<documenta X><blast> neocolonialism
Masao Miyoshi (blast-agent@forum.documenta.de)
Thu, 25 Sep 1997 17:55:33 -0400
Once again, we are sanitizing our academic discourse on the ongoing
political conditions - this time around TNCs and their eager host
governments. We might even be masking a secret nostalgia, as we devote
our scholarly attention to "postcoloniality," a condition in history
that is safely distant and inert, instead of seeking for alternatives in
this age after the supposed end of history. Similarly, multiculturalism
suspiciously looks like a disguise of transnational corporatism that
causes, of necessity, havoc with a huge mass of displaced workers
helplessly seeking jobs and sustenance. Los Angeles and New York, Tokyo
and Hong Kong, Berlin and London are all teeming with "strange looking"
people. And U.S. academics quite properly study them as a plurality of
presences. But before we look distantly at them and give them over to
their specialists, we need to know why they are where they are. What
are the forces driving them? How do they relate to our everyday life?
Who is behind all this drifting? The plurality of cultures is a given
of human life: "our own tradition" is a fabrication as it has always
been, everywhere. It is impossible not to study cultures of others; the
American curricula must include "alien" histories. But that is merely a
beginning. In the recent rise in cultural studies and multiculturalism
among cultural traders and academic administrators, inquiry stops as
soon as it begins. What we need is a rigorous political and economical
scrutiny rather than a gesture of pedagogic expediency. We should not
be satisfied with recognizing the different subject-positions from
different regions and diverse backgrounds. We need to find reasons for
such differences - at least in the political and economic aspects - and
to propose ways to erase such "differences," by which I mean, political
and economic inequalities. To the extent that cultural studies and
multiculturalism provide students and scholars with an alibi for their
complicity in the TNC version of neocolonialism, they are serving, once
again, just as one more device to conceal liberal self-deception. By
allowing ourselves to get absorbed into the discourse on
"postcoloniality" or even post-Marxism, we are fully collaborating with
the hegemonic ideology, which looks, as usual, as if it were no ideology
at all.
-Masao Miyoshi
-------------------------------------------------------------
a forum on spatial articulations, perspectives, and procedures
texts are the property of individual authors
for information, email majordomo@forum.documenta.de with
the following line in the message body: info blast
archive at http://www.documenta.de/english/blasta.htm
or http://www.documenta.de/deutsch/blasta.htm
documenta X Kassel and http://www.documenta.de 1997
-------------------------------------------------------------