Excerpt:
The notion of ‘Chineseness’, consigned as it were to reside within the term ‘Asian’ in the “psycho-geography” (Morley and Robins in Ang 2001:129) of Australia’s “racial/spatial anxiety” (Ang 2001:126) invariably reverts to China as the mythic homeland whenever ‘curiosity’ raises the question “Where are you from?” This appears to be a common perception even in encounters with visitors to Australia. The invocation of this grand narrative that conflates national and cultural identity is illustrated when a fellow participant at the Asia-Pacific Triennial of 1996 posed this very question to me. He was himself a China national. Replying likewise in Mandarin, I told him that I was born in Singapore and studying in Australia. This was immediately met by the response, “Why don’t you return to China? China is your ‘Jia’! (‘home’)”.
At a recent official function to welcome another artist from China attended by a group of patrons and Asian-Australian artists, one of the hosts at the dinner party shared with us the following statement, “I always thought that I was an Australian; I did not know that I was Chinese till I was addressed as such”. A passionate discussion ensued centred around this diasporic experience, which was met with perplexity by our guest. The acute sense of marginality and in-betweenness felt by the Asian-Australian artists was obviously opaque to him, ‘outside’ his experience. He stated through an interpreter, “Why is there this issue of being Chinese or not Chinese? Race and culture is in your blood!” His statement was met with silence. Was it our guest’s intention to retrospectively restore ‘authenticity’ to our culturally ‘vacuous’ bodies with a dip into the fiction of race-blood equation?
Quoted in Ien Ang’s book “On Not Speaking Chinese”, William Yang, an Asian-Australian photographer and performance artist echoes this sentiment in a description of his first visit to China, “…. The experience is very powerful and specific, it has to do with land, with standing on the soil of the ancestors and feeling the blood of China run through your veins…” (Yang in Ang 2001:49).
These two visions of a kind of nationalist ecstasy conjure up an intercorporeal map of the ‘blood of nationalism/’Chineseness’ infusing and circulating within the bodies of its imaginary community collectively known as the ‘Chinese’ people. Be it in an artist from China invoking it outside China, or an artist from outside of China invoking it in China, Rey Chow asserts that this kind of race-blood equation is a “submission to consanguinity which means surrender of agency” (Chow in Ang, 2001:49).
Ien Ang disputes this equation of race-blood when she points out the flaws in this seductive narrative as one that attempts to “construct the subject as passively and lineally (pre) – determined by ‘blood’, not as an active historical agent whose subjectivity is ongoingly shaped through his/her engagements within multiple, complex and contradictory social relations which are over-determined by political, economic and cultural circumstances in highly particular spatio-temporal contexts” (ibid.).
If we return for a moment to the dinner party, the China-born artist sought to ameliorate the complexities of operating from a perceived diasporic off-centredness of the Asian-Australian artists by offering himself as a model of cultural certainty and centrality – the essence of ‘Chineseness’. Indeed, the signifier ‘China’ in Mandarin is pronounced as ‘Zhong Guo’ – which means the Middle Kingdom or as I have always interpreted, ‘Central Nation’. This ‘essence’ of ‘centrality,’ embedded in and ‘radiating’ from the very name of a nation appears to operate as an ideological cue in the unconscious of the individuals who collectively make up the master signifier ‘China’. Is cultural centrality a form of chauvinism in this context? More importantly, is the enunciator attempting to ‘reinstate’ China into the perceived ‘empty’ (neurotic) identities of his audience? Is he representing the State and by implication, complicit with the State? These utterances project speaking positions reminiscent of the roles of ‘ambassador’ and ‘convert’. By the same token, imagine for a moment the substitution of a Western geographical signifier and the enunciation of a text centred on the equation of race and blood performed by someone white.
Ang quotes Stuart Hall who problematizes this nationalist fiction of the “essentializing discursive shortcut” as a ‘Chineseness’ that is “torn from its historical, cultural and political embedding and lodged in a biological constituted racial category” (Hall 1996e: 472) thus causing “difference which have been constructed by heterogeneous diasporic conditions and experiences” to be “suppressed in favour of illusory modes of bonding and belonging”. Is the notion of cultural centrality a nostalgic gesture or even more interestingly, an inherited nostalgia if ‘China ’ re-in[states] its currency upon the individual when he stands “on the soil of the ancestors and feel[s] the blood of China run through [his] veins….” (Yang in Ang 2001:49) and by the same token, when re-presented by an authorised emissary on foreign soil?
The paired arrival of subjection and subjectivity enforced by the master signifiers “China” and “Chinese” attest not only to the relentlessness of the ideology addressing the Individual but also brings about the social existence of the corporeal body in the first place. To press on with this form of ideological interpellation, Judith Butler informs us,
We may think that to be addressed one must first be recognised,
but here the Althusserian reversal of Hegel seems appropriate:
the address constitutes a being within the possible circuit
of recognition and, accordingly, outside of it, in abjection.
(Butler 1997:5) (italics mine)
Oscillating around this doubling of subjection/subjectivity, the condition of abjectness, rooted in the Latin term ‘abicere’ – to throw or cast aside, shares an affinity with Heidegger’s “thrownness” in which we can question the world (the moment in history) we are situated in even though we did not choose (this moment) but find ourselves “thrown” into it.
Robbed of agency through a mode of address that violently interpellates the diasporic body via processes of racialisation, the diasporic subject is induced to submit to an ethnicity that is externally defined by physical markers. She undergoes a recurring mis-recognition of herself, positioned as she is, at the peripheral aura of the dominant ideologies, ‘Australia’ and ‘China, ‘thrown’ into abjection.
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End of Excerpt
Bibliography
Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese, Routledge, 2001.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech – A Politics of the Performative, Routledge, New York & London, 1997.
Chow, Rey. Ethics After Idealism (Theory – Culture-Ethnicity-Reading), Indiana University Press, 1998
Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions, Columbia University Press, 1995.
All copyright reserved by author: Suzann Victor 2006
