Discovering Others II

December 17: Discussion of Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapters 7 and 8, “Gender and Sexuality” and “Ethnicity.” We’ll conclude discussion of the book with chapter 9, “Asia Without Borders,” and in general wrap-up the seminar, in a special meeting, usual time and place, January 14. Students are reminded that seminar projects are due January 19.

Many thanks to all for making this a most enjoyable and rewarding 2004 seminar, and best wishes for the holidays and a happy and productive new year.

December 10: Discussion of Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapter 7, “Gender and Sexuality,” was postponed because of discussion that grew from excellent student questions and comments about multiculturalism, the nature of “Japaneseness,” and (again) essentialized national, racial, and ethnic identities. I tried to introduce the concept of cultural hybridity (or, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz refers to a related concept, cultural “syncretism”) as a useful antidote to misconceptions about essentialized identities. The following, for what it might be worth, is from my notes of June 14, 2003, in which Professor Sadria and I in the graduate Cultural Studies seminar addressed the concept of cultural hybridity not only as a genetic fact but also as an individual choice:

June 14, 2003: Presentation of an understanding of the concept of cultural hybridity. Many discussions of cultural identity are essentialist. Early feminisms essentialized woman-ness, early African-American studies essentialized Blackness. These essentializations formed identifiable constituted bodies, the lesbians of UCLA, the Blacks of Harvard, that in the social polity have served important functions, and have addressed important issues. But if we are not to be essentialist we must question the nature of these constituted bodies.

The idea of a mixing of cultures has always existed, and has been provided an important theoretical frame in Clifford Geertz’s concept of cultural syncretism. Cultures have always mixed. Our way of being in culture is syncretic from the start. Japanese culture is an excellent example of this, as is Chinese culture, as is any culture. Why, then, if we know that all culture is mixed culture, that all culture is syncretic, do we need a new emphasis on hybridity? Does the emergent emphasis on hybridity mark something new? From the 1960s to the end of the twentieth century discussions of such matters often focused on the concept of multiculturalism. Are we entering a new era, an era of cultural hybridity, that in some way extends our understanding of a syncretic multicultural society?

While we would not want to contend that multiculturalism is over or that the legitimacy of constituted identities has in some way been reduced, we would like to say that discussions of cultural hybridity in fact do refer to a qualitatively new element in the social polity. Along with obvious sorts of genetic hybridity—the “Negripino,” “Hinjew,” “Chino-Latino,” and “Blaxican” of the Kotkin and Tseng article we looked at, for example—this element of hybridity has to do with the rise of subjectivity in cultural mixing. Hybridity as understood in this way is not only a social or a genetic hybridity but an individual choice to cross the borders of a constituted identity, cultural hybridity as a personal strategy. In a multiculturalist understanding the constituted borders of cultural identity are not crossed, but we are living in an age, for the first time in history, in which these constituted elements of identity may be trespassed, and the social implications of this are profound.

Brief discussion, in this context, of Michel Maffesoli’s Les Temps des tribus (1988, The Time of the Tribes, 1996) and Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (1961, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963).

Homework: Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapters 8 and 9, “Ethnicity” and “Asia Without Borders,” pp. 162~192. We’ll discuss these along with “Gender and Sexuality” in the December 17 seminar. When you have finished reading these chapters, congratulations, you will have finished reading Asia: Cultural Politics in the Global Age.

Image of the Jaquelyn Thomas orchid, a hybrid, from plantoftheweek.org.

December 3: Enjoyable discussion (for me, at least) of Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapter 6, “Religion,” including discussion of the degree to which religion, or “religion,” ( or religion), in spite of ubiquitous claims that Japanese people “are not religious,” plays an important role in the lives of those of us who live in contemporary Japan (or “Japan”).

Interspersed with this was discussion of the idea of “tradition,” thanks to a good student question about whether I am trying to represent a point of view that suggests that “there is no Asian tradition.” My response in brief was (to quote myself from an e-mail response to the question):

I do not want to deny that tradition exists, in Asia and elsewhere—surely each place and each group of people has its traditions—but rather to say that there is no essential tradition to which we can return to find an essential Asia (or Japan, or Africa, or whatever it is). Culture has always already been mixed from the beginning, including the parts of culture that have been constructed by power / knowledge as “traditional.” I simply want to say that tradition is historically constructed, not some unchanging original essence that has always existed and that defines or determines who we are or who we may become.

I might add to this that a deep knowledge of any cultural tradition is always in all cases a good thing, and that I am troubled by the lack of knowledge of cultural tradition apparent in any discussion of the matter with Japanese students. But avoid the traps even as you begin (please) to learn of your own cultural traditions: 1) they are no more or less deep, mysterious, beautiful, or ambiguous than others (sit on a street corner in Calcutta or Sao Paolo or even Cincinnati and if your eyes are open you will learn of depth, mystery, beauty, and ambiguity); and 2) they are not something that determines your being or becoming, or into which you may retreat to escape the depth, mystery, and ambiguity of the contemporary world, in all its radical hybridity, heterogeneity, and interdependence.

Somehow in this discussion Samuel Huntington’s name emerged, and I suggested that at the very least Huntington’s understanding of the world is not unproblematic in the terms we have been discussing. In much of his writing he is, to be blunt, a cultural essentialist (and his essentialism is hardly “strategic” in Gayatri Spivak’s sense, since he is speaking from and for a hegemonic position). I am in agreement with Edward Said’s assessment, which may be found in, for example, Said’s 2001 essay for The Nation on Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations,” titled The Clash of Ignorance. Said’s essay under a different title appears also at Al-Ahram and the Arab Media Internet Network (AMIN), here and here. I quote from the last two paragraphs:

[Both] Muslims and Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads . . . . Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, is “very reassuring to the men and women who are stranded in the middle of the ford, between the deep waters of tradition and modernity.”

But we are all swimming in those waters, Westerners and Muslims and others alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history, trying to plow or divide them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis. “The Clash of Civilizations” thesis is a gimmick . . . , better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time.

Homework: Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapter 7, “Gender and Sexuality,” pp. 126~61, perfect timing for my suggestion that you open your eyes and attend Chizuko Ueno’s talk to the Cultural Studies Open Seminar on her important book Nashionarizumu to jenda— / Nationalism and Gender this Saturday the 11th at Korakuen.

Image of Bodhidharma by Fugai Ekun (1568~1654), Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Asian Art for the United States [sic.], from www.asia.si.edu; photograph of Chizuko Ueno by Mikio Shuto.

November 26: Good student presentations on Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapters 4 and 5, “The Information Age and the Global Economy” and “Globalisation.”

Homework: Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapter 6, “Religion,” pp. 100~125.

November 19: Further discussion of imaginative geography, national myths, essentialist reifications, and the poverty of reducing the heterogeneity of the world to a simple East / West duality. This followed by an excellent presentation on Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapter 3, “Globalisation.” We did not get to the presentation on chapter 4, “The Information Age and the Global Economy,” and so we’ll begin with that next week.

Homework: Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapter 5, “The Public Sphere,” pp. 86~99.

November 12: Excellent presentation on Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapter 2, “Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postcoloniality.” Discussion also, in response to a question last week, of the problematic nature of responding to colonialism (historical or psychological) with a turn to national or geographic (or racial or ethnic) “essences.” See, for example, this Essentialism page maintained at Emory University (which notes Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “strategic essentialism,” an idea I should have thought to mention in the seminar).

Homework: Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapters 3 and 4, “Globalisation” and “The Information Age and the Global Economy,” pp. 54~85.

As always, students are invited to this week’s Korakuen lectures, John Clammer, “Cultural Policy and Cultural Change in East Asia: A Comparative Perspective” (Policy Studies Forum, Tuesday evening the 16th) and Tin Tin Htun, “Cultural Mandate and Motherhood in Japan” (Cultural Studies Open Seminar, Saturday evening the 20th).

Image from oberlin.edu.

November 5: Good presentation and discussion of Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapter 1, “The Idea of Asia.” Also, a good question was asked after the seminar concluded. Please remind me to turn to that at the beginning of the November 12 meeting.

Homework: Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava chapter 2: “Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postcoloniality,” pp. 25~53. Also, now that you have read the Wikipedia entry on Globalization, please also have a look at the entry on Anti-globalization. We may or may not discuss these directly in the next week or two, but in either case they provide a good contextualization for our reading and discussions.

October 29: Student-led discussion of chapters 1~3 of Iriye. We’ll return to chapter 3 and turn to chapter 4 in the November 5 seminar, and shall follow this with student-led discussion of chapter 1 of Birch, Schirato, and Srivastava, “The Idea of Asia,” pp. 1~24 in Asia: Cultural Politics in the Global Age.

Homework: In addition to “The Idea of Asia” please have a look at the Wikipedia entry on Globalization, which provides a good overview of major themes connected with the subject. You might also want to look at the “Globalization” entry at the Japanese Wikipedia (which I cannot link to because it includes non-standard characters in the URL), although it is not nearly as detailed as the English entry.

October 22: Discussion of term projects, of the nature of a (national) discourse, and of the idea, adapted from Ezra Pound, that “the foreign eye sees what the native eye misses.”

Homework: Iriye, chapter 4, “The Cultural Foundations of the New Globalism,” and conclusion, “Toward a Cultural Definition of International Relations,” pp. 131~86.

The October 29 seminar will be a discussion of Iriye’s Cultural Internationalism and World Order, with student volunteers leading the discussion of each of the four chapters. Following Iriye our reading will be David Birch, Tony Schirato, and Sanjay Srivastava, Asia: Cultural Politics in the Global Age (Palgrave, 2001). The link to to US Amazon.com and will open in a new window.

October 15: We watched the Democracy Now DVD of Arundhati Roy’s August 16 lecture before the American Sociological Association, “Public Power in the Age of Empire.” You may read the full text of the lecture here, or listen to or watch it by clicking the links below the title on this page. Click the image at the left to go to a page of links to work by and about Arundhati Roy.

Homework: 1) be prepared to discuss the ways in which “Public Power in the Age of Empire” is related to the concepts of internationalism and globalization; 2) read Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order chapter 3, “The Separation of Culture from Internationalism,” pp. 91~130. Be thinking about a project for this term and beyond that will have you engaged in an international activity. (We’ll discuss the meaning of “international activity” in that sentence in an upcoming seminar.)

October 8: Class cancelled so that students could attend the lecture of Yôrô Takeshi.

Homework: Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order chapter 2, “The Origins of Cultural Internationalism,” pp. 51~90.

October 1: Discussion of the meaning of “international,” “internationalism,” “internationalist,” “transnational (-ism, -ist).”

Homework: Read and be prepared to discuss the introduction and first chapter of Akira Iriye’s Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) and if you are able please attend Professor Iriye’s lecture “Cultural Globalization in East Asia” next Tuesday evening October 5 in the Policy Studies Forum.

Be thinking about a project for the term that will engage you in some international activity. We shall discuss your ideas in the October 8 seminar meeting.

I’ll locate and make available next week the section of the UNESCO World Culture Report 2000: Cultural Diversity, Conflict and Pluralism that I mentioned, in which Japan is found to be #1 among the world’s nations in regard to “nationalistic feelings.”

September 24: Introduction to the seminar for prospective students.