[Discussion] Culture and the Challenge of Globalization

[sule tarakcioglu]

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boye, ed. Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities,
Culture and the Challenge of Globalization. Explorations in Postcolonial
Studies Series. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. xxv +
317 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $78.50 (cloth),
ISBN 0-7914-5383-9; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 0-7914-5384-7.
*Reviewed by:* Desiree Lewis, Department of English, University of
Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.
*Published by:* H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/>
(August, 2004)
Freedoms beyond Dogma, Essentialism, and Domination

Based on a conference held at Stanford University in 1998, this book
draws together recent studies by prominent postcolonial scholars
including Abdul JanMohamed, Mary Louise Pratt, Robert Young, Edouard
Glissant, and a number of others. Although individual contributions
often raise a number of issues simultaneously, they are usefully
organized into sections that highlight three prominent areas within
postcolonial studies. These are: the relationship between postcolonial
theoretical formulations and the intricate processes they seek to
uncover ("Beyond Dichotomies"); the conceptualizing and theorizing of
identity ("Contested Places, Contested Self Ascriptions"); and the
analysis of how cultural texts and discourses are produced, circulated
and received ("Translating Places, Translating Ambivalence"). The
contributions make it clear that postcolonial explorations of identity
and patterns of cultural domination and contestation have always engaged
with the processes and subject positions that are increasingly being
linked to the term, "globalization." The explicit reflection on a term
originating in economics, then, is an index of its currency in
contemporary discourses, rather than an indication of the turn among
postcolonial theorists to substantively different subject-matter. This
attention also sheds considerable historical, cultural and political
light on a concept which, although often used, is also frequently
simplified or mystified. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes,
"globalization" is a "fuzzy word" (p. 3), with commentators often
limiting its complexity through the use of blunt generalizations or
convenient key words, or through silencing the many cultural exchanges
among different societies and cultures that have developed over several
centuries.

A pivotal strength of the book is the attention paid to debates within
postcolonial studies. Of particular importance here are contributions
that not only interrogate the neat binaries (for example, between
subject and object or self and other) that were popularized with early
postcolonial thinking in the seventies and eighties, but that raise the
pitfalls of work since the nineties. With the popularizing of studies of
creolization, hybridity and metissage, it has become almost pass=E9 to
contest the tendency within early theories of colonial discourse to
duplicate the binaristic logic they sought to contest. Ideas about the
fluidity, porousness and instability of all cultures and identities have
therefore become de rigueur. Yet the "new" language celebrating fusion
and inbetween-ness often erases power and struggle (highlighted with
great force in the writings of a theorist like Edward Said, for
example), and silences what Trouillot describes as "the past on a world
scale ... the continuous and deeply felt encounters that have marked the
last 500 years of human history" (p. 6).

Certain contributions also reflect a timely self-consciousness about the
fate of postcolonial scholarship beyond the academy. Scholars have
generally used terms like "othering," "hybridity" and creolization in
metaphorically rich and intellectually suggestive ways. Yet the concepts
can be reified or packaged in a manner that leads to the loss of their
symbolic resonance. Generally, then, the book offers valuable
epistemological reflections almost three decades after the publication
of the first wave of postcolonial scholarship.

While many of the contributions offer case studies and provide detailed
empirical reflection, the chapters in part 1 are more directly
theoretical in orientation. Of particular importance in this section is
the questioning of the idea that globalization, as a recent phenomenon
signalling a new moment in world history and international exchanges,
commences from the second half of the twentieth century. Trouillot's
"The Perspective of the World: Globalization Then and Now" argues that
"studies of globalization need to develop a global perspective," and
proposes a model of temporal stages (p. 7). For Trouillot, a first
moment commences with New World slavery and the industrial revolution,
so that a second, which starts from the middle of the twentieth century,
is distinctive because of the tremendous volume, influence, and speed of
global flows. Mary Louise Pratt's "Modernity and Periphery: Toward a
Global and Relational Analysis" is similarly attuned to the pitfalls of
identifying globalization as "new." Focusing on the critical study of
modernity by Third-World scholars, she develops a global and relational
account of it. This allows her to show that its definition and
theorization has been Western-centric, with many Third-World thinkers
totally redefining "modernity" and also questioning the conventional
distinctions that have been made between modernity and postmodernity.

Part 2 approaches globalization mainly from the perspective of identity
construction. The more powerful articles here highlight key theoretical
debates. Arif Dirlik's study of Chinese-American identity considers the
extent to which concepts that may start off as being oppositional have
been reified. He shows how easily the fluidity suggested by concepts
like "diaspora" and "hybrid" can be betrayed when they are instrumental
in policing and essentializing those who are not American nationals. In
the course of this discussion, he critically reviews the work of
theorists like Paul Gilroy and Homi Bhabha. Robert Young, by examining
identity politics in Britain, surveys the work of prominent scholars
such as Stuart Hall and Kwame Appiah, and raises provocative insights
about race and ethnicity. These empirically-grounded theoretical
reflections mark a shift away from the highly abstract and dense
postcolonial scholarship--associated especially with Edward Said,
Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha--of the eighties. They indicate the
extent to which scholars are focusing increasingly on how theory can
explain specific cultural and historical patterns, rather than on the
dextrous elaboration of theory. It is noteworthy here that the
relatively plain register of most of the contributions differs
strikingly from the dense and esoteric register of early postcolonial wor=
k.

In the third section of the book dealing with the circulation of texts
and discourses, Emily Apter demonstrates how translation can lead to
caricature, the reinforcing of stereotypes, and a situation where
publishers, booksellers and readers end up feeding off the translated
and stereotypical otherness of marginal writers' texts. Her question
cautions against any automatic celebration of the current popularity of
Third-world writing in the West: "what happens to ethnic and national
literary voice in the global literary market once that voice has become
a reguionally dislocated, overtranslated caricature if cultural affect"
(p. 198)?

Reading against the grain of Apter's sceptical take on translation,
Walter Mignolo and Freya Schiwy propose translation as a metaphor for
the movement beyond stultifying binaries, and argue that "if English is
the hegemonic language in a transnational world, it shall also be the
transnational language in which positions of subalternity can be
rearticulated" (p. 279). The conversation between Apter on one hand, and
Mignolo and Schiwy on the other, is a direct example of the richness of
the debate that the book as a whole offers. Another highlight in section
3 is Ali Behdad's study of American anti-immigration sentiment. He
persuasively argues that anti-immigrant consensus has always been deeply
embedded in the American national consciousness, and that "discourses of
immigration have made the ambivalent concept of the nation-state
imaginable in America" (p. 204). In view of the powerful expressions of
xenophobia in the United States after September 11, the argument is
enormously suggestive.

Overall, the book marks a crucial moment in the history of postcolonial
studies. Because it maps out important theoretical and conceptual
territory to date, it is likely to be of considerable interest both to
researchers who are familiar with postcolonial scholarship, and to
students who are fairly new to the field.

While the book offers a critical retrospective appraisal, it is also a
reminder of the valuable perspectives and analytical tools that
postcolonial studies have offered. Edouard Glissant's keynote address
for the 1998 conference, "The Unforseeable Diversity of the World,"
which concludes the anthology, powerfully conveys the wealth of this
legacy by evoking the intellectual and political quest that postcolonial
theorists have consistently pursued through interrogating the
complexities of cultural and discursive domination. Glissant offers the
concept of "worldness" as an alternative to globalization, defined as
the "reduction to bare basics, the rush to the bottom, standardizaton,
the imposition of multinational corporations with their ethos of bestial
... profit" (p. 288). In this way, he affirms cultural and intellectual
growth in relation to others not on the basis of the domination of any
one person or group by another, but on the basis of "change through
exchange with others" while being "viscerally attached to the origins of
the histories of our particular communities, our cultures, peoples, or
nations" (p. 287).

Glissant's article, maybe especially because its poetic style differs
from the more academic style of the other contributions, compellingly
conveys the idealism that has always been central to postcolonial
scholarship. While the commodification of knowledge and ideas, and
powerful legacies of essentialized thinking may lead to the distortion
of many postcolonial formulations, scholars have consistently searched
for ways to articulate freedoms that lie beyond dogma, essentialism and
domination. This book is a topical, comprehensive and encouraging
testimony of these searches.

Library of Congress Call Number: D883 .B48 2002

Subjects:

    * Globalization.
    * Social sciences.
    * History--Philosophy.
    * Cultural policy.
    * Africa--Civilization--Philosophy.
    * Developing countries--Social conditions.