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Introduction 1 Notes Introduction 1. I include in the Caribbean not only the islands of the Caribbean archipelago but the circum-Caribbean coasts of the mainland Americas, which were characterized by plantation and slave societies; thus, parts of Brazil, Mexico, Guyana, and other mainland nations are included in my discussion. Although I have made a conscious effort not to gener- alize on the basis of the English-speaking Caribbean, and have drawn on the discursive histories of hybridity in the French and Spanish Caribbean, my linguistic competence does not extend to all of the region’s numerous colonial, indigenous, and contact languages. Regrettably, this study repeats Caribbean Studies’ marginalization of the Dutch Caribbean—a marginalization that arises from the number of local Dutch Caribbean contact/languages, the paucity of transla- tions, and the Netherlands’ own relative marginality to the centers of European power. I also dwell only briefly in this book on the large dias- poric Caribbean populations and hybridities. Both these omissions are corrected in Puri, ed., Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures within the Caribbean. 2. The Predicament of Culture 173. Conversely, García Canclini, writing from within the discipline of Latin American Studies, writes “All cultures are frontier cultures.” 3. For an argument that shares my critique, see Mimi Sheller, “Theoretical Piracy on the High Seas of Global Culture.” 4. Nor did this usage die with the nineteenth century. In South Africa, the rhetoric of pluralism often operated as a code word for apartheid. In the context of tensions between Afro- and Indo-Caribbean populations in the present-day Caribbean, the invocation of “pluralism” by some conservative cultural nationalists is also a euphemism for “separate but equal.” (See chapters six and seven.) Although the emphasis today may have shifted from racial to cultural hybridity, the distinctions between race and culture—or for that matter between race and ethnicity—are far from secure. See Young 53–54, 88, 92–93. 224 NOTES 5. To the extent that hybridity and homosexuality were related in discourse, it was as two forms of degeneration (Young 26). 6. See also Coombes 221. Begun in 1990, my study shares the spirit and hopes to complement the work of Coombes, Shohat, and Young; Stallybrass and White’s The Poetics and Politics of Transgression, a study of English popular culture from the seventeenth century on, which treats transgression as a phenomenon of the hybridization of high and low culture; Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, which discusses cultural and generic hybridization in the “arts of the contact zone” in a context of unequal relations of power; Fraser’s Justice Interruptus, which examines the relationship of difference and inequality; Brah and Coombes, eds., Hybridity and its Discontents and Werbner and Madood, eds., Debating Cultural Hybridity. 7. For examples of transnationalist theory, see Boehmer and Moore- Gilbert, eds. Brennan, At Home in the World, Featherstone, ed., Grewal and Kaplan, Robbins, Rediker and Linebaugh, and Spivak’s “Culture” in Toward a Critique of Postcolonial Reason. In my thinking, transnational corporations, the Internet, CNN, MTV, movements such as Pan-Africanism and the pan-Americanism of the Latin American modernists, the EZLN’s transnationally aided nationalism, identities such as “South Asian,” and the organization “Doctors without Borders” that represents an active attempt to cross in solidarity borders whose power it recognizes, all constitute examples of transnationalism. See “Encancaranublado,” a short story by the Puerto Rican feminist writer Ana Lydia Vega, for insight into the tense coexistence of transnational regional Caribbean solidarities and nationalist Caribbean rivalries. For examples of post-nationalism, see Albrow, Appadurai, Guéhenno, and Ohmae. When post-nationalism is simply an orientation— that is a desire or a program, but not a description of an existing reality—then it approaches the transnationalism with which I have no quarrel. For key positions developed in classical marxism on the status of the nation, see Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg. For other debates informed by marxism, see Fanon; James, The Black Jacobins; Nairn; Poulantzas; Eagleton, “Nationalism”; and Jameson, “Conclusion,” The Political Unconscious. On the core-periphery model see World-Systems and Dependency School Theory (Wallerstein et al.; Gunder Frank, Rodney, Amin); for a marxist cri- tique of Third Worldism that reads the Non-Aligned Movement in terms of a politics of communist containment, see Ahmad, chapter 8. For an argument that appropriates “cosmopolitanism” from the tradi- tionally pejorative value given it by nationalists, see Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms” and Feeling Global. For overviews of Marxist debates on the subject of nationalism, see Tom Bottomore, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. 8. Recounted in Vincent, “The Future of the Debate” 180. 9. For excellent and accessible overviews of the economic debates, fuller than the brief summary I offer here, see Kiely, “Introduction” and NOTES 225 chapter 2, to which this section is indebted; Golding and Harris, eds., Klak, ed., Harvey, “Globalization in Question,” and Alan Scott, ed. 10. UNCTAD 1995, qtd. in Kiely 49. The ten nations that accounted for 68 percent of Direct Foreign Investment in the Third World in the early 1990s: Singapore, Mexico, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Egypt, Argentina, Thailand and Taiwan (New Internationalist, qtd. in Kiely 49). The Asian tigers’ rise to prominence in the global market, moreover, is in part the result of a strongly planned and protected national economy. Employment in Export Processing Zones that are so often invoked as signs of postnationalism typically accounts for about 5 percent of total industrial employment in individual countries, and in many cases less than 10 percent of total manufactured exports originate there (Gereffi and Hempel, Jenkins, qtd. in Kiely 54). Kiely also points out that various transnational free-trade groupings like NAFTA and the EC not only may be subject to national regulations based on consider- ations of product quality and health regulations, but themselves act as regional protectionist groupings (51). 11. International Organization for Migration and U.N., World Migration Report 2000 5, 55. The numbers of migrants within nations presumably would be substantially larger. 12. See Puri, “Introduction,” Marginal Migrations. 13. UNDP Report cited in Le Monde Diplomatique, Paris, November 1998. Qtd. in World Press Review, February 1999, 47. 14. Vincent 195; Klak and Conway 259. 15. Vincent 178–181. 16. (New Internationalist 1992, qtd. in Kiely 13). These statistics do not, of course, imply uniform levels of consumption or access to wealth within a nation-state; nation-states have always been and continue to be marked by greater or lesser degrees of class inequality. Notwithstanding the increasing gaps between rich and poor within many First World nation- states, their relatively developed infrastructures and welfare safety nets provide some protections against the experience of mass poverty that characterizes so many Third World nation-states. The statistics should also not be interpreted to suggest a static situation in the Third World. Clearly, selected segments of more and more Third World nations are being incorporated into global communications networks. For instance, in 1996 eight African countries had no Internet access at all; in 1999 only one (Somalia) had none; in 1996, 13 African nations had “full” Internet access; in 1999, 42 did (Discover May 1999, 28). Moreover, the Internet has become a crucial resource for many Third World activisms, perhaps most spectacularly the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. 17. See Boehmer and Moore-Gilbert, eds., Malkki and Ong (particularly the notion of “flexible citizenship”) for the argument that nationalism and internationalism are compatible. 18. See also Kiely’s suggestion that we revise our understanding of core and periphery, treating them as effects rather than causes of 226 NOTES the world system (9). So doing avoids simplified notions of inten- tionality or central planning of the kind that characterized the era of classical imperialism. For other accounts of the hierarchical reinscription of space, see David Harvey, Edward Soja, and Neil Smith. 19. That cultural theory today can continue to declare the nation dead, untroubled by the kind of data I have laid out above, stems in part from skepticism toward empiricist and positivist methodologies. However, this skepticism risks turning into a wholesale disregard for history and political economy. The point of my own invocation of sta- tistics is not to hold them out as incontrovertible truths (indeed, the manipulability of statistics has long been recognized within the social sciences). Rather, I wish to draw upon an early conception of Theory as a transdisciplinary project, a conception that requires one to engage discourses governed by different legitimating rules from those of one’s own. Without such engagement and mutual disciplinary interrogation, Theory becomes simply a self-endorsing grand narra- tive in its own right. To avert such a situation, I further suggest the value of fieldwork for Cultural Studies in the humanities. For the transdisciplinary responsibilities of Theory, see Jameson, “Metacommentary” and Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Culture Studies.” 20. The second of these questions modifies a question
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