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SPEAKING
FREELY
Asian-American melting
pot
By E San Juan, Jr
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
In this age of
unlimited wars for "enduring freedom", also known
as the neo-conservative Project for a New American
Century, one would expect that the public
perception of Asian-Americans - I prefer the term
"US Asians" to avoid any hint of unqualified
acculturation or assimilation - would now be past
stereotypes, myths and cliches. Not so. One
textbook easily splices the narrative of the
European "immigrant's quest for the American
dream" with the "the racial minority's"
victimization by "discriminating laws and
attitudes".
In a revealing analysis of
Judge Karlin's sentencing colloquy in the 1992
trial of Du Soon Ja, Neil Gotanda found that old
paradigms are alive and well amid the
reconfiguration of the planet's geopolitical map
and the passing of the "American Century".
Of course, the stereotype is no longer the
"yellow peril" of the "inscrutable Chinese" and
assorted Dragon Ladies, but the contagion of
Islamic "terrorists". There is also the imminent
threat of the dreaded Abu Sayyaf from Muslim
Philippines. In the three months after September
11, 2001, 147 Filipinos were deported from the US
back to the Philippines for various misdemeanors,
all manacled and chained during the flight,
treated as terrorists by Federal Bureau of
Investigation guards. To date, more than 500
Filipinos have been detained and deported under
the authoritarian, unconstitutional mandate of the
recently expanded USA Patriot Act. Meanwhile, the
Philippines has become the "second front" in the
war against global terrorism - and may be the
first as the insurgency winds down in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
By the year 2020, the
population labeled Asian-Americans in the United
States will number 20.2 million. Filipinos now
constitute the largest group - more than 3 million
of 12 million Asians in the total population of
over 281 million. (The 2000 Census of 2,364,815
doesn't include those who chose other ethnic
categories for compensatory reasons.) And yet
Asian-Americans still are considered pariahs:
consider the highly prejudicial treatment of
Chinese-American Captain James J Yee, the Muslim
chaplain at Guantanamo base prison, and
Arab-American translator Ahmad al-Halabi, not to
mention hundreds of Arab-Americans, Indians,
Filipinos and Pakistanis summarily arrested,
harassed and insulted, even killed after the
disaster of September 11 (see Rahul Mahajan's
inventory of these incidents in his book The
New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism, New
York, 2002).
Given the heterogeneity of the
histories, economic stratification and cultural
composition of the post-1965 immigrants and
refugees, all talk of Asian pan-ethnicity should
now be abandoned as useless, and even harmful,
speculation. Not so long ago, Professor Roger
Daniels stated the obvious: "The conglomerate
image of Asian-Americans is a chimera." This is
more true today. No longer sharing the common
pre-World War II experience of being hounded by
exclusion acts, anti-miscegenation laws, and other
disciplinary apparatuses of racialization,
Vietnamese, Cambodians and Hmongs have now
diverged from the once dominant pattern of
settlement, occupation, education, family
structure and other modes of ethnic
identification. (We don't even reckon with the
presence of Thais, Malaysians, Indonesians,
Bangladeshis, not to mention the Pacific
Islanders.)
Consider the recent case of
the Hmong, Chai Soua Vang, who stands accused of
killing six hunters and wounding two white persons
in Wisconsin last November. Now classified as a
"murderer", Vang is a 36-year-old driver, one of
about 100 shamans in St Paul, Minnesota's
immigrant community of 25,000 Hmong from Laos. The
Hmongs are now stigmatized as an alien, suspect,
threatening "minority" group in America's insecure
homeland.
After 1965, one can no longer
postulate a homogeneous Asian-American bloc -
except in fantasy. To use current jargon, the
bureaucratic and totalizing category
"Asian-American" has been decentered by systemic
contingencies to the point where today a cult of
multiple and indeterminate subject-positions is
flourishing. However, I have yet to meet a cyborg
or borderland denizen of confirmed US Asian
genealogy. Colleagues in the academic field of
ethnic studies have conjectured that if US Asians
are not fully assimilated (except for
Japanese-Americans who claim to be 200%
Americans), they will remain ethnicized at their
place of arrival, segregated by national identity
or homogenized as diasporic constituencies
manipulated by supranational powers in this era of
globalization.
Despite such changes,
versions of the "melting pot" theory are still
recycled to flatten out the politically
significant mutations within a patriotic dogma of
pluralism. A recent textbook entitled Asian
Americans has no hesitation predicting that
Asians will be easily absorbed in time. The trick
is the promotion of toleration via consumerist
"multiculturalism", backed by the economic power
of Japan, China and the once fabled Asian
"Tigers". This accomodationism, or if you like,
insurance against racist exclusion, refuses to
take seriously what I call the Vincent Chin
syndrome: political demagoguery in times of social
crisis can shift the target of scapegoating onto
any Asian-looking "object" that can reactivate the
sedimented persona of the wily, inscrutable,
shifty-eyed foreigner in our midst. This has
already been confirmed by the numerous arrests,
deportations and the unreported detention of
Arab-Americans and other suspects linked to Osama
bin Laden, al-Qaeda and other groups labeled
"terrorist" by the US State Department. As for the
highly touted multiculturalism in schools, it is
for the most part a refurbished version of white
supremacy, the enshrined cooptative formula for
peacefully managing differences among the
subalterns.
'American
exceptionalism'
Like the Native-Americans,
African-Americans, and conquered Latinos, Asians
in the US are supposed to be blessed by the fact
that the US was an exception to feudal-ridden,
colonialist Europe. In his 1972 path breaking book
Racial Oppression in America, Robert
Blauner repudiated the fallacy of subsuming the
diverse experiences of subjugation of people of
color under the immigrant model that privileges
the teleology of Eurocentric assimilation in
defining the character of the US nation-state. But
the specter of "American exceptionalism" has a way
of being resurrected, especially in periods of
crisis and neo-conservative resurgence.
Asian-American pan-ethnicity falls within
this conjuncture. It is one specimen of the
ideological recuperation of what I would call the
Myrdal complex after Gunnar Myrdal, author of the
famous The American Dilemma (1944), that
is, the presumed schizoid nature of US democracy
preaching equality but institutionalizing
exclusionary and oppressive practice, an
ideological tendency that plagues all utilitarian
thought, including its radical and pragmatic
variants (evidenced in the influential writings of
John Rawls and Richard Rorty).
Can the
fusion of all Asians in the US guarantee a united
front against discrimination? Despite its
reflection of a need for principled unity against
institutional racism, pan-Asianism concealed the
ethnic chauvinisms and class cleavages, hierarchy
and conflicts generated by the operation of US
racializing politics and its divide-and-rule
policies. As Glenn Omatsu has pointed out, the
"cultural entrepreneurs" of pan-Asianism turned
out to be agents for opportunist electoral
politics and brokers for the "get rich quick"
ethos, even while Asians (associated with the
competitive power of Pacific-Rim nations) are
collectively perceived as a threat by blacks and
other minority groups.
They begot the
post-1980s Asian neo-conservatives - selected
politicians became federal officials under the
Bill Clinton and George W Bush administrations -
who glorify the "model minority" stereotype while
nurturing the seeds for the Los Angeles explosion
of April 1992. In fact, these bureaucrats did not
prevent, and even downplayed, the virulent racial
attacks against Asians after September 11.
The more profound motivation for
pan-Asianism is the historically specific racism
of white supremacy toward Asians. Historian
Sucheng Chan notes, "In their relationship to the
host society, well-to-do merchants and poor
servants, landowning farmers and propertyless farm
workers, exploitative labor contractors and
exploited laborers alike were considered inferior
to all Euro-Americans, regardless of the internal
ethnic and socio-economic divisions among the
latter." Instead of valorizing ethnicity or
cultural difference per se, we need to concentrate
on the "racialization" process, its ideological
and institutional articulations, within the
framework of the capitalist world system. We need
to attend to the national/international division
of labor which provides the context to understand
ethnicization as, in Immanuel Wallerstein's view,
"the distinctive cultural socialization of the
work force that enables the complex occupational
hierarchy of labor (marked by differential
allocation of surplus value, class/status
antagonisms, etc) to be legitimized without
contradicting the formal equality of citizens
before the law in liberal-democratic polities".
Wallerstein points out that capitalism
gains flexibility in restructuring itself to
preserve its legitimacy, hence the unconscionable
exploitation of the multicultural workforce in the
Los Angeles garment industry, in the "free trade"
zones of Mexico, the Philippines, South Korea,
Malaysia and elsewhere. Ethnicity, then, is not a
primordial category that testifies to the virtue
of a pluralist market-centered system, but a means
utilized to legitimate the contradictions of a
plural society premised on racial hierarchy, also
called a "herrenvolk" democracy. What I would
stress is precisely the need to analyze the
racialization of ethnicized, class/gendered
identities (initially enslaved, conquered and
colonized) to avoid the trap of multiculturalism
as a peculiar US discourse of formalistically
reconciling cultural differences.
Inventing the
'Asian-American'
Recent scholarship on the
ideological construction of "whiteness" in US
history should illuminate the invention of the
"Asian-American" as a monolithic, standardizing
rubric. It is clear that the diverse
collectivities classified as Asian-American
manifest more discordant features than affinities
and commonalities. The argument that they share
similar values (eg, Confucian ethics once promoted
by Singapore's Lee Kwan Yu's ideologues), ascribed
"racial" characteristics, and kindred interests in
politics, education, social services, etc, cannot
be justified by the historical experiences of the
peoples involved, especially those who came after
World War II. This does not mean that US Asians
did not and do not now engage in coalitions and
alliances to support certain causes or cooperate
for mutual benefit; examples are numerous. In
fact, the insistence on pan-Asianism can only
obscure if not obfuscate the enduring problems of
underemployment and unequal reward ("glass
ceiling"), occupational segregation,
underrepresentation and class polarization
obscured by the "model minority" orthodoxy that
props up the American dream of success.
The recent focus (in the New York Times,
for example) on the persistence of social class
divisions up and down US mainstream society
highlights the erasure of Asians as well as other
subordinated groups. The notion of "meritocracy"
has been misleadingly deployed to promote
equal-opportunity policies once a pillar of
Keynesian welfare-state programs. Today, as Chris
Lehmann noted in The Boston Phoenix (June 30,
2005), "Right conduct and meritocratic worth" that
legitimate the status quo have not been able to
disguise the rapacity of the "free market". In
short, social diversity does not abolish class
distinctions nor alleviate the misery and
alienation of the majority of citizens.
Ethnic authenticity, to be sure, cannot
make up for class deprivation. Faced with the
racial politics of this new millennium, all talk
about fashioning or searching for an "authentic
Asian-American identity" and "reclaiming" our
history can only sound fatuous. More culpable is
the view that in order to transcend the Frank
Chin-Maxine Hong Kingston misrecognition of each
other, US Asian artists should utilize their
"ethnic sensibility to describe aspects of the
Asian-American experience that appeal to a common
humanity" - a plea for commodifying the formerly
"exotic" into plain American pie. The ubiquitous
troupe of reconfigured "Lotus Blossoms" and "Gunga
Dins", now of course sporting more fashionable
trappings, still dominate the traveling roadshows
of "Asian-American" cultural production today.
Incalculable damage has been inflicted by
a postmodernist skepticism that sometimes has
claimed to be more revolutionary than rigorous
research into internal colonialism, labor
segmentation, national self-determination, and so
on. One example of postmodernist chic is the
notion of transnational subjectivity, the Asian as
hybrid subject. It doesn't require Superman's
X-ray vision for us to tell that the paragon of
the diasporic subject as a postcolonial "hybrid"
often masks the working of a dominant "common
culture" premised on differences, not
contradictions. Heterogeneity can then be a ruse
for recuperative patriotism. The latest version is
the theory of "multiple identities" and "fluid"
positions of immigrants (for example, Filipino
Americans) straddling two nation-states assumed to
be of equal status and ranking in the world
system; such identities are unique because they
allegedly participate in the political economies
of both worlds. Can anything be further from the
truth? This notion of transnational citizenship is
obviously a paradigm based on the dynamics of
market exchange-value whereby all goods and any
commodified service (as the care of children and
old people by hired Filipina domestics) can be
made equivalent.
The status of the
transnational migrant, however, remains parasitic
on the superior nation-state (the United States),
belying its claim to autonomy and integrity. The
fatal mistake of the transnational model is
analogous to that of panethnicity: despite its
gesture of acknowledging political and ideological
differences, it assumes the parity of
colonized/dominated peoples and the US
nation-state in contemporary global capitalism.
The occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by "the
only remaining superpower" confirms its opposite
every day.
Ethnic conflict
The
concept of internal colonialism, or
neo-colonialism in the heartland, remains a viable
point of departure for understanding the nature of
US ethnic/racial conflicts. It is a truism that
for all neo-colonized subjects in the Western
metropoles, the process of survival involves
constant renegotiation of cultural spaces,
revision of inherited folkways, re-appropriation
of dominant practices, and invention of new
patterns of adjustment. All these embody the
resistance habitus of peoples attempting to
transcend subalternity. What is crucial is how and
why a specific repertoire of practices is enabled
by the structures of civil society, the state and
the disposition of the agents themselves. When
Filipinos, for example, construct the meaning of
their lives, they don't simultaneously conform to
and resist the hegemonic "free enterprise"
ideology. This implies a reservoir of free choices
that doesn't exist for most subjugated
communities. Indeed, the construction of Filipino
identity as a dynamic, complex phenomenon defies
both assimilationist and pluralist models when it
affirms its anti-racist, counterhegemonic
antecedent: the long-lived revolutionary
opposition of the Filipino people to US imperial
domination. This still remains true for
Vietnamese-Americans and Korean-Americans, not for
Japanese, Indians or Chinese, whose countries of
origin have now become models of neo-liberal
globalization.
New post-Cold War
realignments compel us to return to a historical
materialist analysis of political economy and its
overdeterminations in order to grasp the new
racial politics of transnationality and
multiculturalism. Samuel Huntington's thesis of
the "clash of civilizations" which replaced
ideology with culture should be read within the
framework of the US attempt to maintain its
hegemony amid the economic challenge of China and
the European Community. With respect to the
Asian/Pacific-Rim countries whose destinies now
seem more closely tied to the vicissitudes of
unequal exchange as well as indebtedness to the
World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
reconfiguring of corporate capital's strategy in
dealing with this area requires more astute
analysis of the flow of migrant labor, capital
investments, media manipulation, tourism, military
occupation, and so on. There are several million
Filipinos (chiefly women; 10 million Filipinos
work overseas as contract labor) employed as
domestics and low-skilled workers in Hong Kong,
Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Malaysia.
Their exploitation is worsened by the racializing
process of inferiorization imposed by the Asian
nation-states, including the Arab oil economies,
competing for their share in global capital
accumulation. The Western press then reconfigures
the Asian as a neo-social Darwinist denizen of
"booty" capitalism in the "New World
Order".
All these recent developments
inevitably resonate in the image of the Asian -
its foreignness, malleability, affinities with the
West, etc - that in turn determines a complex of
contradictory and variable attitudes toward
US-domiciled Asians. Such attitudes can be read
from the drift of the following questions: is
Japan always going to be portrayed as the
scapegoat for the loss of US jobs? Is China
obdurately refusing to conform to Western
standards in upholding human rights and opening
the country to the seductions of market
individualism? Is Chinese cheap labor the main
cause of US unemployment? Are Korean and Indian
merchants really that greedy and clannish? What
about "mail-order brides" from the Philippines and
Thailand as possible carriers of the AIDS virus?
Are the Singaporeans that barbaric? And despite
the end of history in this post-Cold War milieu,
will the North Koreans continue to be the paragons
of communist barbarism?
In this
international framework, Asians in the US remain
fair game for political contestation and
ideological rearticulation. Given the demographic
and sociopolitical rearrangement of US Asian
collectivities, we have not even begun to address
what Nancy Fraser calls the
redistribution-recognition dilemma, that is, how
political-economic justice and cultural justice
can be realized together by transformative means
instead of repackaging liberal nostrums so popular
among people of color in the mainstream academy.
As I have shown, the distribution issue is
paramount and conditions the imperative of
recognition. In short, the challenge of a radical
democratic critique still needs to be taken up as
we confront the disintegration of pan-Asian
metaphysics and transnationalist discourse amid
the realignments of nation-states and North/South
power blocs in this period of national
emergencies, terrorism, and global wars for
hegemony.
Historical
perspective
In this concluding section, I
want to focus on the Philippines as the scarcely
comprehended country of origin of more than 3
million Filipinos in the US, as well as of 10
million Filipinos scattered around the world as
low-paid domestics or contract workers. Knowledge
of its history and its fraught relation with the
United States can clarify the outright hostile, if
not suspicious, attitude of the dominant society
to this beleaguered, seemingly expendable
community.
A historical crux may generate
serendipitous insights into why and how the
Philippines became currently the major exporter of
"warm bodies" for hire. The Philippine-American
War of 1899-1902 was a brutal war, the "first
Vietnam" for many historians. However, most
textbooks devote only a paragraph, if at all, to
this period - a crucial stage in the construction
of the American national identity. Over 1.4
million Filipinos died, more than 8,000 American
soldiers perished, for the sake of "manifest
destiny" civilizing, what Rudyard Kipling called
the benighted "heathen", preparing him for
president William McKinley's "benevolent
assimilation" by rifles and grade-school lessons
in American English.
At the outbreak of
hostilities between US troops and native
revolutionaries, McKinley didn't know where the
islands were - officials joked whether the
Philippines was a brand name of canned goods or
some kind of pineapple. McKinley justified the
forcible annexation of the Philippines to a
delegation of Methodist Church leaders in 1899
with these words: "Since the natives were unfit
for self-government," McKinley intoned, "... there
was nothing left for [the United States] to do but
to take them all ... and uplift and civilize and
Christianize them." Samples of these natives who
would be uplifted by the puritan work ethic and
individualist self-help were exhibited as
anthropological specimens at the St Louis
Exposition of 1904, one of a series of industrial
fairs intended to project the global stature of
the United States as the fit successor to the
European imperial powers.
One of the
scandalous if censored incidents of the US
campaign to pacify the islands was the defection
of some African-American soldiers to the side of
the "enemy", the revolutionary Philippine
Republic. Soldiers fresh from the campaigns
against the Plains Indians considered the
Filipinos savages and "niggers" that needed taming
and domestication; reservation-like hamlets had to
be set up to cut short a guerilla war that was
becoming costly. Right from the beginning, it was
a thoroughly racialized war. The rhetoric and
discourse of that "civilizing mission", which had
earlier legitimized the genocide against the
Native-Americans, slavery of Africans and violence
against the indigenous Mexicans, continued up to
the time when thousands of Filipinos were
recruited for the Hawaiian sugar plantations after
the entry of Asian migrant labor then - Chinese
and Japanese - was banned in 1908 and 1924.
Objects of the policy called "benevolent
assimilation", Filipinos, the new "nationals" who
were neither citizens nor aliens but a hybrid of
sorts - post-colonial denizens avant le
lettre, were subsequently attacked by white
vigilantes in Yakima Valley, Washington, and
throughout the entire West Coast in the 1930s and
1940s.
We should insert here a reminder
that the famous Plessy vs Ferguson judgment took
place in 1896, two years before the outbreak of
the Spanish-American War. The system of apartheid
- not to be altered for half a century - was
finally given its legal imprimatur and then
extended to the annexed territories (Hawaii,
Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines).
Calling attention to the gap between the
idealized representation of democracy in foreign
adventure and its actual operations in the US
heartland reveals the authentic character of the
expanding nation-state as a racial formation. It
is one constructed on the basis of racial
segregation, hierarchy and violence. While the
claim of "Manifest Destiny", the American
messianic mission, and the reality of a racialized
system may appear incompatible, from a larger
historical perspective, that discrepancy is itself
the condition of possibility for the justification
of empire and the gospel of white supremacy at the
heart of the racial polity. We are seeing a repeat
of this process in the conquest of Afghanistan and
Iraq today.
The US racial order
A review of the political formation of the
United States demonstrates a clear racial, not
simply ethnic, pattern of constituting the
national identity and the commonality it invokes.
As many historians have shown, the US racial
order, following the logic of the expansion of the
free market, evolved from three or four key
conjunctures which, I submit, should be studied as
the core of any general education program: first,
the suppression of the aboriginal inhabitants
(Native-Americans) for the exploitation of land
and natural resources; second, the
institutionalization of slavery and the post-Civil
War apartheid or segregation; third, the conquest
of territory from the Mexicans, Spaniards (Puerto
Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam), and Hawaiians,
and the colonization of Mexicans, Filipinos,
Puerto Ricans; and, fourth, the subordination of
Asian labor, which continues in sweatshops in Los
Angeles, New York and elsewhere.
In the
shaping of the US national formation, the
necessary element has been the norm of racial
stratification, the sociopolitical construction of
racial hierarchy. This problematizes all
speculation about transnational citizenship and
transmigrant flexibility. I think all questions of
citizenship and individual liberties hinge on the
theorizing of "race" and its deployment in various
political and ideological practices of the state
and civil society. While chattel slavery is gone,
"wage slavery" is still with us. I am not denying
progress on the civil rights front. However, legal
scholar Lani Guinier argues that race continues to
be an organizing principle of the US nation-state,
now more purified as the security-conscious
"homeland". She holds that "majority rule is not a
reliable instrument of democracy in a racially
divided society ... In a racially divided society,
majority rule may be perceived as majority
tyranny."
While vestiges of scientific
racism exist, the political use of race as a
biological/anthropological concept is no longer
tenable. Ever since I came to this country in
1960, people always ask me: Where are you from? I
believe that Darwin has given that question a
generic answer. On second thought, the question
may be diagnosed as a symptom of the need to
affirm a measure of common value in the modern
milieu of alienation and reification. At present,
the anxiety of identity politics has been
superseded by questions of loyalty to the flag, to
the Christian market-centered dispensation and its
missionary quest for global supremacy.
Today, the problem of cultural ethos or
ethnicity has become the major site of racial
conflict. The notion of cultural diversity implies
that there is a norm or standard - call it the
American way of life, the common culture, the
great books, the canon, whatever - compared to
which the others (immigrants, refugees, emigres)
appear different, alien, strange, weird. Some
people become problems by the simple fact of their
existence.
No doubt, racial thinking still
pervades the consensual procedures of US society -
from the categories of the census to the
neo-conservative attack on affirmative action,
social safety nets and the gains of the civil
rights struggles. It has acquired new life in the
sphere of public, especially foreign, policy
whenever officials rearticulate the binary
opposition between us (citizens of Western
civilization) and them (the barbaric
fundamentalists, rogue states, terrorists of all
kinds). The common life or national identity rises
from the rubble of differences vanquished,
ostracized and erased.
The 20th century
began with, among other events, the United States
seizing territories in Asia, the Pacific and the
Caribbean inhabited by peoples with their own
cultures, economies and histories. It just ended
with the conquest of Afghanistan and the
continuing occupation of Iraq. The imperative of
modernization covered up for their loss of
sovereignty. The century began with the United
States becoming an imperial power that would,
after World War II, displace its old European
contenders and declare a Pax Americana of the free
market on the ruins of fascist Germany and Japan.
This peace, however, rested also on a neo-colonial
discourse in which the Western democracies
legitimized their mastery of the "free world" in
the crusade against communist (mainly Russian and
Chinese) despotism. But, as historians have shown,
this hegemony over nation-states (especially among
formerly colonized and now neo-colonized
countries) is always already predicated on the
continuation of the European narrative and vision
of world domination, on white supremacy.
The great African-American intellectual W
E B DuBois questioned the presumed universality of
American nationalism when he wrote in 1945, in an
essay entitled "Human Rights for all Minorities",
that black people in the United States were "a
nation without a polity, nationals without
citizenship". Liberals like Nathan Glazer and
Michael Walzer condemn any talk about national
autonomy, collective rights or empowerment of
communities, as inimical to the unity and
stability of the country. The "national question"
involving people of color in the United States,
which I think is the key to unlocking the race
question, remains still unanswered by all
participants in the culture wars, by relativists
and law-and-order folks alike. The "national
question" has been overtaken by patriotism and
allegiance to the besieged "homeland".
Meanwhile, the theme of global ideological
conflict has now been revitalized. It moves up to
center stage in a recasting of the Cold War as, in
Samuel Huntington's words, a clash of
civilizations. Primarily a war between the West
and "the rest". We need not prophesy the details
of this coming "war" within one world system of
transnational corporate business. In fact we all
live in one world where the World Bank and the IMF
occupy pride of place in the pantheon. We are
confronted every day in the media with scenes of
ethnic cleansing, earlier in Rwanda, Bosnia and
Kosovo, all over what was formerly the Soviet
Union, in Afghanistan, in the Sudan, Sri Lanka,
Indonesia and the Philippines. Racialized
antagonisms smolder in various parts of the world,
in Quebec, in Los Angeles, Texas, Chechnya,
Turkey, Haiti and elsewhere.
Scientific
racism colludes with Christian fundamentalism to
reinforce the foundations of the US racial polity.
With the propagation of the Murray-Herrnstein
notion of genetically defined intelligence, we are
once more surrounded with ideas first synthesized
by Comte Joseph de Gobineau in his book Essay
on the Inequality of the Human Races (1953-55)
and later elaborated by Social Darwinism, eugenics
and pragmatic utilitarianism. This paradoxically
co-exists with creationism and its positivist
variants. Its latest manifestation is, in my view,
the theory of common culture - the heritage of
Western civilization. It inheres in all
philosophies and policies that legislate a scheme
of general education for everyone based on a
narrative of development framed by the classics of
the canon, from Aristotle to Rorty and Jacques
Lacan. Whether formulated in terms of modernity,
progress, enlightenment, competency or individual
self-fulfillment, the old belief in "our
civilizing mission" persists, despite claims of
tolerance, liberal latitude, respect for cultural
diversity and so on. The aim of the cultural
literacy espoused by E D Hirsch, for example, and
assorted schemes of "general education" is to
reproduce the liberal self, now assuredly more
sophisticated and cosmopolitan, founded on
centuries-old strategies of domestication and
devaluation of others.
I express here a
view that may outrage defenders of tradition and
the accepted disciplinary boundaries - perhaps
evidence that despite changes and modifications on
the surface, the deep structures of habitual
thought and feeling remain entrenched. But what
are teachers and scholars for, asked James
Baldwin, if not to disturb the peace? While
critical of the meta-narrative of modernizing
progress (courtesy of the IMF/World Bank), I
should also say here that I do not count myself as
one of those postmodernist skeptics who believe
that everything is a manifestation of pure power,
discourse or textuality, arbitrary social
constructions whose truth-claims cannot be
adjudicated. After all, reality is what hurts ...
Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is celebrated today as the
accompaniment to the fall of the "Evil Empire" and
the triumph of liberal capitalist democracy.
Ishmael Reed, among others, has trumpeted the
virtues of America: The Multinational
Society. His term "multinational" continues
the thought of DuBois, the proponents of La Raza
Unida, and the theories of internal colonialism.
Ironically, however, Reed declares somewhat
naively that "the United States is unique in the
world: the world is here" in New York City, Los
Angeles, and so on. Reed, I suspect, doesn't mean
that the problems of the underdeveloped peoples
have come in to plague American cities. With this
figure of subsumption or synecdochic linkage,
America reasserts a privileged role in the world -
all the margins, the absent others, are redeemed
in an inclusive, homogenized space where cultural
differences dissolve or are sorted out into their
proper niches in the ranking of national values
and priorities. Anglo multiculturalism triumphs
again.
We thus have plural cultures or
ethnicities co-existing peacefully, without
conflict or contestation, in a free play of monads
in "the best of all possible worlds". No longer a
melting pot but a salad bowl, a smorgasbord of
cultures, the mass consumption of variegated and
heterogeneous lifestyles. There is of course a
core or consensual culture to which we add any
number of diverse particulars, thus proving that
our principles of liberty and tolerance can
accommodate those formerly excluded or ignored. In
short, your particular is not as valuable or
significant as mine. On closer scrutiny, this
liberal mechanism of inclusion - what Herbert
Marcuse once called "repressive desublimation" -
is a mode of appropriation: it fetishizes and
commodifies others. The universal swallows the
particulars. And the immigrant, or border-crosser,
such as Guillermo Gomez Pena or Coco Fusco, Latino
performance-artists, is always reminded that to
gain full citizenship, unambiguous rules must be
obeyed: proficiency in English is mandatory,
assimilation of certain procedures and rituals are
assumed, and so on and so forth.
Cultural
pluralism first broached in the 1920s by Horace
Kallen has been refurbished for the needs of the
refurbished Pax Americana. What the
multiculturalist orthodoxy (of left or right
varieties) of today elides, however, is the
history of the struggles of people of color - both
those within the metropolis and the peripheries.
While the political armies of racial supremacy
were defeated in World War II, the practices of
the liberal nation-state continue to reproduce the
domination and subordination of racialized
populations in overt and subtle ways. The
citizen-subject, citizenship as such, held to be
the universalizing virtue of the liberal
nation-state, remains defined by the categories
that govern the public sphere and the marketplace,
categories of race, geopolitical location, gender,
nationality, sexuality and so on.
Meanwhile, the highly touted concept of
civic nationalism, a framework for harmonizing
ethnic differences, is bound to reproduce the
racialization of identity and the processes of
stigmatization and marginalization witnessed in
the history of the sociopolitical formation.
Others who are different, inferior or subordinate
to us, are constructed to define the
rights-bearing subject of the liberal
nation-state; these others are excluded or
exteriorized - undocumented aliens, etc - to
establish the boundaries of the nation-state. In
the process, a fictive ethnicity of the nation as
its primordial guarantee emerges to validate its
legitimacy and naturalness.
Opposed to
those who insist on conformity to a uniform
monolithic culture, I am for the recognition of
the integrity and importance of peoples' cultures
and ways of life, and for their right to exist and
flourish. But how can this recognition of
multiplicity be universalized? I believe it cannot
happen within the existing global logic of
corporate accumulation. I believe that
multiculturalism, as long as it is conceived
within the existing framework of the hegemonic
nation-state or bloc of states founded on
inequality and hierarchy, cannot offer the means
to realize justice, fairness and recognition of
people's singular identities and worth around the
world. The multiculturalist respect for the
other's specificity may be the appropriate form of
asserting one's own superiority. This paradox
underlies multiculturalism as, in fact, the
authentic "cultural logic of multinational" or
globalized capitalism. So I am afraid the race
question will be with us in the next millennium as
long as the conditions that produce and reproduce
it are the sine qua non of the prevailing
social structures and institutional practices of
our everyday lives.
And so, amid the
erosion of the progressive socioeconomic and
demographic changes in the last quarter of the
20th century, the Asian presence in the United
States persists as a racialized, not ethnic,
other. Against this socially constructed figure,
the US national identity is founded and defined on
European civilization. One reason for this
persistence, as I have alluded to earlier, is the
immigrant paradigm subtending mainstream
historical accounts and its associated juridical
and popular discourses. Attempts to conceptualize
civic agency or citizenship through culture,
counterposing in the process a heterogeneous civil
society to a homogenizing state, only replicates
an obscurantist metaphysics that underwrites both
a parochial identity politics and its
postmodernist individualist fascination with
pleasure and the playful body.
Neither
pan-ethnicity nor transmigrant hybridity can, in
my view, resolve the crisis of the liberal, racial
polity based on white supremacy, whether implied
or overt. Without the analytic framework of a
history sensitive to the colonial history of
people of color, of Asians in their multiple
singularities, we cannot grasp the determinate
condition of possibility for the destruction of
racisms, both the desublimating and
multiculturalist kind, as well as other forms of
exclusion and marginalization sanctioned by the
homeland security state. Ideologies of difference
and subjectivity need to be critically elucidated
and their useful elements regrounded in the
realities of political economy and the changing
structures of institutional and disciplinary power
in the modern state. Ultimately, the problem of
globalization based on profit and the
unconstrained market need to be addressed. Only
then can we grasp the roots of the alienation and
reification of Asians in the United States, as
well as the oppression and exploitation of other
people of color in the most powerful military
nation on earth today.
E San Juan,
Jr is co-director of the Board of Philippine
Forum, New York City, and heads the Philippine
Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA. He
was recently visiting professor of literature at
the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and
professor of American Studies at Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Among his recent
books are Beyond Postcolonial Theory
(Palgrave), Racism and Cultural Studies
(Duke University Press), and Working
Through the Contradictions (Bucknell University
Press). Three books in Filipino were launched in
Manila recently: Himagsik (De La Salle
University Press), Tinik sa kaluluwa
(Anvil), and Sapagkat iniibig kita
(University of the Philippines). His
award-winning book of criticism, Toward a
People's Literature, is being re-issued by the
University of the Philippines Press.
(Copyright 2005 E San Juan, Jr)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
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