Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity PDF

24 Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity Marking Asian American Differences Lisa Lowe In a poem by Janice Mirikitani ( 2003), a Japanese American nisei woman describes her sansei daughter’s rebellion.1 The daughter’s denial of Japanese American culture and its particular notions of femininity re...

24 Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity Marking Asian American Differences Lisa Lowe In a poem by Janice Mirikitani ( 2003), a Japanese American nisei woman describes her sansei daughter’s rebellion.1 The daughter’s denial of Japanese American culture and its particular notions of femininity reminds the nisei speaker that she, too, has denied her antecedents, rebelling against her own more traditional issei mother: I want to break tradition—unlock this room where women dress in the dark. Discover the lies my mother told me. The lies that we are small and powerless that our possibilities must be compressed to the size of pearls, displayed only as passive chokers, charms around our neck. Break Tradition. I want to tell my daughter of this room of myself filled with tears of shakuhatchi, poems about madness, sounds shaken from barbed wire and goodbyes and miracles of survival. This room of open window where daring ones escape. My daughter denies she is like me... her pouting ruby lips, her skirts swaying to salsa, teena marie and the stones, her thighs displayed in carnivals of color. I do not know the contents of her room. She mirrors my aging. She is breaking tradition. (663) 531 532 | Lisa Lowe The nisei speaker repudiates the repressive confinements of her issei mother: the disciplining of the female body, the tedious practice of diminution, the silences of obedience. In turn, the crises that have shaped the nisei speaker— internment camps, sounds of threatening madness—are unknown to, and unheard by, her sansei teenage daughter. The three generations of Japanese immigrant women in this poem are separated by their different histories and by different conceptions of what it means to be female and Japanese. The poet who writes “I do not know the contents of her room” registers these separations as “breaking tradition.” In another poem, by Lydia Lowe, Chinese women workers are divided also by generation, but even more powerfully by class and language. The speaker is a young Chinese American who supervises an older Chinese woman in a textile factory. The long bell blared, and then the lo-ban made me search all your bags before you could leave. Inside he sighed about slow work, fast hands, missing spools of thread— and I said nothing. I remember that day you came in to show me I added your tickets six zippers short. It was just a mistake. You squinted down at the check in your hands like an old village woman peers at some magician’s trick. That afternoon when you thrust me your bags I couldn’t look or raise my face. Doi m-jyu. Eyes on the ground, I could only see one shoe kicking against the other. (29) This poem, too, invokes the breaking of tradition, although it thematizes another sort of stratification among Asian women: the structure of the factory places the English-speaking younger woman above the Cantonese-speaking older one. Economic relations in capitalist society force the young supervisor to dis- cipline her elders, and she is acutely ashamed that her required behavior does  Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity | 533 not demonstrate the respect traditionally owed to parents and elders. Thus, both poems foreground commonly thematized topoi of diasporan cultures: the disruption and distortion of traditional cultural practices—like the practice of parental sacrifice and filial duty, or the practice of respecting hierarchies of age— not only as a consequence of immigration to the United States but as a part of entering a society with different class stratifications and different constructions of gender roles. Some Asian American discussions cast the disruption of tradi- tion as loss and represent the loss in terms of regret and shame, as in the latter poem. Alternatively, the traditional practices of family continuity and hierarchy may be figured as oppressively confining, as in Mirikitani’s poem, in which the two generations of daughters contest the more restrictive female roles of the former generations. In either case, many Asian American discussions portray immigration and relocation to the United States in terms of a loss of the “origi- nal” culture in exchange for the new “American” culture. In many Asian American novels, the question of the loss or transmission of the “original” culture is frequently represented in a family narrative, figured as generational conflict between the Chinese-born first generation and the American-born second generation.2 Louis Chu’s 1961 novel Eat a Bowl of Tea, for example, allegorizes in the conflicted relationship between father and son the differences between “native” Chinese values and the new “Westernized” culture of Chinese Americans. Other novels have taken up this generational theme; one way to read Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975) or Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) is to understand them as versions of this generational model of culture, refigured in feminine terms, between mothers and daughters. However, I will argue that interpreting Asian American culture exclusively in terms of the master narratives of generational conflict and filial relation essen- tializes Asian American culture, obscuring the particularities and incommensu- rabilities of class, gender, and national diversities among Asians; the reduction of ethnic cultural politics to struggles between first and second generations dis- places (and privatizes) intercommunity differences into a familial opposition. To avoid this homogenizing of Asian Americans as exclusively hierarchical and familial, I would contextualize the “vertical” generational model of culture with the more “horizontal” relationship represented in Diana Chang’s “The Oriental Contingent.” In Chang’s short story, two young women avoid the discussion of their Chinese backgrounds because each desperately fears that the other is “more Chinese,” more “authentically” tied to the original culture. The narrator, Connie, is certain that her friend Lisa “never referred to her own background because it was more Chinese than Connie’s, and therefore of a higher order. She was tact incarnate. All along, she had been going out of her way not to embarrass Connie. Yes, yes. Her assurance was definitely uppercrust (perhaps her father had been in the diplomatic service), and her offhand didacticness, her lack of self-doubt, was indeed characteristically Chinese-Chinese” (173). Connie feels ashamed because 534 | Lisa Lowe she assumes herself to be “a failed Chinese”; she fantasizes that Lisa was born in China, visits there frequently, and privately disdains Chinese Americans. Her assumptions about Lisa prove to be quite wrong, however; Lisa is even more critical of herself for “not being genuine.” For Lisa, as Connie eventually discov- ers, was born in Buffalo and was adopted by non–Chinese American parents; lacking an immediate connection to Chinese culture, Lisa projects upon all Chi- nese the authority of being “more Chinese.” Lisa confesses to Connie at the end of the story: “The only time I feel Chinese is when I’m embarrassed I’m not more Chinese—which is a totally Chinese reflex I’d give anything to be rid of!” (176). Chang’s story portrays two women polarized by the degree to which they have each internalized a cultural definition of “Chineseness” as pure and fixed, in which any deviation is constructed as less, lower, and shameful. Rather than confirming the cultural model in which “ethnicity” is passed from generation to generation, Chang’s story explores the “ethnic” relationship between women of the same generation. Lisa and Connie are ultimately able to reduce one another’s guilt at not being “Chinese enough”; in one another they are able to find a com- mon frame of reference. The story suggests that the making of Chinese Ameri- can culture—how ethnicity is imagined, practiced, continued—is worked out as much between ourselves and our communities as it is transmitted from one generation to another. In this sense, Asian American discussions of ethnicity are far from uniform or consistent; rather, these discussions contain a wide spectrum of articulations that includes, at one end, the desire for an identity represented by a fixed profile of ethnic traits and, at another, challenges to the very notions of identity and singularity which celebrate ethnicity as a fluctuating composition of differences, intersections, and incommensurabilities. These latter efforts attempt to define ethnicity in a manner that accounts not only for cultural inheritance but for active cultural construction, as well. In other words, they suggest that the making of Asian American culture may be a much “messier” process than unmediated ver- tical transmission from one generation to another, including practices that are partly inherited and partly modified, as well as partly invented.3 As the narrator of The Woman Warrior suggests, perhaps one of the more important stories of Asian American experience is about the process of receiving, refiguring, and rewriting cultural traditions. She asks, “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to child- hood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” (6). Or the dilemma of cultural syncretism might be posed in an inter- rogative version of the uncle’s impromptu proverb in Wayne Wang’s film Dim Sum: “You can take the girl out of Chinatown, but can you take the Chinatown out of the girl?” For rather than representing a fixed, discrete culture, “Chinatown” is itself the very emblem of fluctuating demographics, languages, and populations.4  Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity | 535 I begin my chapter with these particular examples drawn from Asian Ameri- can cultural texts in order to observe that what is referred to as “Asian America” is clearly a heterogeneous entity. From the perspective of the majority culture, Asian Americans may very well be constructed as different from, and other than, Euro-Americans. But from the perspectives of Asian Americans, we are perhaps even more different, more diverse, among ourselves: being men and women at different distances and generations from our “original” Asian cultures—cultures as different as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, and Vietnamese— Asian Americans are born in the United States and born in Asia; of exclusively Asian parents and of mixed race; urban and rural; refugee and nonrefugee; communist-identified and anticommunist; fluent in English and non-English- speaking; educated and working-class. As with other diasporas in the United States, the Asian immigrant collectivity is unstable and changeable, with its cohesion complicated by intergenerationality, by various degrees of identifica- tion and relation to a “homeland,” and by different extents of assimilation to and distinction from “majority culture” in the United States. Further, the historical contexts of particular waves of immigration within single groups contrast with one another; the Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II encountered quite different social and economic barriers than those from Japan who arrive in Southern California today. And the composition of different waves of immigrants differs in gender, class, and region. For example, the first groups of Chinese immigrants to the United States in 1850 were from four villages in Can- ton province, male by a ratio of ten to one, and largely of peasant backgrounds; the more recent Chinese immigrants are from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the Peo- ple’s Republic (themselves quite heterogeneous and of discontinuous “origins”), or from the Chinese diaspora in other parts of Asia, such as Macao, Malaysia, or Singapore, and they are more often educated and middle-class men and women.5 Further, once arriving in the United States, very few Asian immigrant cultures remain discrete, impenetrable communities. The more recent groups mix, in varying degrees, with segments of the existing groups; Asian Americans may intermarry with other ethnic groups, live in neighborhoods adjacent to them, or work in the same businesses and on the same factory assembly lines. The boundaries and definitions of Asian American culture are continually shifting and being contested from pressures both “inside” and “outside” the Asian-origin community. I stress heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity in the characterization of Asian American culture as part of a twofold argument about cultural politics, the ultimate aim of that argument being to disrupt the current hegemonic rela- tionship between “dominant” and “minority” positions. On the one hand, my observation that Asian Americans are heterogeneous is part of a strategy to destabilize the dominant discursive construction and determination of Asian Americans as a homogeneous group. Throughout the late nineteenth and early 536 | Lisa Lowe twentieth centuries, Asian immigration to the United States was managed by exclusion acts and quotas that relied upon racialist constructions of Asians as homogeneous;6 the “model minority” myth and the informal quotas discrimi- nating against Asians in university admissions policies are contemporary ver- sions of this homogenization of Asians.7 On the other hand, I underscore Asian American heterogeneities (particularly class, gender, and national differences among Asians) to contribute to a dialogue within Asian American discourse, to negotiate with those modes of argumentation that continue to uphold a poli- tics based on ethnic “identity.” In this sense, I argue for the Asian American necessity—politically, intellectually, and personally—to organize, resist, and the- orize as Asian Americans, but at the same time I inscribe this necessity within a discussion of the risks of a cultural politics that relies upon the construction of sameness and the exclusion of differences. The first reason to emphasize the dynamic fluctuation and heterogeneity of Asian American culture is to release our understandings of either the “domi- nant” or the emergent “minority” cultures as discrete, fixed, or homogeneous, and to arrive at a different conception of the general political terrain of culture in California, a useful focus for this examination since it has become common- place to consider it an “ethnic state,” embodying a new phenomenon of cultural adjacency and admixture.8 For if minority immigrant cultures are perpetually changing—in their composition, configuration, and signifying practices, as well as in their relations to one another—it follows that the “majority” or dominant culture, with which minority cultures are in continual relation, is also unstable and unclosed. The suggestion that the general social terrain of culture is open, plural, and dynamic reorients our understanding of what “cultural hegemony” is and how it works in contemporary California. It permits us to theorize about the roles that ethnic immigrant groups play in the making and unmaking of culture—and how these minority discourses challenge the existing structure of power, the existing hegemony.9 We should remember that Antonio Gramsci writes about hegemony as not simply political or economic forms of rule but as the entire process of dissent and compromise through which a particular group is able to determine the political, cultural, and ideological character of a state (1971b). Hegemony does not refer exclusively to the process by which a dominant formation exercises its influence but refers equally to the process through which minority groups organize and contest any specific hegemony.10 The reality of any specific hegemony is that, while it may be for the moment dominant, it is never absolute or conclusive. Hegemony, in Gramsci’s thought, is a concept that describes both the social processes through which a particular dominance is maintained and those through which that dominance is challenged and new forces are articulated. When a hegemony representing the interests of a dominant group exists, it is always within the context of resistances from emerg- ing “subaltern” groups.11 We might say that hegemony is not only the political  Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity | 537 process by which a particular group constitutes itself as “the one” or “the major- ity” in relation to which “minorities” are defined and know themselves to be “other,” but it is equally the process by which positions of otherness may ally and constitute a new majority, a “counterhegemony.”12 The subaltern classes are, in Gramsci’s definition, prehegemonic, not unified groups, whose histories are fragmented, episodic, and identifiable only from a point of historical hindsight. They may go through different phases when they are subject to the activity of ruling groups, may articulate their demands through existing parties, and then may themselves produce new parties; in The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci describes a final phase at which the “formations [of the sub- altern classes] assert integral autonomy” (1971a, 52). The definition of the subal- tern groups includes some noteworthy observations for our understanding of the roles of racial and ethnic immigrant groups in the United States. The assertion that the significant practices of the subaltern groups may not be understood as hegemonic until they are viewed with historical hindsight is interesting, for it suggests that some of the most powerful practices may not always be the explic- itly oppositional ones, may not be understood by contemporaries, and may be less overt and recognizable than others. Provocative, too, is the idea that the sub- altern classes are by definition “not unified”; that is, the subaltern is not a fixed, unified force of a single character. Rather, the assertion of “integral autonomy” by not unified classes suggests a coordination of distinct, yet allied, positions, practices, and movements—class-identified and not class-identified, in parties and not, ethnic-based and gender-based—each in its own not necessarily equiv- alent manner transforming and disrupting the apparatuses of a specific hege- mony. The independent forms and locations of cultural challenge—ideological, as well as economic and political—constitute what Gramsci calls a “new his- torical bloc,” a new set of relationships that together embody a different hege- mony and a different balance of power. In this sense, we have in the growing and shifting ethnic minority populations in California an active example of this new historical bloc described by Gramsci; and in the negotiations between these eth- nic groups and the existing majority over what interests precisely constitute the “majority,” we have an illustration of the concept of hegemony, not in the more commonly accepted sense of “hegemony-maintenance,” but in the often ignored sense of “hegemony-creation.”13 The observation that the Asian American com- munity and other ethnic immigrant communities are heterogeneous lays the foundation for several political operations: First, by shifting, multiplying, and reconceiving the construction of society as composed of two numerically over- determined camps called the majority and the minority, cultural politics is recast so as to account for a multiplicity of various, nonequivalent groups, one of which is Asian Americans. Second, the conception of ethnicity as heterogeneous pro- vides a position for Asian Americans that is both ethnically specific, yet simul- taneously uneven and unclosed; Asian Americans can articulate distinct group 538 | Lisa Lowe demands based on our particular histories of exclusion, but the redefined lack of closure—which reveals rather than conceals differences—opens political lines of affiliation with other groups (labor unions, other racial and ethnic groups, and gay, lesbian, and feminist groups) in the challenge to specific forms of domina- tion insofar as they share common features. In regard to the practice of “identity politics” within Asian American dis- course, the articulation of an “Asian American identity” as an organizing tool has provided a concept of political unity that enables diverse Asian groups to understand our unequal circumstances and histories as being related; likewise, the building of “Asian American culture” is crucial, for it articulates and empow- ers our multicultural, multilingual Asian-origin community vis-à-vis the insti- tutions and apparatuses that exclude and marginalize us. But I want to suggest that essentializing Asian American identity and suppressing our differences—of national origin, generation, gender, party, class—risks particular dangers: not only does it underestimate the differences and hybridities among Asians, but it also inadvertently supports the racist discourse that constructs Asians as a homogeneous group, that implies we are “all alike” and conform to “types”; in this respect, a politics based exclusively on ethnic identity willingly accepts the terms of the dominant logic that organizes the heterogeneous picture of racial and ethnic diversity into a binary schema of “the one” and “the other.” The essen- tializing of Asian American identity also reproduces oppositions that subsume other nondominant terms in the same way that Asians and other groups are disenfranchised by the dominant culture: to the degree that the discourse gen- eralizes Asian American identity as male, women are rendered invisible; or to the extent that Chinese are presumed to be exemplary of all Asians, the impor- tance of other Asian groups is ignored. In this sense, a politics based on ethnic identity facilitates the displacement of intercommunity differences—between men and women, or between workers and managers—into a false opposition of “nationalism” and “assimilation.” We have an example of this in recent debates where Asian American feminists who challenge Asian American sexism are cast as “assimilationist,” as betraying Asian American “nationalism.” To the extent that Asian American discourse articulates an identity in reaction to the dominant culture’s stereotype, even to refute it, I believe the discourse may remain bound to, and overdetermined by, the logic of the dominant culture. In accepting the binary terms (“white” and “nonwhite,” or “majority” and “minor- ity”) that structure institutional policies about ethnicity, we forget that these binary schemas are not neutral descriptions. Binary constructions of difference use a logic that prioritizes the first term and subordinates the second; whether the pair “difference” and “sameness” is figured as a binary synthesis that consid- ers “difference” as always contained within the “same,” or that conceives of the pair as an opposition in which “difference” structurally implies “sameness” as its complement, it is important to see each of these figurations as versions of the  Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity | 539 same binary logic. My argument for heterogeneity seeks to challenge the concep- tion of difference as exclusively structured by a binary opposition between two terms by proposing instead another notion of difference that takes seriously the conditions of heterogeneity, multiplicity, and nonequivalence. I submit that the most exclusive construction of Asian American identity—which presumes mas- culinity, American birth, and speaking English—is at odds with the formation of important political alliances and affiliations with other groups across racial and ethnic, gender, sexuality, and class lines. An essentialized identity is an obstacle to Asian American women allying with other women of color, for example, and it can discourage laboring Asian Americans from joining unions with work- ers of other colors. It can short-circuit potential alliances against the dominant structures of power in the name of subordinating “divisive” issues to the national question. Some of the limits of identity politics are discussed most pointedly by Frantz Fanon in his books about the Algerian resistance to French colonialism. Before ultimately turning to some Asian American cultural texts in order to trace the ways in which the dialogues about identity and difference are represented within the discourse, I would like to briefly consider one of Fanon’s most important texts, The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre 1961). Although Fanon’s treatise was cited in the 1960s as the manifesto for a nationalist politics of iden- tity, rereading it today we find his text, ironically, to be the source of a serious critique of nationalism. Fanon argues that the challenge facing any movement dismantling colonialism (or a system in which one culture dominates another) is to provide for a new order that does not reproduce the social structure of the old system. This new order, he argues, must avoid the simple assimilation to the dominant culture’s roles and positions by the emergent group, which would merely caricature the old colonialism, and it should be equally suspicious of an uncritical nativism, or racialism, appealing to essentialized notions of precolo- nial identity. Fanon suggests that another alternative is necessary, a new order, neither an assimilationist nor a nativist inversion, which breaks with the struc- tures and practices of cultural domination and which continually and collec- tively criticizes the institutions of rule. One of the more remarkable turns in Fanon’s argument occurs when he identifies both bourgeois assimilation and bourgeois nationalism as conforming to the same logic, as responses to colonial- ism that reproduce the same structure of cultural domination. It is in this sense that Fanon warns against the nationalism practiced by bourgeois neocolonial governments. Their nationalism, he argues, can be distorted easily into racism, territorialism, separatism, or ethnic dictatorships of one tribe or regional group over others; the national bourgeois replaces the colonizer, yet the social and economic structure remains the same.14 Ironically, he points out, these separat- isms, or “micro-nationalisms” (Mamadou Dia, quoted in Fanon 1961, 158), are themselves legacies of colonialism. He writes, “By its very structure, colonialism 540 | Lisa Lowe is regionalist and separatist. Colonialism does not simply state the existence of tribes; it also reinforces and separates them” (94). That is, a politics of ethnic separatism is congruent with the divide-and-conquer logic of colonial domina- tion. Fanon links the practices of the national bourgeoisie that has assimilated colonialist thought and practice with nativist practices that privilege one tribe or ethnicity over others; nativism and assimilationism are not opposites but similar logics both enunciating the old order. Fanon’s analysis implies that an essentialized bourgeois construction of “nation” is a classification that excludes other subaltern groups that could bring about substantive change in the social and economic relations, particularly those whose social marginalities are due to class: peasants, workers, transient popula- tions. We can add to Fanon’s criticism that the category of nation often erases a consideration of women and the fact of difference between men and women and the conditions under which they live and work in situations of cultural domination. This is why the concentration of women of color in domestic ser- vice or reproductive labor (child care, home care, nursing) in the contemporary United States is not adequately explained by a nation-based model of analysis (see Glenn 1981). In light of feminist theory, which has gone the furthest in theo- rizing multiple inscription and the importance of positionalities, we can argue that it may be less meaningful to act exclusively in terms of a single valence or political interest—such as ethnicity or nation—than to acknowledge that social subjects are the sites of a variety of differences.15 An Asian American subject is never purely and exclusively ethnic, for that subject is always of a particular class, gender, and sexual preference and may therefore feel responsible to move- ments that are organized around these other designations. This is not to argue against the strategic importance of Asian American identity, nor against the building of Asian American culture. Rather, I am suggesting that acknowledg- ing class and gender differences among Asian Americans does not weaken us as a group; to the contrary, these differences represent greater political opportunity to affiliate with other groups whose cohesions may be based on other valences of oppression. As I have already suggested, within Asian American discourse there is a var- ied spectrum of discussion about the concepts of ethnic identity and culture. At one end, there are discussions in which ethnic identity is essentialized as the cornerstone of a nationalist liberation politics. In these discussions, the cultural positions of nationalism (or ethnicism, or nativism) and of assimilation are rep- resented in polar opposition: nationalism affirming the separate purity of its ethnic culture is opposed to assimilation of the standards of dominant society. Stories about the loss of the “native” Asian culture tend to express some form of this opposition. At the same time, there are criticisms of this essentializing position, most often articulated by feminists who charge that Asian American nationalism prioritizes masculinity and does not account for women. At the  Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity | 541 other end, there are interventions that refuse static or binary conceptions of eth- nicity, replacing notions of identity with multiplicity and shifting the emphasis for ethnic “essence” to cultural hybridity. Settling for neither nativism nor assim- ilation, these cultural texts expose the apparent opposition between the two as a constructed figure (as Fanon does when he observes that bourgeois assimila- tion and bourgeois nationalism often conform to the same colonialist logic). In tracing these different discussions about identity and ethnicity through Asian American cultural debates, literature, and film, I choose particular texts because they are accessible and commonly held. But I do not intend to limit discourse to only these particular textual forms; by discourse, I intend a rather extended meaning—a network that includes not only texts and cultural documents but social practices, formal and informal laws, policies of inclusion and exclusion, and institutional forms of organization, for example, all of which constitute and regulate knowledge about the object of that discourse, Asian America. The terms of the debate about nationalism and assimilation become clearer if we look first at the discussion of ethnic identity in certain debates about the representation of culture. Readers of Asian American literature are familiar with attacks by Frank Chin, Ben Tong, and others on Maxine Hong Kingston, attacks that have been cast as nationalist criticisms of Kingston’s “assimilation- ist” works. Her novel/autobiography The Woman Warrior is the primary target of such criticism, since it is virtually the only “canonized” piece of Asian Ameri- can literature; its status can be measured by the fact that the Modern Language Association is currently publishing A Guide to Teaching “The Woman Warrior” in its series that includes guides to Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Dante’s Inferno. A critique of how and why this text has become fetishized as the exemplary representation of Asian American culture is necessary and important. How- ever, Chin’s critique reveals other kinds of tensions in Asian American culture that are worth noting. He does more than accuse Kingston of having exoticized Chinese American culture; he argues that she has “feminized” Asian American literature and undermined the power of Asian American men to combat the racist stereotypes of the dominant white culture. Kingston and other women novelists such as Amy Tan, he says, misrepresent Chinese history in order to exaggerate its patriarchal structure; as a result, Chinese society is portrayed as being even more misogynistic than European society. While Chin and others have cast this conflict in terms of nationalism and assimilationism, I think it may be more productive to see this debate, as Elaine Kim does in a recent essay (“‘Such Opposite’” 1990), as a symptom of the tensions between nationalist and feminist concerns in Asian American discourse. I would add to Kim’s analysis that the dialogue between nationalist and feminist concerns animates precisely a debate about identity and difference, or identity and heterogeneity, rather than a debate between nationalism and assimilationism; it is a debate in which Chin and others stand at one end insisting upon a fixed masculinist identity, while 542 | Lisa Lowe Kingston, Tan, or feminist literary critics like Shirley Lim and Amy Ling, with their representations of female differences and their critiques of sexism in Chi- nese culture, repeatedly cast this notion of identity into question. Just as Fanon points out that some forms of nationalism can obscure class, Asian American feminists point out that Asian American nationalism—or the construction of an essentialized, native Asian American subject—obscures gender. In other words, the struggle that is framed as a conflict between the apparent opposites of nativ- ism and assimilation can mask what is more properly characterized as a struggle between the desire to essentialize ethnic identity and the fundamental condition of heterogeneous differences against which such a desire is spoken. The trope that opposes nativism and assimilationism can be itself a colonialist figure used to displace the challenges of heterogeneity, or subalternity, by casting them as assimilationist or antiethnic. The trope that opposes nativism and assimilation not only organizes the cul- tural debates of Asian American discourse but figures in Asian American lit- erature, as well. More often than not, however, this symbolic conflict between nativism and assimilation is figured in the topos with which I began, that of generational conflict. Although there are many versions of this topos, I will men- tion only a few in order to elucidate some of the most relevant cultural tensions. In one model, a conflict between generations is cast in strictly masculinist terms, between father and son; in this model, mothers are absent or unimportant, and female figures exist only as peripheral objects to the side of the central drama of male conflict. Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) exemplifies this masculinist generational symbolism, in which a conflict between nativism and assimilation is allegorized in the relationship between the father, Wah Gay, and the son, Ben Loy, in the period when the predominantly Cantonese New York Chinatown community changes from a “bachelor society” to a “family society.”16 Wah Gay wishes Ben Loy to follow Chinese tradition, and to submit to the father’s author- ity, while the son balks at his father’s “old ways” and wants to make his own choices. When Wah Gay arranges a marriage for Ben Loy, the son is forced to obey. Although the son had had no trouble leading an active sexual life before his marriage, once married, he finds himself to be impotent. In other words, Chu’s novel figures the conflict of nativism and assimilation in terms of Ben Loy’s sexuality: submitting to the father’s authority, marrying the “nice Chinese girl” Mei Oi and having sons, is the so-called traditional Chinese male behavior. This path represents the nativist option, whereas Ben Loy’s former behavior— carrying on with American prostitutes, gambling, etc.—represents the alleged path of assimilation. At the nativist Chinese extreme, Ben Loy is impotent and is denied access to erotic pleasure, and at the assimilationist American extreme, he has great access and sexual freedom. Allegorizing the choice between cultural options in the register of Ben Loy’s sexuality, Chu’s novel suggests that resolution lies at neither pole but in a third “Chinese American” alternative, in which Ben  Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity | 543 Loy is able to experience erotic pleasure with his Chinese wife. This occurs only when the couple moves away to another state, away from the father; Ben Loy’s relocation to San Francisco’s Chinatown and the priority of pleasure with Mei Oi over the begetting of a son (which, incidentally, they ultimately do have) both represent important breaks from his father’s authority and from Chinese tradi- tion. Following Fanon’s observations about the affinities between nativism and assimilation, we can understand Chu’s novel as an early masculinist rendering of culture as conflict between the apparent opposites of nativism and assimilation, with its oedipal resolution in a Chinese American male identity; perhaps only with hindsight can we propose that the opposition itself may be a construction that allegorizes the dialectic between an articulation of essentialized ethnic iden- tity and the context of heterogeneous differences. Amy Tan’s much more recent The Joy Luck Club (1989) refigures this topos of generational conflict in a different social context, among first- and second- generation Mandarin Chinese in San Francisco and, more importantly, between women. Tan’s Joy Luck displaces Eat a Bowl not only because it deviates from the figuration of Asian American identity in a masculine oedipal dilemma by refig- uring it in terms of mothers and daughters but also because Joy Luck multiplies the sites of cultural conflict, positing a number of struggles—familial and extra- familial—as well as resolutions, without privileging the singularity or centrality of one. In this way, Joy Luck ultimately thematizes and demystifies the central role of the mother-daughter relationship in Asian American culture. Joy Luck represents the first-person narratives of four sets of Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters. The daughters attempt to come to terms with their mothers’ demands, while the mothers simultaneously try to interpret their daughters’ deeds, expressing a tension between the “Chinese” expectation of filial respect and the “American” inability to fulfill that expec- tation. By multiplying and subverting the model of generational discord with examples of generational concord, the novel calls attention to the heterogeneity of Chinese American family relations. On the one hand, mothers like Ying-ying St. Clair complain about their daughters’ Americanization: For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid.... because I moved so secretly now my daughter does not see me. She sees a list of things to buy, her checkbook out of balance, her ashtray sitting crooked on a straight table. And I want to tell her this: We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others. (67) 544 | Lisa Lowe The mother presents herself as having sacrificed everything for a daughter who has ignored these sacrifices. She sees her daughter as preoccupied with portable, mobile high-tech commodities which, characteristically, have no cords, no ties, emblematizing the mother’s condemnation of a daughter who does not respect family bonds. The mother implies that the daughter recognizes that something is skewed and attempts to correct it—balancing her checkbook, straightening her house—but, in the mother’s eyes, she has no access to the real problems; being in America has taken this understanding away. Her daughter, Lena, however, tends to view her mother as unreasonably superstitious and domineering. Lena considers her mother’s concern about her failing marriage as meddlesome; the daughter’s interpretation of their antagonism emphasizes a cultural gap between the mother who considers her daughter’s troubles her own and the daughter who sees her mother’s actions as intrusive, possessive, and, worst of all, denying the daughter’s own separate individuality. On the other hand, in contrast to this and other examples of disjunction between the Chinese mothers and the Chinese American daughters, Joy Luck also includes a relationship between mother and daughter in which there is an apparent coincidence of perspective; tellingly, in this example the mother has died, and it is left to the daughter to “eulogize” the mother by telling the mother’s story. Jing-mei Woo makes a trip to China, to reunite with her recently deceased mother’s two daughters by an earlier marriage, whom her mother had been forced to abandon almost forty years before when fleeing China during the Japanese invasion. Jing- mei wants to fulfill her mother’s last wish to see the long-lost daughters; she wishes to inscribe herself in her mother’s place. Her narration of the reunion conveys her utopian belief in the possibility of recovering the past, of rendering herself coinci- dent with her mother, narrating her desire to become again “Chinese.” My sisters and I stand, arms around each other, laughing and wiping the tears from each other’s eyes. The flash of the Polaroid goes off and my father hands me the snapshot. My sisters and I watch quietly together, eager to see what develops. The gray-green surface changes to the bright colors of our three images, sharp- ening and deepening all at once. And although we don’t speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in sur- prise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish. (288) Unlike Lena St. Clair, Jing-mei does not seek greater autonomy from her mother; she desires a lessening of the disparity between their positions that is accom- plished through the narrative evocation of her mother after she has died. By contrasting different examples of mother-daughter discord and concord, Joy Luck allegorizes the heterogeneous culture in which the desire for identity and sameness (represented by Jing-mei’s story) is inscribed within the context of Asian American differences and disjunctions (exemplified by the other three  Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity | 545 pairs of mothers and daughters). The novel formally illustrates that the articula- tion of one, the desire for identity, depends upon the existence of the others, or the fundamental horizon of differences. Further, although Joy Luck has been heralded and marketed as a novel about mother-daughter relations in the Chinese American family (one cover review characterizes it as a “story that shows us China, Chinese American women and their families, and the mystery of the mother-daughter bond in ways that we have not experienced before”), I would suggest that the novel also represents antagonisms that are not exclusively generational but are due to different con- ceptions of class and gender among Chinese Americans. Toward the end of the novel, Lindo and Waverly Jong reach a climax of mis- understanding, in a scene that takes place in a central site of American feminin- ity: the beauty parlor. After telling the stylist to give her mother a “soft wave,” Waverly asks her mother, Lindo, if she is in agreement. The mother narrates, I smile. I use my American face. That’s the face Americans think is Chinese, the one they cannot understand. But inside I am becoming ashamed. I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my daughter and I am proud of her, and I am her mother but she is not proud of me. (255) The American-born daughter believes she is treating her mother, rather mag- nanimously, to a day of pampering at a chic salon; the Chinese-born mother receives this gesture as an insult, clear evidence of a daughter ashamed of her mother’s looks. The scene marks not only the separation of mother and daughter by generation but, perhaps less obviously, their separation by class and cultural differences that lead to different interpretations of how female identity is signi- fied. On the one hand, the Chinese-born Lindo and American-born Waverly have different class values and opportunities; the daughter’s belief in the pleasure of a visit to an expensive San Francisco beauty parlor seems senselessly extrava- gant to the mother whose rural family had escaped poverty only by marrying her to the son of a less humble family in their village. On the other hand, the mother and daughter also conflict over definitions of proper female behavior. Lindo assumes female identity is constituted in the practice of a daughter’s deference to her elders, while for Waverly, it is determined by a woman’s financial indepen- dence from her parents and her financial equality with men and by her ability to speak her desires, and it is cultivated and signified in the styles and shapes that represent middle-class feminine beauty. In this sense, I ultimately read Joy Luck not as a novel that exclusively depicts generational conflict among Chinese American women but rather as a text that thematizes the trope of the mother- daughter relationship in Asian American culture; that is, the novel comments upon the idealized construction of mother-daughter relationships (both in the majority culture’s discourse about Asian Americans and in the Asian American 546 | Lisa Lowe discourse about ourselves), as well as upon the kinds of differences—of class and culturally specific definitions of gender—that are rendered invisible by the privileging of this trope.17 Before concluding, I want to turn to a final cultural text which not only restates the Asian American narrative that opposes nativism and assimilation but articu- lates a critique of that narrative, calling the nativist/assimilationist dyad into ques- tion. If Joy Luck poses an alternative to the dichotomy of nativism and assimilation by multiplying the generational conflict and demystifying the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship, then Peter Wang’s film A Great Wall (1985)—both in its emplotment and in its very medium of representation—offers yet another version of this alternative. Wang’s film unsettles both poles in the antinomy of nativist essentialism and assimilation by performing a continual geographical juxtaposition and exchange between a variety of cultural spaces. A Great Wall portrays the visit of Leo Fang’s Chinese American family to the People’s Repub- lic of China and their monthlong stay with Leo’s sister’s family, the Chao family, in Beijing. The film concentrates on the primary contrast between the habits, customs, and assumptions of the Chinese in China and the Chinese Americans in California by going back and forth between shots of Beijing and Northern California, in a type of continual filmic “migration” between the two, as if to the- matize in its very form the travel between cultural spaces. From the first scene, however, the film foregrounds the idea that in the opposition between native and assimilated spaces, neither begins as a pure, uncontaminated site or origin; and as the camera eye shuttles back and forth between, both poles of the constructed opposition shift and change. (Indeed, the Great Wall of China, from which the film takes its title, is a monument to the historical condition that not even ancient China was “pure,” but coexisted with “foreign barbarians” against which the Mid- dle Kingdom erected such barriers.) In this regard, the film contains a number of emblematic images that call attention to the syncretic, composite quality of all cultural spaces: when the young Chinese Liu finishes the university entrance exam his scholar-father gives him a Coca-Cola; children crowd around the single village television to watch a Chinese opera singer imitate Pavarotti singing Ital- ian opera; the Chinese student learning English recites the Gettysburg Address. Although the film concentrates on both illustrating and dissolving the appar- ent opposition between Chinese Chinese and American Chinese, a number of other contrasts are likewise explored: the differences between generations both within the Chao and the Fang families (daughter Lili noisily drops her bike while her father practices tai chi; Paul kisses his Caucasian girlfriend and later tells his father that he believes all Chinese are racists when Leo suggests that he might date some nice Chinese girls); differences between men and women (accentuated by two scenes, one in which Grace Fang and Mrs. Chao talk about their husbands and children, the other in which Chao and Leo get drunk together); and, finally, the differences between capitalist and communist societies (highlighted in a scene  Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity | 547 in which the Chaos and Fangs talk about their different attitudes toward “work”). The representations of these other contrasts complicate and diversify the ostensi- ble focus on cultural differences between Chinese and Chinese Americans, as if to testify to the condition that there is never only one exclusive valence of difference, but rather cultural difference is always simultaneously bound up with gender, economics, age, and other distinctions. In other words, when Leo says to his wife that the Great Wall makes the city “just as difficult to leave as to get in,” the wall at once signifies the construction of a variety of barriers—not only between Chi- nese and Americans but between generations, men and women, capitalism and communism—as well as the impossibility of ever remaining bounded and impen- etrable, of resisting change, recomposition, and reinvention. We are reminded of this impossibility throughout the film, but it is perhaps best illustrated in the scene in which the Fang and Chao families play a rousing game of touch football on the ancient immovable Great Wall. The film continues with a series of wonderful contrasts: the differences in the bodily comportments of the Chinese American Paul and the Chinese Liu playing ping-pong, between Leo’s jogging and Mr. Chao’s tai chi, between Grace Fang’s and Mrs. Chao’s ideas of what is fitting and fashionable for the female body. The two families have different senses of space and of the relation between family members. In one subplot, the Chinese American cousin Paul is outraged to learn that Mrs. Chao reads her daughter Lili’s mail; he asks Lili if she has ever heard of “privacy.” This later results in a fight between Mrs. Chao and Lili in which Lili says she has learned from their American cousins that “it’s not right to read other people’s mail.” Mrs. Chao retorts, “You’re not ‘other people,’ you’re my daughter. What is this thing, ‘privacy’?” Lili explains to her that “privacy” can’t be translated into Chinese. “Oh, so you’re trying to hide things from your mother and use western words to trick her!” exclaims Mrs. Chao. Ultimately, just as the members of the Chao family are marked by the visit from their American rela- tives, the Fangs are altered by the time they return to California, each bringing back a memento or practice from their Chinese trip. In other words, rather than privileging either a nativist or assimilationist view, or even espousing a “Chinese American” resolution of differences, A Great Wall performs a filmic “migration” by shuttling between the various cultural spaces; we are left, by the end of the film, with a sense of culture as dynamic and open, the result of a continual pro- cess of visiting and revisiting a plurality of cultural sites. In keeping with the example of A Great Wall, we might consider as a pos- sible model for the ongoing construction of ethnic identity the migratory process suggested by Wang’s filming technique and emplotment: we might conceive of the making and practice of Asian American culture as nomadic, unsettled, tak- ing place in the travel between cultural sites and in the multivocality of hetero- geneous and conflicting positions. Taking seriously the heterogeneities among Asian Americans in California, we must conclude that the grouping “Asian 548 | Lisa Lowe American” is not a natural or static category; it is a socially constructed unity, a situationally specific position that we assume for political reasons. It is “strategic” in Gayatri Spivak’s sense of a “strategic use of a positive essentialism in a scru- pulously visible political interest” (1987, 205). The concept of “strategic essential- ism” suggests that it is possible to utilize specific signifiers of ethnic identity, such as Asian American, for the purpose of contesting and disrupting the discourses that exclude Asian Americans, while simultaneously revealing the internal con- tradictions and slippages of Asian American so as to ensure that such essential- isms will not be reproduced and proliferated by the very apparatuses we seek to disempower. I am not suggesting that we can or should do away with the notion of Asian American identity, for to stress only our differences would jeopardize the hard-earned unity that has been achieved in the last two decades of Asian American politics, the unity that is necessary if Asian Americans are to play a role in the new historical bloc of ethnic Californians. In fact, I would submit that the very freedom, in the 1990s, to explore the hybridities concealed beneath the desire of identity is permitted by the context of a strongly articulated essen- tialist politics. Just as the articulation of the desire for identity depends upon the existence of a fundamental horizon of differences, the articulation of dif- ferences dialectically depends upon a socially constructed and practiced notion of identity. I want simply to remark that in the 1990s, we can afford to rethink the notion of ethnic identity in terms of cultural, class, and gender differences, rather than presuming similarities and making the erasure of particularity the basis of unity. In the 1990s, we can diversify our political practices to include a more heterogeneous group and to enable crucial alliances with other groups— ethnicity based, class based, gender based, and sexuality based—in the ongoing work of transforming hegemony. Notes Originally published in Diaspora 1 (1): 24–44, 1991. ©1991 University of Toronto Press, reprint by permission. Many thanks to Elaine Kim for her thought-provoking questions and for asking me to deliver portions of this essay as papers at the 1990 meetings of the Association of Asian American Studies and of the American Literature Association; to James Clifford, who also gave me the opportunity to deliver a version of this essay at a conference sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz; to the audience participants at all three conferences who asked stimulating questions which have helped me to rethink my original notions; and to Page duBois, Barbara Harlow, Susan Kirkpatrick, George Mariscal, Ellen Rooney, and Kathryn Shevelow, who read drafts and offered important comments and criticism. 1 “Nisei” refers to a second-generation Japanese American, born to immigrant parents in the United States, “sansei” a third-generation Japanese American. “Issei” refers to a first- generation immigrant. 2 See Kim (1982) for the most important book-length study of the literary representations of multigenerational Asian America. 3 Recent anthropological discussions of ethnic cultures as fluid and syncretic systems echo these concerns of Asian American writers. See, for example, Fischer (1986) and Clifford  Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity | 549 (1988). For an anthropological study of Japanese American culture that troubles the paradigmatic construction of kinship and filial relations as the central figure in culture, see Yanagisako (1985). 4 We might think, for example, of the shifting of the Los Angeles “Chinatown” from its downtown location to the suburban community of Monterey Park. Since the 1970s, the former Chinatown has been superseded demographically and economically by Monterey Park, the home of many Chinese Americans as well as newly arrived Chinese from Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Monterey Park community of sixty-three thousand residents is currently over 50 percent Asian. On the social and political consequences of these changing demographics, see Fong (1994). 5 Chan’s history of the Chinese immigrant populations in California, Bittersweet (1986), and her history of Asian Americans (1991) are extremely important in this regard. Numerous lectures by Ling-chi Wang at UC San Diego in 1987 and at UC Berkeley in 1988 have been very important to my understanding of the heterogeneity of waves of immigration across different Asian-origin groups. 6 The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese from entering the United States, the National Origins Act prohibited the entry of Japanese in 1924, and the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 limited Filipino immigrants to fifty people per year. Finally, the most tragic conse- quence of anti-Asian racism occurred during World War II, when 120,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of whom were American citizens by birth) were interned in camps. For a study of the anti-Japanese movement culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924, see Daniels (1962). Takaki (1989) offers a general history of Asian-origin immigrant groups in the United States. 7 The model minority myth constructs Asians as aggressively driven overachievers; it is a homogenizing fiction that relies upon two strategies common in the subordinating construction of racial or ethnic otherness—the racial other as knowable, familiar (“like us”), and as incomprehensible, threatening (“unlike us”); the model minority myth suggests both that Asians are overachievers and “unlike us” and that they assimilate well and are thus “like us.” Asian Americans are continually pointing out that the model minority myth distorts the real gains, as well as the impediments, of Asian immigrants; by leveling and homogenizing all Asian groups, it erases the different rates of assimilation and the variety of class identities among various Asian immigrant groups. Claiming that Asians are “overrepresented” on college campuses, the model minority myth is one of the justifications for the establishment of informal quotas in university admissions policies, similar to the university admission policies that discriminated against Jewish students from the 1930s to the 1950s. 8 In the past two decades, greatly diverse new groups have settled in California; demogra- phers project that by the end of the century, the “majority” of the state will be composed of ethnic “minority” groups. Due to recent immigrants, this influx of minorities is character- ized also by greater diversity within individual groups: the group we call Asian Americans no longer denotes only Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos but now includes Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian groups; Latino communities in California are made up not only of Chicanos but also Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Colombians. It is not difficult to find Pakistani, Armenian, Lebanese, and Iranian enclaves in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and even San Diego. While California’s “multiculturalism” is often employed to support a notion of the “melting pot,” to further an ideological assertion of equal opportu- nity for California’s different immigrant groups, I am, in contrast, pursuing the ignored implications of this characterization of California as an ethnic state: that is, despite the increasing numbers of ethnic immigrants apparently racing to enjoy California’s opportuni- ties, for racial and ethnic immigrants there is no equality but uneven development, nonequivalence, and cultural heterogeneities, not only between but within groups. 550 | Lisa Lowe 9 For an important elaboration of the concept of “minority discourse,” see JanMohamed and Lloyd (1990). 10 This notion of “the dominant”—defined by Williams (1977, 121) in a chapter discussing the “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent” as “a cultural process... seized as a cultural system, with determinate dominant features: feudal culture or bourgeois culture or a transition from one to the other”—is often conflated in recent cultural theory with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Indeed, Williams writes, “We have certainly still to speak of the ‘dominant’ and the ‘effective,’ and in these senses of the hegemonic” (121), as if the dominant and the hegemonic are synonymous. 11 See Gramsci (1971a, 54–55). Gramsci describes “subaltern” groups as by definition not unified, emergent, and always in relation to the dominant groups: The history of subaltern social groups is necessarily fragmented and episodic. There undoubtedly does exist a tendency to (at least provisional stages of) unification in the historical activity of these groups, but this tendency is continually interrupted by the activity of the ruling groups; it therefore can only be demon- strated when an historical cycle is completed and this cycle culminates in a success. Subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up: only “permanent” victory breaks their subordination, and that not immediately. In reality, even when they appear triumphant, the subaltern groups are merely anxious to defend themselves (a truth which can be demon- strated by the history of the French Revolution at least up to 1830). Every trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups should therefore be of incalculable value for the integral historian. 12 “Hegemony” remains a suggestive construct in Gramsci, however, rather than an explicitly interpreted set of relations. Contemporary readers are left with the more specific task of distinguishing which particular forms of challenge to an existing hegemony are significantly transformative and which forms may be neutralized or appropriated by the hegemony. Some cultural critics contend that counterhegemonic forms and practices are tied by definition to the dominant culture and that the dominant culture simultaneously produces and limits its own forms of counterculture. I am thinking here of some of the “new historicist” studies that use a particular notion of Foucault’s discourse to confer authority to the “dominant,” interpret- ing all forms of “subversion” as being ultimately “contained” by dominant ideology and institutions. Other cultural historians, such as Williams, suggest that because there is both identifiable variation in the social order over time, as well as variations in the forms of the counterculture in different historical periods, we must conclude that some aspects of the oppositional forms are not reducible to the terms of the original hegemony. Still other theorists, such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, have expanded Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to argue that in advanced capitalist society, the social field is not a totality consisting exclusively of the dominant and the counterdominant but rather that “the social” is an open and uneven terrain of contesting articulations and signifying practices. Some of these articulations and practices are neutralized, while others can be linked to build important pressures against an existing hegemony. See Laclau and Mouffe (1985, esp. 134–145). They argue persuasively that no hegemonic logic can account for the totality of “the social” and that the open and incomplete character of the social field is the precondition of every hegemonic practice. For if the field of hegemony were conceived according to a “zero-sum” vision of possible positions and practices, then the very concept of hegemony, as plural and mutable formations and relations, would be rendered impossible. Elsewhere, in “Hegemony and New Political Subjects,” Mouffe (1988) goes even further to elaborate the practical dimensions of the hegemonic principle in terms of contemporary social movements.  Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity | 551 13 Adamson (1980) reads The Prison Notebooks as the postulation of Gramsci’s activist and educationalist politics; in chapter 6, he discusses Gramsci’s two concepts of hegemony: hegemony as the consensual basis of an existing political system in civil society, as opposed to violent oppression or domination, and hegemony as a historical phase of bourgeois development in which class is understood not only economically but also in terms of a common intellectual and moral awareness, an overcoming of the “economic-corporative” phase. Adamson associates the former (hegemony in its contrast to domination) with “hegemony-maintenance,” and the latter (hegemony as a stage in the political moment) as “hegemony-creation.” Sassoon (1982) provides an excellent discussion of Gramsci’s key concepts; she both historicizes the concept of hegemony and discusses the implications of some of the ways in which hegemony has been interpreted. Sassoon emphasizes the degree to which hegemony is opposed to domination to evoke the way in which one social group influences other groups, making certain compromises with them in order to gain their consent for its leadership in society as a whole. 14 Amilcar Cabral, the Cape Verdean African nationalist leader and theorist, echoes some fundamental observations made by Fanon: that the national bourgeoisie will collaborate with the colonizers and that tribal fundamentalism must be overcome or it will defeat any efforts at unity. In 1969, Cabral wrote ironically in “Party Principles and Political Practice” of the dangers of tribalism and nativism: “No one should think that he is more African than another, even than some white man who defends the interests of Africa, merely because he is today more adept at eating with his hand, rolling rice into a ball and putting it into his mouth” (Cabral 1979, 57). 15 I am thinking here especially of de Lauretis, Spivak, and Minh-ha. The last explains the multiple inscription of women of color: [M]any women of color feel obliged [to choose] between ethnicity and woman- hood: how can they? You never have/are one without the other. The idea of two illusorily separated identities, one ethnic, the other woman (or more precisely female), partakes in the Euro-American system of dualistic reasoning and its age-old divide-and-conquer tactics.... The pitting of anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles against one another allows some vocal fighters to dismiss blatantly the existence of either racism or sexism within their lines of action, as if oppression only comes in separate, monolithic forms. (Minh-ha 1989, 105) 16 For a more extensive analysis of generational conflict in Chu’s novel, see Gong (1980). Gong asserts that “[t]he father/son relationship represents the most critical juncture in the erosion of a traditional Chinese value system and the emergence of a Chinese American character. Change from Chinese to Chinese American begins here” (74–75). 17 There are many scenes that resonate with my suggestion that generational conflicts cannot be isolated from either class or the historicity of gender. In the third section of the novel, it is class difference in addition to generational strife that founds the antagonism between mother and daughter: Ying-ying St. Clair cannot understand why Lena and her husband, Harold, have spent an enormous amount of money to live in a barn in the posh neighbor- hood of Woodside. Lena says, “My mother knows, underneath all the fancy details that cost so much, this house is still a barn” (151). In the early relationship between Suyuan Woo and her daughter, Jing-mei, the mother pushes her daughter to become a success, to perform on the piano; we can see that such desires are the reflection of the mother’s former poverty, her lack of opportunity as both a poor refugee and a woman, but the daughter, trapped within a familial framework of explanation, sees her mother as punishing and invasive. Finally, the mother-and-daughter pair An-mei and Rose Hsu dramatize a conflict between the mother’s belief that it is more honorable to keep personal problems within the Chinese family and 552 | Lisa Lowe the daughter’s faith in Western psychotherapy: the mother cannot understand why her daughter would pay a psychiatrist, a stranger, to talk about her divorce, instead of talking to her mother: the mother who was raised believing one must not show suffering to others because they, like magpies, would feed on your tears says of the daughter’s psychiatrist, “really, he is just another bird drinking from your misery” (241). References Adamson, Walter. 1980. Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cabral, Amílcar. 1979. Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amílcar Cabral. Translated by Michael Wolfers. New York: Monthly Review. Chan, Sucheng. 1986. This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1991. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. Boston: Twayne. Chang, Diana. 1989. “The Oriental Contingent.” Pp. 171–177 in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Mayumi Tsutakawa, and Margarita Donnelly, eds., The Forbidden Stitch. Corvallis, OR: Calyx. Chu, Louis. 1961. Eat a Bowl of Tea. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Daniels, Roger. 1962. The Politics of Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove. Fischer, Michael M. J. 1986. “Ethnicity and the Post-modern Arts of Memory.” Pp. 194–233 in James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fong, Timothy P. 1994. The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, Califor- nia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 1981. “Occupational Ghettoization: Japanese-American Women and Domestic Service, 1905–1970.” Ethnicity 8: 352–386. Gong, Ted. 1980. “Approaching Cultural Change through Literature: From Chinese to Chinese- American.” Amerasia 7: 73–86. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971a. “History of the Subaltern Classes: Methodological Criteria.” Pp. 52–60 in Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International. ———. 1971b. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International. A Great Wall. 1985. Directed by Peter Wang. New Yorker Films. JanMohamed, Abdul, and David Lloyd, eds. 1990. The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press. Kim, Elaine. 1982. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ———. 1990. “‘Such Opposite Creatures’: Men and Women in Asian American Literature.” Michi- gan Quarterly Review 29: 68–93. Kingston, Maxine Hong. 1975. The Woman Warrior. New York: Random House. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Lauretis, Teresa de. 1987. Technologies of Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lowe, Lydia. 1988. “Quitting Time.” Ikon 9: 29. Minh-ha, Trinh T. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press.  Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity | 553 Mirikitani, Janice. 2003. “Breaking Tradition.” Pp. 663–666 in Harriet Sigerma, ed., The Columbia Documentary History of American Women since 1941. New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 1988. “Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New Concept of Democracy.” Pp. 89–104 in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sassoon, Anne Showstack. 1982. “Hegemony, War of Position and Political Intervention.” Pp. 94– 115 in Anne Showstack Sassoon, ed., Approaches to Gramsci. London: Writers and Readers. Spivak, Gayatri. 1987. In Other Worlds. London: Routledge. Takaki, Ronald. 1989. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown. Tan, Amy. 1989. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yanagisako, Sylvia. 1985. Transforming the Past: Kinship and Tradition among Japanese Americans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.