of his uneducated listeners."!5 Today, Christian preachers are natives who assume authority and responsibility for enlightening the ignorant. But if the native gathers this authoritative space, one already "in place" by the 13th-Century, the imitation reflects different political stakes when repositioned in Oceania in the context of late 20th Century American colonial control.!6 Native-Christian "convers(at)ions" are co-constructions which have the effect of submitting to, and simultaneously countering, an encroaching discourse.!7- In the case of the exchange between Ward and the Pohnpeian lay minister, the convers(at)ion appears to displace an anthropological and historical authority through the form of a rhetorical question, an interrogation, that anticipates its own answer ("What was the first job God instructed Adam to do? Name everything"), and through a command and dismissal ("...reread Genesis and return when you have wisdom"). Apparently dismissed, too, is a "western" claim to biblical (Christian) authority through its very espousal by others. In what local tale is the native expert now? Who is knower? What does he know? And from where does that knowledge originate? 18

The co-constructed identity that floats on a powerful and displaced Judeo-Christian tradition interrogates traditional locations of wisdom and ignorance, local and global narratives, as well as essential definitions of

14 Michael Goodich,.Vita Perfecta: The Ideal of Sainthood in the 13th Century (Anton Heirsemann Stuttgart, 1982), p. 7. 15 Ibid,. p. 8. Immediately after Comel West's rousing presentation at the "Predicaments of Theory” Conference, and with a smile, Donna Haraway exclaimed: "I've always loved Sunday momings!" 16 One of the last of the formal colonies in the world, "Micronesia"—so named for the tiny sizes and obscurity of its composite islands—remains a "strategic trust territory" of United States.

17 This notion of submission as counter-colonial discourse is borrowed from Vicente Rafael's study of Tagalog responses to the early Spanish Catholic mission in the Philippines. (fn. 6.) 18 For another example of blurring, see Gary Trompf, ed., The Gospel is not Western: Black Theologies from the Southwest Pacific (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987).

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indigenous culture and identity.19 As political practice, the notion of coconstructed identity from one end of the Pacific plate is affiliated with claims from the other: Contemporary struggles of "Chicano identities," Lorna Dee Cervantes explains, constitute less the search for essentially lost selves than a reclamation, a renaming of the terms of "Chicano experiences" from Anglo control.29 Restless

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Exchanges like that between Ward and her native informant are not indigenous to the late 20th Century record. Local and global claims to wisdom (and foolishness) also appear entangled in another historical and political context on which I end my (alter)native meditation on informants.

In what can probably count as the first ethnography in the Marianas, the 16th-century discalced Friar Juan Pobre holds a dialogue with "the Good Sancho,” a Spaniard who was shipwrecked and who had lived among the Chamorro inhabitants for a number of years: Fray Juan: "Until it is mealtime, please tell me about the nature of these indios..."

Sancho: "Although to us, these indios seem to be such savages, they consider themselves to be very wise. The questions they ask and the answers they give indicate that they believe there is no one else in the world wiser than they."

19 Other "COCONstrUcTed” identities: The coconut tree is not just an icon for tropical islands in paradise. For its infinite uses in island society, the coconut tree remains a most important species in the Pacific. Coconuts, as people from the tropics know, have always provided the very stuff of subsistence: for nourishment, for the construction of homes, for

recreation, for cash and for apparel. A "coconut" is also a term, affectionate and malicious,

used to refer to Pacific islanders who have either been in the U.S. "mainland" too long, or for those who have allegedly “assimilated” too many "American" or "western" traits and habits. (I must also add that, when needed, coconuts can act as emergency flotation devices; that is, of course, until they become too saturated.) For a chart that lists all the uses of parts of the coconut tree, see Reilly Ridgell, "Precontact Lifestyle" in Pacific Nations and Territories: The Islands of Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia (Guam: Guam Community College, 1982,) pp. 32-33.

20 San Jose Mercury News, March 12, 1989.

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Fray Juan: "I do not understand the fact that the most savage people in the world presume themselves to be the wisest."

Sancho: "Listen to the presumptuousness of these indios... Listen to the ignorant answers they give to some of the questions I have asked them. When I asked who made the heavens, they answered that, inasmuch as they can see it, they made it. And when I asked who made the earth, they said: "How stupid you are. If it is Iwho plant my rice and set out my tubers, who is to have made it if not myself.’ They say the same thing conceming the ocean; that inasmuch as they sail and fish on it they have made it. Such is the foolishness with which they answer our questions, but they often say that we are foolish to ask."21

21 Marjorie G. Driver, Fray Juan Pobre de Zamora and His Account of the Marianas Islands. (Mangilao, Guam: University of Guam Micronesian Area Research Center 1984), p. 215. Acting without authority and against the explicit orders of the ship's captain, Fray Juan Pobre "jumped ship into one of the native's boats." Driver writes: "Hugging the indios and coaxing them to kiss the crucifix he carried, Fray Pobre urged them to hasten to shore. The louder his shipmates shouted and called, offering the indios large quantities of iron, the harder Juan pressed them to hurry..."(204) Fray Pobre's "native informant" here,

the "Good Sancho,” was shipwrecked on Guam in 1600, two years earlier. Marjorie Driver dutifully notes that "During the night following the conversation Sancho was speared by an indio and died several days later.” (205)

NOTES

ON TRAVEL

AND THEORY

James Clifford

Travel: a figure for different modes of dwelling and displacement, for trajectories and identities, for storytelling and theorizing in a postcolonial world of global contacts. Travel: a range of practices for situating the self in a space or spaces grown too large, a form both of exploration and discipline. Theory: returned to its etymological roots, with a late twentieth-century difference.

The Greek term theorein: a practice of travel and observation, a man sent by the polis to another city to witness a religious ceremony. "Theory" is a product of displacement, comparison, a certain distance. To theorize, one leaves home. But like any act of travel, theory begins and ends somewhere. In the case of the Greek theorist the beginning and ending were one, the home polis. This is not so simply true of traveling theorists in the late twentieth century. »

Paul Fussel's Abroad: a reading of British "literary traveling" between the two world wars. Fussell distinguishes three types: explorers, travelers and tourists. Explorers, he writes, like Francis Drake and Edmund Hillary, often end up with knighthoods. No traveler, and certainly no tourist, is ever knighted for his performances, although the strains he may undergo can be as memorable as the explorer's. [I read the male pronoun in Fussell's account as generally descriptive rather than generic.] All three make journeys, but the explorer seeks the undiscovered, the traveller that which has been discovered by the mind working in history, the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity. The genuine traveler

17]

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is, or used to be, [Fussell's is a requiem for the good traveler] is in the middle between the two extremes. If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates, retaining all he can of the excitement of the unpredictable attaching to exploration, and fusing that with the pleasure of "knowing where one is" belonging to tourism. (Abroad p. 39) There's an assumed topography, an already "worlded" world (as Gayatri Spivak might put it) underlying Fussell's vision. The explorer "seeks" the undiscovered; he and the other voyagers "move toward" different experiences, discoveries. However formless or unknown the places an explorer visits (and this is a relative matter: how "unknown" was the summit of Everest for Hillary?, or the moon for Neil Armstrong?), the explorer's point of departure is clear. Home is a stable place to tell one's story, show one's photos, get one's knighthood. In Fussell's topography, home and abroad are still clearly divided, self and other spatially distinct. How far this is from the heterocultural situation of Britain today! The title, Abroad, has an old-fashioned ring. Abroad was once simply "out there," over the Channel, a distanced but known set of places. And here Fussell's emphasis on the pleasure of orientation, of knowing where one is while traveling and while experiencing a domesticated frisson of adventure, rings true. The Eurocentrism, let alone andro- and Anglocentrism, of Fussell's definitions is all too clear.

The genuine, reflective traveler, "mediating" extremes, seeking what "has been discovered by the mind working in history," moves across a landscape where things are in place—home and abroad, us and them— where one can go "out" and "return" with a representable experience or a discovery of interest to a stable community of readers. "The mind working in history?" There is no need to ask whose mind, whose history. . . Fussell is right that these preconditions for the "genuine traveler" are no more. In the late twentieth century the community, the polis, of the Greek traveller-theorist loses its centrality as a "home" base. It is more and more difficult to ignore what has always to some extent been true—that

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every center or home is someone else's periphery or diaspora. The most remote "native" lands are tourist attractions. The great cities and suburbs of what used to be called—with a confident sense of spatial integrity— "the West" are occupied by immigrants and Gastarbeiter from the Third World and former colonies.

Such a scrambling of locations brings a repositioning of cultural "theory"—a contested term I use to denote simply any developed comparative knowledge about the histories and forms of collective life. This postcolonial confusion (as Daniel Defert has called it) involves a new marking of "the West" as a site of ongoing power and contestation, of centrality and dispersal. Theory, a product long associated with Western discursive spaces—a status that permitted it to speak confidently of "human" history, culture, psyche, etc.—now is marked by specific historical centers and horizons. Since Fanon at least, non-Western theorists have encroached regularly on the territories of Western theory, working oppositionally, with and against (both inside and outside) dominant terms and experiences. Since the sixties and seventies, diverse non-Western and feminist writers have challenged the status of traditional theory, particularly its aspiration to potent overview, its suppression of location and of its genealogical, storytelling functions. Theory is no longer naturally "at home" in the West--a powerful place of Knowledge, History, or Science, a place to collect, sift, translate, and generalize. Or, more cautiously, this privileged place is now increasingly contested, cut across, by other locations, claims, trajectories of knowledge articulating racial, gender, and cultural differences. But how is theory appropriated and resisted, located and displaced? How do theories travel among the unequal spaces of postcolonial confusion and contestation? What are their predicaments? How does theory travel and how do theorists travel? Complex, unresolved questions.

Conventionally, theory has been associated with big pictures—transcultural and trans-historical. Localization undermines a discourse's claim to "theoretical" status. For example, psychoanalysis loses something of

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its theoretical aura when it is found to be rooted in bourgeois Vienna of the turn of the century and in a certain male subjectivity for which woman is object and enigma. The same is true for Marxism when a critic like Foucault remarks, somewhere in The Order of Things, "Marxism swims in the nineteenth century like a fish in water."

Psychoanalytic claims to speak for "the human" across cultures, classes, genders, and sexualities are now very much in question. Yet psychoanalysis is, nonetheless, considerably more than a local act, a male Viennese ethnoscience. It has travelled—with inevitable displacements, revisions, and challenges. For example, in the United States during the 40s and SOs psychoanalysis was appropriated as "ego psychology,” itself contested in the name of a different Freud by Marcuse and Brown, theorists who found their mass audiences in the radical sixties. The theory's original route into England, and recent rearrival by way of Paris, is another story. So is Fanon's use and displacement of its terms. There are places in the world where psychoanalysis may never travel with any degree of comfort. It would be interesting to explore how "major" theorists, like Freud or Marx, actually travelled in ways that helped establish a "Western" centrality for their theory, and its ability, for a time, to escape location and partiality. We might consider Freud's early travel to Paris, his vacations in Rome, his interest in Shakespeare, all giving a broadly "European" feel to a discourse written in German, in bourgeois Vienna. Moreover, his passionate collecting of antiquities was a kind of travel in time and space to specific origin sites--Egypt, the near East, Greece. All of these displacements within an unmarked "Western" place and history situated his theorizing. They helped construct that "theoretical" place that is noplace and thus potentially everyplace. In the case of Marx, we might attend to the theorist's actual travels from the (marginal) Rhineland to the political center of Europe, Paris, and then to the emerging source of industrial-commercial dynamism, Manchester-London. Germany's "backwardness" was, of course a constant theme for the young Marx. By moving to Paris and then to England he modernized, politically and economically. Written from these places, Marxism made its theoretical claim to centrality and thus to a place at the cutting edge of History. Could Marx have produced Marxism

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in the Rhineland? Or even in Rome? Or in St. Petersburg? It is hard to imagine, and not merely because he needed the British Museum and its blue books. Marxism had to articulate the "center" of the world—the historically and politically progressive source. Center/periphery—Home/abroad—past/future. . . At the same time, a doubt about this historical topography exercised the Slavophile intelligentsia in Russia—as in the twentieth century it has troubled a range of "Third World" intellectuals. A profound attractionrepulsion to the West and Europe was felt by a Hertzen or a Dostoevski (traveling in and out of the "center"), the feeling that Russia must inevitably take that route while hoping that another path to modernity might yet be possible. One thinks of Vera Zasulich's question to the old Marx (Could Russia produce an indigenous socialism?) and his famous

"maybe." Such ambivalences and alternative paths have long been expressed by "marginal" theorists, but only in postcolonial contexts have they begun to seriously disrupt the (chrono)topographies underlying Western theoretical claims to represent "human" diversity and history.

Of the many recent writings that, in preliminary ways, articulate and analyze postcolonial locations and displacements of theory two have been particularly influential in the United States: Adrienne Rich's often-cited "Notes Toward a Politics of Location" (1984) and Edward Said's "Travelling Theory." (1983) The first is collected in Blood, Bread and Poetry, the second in The World, the Text and the Critic. Rich's "Notes," along with several other important essays of the early eighties registers the contestation of a political/theoretical category "woman" and of a common female "experience" that had emerged in the seventies as part of a largely white, first-world, middle-class feminism. Rich was among the first to react to a disruption of this too-homogenous category and experience around differences of race, culture and sexuality. Works like Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga’'s collection, This Bridge Called My Back (1981), Barbara Smith's collection, Home Girls (1983), and Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider (1984) or Zami (1982) were complicating, in concrete personal and theoretical ways, the

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intersection of specific and unequal experiences too quickly subsumed under the term "Woman." The problem was that we did not know whom we meant when we said "we." (Rich: 217)

It was in the writings but also in the actions and speeches and sermons of Black United States citizens that I began to experience the meaning of my whiteness as a point of location for which I needed to take responsibility. It was in reading poems by contemporary Cuban women that I began to experience the meaning of North America as a location which had also shaped my ways of seeing and my ideas of who and what was important, a location for

which I was also responsible. (Rich: 219-20) In light of such decenterings, to "theorize" becomes a newly problematic activity. For it cannot simply dissolve into—or, put more positively, be "grounded in"—the local, "experiential," and circumstantial. To theorize about "women" or "patriarchy" one must stand in some experience of commonality or political alliance, looking beyond the local or experiential to wider, comparative phenomena. Indeed, how can feminism as a distinct discourse and politics exist without the possibility of broad theorizing? And yet, if "woman," must be allowed to fracture into "women," into different historical experiences of gender, cross-cut by race, culture, class, and nationality, how are the commonalities and differences at stake to be theorized? "Location," here, is not a matter of finding a stable "home" or of discovering a common experience. Rather it is a matter of being aware of the difference

that makes

a difference in concrete

situations, of

recognizing the various inscriptions, "places," or "histories" that both empower and inhibit the construction of theoretical categories like "Woman," "Patriarchy," or "colonization," categories essential to political action as well as to serious comparative knowledge. "Location" is thus, concretely, a series of locations and encounters, travel within

diverse, but limited spaces. Location, for Adrienne Rich, is a dynamic awareness of discrepant attachments—as a woman, a white middle-class writer, a lesbian, a Jew. When, in a much-quoted passage from Zami, Audre Lorde writes of inhabiting a "house of difference," she refers to a

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constrained, empowering locus of historically-produced connections and differences:

woman,

Afro-American,

lesbian, North-American,

Caribbean. Karl Mannheim's free-floating intellectual is no more. With different degrees of comfort and privilege, he or she moves around in complex, constrained travel trajectories. And the same is true of the post-modern primitivist figure of the "nomad," whether the source is Deleuze and Guattari, or Bruce Chatwin's recent Songlines. Indeed, far from an experience of escape or flight, actual "nomadism," past or present, is a regulated practice of travel within a known world. (It is interesting to speculate on the current appeal of the nomad metaphor—an image of dwelling-in-travel, of inhabiting, with mastery, a "place" that's too large.) The word "travel" suggests a more everyday, institutionalized activity, inviting historical specification. Perhaps it is why Edward Said titled his essay "Traveling Theory” rather than "Nomadic Theory", or "Displaced Theory," or "Disseminating Theory." This sense of worldly, "mapped" movement is also why it may be worth holding on to the term "travel", despite its connotations of middle class "literary," or recreational, journeying, spatial practices long associated with male experiences and virtues. "Travel" suggests, at least, profane activity, following public routes and beaten tracks. How do different populations, classes and genders travel? What kinds of knowledges, stories, and theories do they produce? A crucial research agenda opens up. »

Said's "Traveling Theory" challenges the propensity of theory to seek a stable place, to float above historical conjunctures. He proposes a series of important questions about the sites of production, reception, transmission and resistance to specific theories. The essay centers on a limited travel story: the transmission and alteration of Lukacsian Marxism from Hungary in the post WW1 period to the Paris of Lucien Goldmann, to the England of Raymond Williams. Said's general pespective is summed up in the following paragraph, following on a contrast between Lukacs the "participant in a struggle" (the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919) and Goldman, "expatriate historian at the Sorbonne."

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In measuring Lukacs and Goldmann against each other, then, we are also recognizing the extent to which theory is a response to a specific social and historical situation of which an intellectual occasion is a part. Thus what is insurrectionary consciousness in one instance becomes tragic vision in another, for reasons that are elucidated when the situations in Budapest and Paris are seriously compared. I do not wish to suggest that Budapest and Paris determined the kinds of theories produced by Lukacs and Goldmann. I do mean that "Budapest" and "Paris" are irreducibly first conditions, and they provide limits and apply pressures to which each writer, given his own gifts, predilections, and interests, responds. (p. 237) Said's essay is an indispensable starting place for an analysis of theory in terms of its locations and displacements, its travels. But the essay needs modification when extended to a postcolonial context. The Budapest, Paris, London itinerary is linear, and confined to Europe. Said's delineation of four "stages" of travel—an origin, a distance traversed, a set of conditions for acceptance or rejection, and finally a transformed (incorporated) idea occupying "a new position in a new time and place" (p. 227)—these stages read like an all-too-familiar story of immigration and acculturation. Such a linear path cannot do justice to the feedback loops, the ambivalent appropriations and resistances that characterize the travels of theories, and theorists, between places in the "First" and "Third" worlds. (I'm thinking about the journey of Gramscian Marxism to India through the work of the Subaltern Studies group, and its return as an altered, newly valuable commodity to places like Durham North Carolina or Santa Cruz California in the writings of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakravorty, etc. When I began these notes Guha was a visiting professor at Santa Cruz.) Intellectuals such as Gayatri Spivak, Cornel West, Aijaz Ahmad, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chandra Mohanty, Renato Rosaldo, Said himself, the writers in this volume, to name only a few, move theories in and out of discrepant contexts, addressing different audiences, working their different "borderlands." Theirs is not a condition of exile, of critical "distance," but rather a place of betweenness, a hybridity composed of distinct, historically-connected postcolonial spaces. Lata Mani's essay in

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this volume is a case in point. A traveling theorist addressing audiences in both India and the United States, she risks misappropriation at every moment of speaking and writing.

Lukacs, Goldman and Williams had pretty clear notions of who would read them—a relatively stable audience. This is not true in a complexly literate, politicized, global system of cultural flows (the world of "public culture” currently being investigated by Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai, among others). Theorists such as Mani—indeed, with varying degrees of risk, all of us—are exposed to discrepant audiences in very different "locations." Historical or cultural theory written today must expect to be appropriated by readings, local experiences and political agendas from several "third world" and "minority" as well as feminist locations. If Said were expanding on "Traveling Theory” today he would no doubt grapple with such non-linear complexities. (Lukacsian Marxism in his essay seems to travel by immigrant boat; theory nowadays takes the plane, sometimes with round-trip tickets.) Said's work in the eighties, along with that of many postcolonial intellectuals moves between several locations, between first and third world, "central" and "marginal,"

places. Such traveling theorists see their productions as inescapably political, written against and for, in concrete situations of indentification, opposition, alliance. The "experiences" described and explained by theory are nonsynchronous, exclusive of one another in hierarchical ways. Theory is always written from some "where", and that "where" is less a place than itineraries: different, concrete histories immigration, exile, migration. These include the migration intellectuals into the metropolitan universities, to pass remain, changed by their travel but marked by places

peculiar allegiances and alienations.

of dwelling, of third world through or to of origin, by

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Location

Exercise

A placeon the map is also a place in history. (A. Rich) I've always felt slightly disoriented in Santa Cruz. Even after ten years. The sunsets are particularly disturbing. Here I am on The West Coast, yet the sun sinks into the ocean, off to my right, behind the land. That mountain in the view is not an offshore island but Monterey peninsula. We are looking south, across the arc of a wide bay. Ten miles up the coast, beyond the Northern lip of Monterey Bay, the shoreline turns from East-West to its proper coastal alignment. The setting sun behaves itself. I can stand on the clifftop or beach and look westward to the east, to China and Japan. The look is familiar. It poses no immediate perceptual problems. I know where I am, as Charles Olson said: "where we run Out of continent." In Santa Cruz I can never quite reconcile this "cartographic" location, on The West Coast, with the evidence of my senses registering more land "out there," and the sun going down to my right, behind the hill. There's a permanent discrepancy between the realities of map and experience, with the first always (never quite) overriding the second. Were I one of those people who situate themselves concretely, by means of the four directions. . . But I'm not. The map—the great abstract coast, the hemisphere—is more real to me than the local curve of shore. I'm "looking west to the east," despite my senses. This is where I am on the world I learned to represent to myself long ago puzzling over maps where California, Oregon, and Mexico occupied the margin, the last "continent" before a scattering of tiny islands and the map's left edge, an edge where mysteriously west stopped and started up again as east on the right hand side. I always wondered about the Aleutian Islands, connecting somehow the two edges, directions, of the world.

This orientation, perhaps particularly North American, looking west to the east, came to seem natural to me. Even its founding paradoxes—an east both "behind" and "ahead," past and future, near (at the Bosphorous) and far (across the Pacific), expelled and desired—made

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sense to me, as a Westerner. In Santa Cruz, looking west but seeing only south, I resent the everyday dis. . . occidentation.

South: the other half of Santa Cruz county: Watsonville, Castroville, lettuce fields, Latino migrants, . . . and drifting in, the new, nomadic, computer plants. I, my parents, my grandparents, did not come to this remote coast from China, Japan, the Philippines, Mexico, Guatemala, Samoa, Cambodia, Vietnam. . .

Before moving to Santa Cruz I lived in the center of the world. The center was the North-Atlantic Ocean—for the capitalist West what the Mediterranean had been for Europe, from Rome to the Renaissance—a body of water to gather around, a known space to travel over. My first homes were in New York City and Vermont (migratory map for a modernist intellectual). I studied and lived for a time in London, Philadelphia, Boston, Paris. My parents, born in Indiana, were Anglophiles. We travelled to and fro across the North Atlantic, by boat, book, memory, genealogy. White Anglo Saxon Protestants. To know who you are means knowing where you are. Your world has a center you carry with you. For the Oglala Sioux Black Elk, the Black Hills of North Dakota and especially Harney Peak formed the center of the world. Black Elk traveled to Chicago, New York, Paris and London. He also said that wherever you are can be the center of the world. Centers and borders, homes and other places, are already mapped for us. We grow, live across and through them. Locations, itineraries:

helping us know our place, our futures, while always having to ask. . . "Where WE run out of continent?" «

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Clifford Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility that matter, but movement: not where you are or what you have, but where you come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there. —C.L.R. James, 1901-1989