August 28, 2005
Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993.
Addressing topics as diverse and as reciprocally relevant as theory, pedagogy, feminism, literature, music, and the media, Writing Diaspora argues for a rigorous reappraisal of cultural studies. Chow is wary of the explosion of area studies and cultural studies in the Western Academy, noting that “cross-cultural” study, with its attention to difference, can in fact reinscribe colonial “othering” and risks remaining “trapped within a type of discourse that is geographically deterministic and hence culturally essentialist” (7).
The Orientalist, Chow writes, has a “special sibling” in the Western Academy called the Maoist. This Maoist is a “cultural critic who lives in a capitalist society but who is fed up with capitalism […] a supreme example of the way desire works: What she wants is always located in the other, resulting in an identification with and valorization of that which she is not/does not have” (10). Located geographically/psychically in the West, the Maoist masochistically generalizes non-Western cultures as uniformly “subaltern” and then uses these “subaltern” cultures “to flog an equally generalized West” (13). The desired effect is a kind of “self-subalternalization”—a self-victimization—that deprives “the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional import” (13). Thus, while seeming powerless, the Maoist (aligned, no matter what his or her racial identity, with the rhetoric of “white guilt”) is blindly and inextricably invested in oppression. Writing Diaspora, then, asks Western scholars to consider their position as part of a hegemonic power structure that resists neat national or transnational demarcations.
Following Michel de Certeau, Chow postulates a model for political intervention based on tactical, rather than strategic, solidarities. While strategies are spatial and belong “to those who are committed to the building, growth, and fortification of a ‘field,’” tactics are temporal and effective precisely because they lack a definable center (16). Rather than depoliticize or ignore specific injustices, Chow’s is “an attempt to broaden that politics to include more general questions of exploitation, resistance, and survival by using the historical experience of the ‘native’ as its shifting ground” (50).
In Chapter VI, “The Politics and Pedagogy of Asian Literatures in American Universities,” Chow critiques the academic marginalization of Asian Studies. As they stand, area studies and cultural studies address cultures in terms either of essential values or of cultural pluralism. Chow notes that “When scholars are departmentalized simply because they are all ‘doing’ ‘China,’ ‘Japan,’ or ‘India,’ what actually happens is the predication of so-called ‘interdisciplinarity’ on the model of the colonial territory and the nation-state” (133). Instead of this strategic repetition of an originally colonial geography, Chow suggests educators formulate tactical pedagogies along, for instance, ethnic as opposed to nationalistic terms. Ethnicity “signifies the social experience which is not completed once and for all but which is constituted by a continual, often conflictual, working-out of its grounds,” and holds the potential for providing “the new terms of criticism as well as reference” (143).