LESSONS IN CULTURAL LEGITIMATION
Growing up in British Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, I am probably one of few “postcolonial” intellectuals working in the North American humanities academy today who can lay claim to having been subjected to a genuinely classic colonial education. There are many possible ways to define the nature of this “classic” quality, but in my case it was distinguished by the peculiar intellectual choices I made from an early age on. Unlike many of my friends who, under family pressure or out of personal preference, had gone into medicine, law, accounting, engineering, computer science, banking or business management, I decided I was going to pursue language and literature studies. However, although I had received a fair amount of formal education in the Chinese language and its literature, my favourite subjects from secondary school (where we had to decide whether to go into the “arts” or “science” stream at around age 15) to what was known as the “Advanced Level” or matriculation were English language and literature. Because I had the fortune of having had some very good teachers, I was, by the time I entered university, sufficiently acquainted with the theoretical method of reading literature known as New Criticism. As an undergraduate at the University of Hong Kong, my curriculum included Comparative Literature (European fiction and drama of the modern period since the seventeenth century) as well as English literature (from Chaucer to the early decades of the twentieth century); it also included an introduction to structuralism and the fundamental issues in poststructuralist theory. It was in order to further my knowledge of poststructuralist theory that I embarked upon graduate studies in the United States—even though my institution, Stanford University, was perhaps not the perfect match for my intellectual ambition at the time, and I was repeatedly told throughout my time at Stanford that I must have come from or should have gone to Yale. If I was working with a theoretical commitment in my early graduate student years, it was a commitment to the possibility of radicalising the concept of literature (and by implication, the concept of the literary “work” per se), a possibility that I had learned by way of poststructuralism’s problematisation of the sign. Politically, this also meant the exciting possibility of historicising the methods of reading—specifically, those of New Criticism—in which I had been trained since secondary school, and of calling into question the Anglo-Americanness of such methods.
Although I had a substantial grounding in the standard Chinese language and modern Chinese literature, as well as a fair acquaintance with premodern Chinese poetry, prose and fiction, Chinese was not my chosen option of formal study during the undergraduate and graduate years. In retrospect, I would attribute this decision not to specialise in Chinese as the overdetermined outcome of the “classic” processes of cultural legitimation and subordination that are typical of the colonial experience.
As a first approximation, cultural legitimation may be defined as a procedure in which a first set of terms acquires validity and significance—becomes “viable” and “real”—through a second set of terms. Events, including the event of the production of knowledge, usually do not become “legitimate” until and unless they are being reinforced by other events that provide the grounds or terms of their validation or justification. What interests me about postcolonial studies, then, is the manner in which it addresses this recurrent but none the less historical two-part structure of cultural legitimation, in particular as such legitimation pertains to the dissemination and acquisition of knowledge.
To this extent, I have not found some of the highly visible controversies over “postcolonialism” to be very challenging. For instance, the endless debates about the infelicity of labelling (that is, why we should or should not use the term “post-colonial”), the dogmatic chastisements against “third world” intellectuals’ “postcolonial aura” as something complicit with the evil forces of global capital, and the well-intentioned attempts to distinguish the ontological and philosophical status of postcolonialism as such from other ideologies such as postmodernism—such controversies appear to me to obfuscate or trivialise the historical import of the emergence of postcolonial studies, which has many genealogical affinities with the radical implications of Marxism, deconstruction and feminism. My own attention to postcolonial studies stems rather from an attempt to trace these affinities, especially in terms of the types of critical questions postcolonial theory enables us to ask.
If my multi-level educational experience in Hong Kong accounted for some of the origins of my intellectual trajectory, these origins were deeply immersed in lessons of cultural legitimation, and perhaps only those who have lived through the colonial experience on a day-by-day level would recognise the subtle mechanisms of the processes involved. In this light, it is instructive to remember how the predominant native/local “culture”—the Chinese—was handled by the British administration in comparison with the coloniser’s—the British (and by extension, Western European cultures in general) in colonial Hong Kong. To say that Chinese culture had been made unavailable, or simply wiped out or disallowed, would be inaccurate. (For instance, in what comes across as a gross simplification of how colonialism, especially British colonialism, worked, many intellectuals from the People’s Republic of China assume mistakenly to this day that only English was used in Hong Kong’s schools.) Instead, what needs to be emphasised is that Chinese culture was never eradicated tout court but always accorded a special status—and that this was actually the more effective way to govern. During the era when I was in secondary school (1970s), English was the mandatory medium of instruction in Hong Kong’s Anglo-Chinese schools (there were also Chinese schools where Cantonese was the medium of instruction), but Chinese language and literature, and Chinese history were also possible subjects (for public examinations). The native culture, in other words, continued to be taught (all the way to university and postgraduate levels) and allowed a role in the colonised citizens’ education. Rather than being erased, its value became “specialised” and ghettoised over time, precisely through the very opportunities that were made available for its learning. Albeit not a popular one, the study of Chinese remained an “option.” It was in this manner that British colonialism avoided the drastic or extremist path of cultural genocide (which would have been far too costly anyway) and created a socially stable situation based on the pragmatist hierarchisation of cultures, with the British on top and the Chinese beneath them. To study Chinese was never against the law but was simply constructed as a socially inferior phenomenon. Racism was indeed very much in operation, but it was a racism that had turned race and culture into class distinctions, so that, in order to head toward the upper echelons of society, one would, even (and especially) if one was a member of the colonised race, have no choice but collaborate with the racist strategies that were already built into the class stratification informing the management, distribution and consumption of knowledge.1
Clearly, being somewhat of an idealistic bookworm, I was not interested in the more lucrative trades and professions, but the intellectual path I had chosen (that of abandoning the option of Chinese after my “A” levels), like that of most young people in Westernised Asian countries, was still largely in conformity with the opportunities of upward social mobility that were made available and endorsed by the political system at large. (Typically, a university degree in English, History, or other humanities disciplines was the key to a respectable and prestigious job in the government bureaucracy.) To assert anything less material-value-conscious would be disingenuous. Subsequently, it was only in my period as a graduate student in the US that I became interested in using the knowledge and experience in Chinese literature that I had all along for serious scholarly purposes. But even that, I would emphasise, was by no means a straightforward development. It was simply not the case that, once in the West, I saw the light, realised the flaws of my colonial education, and rediscovered my “own” ethnic culture. It was simply not a case of a born-again conversion experience.
The path toward the study of Chinese culture, too, was mediated by the West, except this time it was mediated by my ongoing commitment to poststructuralist theory, which, at the same time that it deconstructed the logos, also brought about a heightened sensitivity to difference. During the latter part of my graduate student years, my interest was no longer simply in radicalising the methods of New Criticism. From the critique of structures, it had shifted into an interest in genres of writing that fragmented, exceeded or simply became non-confinable within accepted historical or literary paradigms. Put in an alternative manner, poststructuralist theory had led, in my case, to a concern with difference, and this concern with difference quickly developed into a concern with forms of difference—generic, sexual and cultural. It was this kind of theoretical preoccupation—firmly from within a Western literary training—that finally directed my attention (back) to a more systematic study of modern Chinese literature and culture.
But the cross-over from English and Comparative Literature to Chinese was by no means simple: it was not a mere matter of switching from one language area into another because, as anyone working in non-Western cultures knows, the study of these cultures already has well-established and at times obstinately defended territorial boundaries. Thus, one cannot embark on the study of the literature of modern China, say, without somehow running up against all the strategies that have long been in place to protect it against the invasion by “aliens”—those who do not have or are not undergoing advanced formal training in Chinese—such as myself. (Ever since my work became known, for instance, there have been claims by various sinologists that I do not actually know Chinese or have real knowledge about China and Hong Kong.)
At the time I turned to the study of modern China (in the mid-1980s), and specifically to the study of a popular type of literature produced in the early twentieth century known as “Mandarin Duck and Butterfly” literature, China study in the US was still predominantly organised within the parameters of “area studies” that had been established during the Cold War years. China experts tended to be either conservative or leftist in their politics—the former being people who identified more or less with the official ideological position of the US government; the latter often being those who had chosen their fields of specialisation during the 1960s and 1970s, when China represented that inaccessible (and hence idealised) “third world difference” to the mainstream values of materialistic America. Whether lodged in convictions of the right or the left, the terms of legitimation provided for the study of China in the US were largely in accordance with US foreign policy vis-à-vis communist countries, which required that a place such as China be subject to political, military and cultural surveillance in the form of an enemy-to-be-deciphered. In hindsight, even those whose political idealism had led them to defend the merits of Chinese culture were, I think, partaking of a kind of knowledge production the benefits of which accrued to themselves rather than to their objects of study, the Chinese people, an entity which was held at a distance and which remained an abstraction. This was still the time before significant numbers of ethnic Chinese (especially those from the PRC) burst on the scene as job seekers equipped with American PhDs; the academic enterprise of studying China—as a “foreign” culture—remained by and large in the hands of white China specialists. This enterprise was secured along an untroubled dividing line between the “object” and “subject” of study: China and the Chinese were objects to be explored and investigated, while the subjects weighing the pros and cons of these objects—that is, doing the work of evaluation—were Western.
In spite of the Maoist aspirations of some of its practitioners, China studies in those years was hardly connected with the issues of colonialism and postcolonialism. It was as if, their idealism notwithstanding, once they were confronted with the modern culture of China, even the left-leaning China specialists collaborated with their right-wing countrymen and adopted the language of cultural exceptionalism, completely obliterating the fact that modern Chinese history itself was part of the non-Western world’s prolonged humiliating encounter with the West for the past 500 years. Today, with postcolonial theory becoming a trendy thing among white specialists of the non-West, including white China specialists, and with ethnic Chinese intellectuals (inside and outside China) becoming alert to the implications of colonialism and imperialism, it seems almost unthinkable that things in the past could have been so different, but it is sobering to bear in mind that, merely a decade ago, the study of China and the articulation of postcolonial issues existed in entirely unrelated intellectual universes.
So what and how exactly does postcolonial theory contribute to China study? I believe I have been providing some answers to this question, beginning with the publication of my first book, Woman and Chinese Modernity (1991). In the study of the non-West, what may appear to be a two-part structure in the process of cultural legitimation involves a third element, namely, the people who are carrying out such study—and the biases that accompany their perspectives. This, essentially, is the lesson from Edward Said’s Orientalism, the foundational text for postcolonial studies. Much of the critical inquiry that follows Said’s lead, then, has been produced in the spirit of questioning the legitimacy of this kind of European representation of the non-West, a representation that often reduces members of the non-Western communities that are being “studied” to silence. Once it is no longer possible to ignore representation as an act initiated by parties with definite self-interests, questions of who can represent whom inevitably follow, ultimately leading to the realization that perhaps the most underprivileged classes do not have the right to represent anything, not even themselves. The implications of these questions constitute the focus of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Taken together, the works of Said, Spivak and other postcolonial critics account for a paradigm shift in the type of question being asked of the previously colonised world—from merely what is being “studied” to who it is who is doing this “studying.” And, once the question of who is added, we have obviously left behind the more taxonomic categorisations of cultural difference and entered the complex realm of the subjectivities involved in any engagement with cultural difference. Hence, the poststructuralist specialisation in deconstructing language becomes, by necessity, supplemented by considerations of language as acts that originate from “subjects,” and the more straightforward analyses of textual nuances are obliged to come to terms with what may be called identity politics.
As I now look back on my own intellectual trajectory, it is possible to say that the preoccupation with cultural difference, which made me pay attention to questions raised by postcolonial theory, provided the preliminary grounds for working out a new set of terms for the study of modern China. These new terms include—indeed foreground—what was hitherto precluded: the experience of China as part of a larger world history, in which the forces of Western imperialism and colonialism, at the same time that they mandate modernisation in non-Western countries, have left indelible, discernible ideological imprints on various forms of cultural production such as literary writing and film-making. To see China in these postcolonial theoretical terms is, ultimately, to wrest it from a long orientalist tradition, in which the fraught realities of Chinese modernity are characteristically understood as the continuations of or aberrations from a pure native tradition. To this day there remains, among China scholars of high institutional standing, an entrenched habit of writing whereby the consideration of Chinese history, even modern Chinese history, is methodologically confined within strictly “Chinese” events in such a manner as to downplay or omit entirely the coercive role played by the West. In the ostensible guise of not diverting attention to non-Chinese issues, such sinocentric historiographic and literary habits in fact collaborate in the perpetuation of a kind of imperialistic gaze at China as object, and postpone the need to confront the racial implications of such a gaze.
Despite its incessant and often unpleasant interrogations of “who is doing what to whom,” then, I believe identity politics should be recognised as having made a substantial contribution to fundamentally reshaping our assumptions about knowledge. In this regard, many of the notions that have acquired great currency in the realms of cultural studies and postcolonial studies, such as “hybridity,” “performativity,” “migrancy,” “diaspora,” and their affiliates, can all be seen to have taken off from a certain kind of identity politics. Rather than understanding identity in terms of stable reference points, the theorists of these notions have collectively shifted the conceptualisation of identity to an epistemological paradigm in which it is liminality, instability, impurity, movement and fluidity that inform the formation of identities. While the merits and demerits of this new type of theorisation must be debated on a different occasion,2 my point is simply that these notions are part and parcel of new discursive practices which are drastically transforming knowledge by stubbornly focusing our attention on what has hitherto been cast outside the boundaries of what can be known.
Michel Foucault wrote in The Order of Things that Man is not an eternal but a rather recent historical phenomenon, who arose with the steady fragmentation of the modern world into compartments of intelligibility known as the “disciplines”— such as biology, archaeology, literature, economics, and so forth.3 The most important part of Foucault’s argument is that “knowledge” itself is not a given but rather an outcome of shifting historical relations of representation. Specifically, these relations involve two parallel, though seemingly paradoxical, sets of developments. The first is an increasing exactitude that accompanies the scientific objectification of the world. Knowledge, in other words, is a matter of a progressive detailing in methodology, of being able to capture things instrumentally in as precise and meticulous a manner as possible—as facts, data, information. Simultaneously, however, the linkages between observable phenomena and the evolving historical conditions which produced them have become increasingly elusive or hidden. As the world becomes more visible and observable, it has also become largely symptomatic. To probe its “causes,” which are no longer readily understandable, more and more interpretation is needed. But the criteria for such interpretation are themselves far from being continuous or natural; instead, they are constantly being reinvented and reconceptualised. Hence, the attempt to render the world as a knowable object is paralleled by increasingly abstract, theoretical processes of explanation and justification—in what I have been referring to as cultural legitimation.
Postcolonial studies furthers Foucault’s arguments by foregrounding a dimension he did not broach—that of race and ethnicity.4 Once this dimension has been restored to the picture, the increasing “objectification” of the world that Foucault so eloquently elucidates can be historicised as part of the ongoing imperialist European agenda for transforming the world into observable and hence manageable units, and the intensification of abstract theoretical processes, too, must be seen as inseparable from the historical conditions that repeatedly return the material benefits of such processes to European subjectivities. The terms of postcolonial studies thus help accentuate the binarism of objectification and theorisation introduced by Foucault in the following manner: some humans have been cast as objects, while other humans have been given the privilege to become subjects. Once we see this, Foucault’s point that Man is a recent historical invention begins to make perfect sense—but less because of the emergence of disciplinary knowledge per se than because the objectification-theorisation mechanism that is constitutive of disciplinary knowledge is, arguably, best exemplified in the colonial experience, whereby “Man” is epistemologically as well as practically divided into object and subject on grounds of racial and ethnic difference. If Man is a historical invention, it is because he is a Western invention, which relies for its inventiveness—its “originality” so to speak— on the debasement and exclusion of others. And it is these debased and excluded others, the “men” who were at one time considered not quite Man enough—not only because they had been banished to the European madhouses, prisons and hospitals that Foucault investigated, but also because they happened to be living as subordinates within the European colonial apparatus—who are now swarming around the disciplinary boundaries between subject and object. In the presence of these other “men,” Western Man is now (to borrow Heidegger’s famous verb for being) thrown back to his proper place in history, where he, too, must be seen as object.
Although the questions brought about by identity politics are an ineluctable part of postcolonial studies, therefore, postcolonial studies itself is not reducible to identity politics. My brief allusion to Foucault above is meant to emphasise the genealogical affinity postcolonial theory shares with the development of abstract theoretical thought in the modern world in general. In an age that is driven by the utilitarianism, pragmatism and anti-intellectualism of corporate interests, it is, I think, crucial to underscore this point and keep alive the theoretical edge of postcolonial studies. (In other words, I do not believe that the familiar move of pitting “concrete reality” against “abstract theory” will in the long run do postcolonial studies any good.) This is not to say, of course, that postcolonial studies should not continue to remain on the alert vis-à-vis the tendency toward imperialism on the part of many Western theorists as the latter claim to go “global.” Indeed, it is the inextricable mutual entanglement of both kinds of practices—that of being sophisticatedly theoretical and that of being vigilant against the many guises of imperialism—that makes postcolonial studies such an intellectually exciting event. Yet precisely because of this two-pronged nature of its articulation also, postcolonial studies is potentially disturbing, and forces of subordination and delegitimation are at work even as the field gathers momentum.
I was informed recently by a white graduate student that she had been discouraged by her adviser (a white academic who advocates the need to “globalise” Western theory) from pursuing postcolonial studies because she was not a person of colour. This kind of information, being anecdotal in nature, does not really constitute any concrete source of “scholarly” evidence, but anecdotes like this do convey some sense of the reality of which they partake. What may be safely deduced from my student’s report is a general (mis)perception that postcolonial studies is or should remain the exclusive domain of “peoples of colour”—perhaps specifically of those who have gone through, or whose ancestors have gone through, the experience of colonialism. What is alarming is the imperialist strategy of ghettoisation that is thus skilfully being deployed to restrict a field—in this case, in the guise of benevolent professional advice to a student who in fact has a strong and legitimate interest in postcolonial issues. If enough of this kind of advice is given and taken, then the fate of postcolonial studies would probably become, indeed, that of a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the status of something that is untouched by white people, and reproduced and circulated only among so-called “peoples of colour.” Should that happen, it would, in effect, have been successfully delegitimated as a viable field of study, while the blame for its loss of credibility could, once again, be comfortably laid at the door of the “peoples of colour” and the acrimonious identity politics they bring to the study of the postcolonial world. (To the credit of my student, she had, entirely on her own initiative, already decided to change advisers by the time she reported this incident to me.)
What this little anecdote indicates is the familiar pattern of a vicious circle that haunts the emergence of an area of intellectual inquiry the point of which is precisely to query injustice—not only the injustice of the suppression of certain groups of peoples and their histories but also the injustice of established institutional processes of cultural legitimation. Emerging as a response to the massive inequities created by the historical phenomena of European and American imperialism and colonialism, postcolonial studies, even as it rigorously addresses such inequities (by drawing on identity politics, for instance, in addition to the many theoretical attempts to transform the boundaries of accumulated knowledge), may in the end be delegitimated by the very historical conditions that propelled it into being in the first place. Perhaps, like the study of things Chinese in British Hong Kong, post-colonial studies need never be eradicated entirely but could simply be channelled into a second-class or third-class “option” with a socially inferior status in the grand scheme of the “global” production of knowledge.
For these reasons, postcolonial studies cannot, to my mind at least, be regarded simply as yet another new, fashionable kind of theoretical framework (that may eventually be supplanted). Rather, I think of it as a kind of scholarship that has the capacity for keeping alive the questions of disciplined knowledge, on the one hand, and those of the continued conditions of inequity—the class implications—that accompany such knowledge as it seeks to deal with racial, ethnic and cultural difference, on the other. For me, the “postcolonial difference” remains the lesson in cultural legitimation it teaches. All knowledges are created equal—but some are more equal than others.5