East-West Film Journal, Volume 7, No. 1 (January 1993)

EAST-WEST FILM JOURNAL VOLUME 7· NUMBER 1 SPECIAL ISSUE ON CINEMA AND NATIONHOOD Baseball in the Post-American Cinema, or Life in the Minor Leagues I VIVIAN SOBCHACK A Nation T(w/o)o: Chinese Cinema(s) and Nationhood(s) CHRIS BERRY Gender, Ideology, Nation: Ju Dou in the Cultural Politics of China 52 w. A. CALLAHAN Cinema and Nation: Dilemmas of Representation in Thailand 81 ANNETTE HAMILTON Tibet: Projections and Perceptions 106 AISLINN SCOFIELD Warring Bodies: Most Nationalistic Selves 137 PATRICIA LEE MASTERS Book Reviews 149 JANUARY 1993 The East-West Center is a public, nonprofit education and research institution that examines such Asia-Pacific issues as the environment, economic development, population, international relations, resources, and culture and communication. Some two thousand research fellows, graduate students, educators, and professionals in business and government from Asia, the Pacific, and the United States annually work with the Center's staff in cooperative study, training, and research. The East-West Center was established in Hawaii in 1960 by the U.S. Congress, which provides principal funding. Support also comes from more than twenty Asian and Pacific governments, private agencies, and corporations and through the East- West Center Foundation. The Center has an international board ofgovernors. Baseball in the Post-American Cinema, or Life in the Minor Leagues VIVIAN SOBCHACK The icons of our world are in trouble.! LEEIACOCCA AT THE beginning of Nation Into State: The Shifting Symbolic Founda tions of American Nationalism, a historical and literally concrete explora tion of the symbolic landscape of the United States, political geographer Wilbur Zelinsky explores a variety of meanings attached to the concept of "nation." Distinguishing between nationhood and statehood (closely related but not synonymous concepts), he tells us: If we distill the notion of nationhood, or peoplehood, to its essence, it is the shared belief among a sizeable group of individuals (too large a number for personal contact to be feasible among all) that they are united in the posses sion of a unique and cherished social and cultural personality. (Zelinsky I988 ,5) Zelinsky goes on to point out "how impossible it is to define the nation without simultaneously defining nationalism," for, as he puts it, "belief in the existence of the former automatically breeds some level of allegiance, or even passion, for that rather mystical, romantic concept." Both nation and nationalism, he suggests, are "forms of social consciousness," but both are also social constructions and artifacts - even if, on the one hand, the nation is born and sustained "only when enough people ... believe in its existence," and, on the other, the sense of nationhood, the conscious ness of national identity, "must appear to be the natural upwelling of sen- I 2 VIVIAN SOBCHACK timents based upon a mutual discovery of commonalities rather than something imposed from above" (Zelinsky 1988, 5-6; emphasis mine). One would be hard pressed to deny this description of national identity as it is lived indigenously from within (rather than seen objectively from without). Nonetheless, contemporary experience in the postmodern America of late capitalism would seem to belie it. While most Americans currently believe in the existence of the nationalist state (living as they are under its increasing compulsions), they do so in an increasingly alienated and negative mode. On the one hand, the supposed "superiority" of our democratic mode of government has been paradoxically leveled by what might be seen as our ideological triumph. Citing such events as "peres troika, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the capitalization of the Eastern Bloc," to which I might add the recent collapse of communism and the state power of the Soviet Union (against which the United States hereto fore defined itself), cultural critic Bill Brown points out that "the daily headlines of 1990 ... depict a decade wherein the ideological frontier, the global line of resistance to capitalist democracy, is fading." The "very suc cess of American ideological monopoly," he suggests, "precipitates cul turalloss, the loss of 'America' itself, the dispersal of 'America,' 'America' appearing, all at once, everywhere and therefore nowhere" (Brown 1991, 60-61). Thus, the foundational myth of "American exceptionalism" that has been, as Agnew says, so much "an integral part of American history" seems increasingly baseless (Agnew 1987,15, cited in McGerr 1991). On the other hand, this recent (and to some degree "sudden") national "baselessness" caused by America's ideological success (its consequence: a peculiar and paradoxical sense of alienation) is matched by the blatant failure of capitalist democracy as it has been experienced "at home." The most spectacular examples are the nation's trillion-dollar deficit and the savings-and-Ioan scandal, but more concretely visible are crises in health care and pension funds, factory layoffs and closures, and the alarming realization and growth of an American underclass who stand - actually and symbolically - as "homeless." Governmental response has only wid ened the gap between real experience and state "representation." The most telling recent example is President Bush and his top White House aides' response to the failing economy "as a public relations problem, not a pol icy issue," as one newspaper reporter put it (Rosenthal 1991). Daily events in the United States narrate a foundering of belief in the nation as well as a nearly complete loss of faith in the state. In the street BASEBALL IN THE POST-AMERICAN CINEMA 3 and across the media, one is exposed to an "upwelling of sentiments" based less upon, as Zelinsky puts it, the mutual discovery or maintenance of "commonalities" than upon the mutual (and generally hostile) discovery and promotion of differences. On the one hand, the current economic sit uation has pervaded the national consciousness in the form of a general "depression" that might be seen as the new "commonality" binding Ameri cans together. But this commonality is purely negative. Listening to a local CBS radio news station on November 2, 1991, within a single hour, one could hear reports about the stock market dropping sixty-three points, a training conference being held in San Jose, California, on developing "self esteem" in the workplace as an aid to bettering the quality of production, and the results of a poll on global "competitiveness" that indicated most Americans feel "we" are slipping in the international lineup of major eco nomic powers. On the other hand, the economic situation in the United States has not only made American class differences appallingly obvious, but it has also fueled hostile articulations of racial and ethnic difference in the midst of a period also marked by massive and contentious immigra tion of Hispanics and Asians into the United States and visible demo graphic challenges to the coherence of America as a "white majority." Again, several myths informing a sense of national "exceptionalism" are exposed by their perversion in the current socioeconomic context. Histo rian Michael McGerr tells us: The myth of America as a uniquely middle-class society tends to mute peo ple's awareness of class differences. The "American dream," the less than fully justified faith in social mobility, tends to reconcile both the more and less fortunate to the inequalities of capitalism. (McGerr 1991,1063) Today, the exceptionalist myth of America as "uniquely" middle-class is challenged daily on the streets and by a perversion of the exceptionalist myth of "social mobility" - namely, its current dynamic as "downward." And while the liberal rhetoric of "community" (as in "the homeless com munity") attempts to efface class differences, the latter's actuality is no longer "muted." The new downward social mobility foregrounds "the inequities of capitalism" and serves to further fragment a phenomenologi cal sense of national commonality. This economic fragmentation informs and further amplifies social fragmentation along other lines of visible difference: race, ethnicity, and geography. On the one hand, the recent assertion and politics of racial, 4 VIVIAN SOBCHACK ethnic, and regional identities have been a positive response to participa tion in a global culture constituted primarily through new communication and media technologies and wide-ranging diasporic and transnational movement. Americans live in an age when electronic interfaces and instant communication have nearly erased the boundaries and distances of national geography. A pervasive and dispersed global network of com mercial franchise has sent American Kentucky Fried Chicken to Beijing, McDonald's to Moscow, and Holiday Inns, American movies, and music videos everywhere. In the other direction, if more quietly, foreign interests have purchased American companies and real estate and are increasingly making their presence felt in the context of everyday "American" life. On the other hand, the recent assertion and politics of racial, ethnic, and regional identities have been an embattled response to a rising and fear some parochialism, provincialism, and fundamentalism on the part of the white "uniquely" American middle class, whose mythic "majority" (already diminished economically) is terrified of being culturally hybri dized and de-based - that is, of losing its numerical and political clout and being "sent down" from its white franchise to live and play in

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