FranÇoise Lionnet is Chair of French and Francophone Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity.

Shu-mei Shih is Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937.

MINOR TRANSNATIONALISM

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2005 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3478-1

Contents

FRANOISE LIONNET AND SHU-MEI SHIH Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally…………………………………………….1SUZANNE GEARHART Inclusions: Psychoanalysis, Transnationalism, and Minority Cultures……………………………………………………27DAVID PALUMBO-LIU Rational and Irrational Choices: Form, Affect, and Ethics……………………………………………………………41shu-mei shih Toward an Ethics of Transnational Encounters, or, “When” Does a “Chinese” Woman Become a “Feminist”?………………………….73SUSAN KOSHY The Postmodern Subaltern: Globalization Theory and the Subject of Ethnic, Area, and PostcolonialStudies………………………..109TYLER STOVALL Murder in Montmartre: Race, Sex, and Crime in Jazz Age Paris…………………………………………………………….135KATHLEEN MCHUGH Giving “Minor” Pasts a Future: Narrating History in Transnational Cinematic Autobiography…………………………………155MORADEWUN ADEJUNMOBI Major and Minor Discourses of the Vernacular: Discrepant African Histories………………………………………….179FRANOISE LIONNET Transcolonial Translations: Shakespeare in Mauritius………………………………………………………………..201ALI BEHDAD Postcolonial Theory and the Predicament of “Minor Literature”………………………………………………………………223MICHAEL K. BOURDAGHS The Calm Beauty of Japan at Almost the Speed of Sound: Sakamoto Kyu and the Translations ofRockabilly………………….237JENNY SHARPE Cartographies of Globalization, Technologies of Gendered Subjectivities: The Dub Poetry of Jean “Binta” Breeze…………………261SEIJI M. LIPPIT The Double Logic of Minor Spaces……………………………………………………………………………………283ELIZABETH A. MARCHANT National Space as Minor Space: Afro-Brazilian Culture and the Pelourinho…………………………………………..301RAFAEL PREZ-TORRES Alternate Geographies and the Melancholy of Mestizaje……………………………………………………………..317Contributors…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….339Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..343

Chapter One

SUZANNE GEARHART

Inclusions

Psychoanalysis, Transnationalism, and Minority Cultures

The questions before us today are simple and direct: do minority cultures exhibit transnational perspectives and, if so, how do these perspectives inflect our understanding of transnationalism? But despite their apparent directness, they are, of course, very difficult questions, whose terms are problematic and whose answers, therefore, are to say the very least complex. One of the things at stake in these questions is the meaning of the term “minority culture” itself. In this connection one of the first problems one encounters concerns the context within which any given minority culture is defined. We know that a group that might be called a minority within one particular national context can be a majority in another national context. But what does this mean with respect to its minority status? A related issue would be that of cultural groups that do not exist as a majority within any national context whatsoever. How would the different status of these two types of minorities within the general category of minority cultures inflect our understanding of the term “minority” itself? Does the term “minority” have the same significance with respect to each?

Still another question would concern the relationship between minority cultures and power. The question of minority cultures is inseparable from a question of power, or at least when we speak of a minority culture today it seems to me that what we have in mind are cultural groups whose members are not only fewer in number than those of the cultural majority but who are also relatively disempowered with respect to members of a more powerful majority culture or group. If one associates power with majority status and disempowerment with minority status, however, it is not logically inconceivable that there could be a “majority” culture that is also a “minority” culture, or a “minority” culture that is also a “majority” culture. In other words, there could be groups whose members are greater in number but are relatively deprived of power and groups whose members are fewer in number but are relatively more powerful.

The history of colonialism offers numerous examples of such majority/ minority inversions, in which a small minority made up of colonizers tyrannizes a large majority made up of the colonized. Postcolonial societies in which the former colonizers or their descendants still represent an overwhelmingly powerful minority-at least in economic terms-represent another example. But even cultures or nations that have existed for centuries as separate states and that have had no direct experience of colonization offer examples of such a “minority majority” or “majority minority” paradox. In saying this I am thinking of the way in which class and “racial” characteristics reinforce each other in the history of racism. Myths of race, it has been argued, refer not so much to the nation as a whole as to a class or an aristocracy within the nation-the criteria invested by racism with racial and cultural significance tend to be criteria of social class. Thus the dominant racial ideology of a given nation tends to coincide with the class ideology of an elite within the nation (Balibar and Wallerstein 60-61). In this sense, a “minority” culture becomes the “majority” culture, and elites become what might be called “minority majorities” or “majority minorities.”

In order to pursue a bit further these and other questions about the possible meanings of the concept of minority culture, I now turn to the work of Etienne Balibar, not only because of his widely cited essays on contemporary nationalism, immigration, neoracism, and citizenship, but also because I would like to discuss the possible role of psychoanalysis in providing new approaches to such questions. For alongside the questions about minority culture I have already mentioned are still another group of questions about cultural identity or rather cultural identification and the formation of cultural groups. Questions that in turn lead to still other questions about the meaning of the terms “minority” and “majority” in relation to any particular experience of culture. Questions that have the merit-or the drawback, whichever you prefer-of making it even more difficult to determine what is meant or could be meant by the terms “minority” and “minority cultures.”

These questions about the formation of cultural groups call, in my view, for a psychoanalytic perspective and language in order to be phrased, because they suggest that cultural identity is never given in itself, but rather produced by means of identification or identifications, and because psychoanalysis provides concepts and strategies that can be used to analyze this production of identity and to articulate its potential implications for our understanding of the first of the problematic terms and concepts that are our focus-“minority culture.”

It might seem paradoxical to refer to the work of Balibar in connection with psychoanalysis, not only because he is known primarily as a political philosopher and cultural theorist, but also because in the one essay that he has devoted entirely to the discussion of psychoanalytic issues, his essay on Wilhelm Reich, entitled “Fascism, Psychoanalysis, Freudo-Marxism,” Balibar explicitly discourages any attempt to revive what he calls “Freudo-Marxism,” especially the Freudo-Marxism of Reich. However, Balibar also argues that it is important to “recall the necessity” of Freudo-Marxism (177), and many points in his political and cultural analyses take on even greater clarity and force when they are viewed in the light of this essay on psychoanalysis.

I will be focusing on two concepts that lie at the heart of Balibar’s cultural and political analyses-“transindividuality” and “interior inclusion.” As I read Balibar, both of these terms suggest that the point of departure for his political philosophy and cultural theory is a self that is not punctual and unified but rather complex and problematic, a self whose identity has been put into question from the very outset by the concept and process of repression. I recognize that it is virtually commonplace today to speak of a divided or split or complex subject, and that as a result many might ask whether a political philosophy that takes the idea of psychic repression as a starting point has anything new or different to teach us. I would respond by saying that it is not at all clear that the social and cultural implications of such a problematic form of subjectivity have been previously explored in the way Balibar explores them or with the same critical results.

In addressing questions about the links between psychoanalysis and cultural theory in Balibar’s work, it is important to stress that his relationship to psychoanalysis is a critical one-critical, in particular, of the psychoanalytic model proposed by Reich and other Freudo-Marxists. What Balibar explicitly rejects is Reich’s affirmation of what could be called the libidinal model of culture and politics: Reich’s desire for a return to “the utopia of a psyche without an unconscious,” a return in which “the objective of politics” becomes “the removal of repression itself” (“Freudo-Marxism,” 187) and the total fulfillment of desire. What Balibar embraces, on the other hand, is the contrasting idea that repression and desire do not exist separately, which implies that the ego cannot be simply liberated from repression (or identified with repression) and that repression itself cannot be simply removed or overcome. In what I am tempted to call Balibar’s version of psychoanalysis, the ego is “tied to the ambivalence of repression, to the double pressure of a desire and a censorship, or of an id and a superego with whom you have to ‘negotiate'” (185). Repression, in other words, is necessarily negative and positive, neither purely negative nor purely positive, because what is positive from the standpoint of one “pressure” or psychic instance will be negative from the standpoint of the other and vice versa.

What in Balibar’s terms are the social and cultural implications of this psychic configuration? The question is too simple, because it presupposes or risks presupposing that it is legitimate to analyze (or psychoanalyze) the conflict and interplay between the ego, the id, and the superego without asking the question of how they came to be what they are and to function as they do in the first place. It assumes, in other words, that the psyche is a cause of social relations and social structures when it may in fact be an effect. This is why Balibar argues that engaging in psychoanalysis without any supporting social analysis leads to results that are limited and reductive (“Freudo-Marxism,” 185). But such concepts as the “collective unconscious” or the “popular unconscious” are equally limited and reductive, not only of the individual and the individual unconscious but also of the complexity of social and cultural relations. Rather than offering an alternative to the notion of the individual unconscious, Balibar argues, they mirror it to the extent that those who use such concepts construe the collective or popular subject (and its unconscious) as the mere sum of individual subjects, and the collectivity itself as a kind of superindividual. There is a Marxist individualism (or “whiggism”) (180) as well as a Freudian individualism.

Thus while certain forms of social analysis seem profoundly dissimilar to traditional forms of psychoanalysis, from the political-psychoanalytic perspective that is Balibar’s they appear profoundly similar, because each tends to neglect the ambiguity of repression. In psychic terms, this ambiguity means that the self is confronted by “the other” not only when it confronts society, but also when it confronts itself, a product of the “negotiation” between desire and censorship or, in other words, between the self and itself. In cultural terms, it means that society is confronted by “the other” in the form of individual selves, in the form of other collective selves, but also, and perhaps most significantly, in the form of its own collective “identity.” In other words, the other of society is not merely the self, and the other of the self is not merely society. The other of both self and society is the “transindividual,” a term used frequently by Balibar to denote a relation that is at once intersubjective and intrasubjective, that disrupts all forms of individual and collective identity.

Balibar’s concept of repression and complementary concepts such as “transindividuality” and “interior exclusion” have a dual relation to culture in his work, providing the basis for his critical analyses of contemporary culture and politics and also for the model of civil society he proposes as an alternative to the nationalisms and “fictive ethnicities” (Race, Nation, Class 96) that dominate politics in many, if not all parts of the contemporary world. For example, a central preoccupation of Balibar is the question of the relation between violence and nationalism-that is, in our terms, the question of the violence against minorities and minority cultures perceived as not fitting into or belonging to a majority, national culture. There is, according to Balibar, a crucial issue to be explored in connection with this violence, one immediately linked to his perspective on repression. In Balibar’s language it is the issue of “interior exclusion,” which for him is implicitly the paradigmatic form of exclusion of minority cultures and therefore of violence against them as well. But what, exactly, does he mean by this term? Though Balibar never uses the term “exterior exclusion,” the definition of “interior exclusion” obviously depends on an implied contrast between the two terms. According to the logic suggested by this contrast, exterior exclusion would be a form of exclusion in which the conflict created by cultural identification opposes those who identify with a given culture or nation to those who do not identify with it and who are therefore stigmatized and excluded by those who do. In other words, the concept of exterior exclusion would presuppose a purely positive (or a purely negative) form of repression (or identification), in which the self or the collectivity constitutes a unified totality, and in which “exclusion” would relate to what is “exterior” to that totality.

What if repression is neither simply positive or negative, however, but rather ambivalent? Clearly, if the “pressure” with which the subject “negotiates” is a contradictory one, then exclusion would involve not only what is “exterior”-those (minority) individuals or (minority) cultures that do not conform to the model of identity created by what might be called the dominance of one pressure over another in a given situation. It would also involve what is interior; that is, it would involve the subordination or the “minoritization” of one of the two pressures with which one has to negotiate in order to create a single self or identity that can relate positively (or negatively) to a culture or a nation. The exclusion of either one of these pressures would be an “interior” exclusion, in the sense that each of them corresponds to a part of the self.

The concept of interior exclusion obviously has a cultural and social meaning as well. In using it to analyze contemporary political and cultural conflicts, Balibar’s suggestion is that cultural or political exclusion not only takes the form of conflict between members of one nation and another, or one ethnic group within a nation and another, but also takes the equally “inclusive” form of a conflict between those (but this would include everyone) who identify positively and those (but this would also include everyone) who identify negatively with the ideals of the nation or the ethnic group in question. In other words, the violence latent in cultural communities or nations may be directed not only at members of minority cultures but also against the community or the nation itself.

It is here that one can begin to answer the question of whether other forms of cultural analysis make it possible to confront the problem of the ambivalence of identification as squarely as Balibar’s and whether the critiques of the subject that have been used to support various cultural critiques are really all the same. In many or almost all of the models of ambivalent identification that have been proposed, does not the “ambivalence” in question merely mirror a purely cultural hybridity and in this sense perpetuate the concept and logic of exterior exclusion that is the object of Balibar’s critique? For as Balibar suggests, the source of cultural ambivalence is not only that one or more distinct cultures (that is, cultures that are “exterior” to each other) make conflicting demands on the subject. One’s “own” culture is also the source of conflicting demands, or rather, one’s relationship to one’s “own” culture can be equally ambivalent, because subjectivity is not so much an identity as it is a process of negotiation and conflict.

But how exactly does the concept of interior exclusion apply to nationalism? It would seem that in this regard the logic of interior exclusion leads to an absurd paradox-that the nationalist is an antinationalist or, in the language we are using, that the “majority” culture is a “minority” culture. As implausible as it may at first seem, this is what Balibar in fact argues, for example, when he writes of the (antinational) nationalism and xenophobia of the National Front: “The ‘carte d’identit’ [or national identity card] is important, but we know that actually in the discourse of the National Front, as in all historical racisms and fascisms, the principal obsession is not with knowing who has the identity card and who does not have it and can therefore be turned back [refoul] at the border. It is to know which Frenchmen are ‘in reality’ camouflaged foreigners inside French nationality.” For the National Front, “potentially anyone at all is a foreigner” (Droit de cit 123-124; my translation).

(Continues…)

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