REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIESREVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIES Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of TheoryP e t e r P e r i c l e s Tr i f o n a s ,R O U T L E D G E FA L M E R A M E M B E R O F T H E TAY L O R & F R A N C I S G R O U PNEW YORK LONDONEDITORPublished in 2000 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Copyright ©2000 by Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trifonas, Peter Pericles, 1960– Revolutionary pedagogies: cultural politics, instituting education, and the discourse of theory / [edited by] Peter Pericles Trifonas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-92568-1 (hb: alk. paper) — ISBN 0-415-92569-X (pb: alk. paper) 1. Critical pedagogy. 2. Education—Political aspects. 3. Education—Social aspects. 4. Education—Philosophy. LC196.R48 2000 370.11'5—dc21 ISBN 0-203-90155-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-90159-2 (Glassbook Format)99-056409To my parents, Panagiotis and Martha, whose immeasurable sacrifice and love taught me that to live is but to learn; the joyful inspiration of their ancient wisdom is confirmed each and every single day by the miracle of my own children, Peirce, Anthi, and Yanni.ContentsAcknowledgmentsixIntroductionxiI CULTURAL POLITICS Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational WorldGayatri Chakravorty SpivakStrange Fruit: Race, Sex, and an Autobiographics of Alterity30William F. PinarAll-Consuming Identities: Race and the Pedagogy of Resentment in the Age of Difference47Cameron McCarthy and Greg DimitriadisThe Touch of the Past: The Pedagogical Significance of a Transactional Sphere of Public Memory61Roger I. SimonII INSTITUTING EDUCATION Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends83Jacques DerridaTechnologies of Reason: Toward a Regrounding of Academic Responsibility Peter Pericles Trifonas113VIIICONTENTSUnthinking Whiteness: Rearticulating Diasporic Practice140Peter McLarenPostmodern Education and Disposable Youth174Henry A. GirouxMultiple Literacies and Critical Pedagogies: New Paradigms196Douglas KellnerIII THE DISCOURSE OF THEORY The Shock of the Real: Critical Pedagogies and Rightist Reconstructions225Michael W. AppleThe Limits of Dialogue as a Critical Pedagogy251Nicholas C. BurbulesThe Social Sciences as Information Technology: A Political Economy of Practice274John WillinskyResponsible Practices of Academic Writing: Troubling Clarity II289Patti LatherDegrees of Freedom and Deliberations of “Self ”: The Gendering of Identity in Teaching312Jo-Anne DillaboughPermissions353Contributors355Index359Acknowledgmentswould like to thank Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, John Willinksy, Roger Simon, Nicholas Burbules, Doug Kellner, Michael Apple, Patti Lather, Bill Pinar, Denise EgéaKuehne, Jo-Anne Dillabough, Cameron McCarthy, and Greg Dimitriadis, who have participated in this anthology, for their support of this project and for the generous contributions of their texts to the collection. I have learned much from their work and have been inspired by the gift of their friendship. Heidi Freund has provided valuable insight into the task of editing this book as well as tremendous reserves of patience while it was transformed into its present form. Thank you. I would like to express my gratitude to Elefteria Balomenos for reading portions of the manuscript and for assisting in the writing of the introduction. This book would not have been possible without a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Connaught Grant from the University of Toronto.IntroductionHow does contemporary critical theory encounter pedagogy? radicalize it? revolutionize it? make it revolutionary? This is the central question, among others, that this volume seeks to address. It does so by highlighting the work of contemporary theorists who are also very well known for their revolutionary teaching and the radicality of what they have taught with respect to cultural politics, instituting education, and the discourse of theory. Although this characterization of the chapters presented in this volume is self-consciously forefronted by the title of the anthology (and any title worthy of the appellation “title” should surely thematize the heterogeneity of a body of work so as to do just that!), the text does not speak only to those who have embraced the ethical value of opening the empirico-conceptual and epistemic limits of one’s work and oneself to the risk of less than canonical modes of thinking. It also addresses those who would wholeheartedly blame contemporary theorizing for all that is perceived to be “wrong” with the state of the humanities and the social sciences today. By containing the idiomatic values of such arguments within the thematic trajectory of this titular enframing of the topic, the essays sustain a probing articulation of the tensions among the discursive spaces and the real-world dimensions of an interdisciplinary nexus of theory that informs and manifests practice in the application of ideas. For any engagement or identification with a theoretical position or direction (for instance, a theorem, a system, a methodology, a “proof,” an ideology, an argument) implies the critical outworking of an academic responsibility to uphold an obligation owed to the search for truth at all costs. This is what makes theory practice and provides a justifying principle, a principle of reason for what we think, do, and write. The collection converges upon specific interpretations of the obligation we have to respond responsibly to the alterity of those we teach for beyond ourselves. The interplay between texts I have included thereby challenges us to reflect upon and to reexamine the logic and the boundaries of “thought” and “action,” “theory” and “practice,” and what comprises and displaces the opposition of these two entities in the name of revolutionizing pedagogy, radicalizing the normative limits of its ethics so as to make it more responsive to the difference of an Other. Of course, the relating of “idea” to “performance” and vice versa is most certainly nothing new, especially as it relates to the teaching body and a body of teaching. As I have said, the desire motivating the appearance of this text is not to offerXIIINTRODUCTIONyet another treatise containing polemics on why one should be “for” as compared to being “against” theory in the pursuit of achieving discreet pedagogical purposes, objectives, and ideals. No matter what the ethico-ideological impetus behind such a stance may be, there is no fruitfulness in taking either an offensive or a defensive posture for the sake of simply protecting the lineage, direction, and territory of a disciplinary ground from the contaminating effects of its Others. For in choosing sides, one reinstitutes the ideological errors of those familiar divisions, epistemic and methodological, that do nothing more than promote and entrench the institutional conflicts (skirmishes and wars) between otherwise interrelated and complementary faculties and induce artificial distinctions grounding the differences among areas of study—for example, the theoretical versus the practical, the scientific versus the artistic, the cognitive versus the aesthetic, the rigorous versus the undemanding, the male-oriented versus the female-oriented, the required versus the elective, and so on. The quest for validation, in each and every case, is worked out at the expense of recognizing the openings of an interdisciplinary logic—a pragmatico-interpretative space beyond the oppositionality of binary thought—that would defy the historicity of an institutional axiomatics aimed at the calculation and realization of a single, teleological destination. For it is the myopia of a repression of the desire to trailblaze, to forge new directions and paths of inquiry, thinking and teaching, that risks the danger of separating theory from practice for the sole purpose of policing boundaries and orienting the ends of research and of education. This would lead to the abdication of academic responsibility to the truth of the Other that we cannot already know and results in the instauration of a “pointless pedagogy” grounded on, of, and for the rationality of its own reason. Its logic remains, in effect, a prisoner to the fulfillment of its own faith and faithfulness in the laws and rules it upholds without exception by being negatively positioned toward what it must deny as Other in order to keep intact the right of its self-approving integrity. A pointless pedagogy is not aimless, that is, without purpose or direction. It is, however, conceptually and performatively unquestioned (what is its point?) and therefore both unqualified and underdetermined, yet curiously enough also overqualified and overdetermined, in the limits of its responsivity by offering no opening toward a recognition of what it might exclude as being unlike itself. A pointless pedagogy—signifying everything and nothing through its lack of an affirmative response to anything outside of itself—has no hope or possibility of realizing the horizons of other teachings whose alterior truth it cannot but deny. None of the texts collected in this volume is guilty of doing this—that is, of promulgating a closure of response and responsibility in favor of a strategic exclusions intended to work in defense and support of a single-minded theory of/and/as practice. And this is what makes the particular thematic trajectory or “theoretical jetty” of each essay “radical” and “revolutionary” (even “topical” when we relate itINTRODUCTIONXIIIback to the title) by articulating a path toward an alterior ground for enacting a reactionary and inclusive pedagogy aimed at the ethical reconstruction of education and its institution via an intensification of academic responsibility. So there is a common thread weaving together the heterogeneous strands of thinking represented here. The anthology gathers together the texts of theorists and educators whose practice has and is struggling to rethink the ethics and politics of dominant modes of knowledge and their pedagogical forms of expression that have operated within the institutional purview of a traditional system of education to locate the epistemic and performative parameters of its scene of teaching along a normative axis of response and responsibility. In essence, this is what gives the book its ethical and transformative impetus: another way to put it would be its reconstructive and therefore revolutionary bent. That is, it engages the form and content of seemingly benign dimensions of what has been protected under the aegis of an existing codification of social infrastructures and their prevailing cultural conditions as the “knowledge worth knowing.” How do the transdisciplinary sites of the discursive engagement of critical theory with pedagogy confront the ethico-political consequences of (post)modern social practices as active forms of cultural politics? How does this confrontation of critical theory and pedagogy with the field of social and cultural practices redefine the bounds of pedagogy and the instituting or institution of education? How does the discourse of theory affect our responsibility to rethink and revolutionize what it means to teach, to learn, to know? In short, how is the idea of the “revolutionary pedagogy” possible, or not, and what forms does it take when it is applied to the scene of teaching and learning, including research, as an active means of transforming the cultural historicity of educational praxis? In essence, these are the guiding questions that this edited book addresses by isolating the need to renegotiate the formative grounds of knowledge across three areas constituting the sites of its pedagogical articulation: Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory. On the one hand, the essays contained in this collection can be read as individual texts that stand very much alone as examples of groundbreaking work done within these interdependent areas of inquiry. On the other hand, each chapter relates to the other by being interdependent upon arguments that link and extend these contested sites of knowledge production in order to take up the question of the ethico-political interpellation and radicalization of the scene of teaching and learning toward a revolutionizing of pedagogy. The first section, on Cultural Politics, deals with questions regarding the formation of subjectivity as the basis for a pedagogical reconfiguring of what it means to be a subject from competing and complementary points of view, for example, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and class. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in “Diasporas Old and New: Women in theXIVINTRODUCTIONTransnational World,” takes up the question of the future of feminist theory. The struggle of women in relation to the displacement of subjectivity that has resulted from the increased migrancy of labor due to global economic restructuring is the focus of the chapter, as the sociocultural manifestations of a new economic citizenship are examined with respect to the problem of a universalization of feminism. There is a listing of what injustices the transnational inspires and also how, by removing the obstacles preventing the actualization of border crossings it is feasible to assure the possibility of the sustainable development of capitalism through the movement of bodies over space and time. Spivak attends to the difficulties of reading sociopolitical and economic contexts serving to unite women from the new diasporas of the transnational marketplace with women of developing nations and the difficulties of achieving international solidarity among feminists in the name of the subalterned, the disenfranchised, and the abused. The chapter ends with a neverending syllabus—one to be permanently under erasure—and some suggested readings for a course in global feminist theory that enacts the movement toward realizing a transnational perspective necessary for a reconfiguring of the roles and identities of women across the changing definitions of citizenship, state, and nation constantly working themselves out through the economically driven conditions of diasporas old and new. In “Strange Fruit: Race, Sex, and an Autobiographics of Alterity,” William F. Pinar blurs the dividing line between race and gender. The purpose of the quest is to revisit life stories that are not his own but have influenced the integrity and integration of his thinking and being as a subject. The hope Pinar augurs is to reformulate the boundaries of self and other. The intersections of race and homosexuality form the starting point for an inquiry into currere, or curriculum inquiry conceived as a type of social psychoanalytics, which brings together Pinar’s voice with the narratives of others as autobiographics of alterity will enmesh with and disambiguate their dimensions through the articulation of the differential effects on the subjective present by a time past. Pinar engages the disturbing history of violence against black males in America and outlines the pathological dimensions of racism exemplified in the phenomena of lynching and the mutilation of sexual organs and other body parts. What causes such acts of hatred and ritualistic cruelty that are focused on race and gender but also imply a fear of sexuality and difference? How can we explain the psychic drives of this traumatic behavior in American culture, beyond explanations resorting to an identification of neurasthenia based solely on object relations and the binary formation of subjectivity? In one sense, answering these questions is the crux of Pinar’s chapter but like Spivak, he prefers only to begin upon the path of exploring the historicity of subject formation and otherness as the radicalization of difference by pointing to a direction of study he is and will be doing (really has been doing) for some time via the autobiographics of alterity called currere. TheINTRODUCTIONXVchapter thus foreshadows a curriculum of research constructed to answer a larger and more pressing question in trying to set the theoretical and practical groundwork for conceiving the possibility of what Franz Fanon called a “new man.” In “All-Consuming Identities: Race and the Pedagogy of Resentment in the Age of Difference,” Cameron McCarthy and Greg Dimitriadis present a dialogue of our times that illuminates the divergent forces involved in the formation of a cultural consciousness which is ill at ease within its insatiable appetite for material assets. The chapter illustrates how the rituals of contemporary culture and its ideology allow for a clear-sighted affiliation of interests through which subjectivity is defined in relation to the comfort of an illusion of belonging to a community and knowing one’s place in it. McCarthy and Dimitriadis argue that this image of identity forms a niche that prefigures and limits one’s vision of the dimensions of the lifeworld and is ill at ease with the reality of a subject’s appetite for material and social assets so prevalent in the political economy of modern day global capitalism. The sense of self is realized through the commodification of desire and the obsessions and excesses it produces as identity is worked out via the consumption of popular culture. Thus, for McCarthy and Dimitriadis, subjective appetites and perspectives inevitably exist, albeit subsumed among the influences of the pop culture industry which is mapping and recodifying the signs of difference on a global scale. Through this reign of images that are consumed and all-consuming, identity is manifest according to an obsession or fetishization of object relations occupying the subject. Popular culture—as conceived in this chapter—serves to propel affiliations and disassociations of convenience, necessity, and urgency in the desire to meet the real and affective constraints of time and appetite. The scarcity of resources creates and reinforces the limit of accessibility that marks a rift in race relations and racial animosity based on policy discourses reducing equality of opportunity, for example, access to education and to a fair-game, market-based economy structured around strategies of competition and meritocracy. Roger Simon discusses the importance of a public memory as a transactional space, not for the consolidation of national memory but for mobilizing practices of remembrance-learning in which one’s stories might be shifted by the stories of others. In “The Touch of the Past: The Pedagogical Significance of a Transactional Sphere of Public Memory,” Simon argues that memories become transactional when they enact a claim on us, providing accounts that interrupt one’s self-sufficiency essentially by claiming an attentiveness to an otherness that cannot be reduced to a version of our own stories. Such memories are not limited by practices of identity and identification. Within a transactional sphere of public memory, possibilities exist to enact a memorial relation to others quite different from ourselves. One condition under which this may occur is in one’s encounter with testimony, understood as a multilayered communicative act, a performance intent on carryingXVIINTRODUCTIONforth memories through the conveyance of a person’s engagement between consciousness and history. Testimony is always directed toward another, attempting to place the one who receives it under the obligation of a response to an embodied singular experience not recognizable as one’s one. But there are different ways in which witnesses to testimony may respond to its transactive address. Two different forms of sensibility in this regard are discussed: the spectatorial and summoned. The first responds to testimony as if it were a document to be understood, felt, and judged. The second requires that one accept co-ownership of the testimony-witness relation and the burden of being obligated to testimony beyond one’s instrumental concerns, opening oneself to the force of testimony that may call one’s very practice of listening and responding to it into question. How this might be so and what the pedagogical importance of such a practice of listening might be is discussed in relation to listening to testimony given by members of the Sayisi Dene First Nation as they provide accounts of the 1956 forced removal of their peoples from their homelands by the Canadian government. An argument is made that listening may become a mode of thought when it is structured within a double attentiveness which calls into question our sufficiency to hear what is being spoken. In such listening/ thought is the possibility of having Sayisi Dene stories shift our own, a shift that is necessary to any future reconstruction of First Nations–Canadian relationships. The second section, on Instituting Education, takes the analysis further into the question of what it means to teach and the ethics of pedagogy, the valuations of its institutions, and the movements for and against visions of equitable educational reform, whatever these may be, for example, critical pedagogy, deconstruction, poststructuralism, or postmodernism. Jacques Derrida takes up the question of the scene of pedagogy in “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends.” This text was originally produced from the notes taken at an organizational meeting of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy (GREPH) and was published in a book about the teaching of philosophy that included contributions by Michel Foucault and Michel Serres, among others. In it, Derrida deconstructs the function of the teaching body in the institution by reflecting upon the curricular expectations of his own pedagogical role as répétiteur, or an instructor who taught the history of philosophy in such a way as to render its repetition during examination possible, while he was at the École Normale Supérieure. The chapter essentially offers an example of the political implications and applications of deconstruction by outlining how the GREPH should conduct its battle against the Haby Reform, an edict that threatened the eradication of the teaching of philosophy in the French high school system and afterwards. Derrida offers a genealogy of the historical formation of the teaching body of philosophy in France. As a statement of how to operationalize, motivate, and sustain an ethical and political resistance to the declarations of the state, theINTRODUCTIONXVIItext uses this inherited model of teaching to show how it is upheld and depends on the system of education that it in turn advocates and reinforces. In this sense, the text is historically important because of the insight it gives us into the mission of the GREPH and the extent of Derrida’s involvement within the radical scope of this pedagogical interest group. It also establishes what many in North America have denied or ignored: the ethics and politics of deconstruction articulated via Derrida’s work on the institution of education. “Technologies of Reason: Toward a Regrounding of Academic Responsibility” builds upon facets of Derrida’s work on the institution of education undertaken after his involvement with the GREPH. It concentrates upon the ethics of deonstruction as a way to reconfigure academic responsibility. In this chapter, my own, I have taken up the question of the grounding of reason within the university by reading a text by Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils,” which asks (and I am paraphrasing somewhat): Is the university’s reason for being rational? Which is another way of asking us—those who teach and learn within and without its walls—to reflect upon the nature of our academic responsibility in upholding the tradition of the Universitas. In many ways, Derrida’s text is a genealogy of the history of reason and its transformation to a scientifico-technical rationality that owes much to Heidegger. The chapter pays close attention to the Heideggerian line of Derrida’s argument that develops via the images of the ground/abyss of reason as metaphors for the principle of reason as a principle of foundation and self-evidence. This is the basis of academic responsibility that is unquestioned and taken for granted. Derrida’s text exhibits the union of constation and performativity it exemplifies in saying what it does and doing what it says. “The Principle of Reason” was a lecture given on a bridge over the gorge at Cornell University. And this, of course, is not insignificant but central to the argument of my chapter. Peter McLaren takes the binary logic or “reason” of racialization that juxtaposes the Other against the color white and relates it to the ethical predicament of the instituting of education at a time of global expansions and interconnectivity when capitalism has been essentially self-validated and self-congratulated as the spectre of a democracy to come. “Unthinking Whiteness: Rearticulating Diasporic Praxis” is in itself a reactionary stance toward maintaining an ignorance of how sociopolitical forms of repression rooted at the cultural foundations of our institutions impinge upon the ethical and material fabric of our everyday lives. The recodification of capitalism by the rise of technology, McLaren argues, has made it impossible to ignore the changes to what we know as democracy and schooling that have brought out challenges to the concept of self and Other, including an acceptance of whiteness as the semiotic marker of subjectivity and humanity. Racism is thus linked with capitalism and its ethics of exclusion based on the historicity of imperialistXVIIIINTRODUCTIONeconomic imperatives evident in the contemporary global marketplace that originally brought the non-Western Other to the West. For McLaren, the struggle for democracy requires a radicalization of the political imaginary or an envisioning of citizens as more than clients and consumers. The chapter ends with the discussion of critical pedagogy and an ethical imperative beyond communitarianism. It is becoming more and more obvious that an uncomplicated notion of a community unresponsive to difference allows no social transformativity to take place, as the ideal of community and belonging must be maintained at the expense of subjective agency, of freedom, and of the Other. Henry Giroux, besides being arguably the most recognizable advocate of critical pedagogy, is also well known for his texts on postmodern education and cultural studies. This work is extended here in this book. In this chapter, “Postmodern Education and Disposable Youth,” the aforementioned themes are readdressed but taken in a new direction, as the deprecating hype around the meaning of postmodernism and its nonessentialist recoding of the values of reason is brought face to face with a serious discussion of what postmodernism entails for pedagogy in ethical terms. The argument of this text is firmly entrenched within the discourse of theory, but the domain of inquiry is the current state of schools and schooling and the possibility of configuring a radical democratic project that would recognize manifestations of alterity beyond the modernist reason and logic of rejecting difference. Giroux analyzes the political and economic rootedness of social and cultural conditions that have produced hybrid states of subjectivity he identifies as border youth, urbane nomads, literally and figuratively, who must be recognized in both their marginal position and contingency to the world of fixed meanings and representations. The postmodern does not exacerbate the dislocation of identity as much as it offers the possibility of explaining and understanding it and, of course, using this insight to inform the institution of education and intensify the responsibility of its pedagogical manifestations both in form and in content. Toward this end, Giroux goes on to discuss the representation of popular culture in some recent controversial films to analyze and illustrate how variations of the image of border youth are played out in public by the media and can be used to enact an ethical pedagogy that is more responsive to alterity in the postmodern age. “Multiple Literacies and Critical Pedagogies: New Paradigms” is a statement about rethinking contemporary pedagogical practices with respect to the multicultural evolution of society. In many respects, it is a complement to the chapters in this section that precede it because it extends the theme of reason and rationality in the instituting of education and concretizes the need for the teaching body to open itself up to the use of nontraditional methods of reading and writing. Referring to media literacy as the key for coping with the breakneck speed of technological innovations invading the scene of teaching, Kellner argues for a critical pedagogyINTRODUCTIONXIXthat is both deconstructive and reconstructive in its quest to meet the pedagogical challenges of difference. The chapter outlines the effects of technological transformations—procedural refinements and epistemological redefinitions—that have forever altered the process of reading and writing by taking into account and accounting for the revolutions in teaching they require and inspire as an intersubjective exchange and recoding of experience. The last section deals with the Discourse of Theory or the responsibility of the representational practices that have framed how the call for educational reform is expressed as forms of thinking, writing, and research. Is style or form as important as content? Part III is a meditation from various points on what this question means and has meant for the revolutionizing of pedagogy and educational research and the problems of ethical and political polarization or conflict that the discourse of theory has revealed. Michael Apple, in “The Shock of the Real: Critical Pedagogies and Rightist Reconstructions,” frames the problems of unifying the discourse of theory in the proliferation of meanings given to critical pedagogy. The internal struggles of likeminded left-wing theorists have opened a gap for the New Right’s reconstructions of emancipatory education that have lead to the instauration of an image of plain, commonsensical approaches to education. For Apple this is doubly alarming because not only is a new orthodoxy being constructed by an appeal to the need for obvious and clear-cut standards, but it is being inaugurated using some of the same data, examples, and discourse that are now part of the established vernacular of critical pedagogy, for example, its concern for achieving a utopic state of free and equal individuals. This rhetoric is, Apple argues, vague and disjointed at best, even contradictory to its emancipatory premises, because it is not directly tied to real transformations in the material realm of sociocultural and politicoeconomic practices or to what affects schools and teachers on a day-to-day basis. The result is that education has shifted to the right. Apple discusses strategies and methods for altering this disturbing path in a radical way by asking critical pedagogy to ground its discourse in the realities of those it wants and needs to identify with it, thereby making a more effective push toward the realization of democratic schools. In “The Limits of Dialogue as a Critical Pedagogy,” Nicholas Burbules rethinks the emancipatory potential of dialogue. In essence, the chapter is about the limits of communication and the responsibility in/of response. He has written much on this subject, but this essay is an extension and deepening of his previous work on dialogue that takes into account those factors inhibiting the possibility of understanding the Other and coming to terms with an alterity we cannot begin to comprehend yet must accept. Burbules covers the history of dialogue since Plato and ends up in the postmodern era of identity politics and difference. The milieu of the breaking down of sign-sense relations and its aftermath of multiple sites of meaningXXINTRODUCTIONnegotiation marks the point where discourse is a situated practice. He is then able to analyze and complicate the decontextualized model of dialogue that posits an ideal vision of the clear exchange of information in light of current theorizing. John Willinsky discusses what the use of new information technologies, such as data mining and Knowledge Discover Databases (KDD), will do to the old theory/practice debate, as those who stand up against theory begin to find that their case for the accessibility and practicality of applied research is being seriously eroded by the efficiency of centralized and automated data mining of commercial and government databases supplemented by built-to-order research. In “The Social Sciences as Information Technology: A Political Economy of Practice,” he discusses the ramifications of this hypothesis. It is suggested that the politics of theory and in the social sciences will become just that, as we engage, to give it a slightly sci-fi flavor, in the coming struggle over the function and control of these knowledge-generating analytical and synthetic engines. Call it “Automation in Theory” or perhaps “Automata Theory”; Willinsky implies we need a political economy of practice and offers us one to consider. In “Responsible Practices of Academic Writing: Troubling Clarity II,” Patti Lather looks at the politics of the call for clarity in language through the case histories of women with HIV and how the impossibility of testimony complicates rather than reduces the impact of texts as catalysts for response or analysis. Her concern is with the “limit questions,” that is, those interrogations that lead to a complication of the values of responsibility in response to a text. The question of clarity and meaning—the sign-sense dyad—is coupled with the question of reading and writing and what we owe to the Other in the process of representing experiences we cannot ever hope to translate or record faithfully. Lather discusses the ethical dilemma of writing her research of women with HIV and the problems of creating a text that would do justice to the heteroglossia of the dialogue between the researchers and the participants of the ethnography. In “Degrees of Freedom and Deliberations of ‘Self ’: The Gendering of Identity in Teaching,” Jo-Anne Dillabough critiques from two related feminist perspectives the foundations of the theoretical discourse that upholds the concepts of “teacher professionalism” and “professional identity” as they are currently manifest in the field of teaching. In the first instance, feminist critiques of liberal democracy are drawn upon to expose the gendered assumptions which underlie dominant conceptions of the “professional” teacher. Dillabough pays particular attention to the nowdominant view of the teacher as a rational and instrumental actor, and its gendered dimensions are explored. Second, the gender dualisms which reside at the heart of the concept and discourse of “teacher professionalism” are identified and discussed. The discussion is then widened to examine the role of gender politics in shaping the epistemological premises upon which teacher professionalism is developed andINTRODUCTIONXXIits more formative role in the exploitation of women teachers’ labors. Drawing upon examples of current feminist research and her own preliminary empirical data, Dillabough concludes the chapter by presenting an alternative conceptual framework for assessing the gendered nature of identity-formation in teaching.I CULTURAL POLITICSGayatri Chakravorty SpivakDIASPORAS OLD AND NEW 1Women in the Transnational WorldWhat do I understand today by a “transnational world”? That it is impossible for the new and developing states, the newly decolonizing or the old decolonizing nations, to escape the orthodox constraints of a “neo-liberal” world economic system which, in the name of “Development,” and now “sustainable development,” removes all barriers between itself and fragile national economies, so that any possibility of building for social redistribution is severely damaged. In this new transnationality, what is usually meant by “the new diaspora,” the new scattering of the seeds of “developing” nations, so that they can take root on developed ground? Eurocentric migration, labor export both male and female, border crossings, the seeking of political asylum, and the haunting in-place uprooting of “comfort women” in Asia and Africa. What were the old diasporas, before the world was thoroughly consolidated as transnational? They were the results of religious oppression and war, of slavery and indenturing, trade and conquest, and intra-European economic migration, which, since the nineteenth century, took the form of migration and immigration into the United States. These are complex phenomena, each with a singular history of its own. And women’s relationship to each of these phenomena is oblique, ex-orbitant to the general story. It is true that in transnationality their lines seem to cross mostly, though not always, in First World spaces, where the lines seem to end; labor migrancy is increasingly an object of investigation and oral history. Yet even this tremendous complexity cannot accommodate some issues involving “women in the transnational world.” I list them here: (1) homeworking, (2) population control, (3) groups that cannot become diasporic, and (4) indigenous women outside of the Americas. Homeworking involves women who, within all the divisions of the world and in modes of production extending from the precapitalist to the post-Fordist, embracing all class processes, do piecework at home with no control over wages; and thusREVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIESabsorb the cost of health care, day care, workplace safety, maintenance, management; through manipulation of the notion that feminine ethics is unpaid domestic labor (“nurturing”) into the meretricious position that paid domestic labor is munificent or feminist, as the case may be. The concept of a diasporic multiculturalism is irrelevant here. The women stay at home, often impervious to organizational attempts through internalized gendering as a survival technique. They are part (but only part) of the group necessarily excluded from the implied readership of this essay. “Population control” is the name of the policy that is regularly tied to so-called aid packages, by transnational agencies, upon the poorest women. As workers like Malini Karkal, Farida Akhter, and many others have shown, the policy is no less than gynocide and war on women.2 It is not only a way of concealing overconsumption—and each one of us is on the average twenty to thirty times the size of a person in Somalia or Bangladesh; but it also stands in the way of feminist theory because it identifies women with their reproductive apparatus and grants them no other subjectship. For “groups that cannot become diasporic” I turn to the original definition of the “subaltern” as it was transplanted from Gramsci: . . . the demographic difference between the total . . . population [of a colonial state] and all those who can be described as the “elite.” Some of these classes and groups such as the lesser rural gentry, impoverished landlords, rich peasants . . . upper-middle peasants [and now some sections of the urban white- and blue collar work force and their wives] who “naturally” ranked among the “subaltern,” [can] under certain circumstances act for the “elite”. . . . —an ambiguity which it is up to the [feminist] to sort out on the basis of a close and judicious reading.3 Large groups within this space of difference subsist in transnationality without escaping into diaspora. And indeed they would include most indigenous groups outside Euramerica, which brings me to the last item on the list of strategic exclusions above. Womanspace within these groups cannot necessarily be charted when we consider diasporas, old or new. Yet they are an important part of “the transnational world.” What I have said so far is, strictly speaking, what Derrida called an exergue.4 It is both outside of the body of the work of this paper and the face of the coin upon which the currency of the Northern interest in transnationality is stamped. This brief consideration of the asymmetrical title of the conference can lead to a number of labyrinths that we cannot explore. I cut the meditation short and turn to my general argument.DIASPORAS OLD AND NEWNearly two years later, as I revise, I will linger a moment longer and inscribe the “groups that cannot become diasporic” more affirmatively, as those who have stayed in place for more than thirty thousand years. I do not value this by itself, but I must count it. Is there an alternative vision of the human here? The tempo of learning to learn from this immensely slow temporizing will not only take us clear out of diasporas, but will also yield no answers or conclusions readily. Let this stand as the name of the other of the question of diaspora. That question, so taken for granted these days as the historically necessary ground of resistance, marks the forgetting of this name. When we literary folk in the U.S. do multiculturalist feminist work in the areas of our individual research and identity, we tend to produce three sorts of thing: identitarian or theoretist (sometimes both at once) analyses of literary/filmic texts available in English and other European languages; accounts of more recognizably political phenomena from a descriptive-culturalist or ideology-critical point of view; and, when we speak of transnationality in a general way, we think of global hybridity from the point of view of popular public culture, military intervention, and the neocolonialism of multi-nationals. Thus from our areas of individual research and identity group in the United States, we produce exciting and good work. If we place this list within the two lists I have already made, it becomes clear that we do not often focus on the question of civil society. Hidden and transmogrified in the Foucauldian term “civility,” it hardly ever surfaces in a transnationalist feminist discourse. In a brilliant and important recent essay, “The Heart of Ex-Nomination: Nation, Woman and the Indian Immigrant Bourgeoisie,” Ananya Bhattacharjee has turned her attention to the topic.5 But in the absence of developed supportive work in the transnationalist feminist collectivity, this interventionist intellectual has not been able to take her hunch on civil society as far as the rest of her otherwise instructive essay. In an ideal democratic (as opposed to a theocratic, absolutist, or fascist) state, there are structures other than military and systemic or elective-political from which the individual—organized as a group if necessary—can demand service or redress. This is the abstract individual as citizen, who is “concretely” recoded as the witness, the source of attestation, in Marxian formulation the “bearer,” of the nation form of appearance. This “person” is private in neither the legal nor the psychological sense. Some commonly understood arenas such as health, education, welfare, and social security, and the civil as opposed to penal or criminal legal code, fall within the purview of civil society. The individual who can thus call on the services of the civil society—the civil service of the state—is, ideally, the citizen. How far this is from the realized scene, especially if seen from the point of view of gays, women, indigenous and indigent peoples, and old and new diasporas, is of course obvious to all of us. However, it is still necessary to add that, within the definitions of an ideal civilREVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIESsociety, if the state is a welfare state, it is directly the servant of the individual. When increasingly privatized, as in the New World Order, the priorities of the civil society are shifted from service to the citizen to capital maximization. It then becomes increasingly correct to say that the only source of male dignity is employment, just as the only source of genuine female dignity is unpaid domestic labor.6 I write under the sign of the reminder that the other scene, sup-posing any possible thought of civil societies (which is itself race-class-gender differentiated between South and North) of an almost tempoless temporizing, negotiating with the gift of time (if there is any), is not this.7 It is our arrogant habit to think that other scene only as an exception to the temporizing focused by the Industrial Revolution, which I pursue below. I began these remarks by saying that transnationality has severely damaged the possibilities of social redistribution in developing nations. Restated in the context of the argument from civil societies, we might say that transnationality is shrinking the possibility of an operative civil society in developing nations. The story of these nations can be incanted by the following formulas since the Industrial Revolution: colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, transnationality. In the shift from imperialism to neocolonialism in the middle of this century, the most urgent task that increasingly backfired was the very establishment of a civil society. We call this the failure of decolonization. And in transnationality, possibilities of redressing this failure are being destroyed. I do not think it is incorrect to say that much of the new diaspora is determined by the increasing failure of a civil society in developing nations. Strictly speaking, the undermining of the civil structures of society is now a global situation. Yet a general contrast can be made: in the North, welfare structures long in place are being dismantled. The diasporic underclass is often the worst victim. In the South, welfare structures cannot emerge as a result of the priorities of the transnational agencies. The rural poor and the urban subproletariat are the worst victims. In both these sectors, women are the superdominated, the superexploited, but not in the same way. And, even in the North, the formerly imperial European countries are in a different situation from the U.S. or Japan. And in the South, the situations of Bangladesh and India, of South Africa and Zaire are not comparable. Political asylum, at first sight so different from economic migration, finally finds it much easier to recode capitalism as democracy. It too, then, inscribes itself in the narrative of the manipulation of civil social structures in the interest of the financialization of the globe. Elsewhere I have proposed the idea of the rise of varieties of theocracy, fascism, and ethnic cleansing as the flip side of this particular loosening of the hyphen between nation and state, the undermining of the civil structures of society. Here I want to emphasize that, as important as the displacement of “culture”—whichDIASPORAS OLD AND NEWrelates to the first word in the compound, “nation,” and is an ideological arena—is the exchange of state, which is an abstract area of calculation. Women, with other disenfranchised groups, have never been full subjects of and agents in civil society: in other words, first-class citizens of a state. And the mechanisms of civil society, although distinct from the state, are peculiar to it. And now, in transnationality, precisely because the limits and openings of a particular civil society are never transnational, the transnationalization of global capital requires a poststate class system. The use of women in its establishment is the universalization of feminism of which the United Nations is increasingly becoming the instrument. In this reterritorialization, the collaborative nongovernmental organizations are increasingly being called an “international civil society,” precisely to efface the rôle of the state. Saskia Sassen, although her confidence in the mechanisms of the state remains puzzling, has located a new “economic citizenship” of power and legitimation in financial capital markets.8 Thus elite, upwardly mobile (generally academic) women of the new diasporas join hands with similar women in the so-called developing world to celebrate a new global public or private “culture,” often in the name of the underclass.9 Much work has been done on the relationship between the deliberate withholding of citizenship and internal colonization. In her “Organizational Resistance to Care: African American Women in Policing,” Mary Texeira has recently cited Mike Davis’s idea of the “designer drug-busts” in Los Angeles as “easy victor[ies] in a drug ‘war’ that the LAPD secretly loves losing.”10 Michael Kearney shows vividly how the U.S. Border Patrol keeps the illegal migrants illegal on the Mexican border.11 The state can use their labor but must keep them out of civil society. In Marx’s terms, capital extends its mode of exploitation but not its mode of social production. In Amin’s, the periphery must remain feudalized. In Walter Rodney’s, underdevelopment must be developed.12 In other words, are the new diasporas quite new? Every rupture is also a repetition. The only significant difference is the use, abuse, participation, and rôle of women. In broad strokes within the temporizing thematics of the Industrial Revolution, let us risk the following: like the Bolshevik experiment, imperial and nationalist feminisms have also prepared the way for the abstract itinerary of the calculus of capital. “Body As Property” is an episode in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bella Abzug.” The study of diasporic women and the ambivalent use of culture in access to a national civil society is a subject of immense complexity whose surface has been barely scratched in terms of such cases as the hijab debates in France. What is woman’s relationship to cultural explanations in the nation-state of origin? What is “culture” without the structural support of the state? And, as I have been insisting, the issue is different for women who are no longer seriously diasporic with referenceREVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIESto the modern state. This difference was brought home to me forcefully when a new diasporic student of mine, because her notion of citizenship was related to getting citizenship papers, was unable quite to grasp the following remark by Jean Franco: “ The imperative for Latin American women is thus not only the occupation and transformation of public space, the seizure of citizenship, but also the recognition that speaking as a woman within a pluralistic society may actually reinstitute, in a disguised form, the same relationship of privilege that has separated the intelligentsia from the subaltern classes.”13 Franco is suggesting, of course, that even women who resist and reject their politico-cultural description and collectively take the risk of acting as subjects of and agents in the civil society of their nation-state are not necessarily acting for all women. In the case of Martinez vs. Santa Clara Pueblo, where by tribal law the mother cannot claim child custody because her divorced husband belongs to another tribe and the Supreme Court refuses to interfere, Catherine MacKinnon invokes, among other things, the matriarchal tribal laws of yore.14 A transnational perspective would have allowed her to perceive this as the colonizing technique of all settler colonies: to create an artificial enclave within a general civil society to appease the rising patriarchal sentiments of the colonized. As the Women’s Charter of the ANC pointed out forty years ago, invoking culture in such contexts is dangerous.15 I have suggested above that the boundaries of civil societies mark out the state but are still nationally defined. I have further suggested that a hyperreal class-consolidated civil society is now being produced to secure the poststatist conjuncture, even as religious nationalisms and ethnic conflict can be seen as “retrogressive” ways of negotiating the transformation of the state in capitalist postmodernization. Feminists with a transnational consciousness will also be aware that the very civil structure here that they seek to shore up for gender justice can continue to participate in providing alibis for the operation of the major and definitive transnational activity, the financialization of the globe, and thus the suppression of the possibility of decolonization—the establishment and consolidation of a civil society there, the only means for an efficient and continuing calculus of gender justice everywhere. The painstaking cultivation of such a contradictory, indeed aporetic, practical acknowledgment is the basis of a decolonization of the mind. The disenfranchised new or old diasporic woman cannot be called upon to inhabit this aporia. Her entire energy must be spent upon successful transplantation or insertion into the new state, often in the name of an old nation in the new. She is the site of global public culture privatized: the proper subject of real migrant activism. She may also be the victim of an exacerbated and violent patriarchy which operates in the name of the old nation as well—a sorry simulacrum of women in nationalism. Melanie KleinDIASPORAS OLD AND NEWhas allowed us the possibility of thinking this male violence as a reactive displacement of the envy of the Anglos and the Anglo clones, rather than proof that the culture of origin is necessarily more patriarchal.16 The disenfranchised woman of the diaspora—new and old—cannot, then, engage in the critical agency of civil society—citizenship in the most robust sense—to fight the depradations of “global economic citizenship.” This is not to silence her but rather to desist from guilt-tripping her. For her the struggle is for access to its subjectship of the civil society of her new state: basic civil rights. Escaping from the failure of decolonization at home and abroad, she is not yet so secure in the state of desperate choice or chance as even to conceive of ridding her mind of the burden of transnationality. But perhaps her daughters or granddaughters—whichever generation arrives on the threshold of tertiary education—can. And the interventionist academic can assist them in this possibility rather than participate in their gradual indoctrination into an unexamined culturalism. This group of gendered outsiders inside are much in demand by the transnational agencies of globalization for employment and collaboration. It is therefore not altogether idle to ask that they should think of themselves collectively not as victims below but agents above, resisting the consequences of globalization as well as redressing the cultural vicissitudes of migrancy. This, then, is something like the situation of diasporas, and, in that situation, of our implied reader. The image of the classroom has already entered as a sort of threshold of description for the latter. Therefore we might well speak of classroom teaching. The so-called “immediate experience” of migrancy is not necessarily consonant with transnational literacy, just as the suffering of individual labor is not consonant with the impetus of socialized resistance. In order that a transnationally literate resistance may, in the best case, develop, academic interventions may therefore be necessary; and we should not, perhaps, conflate the two. Even if one is interventionist only in the academy, there are systemic problems, of course. And I do not intend to minimize them. It is again because of constraints on time that I am reminding ourselves only of the methodological problems. The first one is that the academy operates on the trickle down theory, with rather a minor change in the old dominant, which is that the essence of knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, and if you know the right thing your mind will change, and if your mind changes you will do good. I know how one must fight to change the components of academic knowledge. Nonetheless one cannot fall into the habit of mere descriptive ideology-critical analyses—incidentally often called “deconstruction”—and reproduce one’s own kind in an individualistic and competitive system in the name of transnationalism. We must remind ourselves that knowledge and thinking are halfway houses, that they are judged when they are set to work.10REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIESPerhaps this can break our vanguardism that knowledge is acquired to be applied. I have tried to suggest that setting thought to work within the U.S. civil structure in the interest of domestic justice is not necessarily a just intervention in transnationality. Thus we confront an agenda as impossible as it is necessary. It is in the spirit of such speculation that I will move now to some thoughts about intervention only in the academy. In the fall of 1993 I attempted to teach a course on global feminist theory. I will share with you some of the lessons I learnt during the semester. My earlier examples from Jean Franco and Catherine McKinnon are from that class, from the Latin and North American weeks respectively. This is a list-making kind of essay. This part too will be a list of problems. The book list is long and I will pick only a few items on it. I have generally assigned collective responsibility for the problems. Of course that was not always the case. What I say will seem simple, but to implement what we proposed to ourselves and to make a habit of it is difficult, certainly more difficult than inspirational political talk in the name of transnationality that silently presupposes a civil structure. Starting with Ifi Amadiume’s Male Daughters, Female Husbands, we had our first problem: the internalization of European-style academic training.17 All but one student was against Eurocentrism. But they valued noncontradiction above all else. (Students who come to my poststructuralism seminar can be coerced into relaxing this requirement. But global feminism is a tougher proposition. And, given the subdivision of labor in my institution at the moment and the reputation of the English Department, there were no Black students.) Amadiume, a Nigerian diasporic in London, wasn’t doing too well by those standards. The only alternative the class could envision was the belligerent romanticization of cultural relativism. What seems contradictory to Europeans may not to Africans? Nigerians? Ibos? I am not an Africanist and have been faulted for wanting to study African feminism in a general course. But even to me these relativist positions seemed offensive. A combination of this impatience with illogic hardly covered over with relativist benevolence has now become the hallmark of UN-style feminist universalism.18 I think it is therefore counterproductive today to keep out resistant nonnatives or nonspecialists from speaking on the obstacles to transnational literacy as they arise with reference to different points on the map. At any rate, I learned to propose that we look always at what was at stake, a question that seemed to be much more practical than the litany of confessional or accusatory, but always determinist, descriptions of so-called “subject-positions.” I did not of course have the kind of insider’s knowledge of Amadiume’s place in the African field that I would have had if I had been an African or an Africanist. It did however seem fairly clear from Amadiume’s text that she was pitting her own academic preparation in the house of apparent noncontradiction against “my knowledge of my own people”:DIASPORAS OLD AND NEW11When in the 1960s and 1970s female academics and western feminists began to attack social anthropology, riding on the crest of the new wave of women’s studies, the issues they took on were androcentrism and sexism. [She cites Michelle Rosaldo, Louise Lamphere, and Rayna Reiter, among others.] The methods they adopted indicated to Black women that white feminists were no less racist than the patriarchs of social anthropology whom they were busy condemning for male bias. If we take the magnitude of her predicament into account, we can look at the book as a strategic intervention. Another problem that some found with Amadiume and that was to surface again and again through the semester with reference to material from different geographical areas was that the traditional gender systems seemed too static and too rigid. Once again, I asked the class to consider the politics of the production of theory. Amadiume is an anthropologist by training. Africa has been a definitive object of anthropology. Oral traditions do not represent the dynamism of historicity in a way that we in the university recognize. And orality cannot be an instrument for historicizing in a book that we can read in class. I reminded myself silently of Derrida’s tribute to the mnemic graph in orality: “The genealogical relation and social classification are the stitched seam of arche-writing, condition of the (so-called oral) language, and of writing in the colloquial sense.”19 Neither Amadiume nor her readers have at their command the memory active within an oral tradition as a medium. The only kind of thing we are capable of recognizing is where the technical instrument is European and the references alone are bits of “ethnic” idiom, such as Mnouchkine’s Oresteia, or Locsin’s Ballet Philippine. But Amadiume is questioning the European technical instrument, from within, with no practical access to the instrumentality of her tradition, which makes a poorer showing in a medium not its own.20 Of course, the traditional gender system will seem “too static” by contrast with the system we fight within. In addition, as I have pointed out, traditional gender systems have been used to appease colonized patriarchy by the fabrication of personal codes as opposed to imposed colonial civil and penal codes. They have also been the instrument for working out the displaced envy of the colonized patriarchy against the colonizer. We must learn to look at customary law as a site of struggle, not as a competitor on a dynamism count. This became most evident in our readings on Southern Africa. But let me linger another moment on the question of what is at stake: who is addressed, within what institution? The class seemed to be most comfortable with the work of Niara Sudarkasa (Gloria A. Marshall) from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, a woman from an old U.S. diaspora, produced through a reputable U.S. university, who has taken a name from her cultural12REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIESorigin and is explaining that cultural material to other U.S. tertiary students. I am not asking us to denigrate the evident excellence of her work. I am asking us to consider that our approval comes from the comfort of a shared cultural transcription, cultural difference domesticated and transcoded for a shared academic audience. Reading Filomena Steady’s Black Women Cross-Culturally, I asked the students to read the notes on contributors as texts: what is at stake, who is addressed, what institution, cui bono?21 Given the difference, for example, between the liberal University of Cape Town and the radical University of the Western Cape, I could not dismiss out of hand a Black man teaching customary law at the former institution as yet another academic. Indeed, the inventive constitutional transmogrification of customary law in some Southern African feminist constitutionalist work, in order that the frontage road to the highway of constitutional subjectship can be left open for the subaltern woman, attempts to face the contradiction which Jean Franco signals. We must learn to make a distinction between the demand, in itself worthy, for the museumization of national or national-origin “cultures” within the instrumentality of an alien and oppressive civil society, and these attempts to invent a gendered civility. In this latter struggle, civil concerns within the new nation under duress must be aware of the threat of economic transnationalization, whose euphemistic description is “Development,” capital D, and the lifting of the barriers between international capital and developing national economies euphemistically known as liberalization. Let us, for example, look at the warning issued by Mary Maboreke, Professor of Law at the University of Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe attained independence on 18 April 1980. . . . As of 1 October 1990, Zimbabwe abandoned its strict trade controls over trade liberalization. . . . [T]he new economic order flash[es] a warning light. . . . All the gains made so far would vanish. . . . Analyses of how deregulation programmes affected women should have been done before the problems arose. It is now rather late to demand the necessary guarantees and protections. As it is we have lost the initiative and are now limited to reacting to what authorities initiate.22 Unless we are able to open ourselves to the grounding feeling, however counterintuitive, that First World diasporic women are, by the principles of the case, on the other side from Maboreke, we will not be able to think transnationality in its transnational scope, let alone act upon it. We “know” that to ground thinking upon feeling cannot be the basis of theory, but that “is” how theory is “judged in the wholly other,” that “is” the “ghost of the undecidable” in every decision, that “is” how the “truth” of work is set or posited [gesetzt] in the work(ing), that is why logo-DIASPORAS OLD AND NEW13centrism is not a pathology to be exposed or corrected, that is how we are disclosed and effaced in so-called human living; we cannot get around it in the name of academic or arty antiessentialism. When a prominent section of Australian feminists claim uniqueness by virtue of being “femocrats,” namely being systemically involved in civil society, we can certainly learn from them, but we might also mark their “sanctioned ignorance” of the Southern African effort, sanctioned, among others, by themselves and us.23 Some of us in the class pointed out that faith in constitutionality was betrayed after the Civil Rights struggle with the advent of the Reagan-Bush era. This certainly seems plausible in the U.S. context. But this too is to universalize the United States as ground of evidence, one of the banes of United Nations feminism. Academic efforts at thinking global feminism must avoid this at all costs. The ungendered and unraced U.S. Constitution was and is widely supposed to be the first full flowering of the Enlightened State. To be foiled by its conservative strength is not to be equated with the attempt to put together a new constitution in Southern Africa—Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, and now South Africa—and to strive to make it gender-sensitive from the start. If the U.S. experience is taken as historically determining, it is, whether we like it or not, Eurocentric. Philosophically, on the other hand, a persistent critique—that the subject of the Constitution is the site of a peformative passed off as a constative, that the restricted universalism of all ethnocustomary systems share in some such ruse, that all contemporary constitutions are male-reactively gendered—seems appropriate from those who have earned the right to practice it, so that a constitution is seen as dangerous and powerful; as a means, a skeleton, a halfway house.24 I have repeatedly suggested that the word “Development” covers over the economics and epistemics of transnationality. “Women in Development” can be its worst scam. Nowhere is this more evident than in Southeast Asia. This taught us (in the class) the importance of checking the specificity of imperial formations in our consideration of the woman of each region. For it is in the clash and conflict of imperial subject formation, indigenous/customary law, and regulative psychobiographies (the history of which we cannot enter without a solid foundation in local languages) that the track of women in the history of the transnational present can be haltingly followed. In the case of Southeast Asia, for example, we have to follow the uneven example of U.S. imperialism and the culture of development proper—export-processing zones, international subcontracting, post-Fordism and how it reconstitutes women. Aihwa Ong helped us see how the conventional story of colonialism and patriarchy will not allow us to solve the problem.25 Her most telling object of investigation is so-called examples of mass hysteria among women in the workplace, and her analytical tool is Foucauldian theory. Although Ong herself is impeccable in the poli-14REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIEStics of her intellectual production, she, like the rest of us, cannot be assured of a transnationally literate audience in the United States in the current conjunctures. The habit of difference between using “high theory” to diagnose the suffering of the exploited or dominated on the one hand, and a self-righteous unexamined empiricism or “experiencism” on the other produces the problem of recognizing theory when it does not come dressed in appropriate language. Foucault is full dress, and we had less difficulty in gaining mastery over our material by way of his speculations when used by a developing-nation-marked U.S. diasporic, especially since the instructor’s position of authority was also occupied by a similar subject, namely, Gayatri Spivak. When we resist this within the U.S. field, our only route seems to be an altogether antitheoreticist position, privileging anything that is offered by nongovernmental activists and their constituencies, not to mention writers who describe them with a seemingly unmediated combination of statistics and restrained pathos. I cannot, at this fast clip, walk with you through learning and earning the right to discriminate among positions offered by “participants.” Let me simply say here that out of all the good and fact-filled books on Southeast Asia we read, when we encountered, at the end of Noeleen Heyzer’s painstaking book, Working Women in South-East Asia, full of activist research, words I am about to quote presently, we had difficulty recognizing theory because it was not framed in a Heideggerian staging of care, or a Derridean staging of responsibility.26 But here is theory asking to be set into—posited in—the work (at least, as long as we are in the classroom) of reading, a task that would inform—and indeed this is what I have been trying to say in these crowded pages—an impossible and necessary task that would inform the overall theme of the conference where these words were first uttered beyond the outlines of the diasporic subject into transnationality; and make indeterminate the borders between the two. Women are culturally perceived as really responsible for tasks associated with the private sphere, especially of the family. . . . It is . . . in the public sphere that bonds of solidarity are formed with others sharing similar views of the world. . . . [Yet] many cultures perceive the need to “protect” women from being exposed to these. . . . [By contrast, t]he task ahead is certainly to spread the ethics of care and concern. This concern entails an alternative conception or vision of what is possible in human society . . . a vision in which everyone will be responded to. . . . Let us linger a moment on the possibility of rethinking the opposition between diaspora and globality in the name of woman, if we can all recognize theory in activist feminist writing (since in the house of theory there is still a glass ceiling). InDIASPORAS OLD AND NEW15Situating the Self, Seyla Benhabib is clearly looking for a more robust thinking of responsibility to supplement masculinist political philosophies that radiate out from social needs and rights thinking.27 She cannot, however, conceive of the South as a locus of criticism. Her companions are all located in the North: Communitarian critics of liberalism like Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer . . . [f ]eminist thinkers like Carol Gilligan, Carole Pateman, Susan Moller Okin, Virginia Held, Iris Young, Nancy Fraser, and Drucilla Cornell . . . [p]ostmodernists, . . . by which we have come to designate the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. . . . Following the Euro-U.S. history of the division between public and private as male and female, her particular prophet is Carol Gilligan. She cannot find responsibility except in the private sphere of the family and perhaps, today—though one cannot readily see why this is specifically modern—in friendship. She cannot, of course, recognize an altogether more encompassing thought of responsibility in what she calls “postmodernism.”28 But neither “postmodernism” nor Benhabib can acknowledge the battering of women in their normality by way of notions of responsibility.29 It is left to women like Heyzer to recognize that responsibility—the impossible vision of responding to all—has the greatest chance of animating the ethical in the public sphere of women in development when it becomes another name for superexploitation, precisely because in such a case feminine responsibility is conveniently defined, by the enemy, as it were, within the public sphere.30 Here the incessant movements of restricted diasporas become more instructive than the cultural clamor of Eurocentric economic migration. When Lily Moya, thwarted in her attempt to move from subalternity into organic intellectuality, runs away into Sophiatown and says, “the witchdoctor is menstruation” and “My life was a transfer,” even so astute a writer as Shula Marks looks for a diagnosis.31 In the comfort of our fourth-floor seminar room, we were learning to recognize theory in unconventional representations, “philosophy in the text of metaphor.”32 Moya’s propositions were to us as much of a challenge as “man is a rational animal.” On page 129 of Beyond the Veil, a common Arabic women’s expression is quoted: Kunt haida felwlad.33 It is rather a pity that Fatima Mernissi translates this as: “I was preoccupied with children.” If we translate this literally as “I was then in boys,” we a get a theoretical lever. “Boys” for all “children” packs the same punch as “man” for all persons. And if we take that “in” and place it against the gynocidal16REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIESthrust of the International Council on Population and Development connected to capital export and capital maximization—the correct description of transnationality—we come to understand the killing schizophrenia which these women suffer, caught in the unresolved contradiction of abusive pharmaceutical coercion to longterm or permanent contraception on the one side and ideological coercion to phallocentric reproduction on the other.34 And devenir-femme in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia can then undergo a feminist reinscription which is parasitical to the authors’ pouvoir-savoir.35 I touch here upon the crucial topic of the task of the feminist translator as informant. Diaspora entails this task and permits its negligent performance. For diasporas also entail, at once, a necessary loss of contact with the idiomatic indispensability of the mother tongue. In the unexamined culturalism of academic diasporism, which ignores the urgency of transnationality, there is no one to check uncaring translations that transcode in the interest of dominant feminist knowledge. I began these remarks with a list of the groups that a title such as ours cannot grasp. I then rewrote their name as “those who have stayed in place for more than thirty thousand years,” as the limit to the authorized temporizing of our civilization as leading to and proceeding from the Industrial Revolution, the experience of the impossible that opens the calculus of resistance to transnationality. I suggested then that we are called by this limit only by way of battered and gender-compromised versions of responsibility-based ethical systems. Just as for the women of each geopolitical region, we have to surmise some network of response or reaction to hegemonic and/or imperialist subject-constitutions; to distinguish the heterogeneities of the repositories of these systems one calculates the moves made by different modes of settler colonizations. And out of the remnants of one such settlement we were able to glean a bit of theory that gave the lie to ontopology and to identitarian culturalisms. This lesson in theory is contained in the philosopheme “lost our language,” used by Australian aborigines of the East Kimberly region.36 This expression does not mean that the persons involved do not know their aboriginal mother tongue. It means, in the words of a social worker, that “they have lost touch with their cultural base.” They no longer compute with it. It is not their software. Therefore what these people, who are the inheritors of settler colonial oppression, ask for is, quite appropriately, mainstream education, insertion into civil society, and the inclusion of some information about their culture in the curriculum—under the circumstances, the only practical request. The concept-metaphor “language” is here standing in for that word which names the main instrument for the performance of the temporizing that is called life. What the aboriginals are asking for is hegemonic access to chunks of narrative and descriptions of practice so that a representation ofDIASPORAS OLD AND NEW17that instrumentality becomes available for performance as what is called theatre (or art, or literature, or indeed culture, even theory).37 Given the rupture between the many languages of aboriginality and the waves of migration and colonial adventure clustered around the Industrial Revolution narrative, demands for multilingual education would be risible.38 What will happen to the woman’s part in the lost “software,” so lovingly described by Diane Bell in Daughters of the Dreaming, is beyond or short of verification.39 For “culture” is changeful, and emerges when least referenced. This lesson I have learned, for example, by way of the displacement of the scattered subaltern anticolonialist ghost-dance initiative among the First Nations of the North American continent in the 1890s, then into political protest within the civil society at Wounded Knee in the 1970s and its current literary/authentic multiculturalist feminist transformations in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.40 For reasons of time, appropriate also because of my unease about academic identity politics in these transnationalizing times, South Asia, the place of my citizenship, the United States, the source of my income, and Northwestern Europe, the object of my limited expertise, remained blank on the first time of these remarks. And, apart from reasons of time at this second time, these omissions still seem appropriate. We certainly enjoyed reading some texts of Italian feminism.41 But it was remarkable that, although diasporic Third World women offer large-scale support, through homeworking, to Italy’s postindustrial base, and Benetton is one of the leaders in the field of post-Fordist feminization of transnationality, these women and this phenomenon were never mentioned. The class discussions of civil society around the Italian feminists’ expressed concerns were therefore interesting, especially since we followed up Swasti Mitter’s documentation in her own work on economic restructuring in general.42 Lack of time will not allow me to touch on the new postcoloniality in post-Soviet Asia and the Balkans; nor on the reasons why East Asia defeated me. These two complex issues do not fit within the broad lines I have laid out. Here’s why, briefly. The historical narratives which constituted “the Balkans” and “inner Asia” as regions are, in themselves, profoundly dissimilar. Yet, by way of their unified definition as Soviet Bloc, and thus their equally single dismantling, albeit into a disclosure of their heterogeneous historicity, they seem similar. Our temporizing is organized not only around the Industrial Revolution but also around single-nation empires. To see the uneven sovietization of the “Soviet Bloc” in terms of the precapitalist multinational empires as well as the Asian bloc, we must examine the difference betwee Lenin’s and Stalin’s versions of imperialism and nationalism.43 Although the unifying bulldozer of financialization is at work in the pores of the Balkans and the Transcaucasus—USAID building a “civic society” in Bosnia, the IMF pressuring Armenia to settle the Nagorno-Karabakh issue before loans are18REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIESassured—the general question of the diaspora, as perceived by remote-control bleeding-heart feminism, is so patheticized by the human interest that can fill in the loosened hyphen between nation and state that questions of transnationality cannot be considered within a general feminist conference or course. Inner Asia, by contrast, seems only too ready for anthologization into feminism. This may be a result of the existence of a small Russianized corps of emancipated bourgeois women in this sector. But who will gauge their separation from the subaltern, from Asian Islam—how, in more senses than one, they have “lost their language” without being in the almost tempoless temporizing of the aboriginal limit? A new sort of subaltern studies is needed there, for which the appropriate discipline is history and an intimate knowledge of the local languages an absolute requirement. This is all the more necessary because this region’s “liberation” comes concurrently with the United Nations’ consolidation for a culturally relativist feminist universalism making the world ultimately safe for Capital. My minimal attempts at tracking this region’s preparation for the Fourth World Women’s Conference organized by the United Nations at Beijing (1995) increases a conviction that the constitution of “woman” as object-beneficiary of investigation and “feminist” as subject-participant of investigation is as dubious here as elsewhere. I have not the languages for touching the phenomenon. And therefore it fits neither my syllabus nor our title. And East Asia. As controlling capital, often a major player with the North. As superexploited womanspace, one with the South and its nonelite networks. Hong Kong unravelling the previous conjuncture, territorial imperialism, the mark of Britain. China unravelling a planned economy to enter the U.S.-dominated new empire. Economic miracle and strangulation of civil society in Vietnam. New World Asians (the old migrants) and New Immigrant Asians (often “model minorities”) being disciplinarized together. How will I understand feminist self-representation here? How set it to work? How trust the conference circuit? A simple academic limit, marked by a promise of future work. To end with a warning. In the untrammeled financialization of the globe which is the New International Order, women marked by origins in the developing nations yet integrated or integrating into the U.S. or EEC civil structure are a useful item. Gramsci uncannily predicted in his jail cell that the U.S. would use its minorities in this way.44 And remember Clarice Lispector’s story, “The Smallest Woman in the World,” where the pregnant pygmy woman is the male anthropologist’s most authentic object of reverence?45 It is as if these two ingredients should combine. An example: A little over a decade ago, I wrote a turgid piece called “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The story there was of a seventeen-year old woman who had hanged herself rather than kill, even in the armed struggle against Imperialism, and in the act had tried to write a feminist statement with her body, using the script of menstruationDIASPORAS OLD AND NEW19to assert a claim to the public sphere which could not be received into what may be called a “speech act.” Hence I lamented about this singular (non)event: “The subaltern cannot speak.” Her name was Bhubaneswari Bhaduri. Bhubaneswari’s elder sister’s eldest daughter’s eldest daughter’s eldest daughter is a new U.S. immigrant and has just been promoted to an executive position in a U.S.-based transnational. This too is a historical silencing of the subaltern. When the news of this young woman’s promotion was broadcast in the family amidst general jubilation I could not help remarking to the eldest surviving female member: “Bhubaneswari”—her nickname had been Talu—“hanged herself in vain,” but not too loudly. Is it any wonder that this young woman is a staunch multiculturalist, wears only cotton, and believes in natural childbirth? There are, then, at least two problems that come with making the diaspora definitive: first, that we forget that postnationalist (NGO) talk is a way to cover over the decimation of the state as instrument of redistribution and redress. To think transnationality as labor migrancy, rather than one of the latest forms of appearance of postmodern capital, is to work, however remotely, in the ideological interest of the financialization of the globe. And, secondly, it begins from the calculus of hybridity, forgetting the impossible other vision (just, perhaps, but not “pure”) of civilization, “the loss of language” at the origin. Meaghan Morris had apparently remarked to Dipesh Chakrabarty that most trashings of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” read the title as “Can the Subaltern Talk?” I will not improve upon that good word. I will simply thank Meaghan Morris for her witty support, as I will thank Abena Busia, Wahneema Lubiano, Geraldine Heng, Cassandra Kavanaugh, Ellen Rooney, Rey Chow, Jean Franco, and others for making the syllabus possible; and the members of my seminar at Columbia in fall 1993 and at the University of California-Riverside in spring 1994 for teaching me with what responsibility we, women in a transnational world, must address ourselves to the topic: “Diasporas Old and New.”An Unfinishable Syllabus: Always to be Updated SpivakFeminist TheoryFall 93I. Sub-Saharan Africa Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987). Filomina Chioma Steady, ed., The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (Rochester, NY: Schenkman, 1981), Introduction and essays by Sudarkasa, Aidoo, Urdang, Gugler, Pala, Hine and Wittenstein, Terborg-Penn, Staples.20REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIESII. N. Africa Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992). Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (London: Al Saqi, 1985). III. S. Africa Susan Bazilli, ed., Putting Women on the Agenda (Cape Town: Ravan Press, 1991), Introduction and essays by Zama, Ginwala, Mabandla, Nhlapo, Gwagwa, Maboreke, Gawanas, Dow. Shula Marks, ed., Not Either an Experimental Doll (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987). IV. S. Asia Bina Agarwal, ed., Structures of Patriarchy: State Community and Household in Modernizing Asia (London: Zed Books, 1988), essays by Agarwal, Schrijvers, Phongpaichit, Srinivasan. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), Introduction and essays by Chakravarti, Mani, Banerjee, Kannabiran and Lalitha, Chatterjee, Tharu. V. South-East Asia Noeleen Heyzer, Daughters in Industry: Work, Skills and Consciousness of Women Workers in Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Center, 1988), Chap. 1 (pp. 3–32), Chaps. 8, 9, 10, 11 (pp. 237–326), Chap. 13 (pp. 356–384). ______, Working Women in South East Asia, Introduction and Chaps. 1, 4, 7, 8. Saskia Wieringa, ed., Women’s Struggles and Strategies (Aldershot, UK: Gower Publishing, 1988), Introduction and Chap. 5 (pp. 69–89). Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987), Chaps. 7, 8, 9, 10 (pp. 140–221). VI. West Asia Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Smadar Lavie, Poetics of Military Occupation: Mezeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). VII. Australia Diane Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Kaye Thies, Aboriginal Viewpoints on Education: A Survey in the East Kimberley Region (Needlands, Australia: University of Western Australia, 1987). Selections from John Frow and Meaghan Morris, eds., Australian Cultural Studies (ChampaignUrbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Selections from Australian Feminist Studies.DIASPORAS OLD AND NEW21VIII. Latin America Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, ed., I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (London: Verso, 1984). Juan Flores et al., eds., On Edge: the Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), essay by Franco. Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Jane Jaquette, The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Feminism and the Transition to Democracy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), Introduction and pp. 72–148, 185–208. NACLA Report on the Americas 27.1 (1993), pp. 19, 46–47. Elizabeth Jelin, Women and Social Change in Latin America (London: Zed Books, 1990), Introduction and Part I, Chap. 2. Selections from Heleieth Saffioti, Women in Class Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978). Steady, The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, essay by Nunes. IX. U.S. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Harper, 1991), Chaps. 2, 5, 6, 10. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992). Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Steady, The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, Part II, Chaps. 2–6. X. Italy Sheila Allen and Carol Wolkowitz, Homeworking: Myths and Realities (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 170–171. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, eds., Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader (London: Blackwell, 1991), Introduction and pp. 33–208, 260–283, 310–317, 339–367, Chronology. Rosi Braidotti, “The Italian Women’s Movement in the 1980s,” Australian Feminist Studies 3 (Summer 1986). Patricia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis, eds., Sexual Differences: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990). Mirna Cicogna, “Women Subjects and Women Projects,” Australian Feminist Studies 4 (Autumn 1987). Swasti Mitter, “Industrial Restructuring and Manufacturing Homework: Immigrant Women in the U.K. Clothing Industry,” Capital and Class 27, 47–49, 62, 75–76. Selections from Enzo Mingione, “Social Reproduction of the Surplus Labor Force: The Case of22REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIESItaly,” in Nanneka Redclift and Mingione eds., Beyond Employment (London: Macmillan, 1985). XI. North-West Europe Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie, eds., M/F (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 3–5, 21–44, 134–148, 274–282, 315–327, 345–356. Frigga Haug and Others, Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory (London: Verso, 1987). Toril Moi, ed., French Feminist Thought: A Reader (London: Blackwell, 1987), essays by Beauvoir, Leclerc, Delphy, Kristeva, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Kofman, Montrelay. Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). XII. Post-Soviet Eurasia Mary Buckley, Perestroika and Soviet Women (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, eds., Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (New York: Routledge, 1993), Introduction and essays by Todorova, Harsanyi, Siklova, Kiczkova and Etela Farkasova, Milic, Duhacek, Bohm, Dolling, Adamik, Fuszara, Lissyutkina. Helena Goscila, ed., Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women’s Culture (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), essay by Ivanova. Barbara Holland, ed., Soviet Sisterhood (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), essays by McAndrew, Allott, Holt. Selections from Gregory Massell, Surrogate Proletariat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Selections from R. Aminova, The October Revolution and Women’s Liberation in Uzbekistan (Moscow: Nauka Publishing House, 1977).Appendix XIII. East Asia (For lack of time, this area was not covered. What follows is a working bibliography on China which I will have to work through. Only one work and one journal covering Japan are included. Because the next time I teach this course student suggestions will allow me to shorten the reading list, I hope to be more inclusive). Ray Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Women’s Studies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993). Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989). Tonglin Lu, ed., Gender and Sexuality: Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993).DIASPORAS OLD AND NEW23Yayori Matsui, Women’s Asia (London: Zed Books, 1989). Janet W. Salaff, Working Daughters of Hong Kong (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Selections from U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, Women in Chinese Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975).Notes 1. This chapter is the text of a talk delivered at Rutgers University in March 1994. It was previously published in another form in Textual Practice 10.2 (1996), pp. 245–269. The dynamic of women in diaspora is so fast moving that it is hopeless to attempt to “update” this. The reader might want to check Spivak, “‘Woman’ As Global Theatre: Beijing 1995,” Radical Philosophy 75 (Jan-Feb 1996), 2–4, for the line of revision that I would take. Increasingly and metaleptically, transnationality is becoming the name of the increased migrancy of labor. To substitute this name for the change from multinational capital in the economic restructuring of the (developed/developing) globe—to recode a change in the determination of capital as a cultural change—is a scary symptom of Cultural Studies, especially feminist Cultural Studies. 2. As I will show later, the complexity of Farida Akhter’s position is to be understood from the weave (or text-ile) of her work, not merely her verbal texts, which are, like all translations, not a substitute for the “original.” Let me cite, with this proviso, Akhter, Depopulating Bangladesh (Dhaka: Narigrantha, 1992), and Malini Karkal, Can Family Planning Solve the Population Problem? (Bombay: Stree Uvach, 1989). The scene has been so Eurocentrically obfuscated that I hasten to add that this is not a so-called “pro-life” position, but rather a dismissal of Western (Northern) universalization of its domestic problems in the name of woman. See also Spivak, “Empowering Women?” Environment 27.I (Jan-Feb 1995), 2–3. 3. Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Guha, ed. Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 8. 4. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 209. 5. In Public Culture 5.1 (Fall 1992). 6. For the usual debate on civil society between left and right, see Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (New York: Verso, 1994), and Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (New York: Allen Lane, 1994). 7. I use “sup-pose” (rather than “pre-suppose,” which presupposes the subject’s agency) here in what I understand to be Derrida’s sense in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, trans. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,24REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIES1992), p. 76. The word suppose is unfortunately translated “presuppose” in the English version. The imaginary map of geo-graphy as we understand it today has been traced by pushing the socalled aboriginals back, out, away, in. The story of the emergence of civil societies is sup-posed in that movement. 8. Saskia Sassen, On Governance in the Global Economy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 9. The argument about feminist universalism propagated through the United Nations is beginning to invaginate this essay in its current revision. I am now convinced that the recoding of transnationality (an economic phenomenon) as people moving across frontiers is part of this propagation: capital being recoded into capital-ism. I have proposed elsewhere these United Nations initiatives in the name of woman have produced feminist apparatchiks whose activism is to organize the poorest women of the developing world incidentally in their own image (“train them to be women,” in Christine Nicholls’s bitter, felicitous phrase) primarily in the interest of generating research fodder according to the old dominant: the essence of knowledge is knowledge about knowledge. As part of this endeavor, some large U.S.-based organizations secure funds for nonelite NGOs in order to enrich their own databases or to redirect the latters’ energies toward activities favored by the former: ideological manipulation of the simplest sort, rather like buying votes in the interest of “economic citizenship.” Recently I have twice heard this kind of activity described by two different people as “working with” these NGOs. Here again the academic diasporic or minority woman thinking transnationality must be literate enough to ask: cui bono, working for whom, in what interest? In “The Body as Property: A Feminist Re-Vision” (in Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds., Conceiving the New World Order, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), Rosalind Pollack Petchesky almost quotes Farida Akhter, a Bangladeshi activist, for a few lines, only to substitute Carol Pateman, whose “critique” seems to her to have an “affinity” with Akhter but to be “more systematic and encompassing” (395). Not content with silencing Akhter by substitution, she then proceeds to provide a “feminist” alternative to such “essentialism” by way of ethnography (New Guinea tribal women can’t be different from women exploited by post-Fordism in Bangladesh!), sixteenth-century Paris, “the early-modern European origins of ideas about owning one’s own body” among the women of the British Levellers, and, finally, the work of Patricia Williams, the African-American legal theorist. Here is her version of Akhter: Farida Akhter, a women’s health activist and researcher in Bangladesh, condemns “the individual right of woman over her own body” as an “unconscious mirroring of the capitalist-patriarchal ideology . . . premised on the logic of bourgeois individualism and inner urge of private property.” According to Akhter, the idea that a woman owns her body turns it into a “reproductive factory,” objectifies it, and denies that reproductive capacity is a “natural power we carry within ourselves.” Behind her call for a “new social relationship” with regard to this “natural power” of woman lies a split between “the natural”DIASPORAS OLD AND NEW25woman and “the social” woman that brings Akhter closer to the essent