Not Like a Native Speaker, by Rey Chow

N ot L i k e a N at i v e Speak er on languaging as a postcolonial experience

RE Y CHOW

Copyrighted Material

INTRODUCTION SKIN TONES—ABOUT LANGUAGE, POSTCOLONIALITY, AND RACIALIZATION

N

ear the beginning of his memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama recalls a childhood encounter with a close-up photograph of a black man’s hands in a magazine at the US embassy in Indonesia. Noting that the hands “had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh,” Obama’s narrative voice goes on: He must be terribly sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybe, or an albino—I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn’t it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.1

The adult Obama remembers the nine-year-old boy’s reactions as visceral: “I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. . . . I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat . . . to

C6505.indb 1

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

demand some explanation or assurance.” His embodied reactions devolved into aphasia: “As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear.”2 This loss of voice, as I will go on to argue, is a distinct form of what may be called, after Michel Foucault, “limit experience,” in which one reaches the end of certitude and touches the edge of the abyss. Although this description is still straightforward enough, another question looms: How might aphasia (as the limit of having voice or being able to speak) be understood simultaneously in relation to racialization, the other major factor in play in this story?

R A C I ALIZAT ION AS AN ENCOUNTER WITH LAN GUAGE

Let me approach this question by way of an ad hoc genealogy of theoretically celebrated scenes. To begin with, Obama’s account, succinctly conveying the trauma that gripped the young mulatto, is as striking as Frantz Fanon’s anguished remembrance in Black Skin, White Masks of being fixed by others in a way that is overdetermined from without: “Dirty nigger!” “Look, a Negro!”3 In both situations, the piercing sensations of shock, debasement, vulnerability, and worthlessness are part of the obligatory reflexivity thrust upon the person of color, who cannot but be startled by his own and his own kind’s objectification in a predominantly visual register. In strangers’ habitual ways of gazing at oneself (Fanon) or in a chance discovery, through a photograph, of what another black person has done to himself (Obama), race is grasped and presented predominantly as a visual drama, which highlights what it is like to be seen as black in a society that treats being black with contempt, as something dirty.

Although chapter 1 of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is devoted to “the Negro and language,” the crucial link between racial objectification and the work of language often still seems inadequately probed in contemporary scholarship. Fanon, for his part, refers to language in the colonial context as an imposition on the colonized to master the colonizer’s language, even while the point of this mastery is, as he points out, an exchange for another kind of value in what he calls the “racial epidermal schema.” “The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter—that is, he will come closer to 2

C6505.indb 2

INTRODUCTION

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

being a real human being—in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language.”4 The acquisition of (the French) language, in other words, becomes the acquisition of whiteness. This other biosemiotics, in which language possession is translated into and receives its value as skin color, is something that deserves much further elaboration than has usually been given. To begin such an elaboration, we must ask a deceptively simple question: What exactly is language here?

Consider again the exclamations “Dirty nigger!” and “Negro!” as reported by Fanon. These utterances are made, first and foremost, to name the other. Walter Benjamin’s writings on human language make him an interesting, if somewhat surprising, interlocutor at this juncture. Like some of his predecessors in the tradition of language philosophy, Benjamin discusses language in terms of a mental interiority, an inner capacity specific to humans. Although this approach is by no means remarkable, what is provocative about Benjamin’s reflections is their ambivalence, their Janus-faced quality of partaking both of religious mysticism and of early-twentiethcentury revolutionary utopianism. In the case of language, for instance, Benjamin spotlights the act of naming, which, as his texts attest, conjures a divine notion of creativity. At the same time, as is characteristic of Benjamin’s thinking, naming is also the key to an arguably secularized perspective on community formation. The hinge is mimesis: as the definitive, lynchpin event in language, naming is associated with the mimetic, with the capacity to produce similarity. The name (and, by implication, human language) is, Benjamin writes, a nonsensuous form of similarity (because words are abstract rather than concretely physical entities); naming is what establishes “a magical community with things” that is “immaterial and purely mental” and that is symbolized by sound.5 In this equation between naming and mimesis lies what may be identified as a proto-sociopolitical move. By naming things, Benjamin suggests, we are in effect mimicking them—that is, becoming like them. To name (the other), to become like (the other), to form social relations (with the other): this is how we derive knowledge of the world.

If Benjamin’s theological and romantic ruminations are transposed onto a sociopolitical frame, what the name signifies is none other than a contact INTRODUCTION

C6505.indb 3

3

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

zone. The name is the place where symbolic correspondence, meeting, symmetry, reciprocation, and integration can, ideally speaking, be established with the world. This potential of a continuum—indeed, a match— between humans and the mute world of things makes naming an incomparably powerful, performative gesture: by naming something, we confer upon it an identity it does not otherwise have—an identity by which what is named becomes animated as our relation, our equal, our community; an identity by which what is named can touch (and affect) us as much as we can touch (and affect) it.

Precisely because of such potential for commonality and sameness, however, the name is eminently dangerous. The precarious flipside to correspondence and integration between namer and named becomes insuppressible when the gesture of naming is applied not simply to a mute world of things, as Benjamin has described it, but rather to other human beings—that is to say, when the name as such is no longer simply a designation but must also be received as a form of address, a call.6 This is how the name enters Fanon’s account.

The instant the black man is visually objectified is the same instant he feels being hailed into existence, as it were, through the names “dirty nigger” and “negro.” First published in French in 1952, Fanon’s account poignantly foreshadows the interpellation of the subject as Louis Althusser argues in his oft-quoted critique of ideology and ideology state apparatuses (first published in French in 1970). Notably, for purposes of analytic clarity, Althusser breaks down the process of interpellation into a sequence of two moments, embodied by two different personae walking along the street. First is the policeman (or some other stranger) issuing an anonymous call, the call that does not yet bear a specific name—“Hey, you there!” Then there is an acquiescent turning around, what Althusser describes as the 180-degree physical conversion, by the hailed person in response to that call. This turning around, a kind of feedback that is tantamount to a “Yes, that’s me,” completes the loop initiated by the anonymous hailing and constitutes the subject. For Althusser, it is in this second moment, when the individual reciprocates, “believing/suspecting/knowing that it is for him, i.e., recognizing

4

C6505.indb 4

INTRODUCTION

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

that ‘it really is he’ who is meant by the hailing,” that ideology successfully completes its task of recruiting the subject.7 Since Althusser’s analysis became well known, it has typically provoked debates around the consistency and volition of this subjective or subjectivizing moment of turning around. Does the subject always (have to) answer the anonymous call? How do we know? Can he not ignore it or resist it? And so forth.8 In a similar vein, were we to transpose Althusser’s terms onto Fanon’s scene of the encounter with the namer of the black man, it would seem logical, at first, to raise questions about subjective consistency and volition as a way to counter the names/calls “dirty nigger” and “negro.” Couldn’t the black man refuse to answer and thus refuse the mode of address that is imposed on him? Wouldn’t it solve the entire problem if the black man simply does not recognize that he is being hailed and does not substantiate the anonymous call with himself or his own name? To be sure, Fanon himself has written in somber defiance: “with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation.”9 At the same time, when taken as a whole, Fanon’s work points in a quite different direction, one suggesting rather that refusal or nonrecognition is not such a simple matter—that nonparticipation in the transindividual situation of racialization (or racializing interpellation) is in fact out of the question.

What is Fanon really describing, then, when he reports the incident of the humiliating objectification and address? It is the experience of a shock, registered both in embodied form (through his own blackness) and beyond corporeality, at what may be called an ineluctability or coerciveness of identification based on none other than the performative mimeticism that is the name.10 In the magical guise of touching and corresponding with the other, as Benjamin suggests, naming establishes the “community” (or, in the language of today’s social media, “connectivity”) in which the named object is given a life other than muteness. Yet precisely because such community relations replace (substitute, take over—indeed, usurp) muteness, the black person has nowhere to hide once the name is pronounced. With the unleashing of the name comes the obligatory realization that something substantive has taken place, that he has been addressed and called into existence

INTRODUCTION

C6505.indb 5

5

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

in that flash of a moment dubbed with the devastating soundbites.11 This phenomenon of a compulsory “self”-recognition operates at a level that goes considerably beyond the logical questions about subjective consistency and volition because the knowledge and authority it bears come from another scene, because the injunction of racialization has already been issued long before this particular encounter, before this particular black person enters the picture in an individuated fashion. What Fanon is describing, therefore, is not simply an instance of what we nowadays call hate speech, but also an ontological subtraction and contradiction: the laying-out of a trajectory of self-recognition from which the possibility of self-regard (or self-respect) has, nonetheless, been removed in advance. For the black person, this chance of self-recognition is held out in the precise form of his reduction or thing-ification: he can be/become (himself ) by being/becoming less, by being/becoming diminished. A self-recognition for which he has to take off (minus) whatever self-esteem he may happen to have: this ontological subtraction and contradiction are what Fanon is at pains to make intelligible.

It is important to remember that this doomed trajectory does not amount to a simple negation or annihilation. The black man is not named as nothing. Rather, he is given a place in the community of relations as performed by the name; he is hailed as some thing—dirt, negro, nigger. In this manner, the phenomenon of racialization raises to a second order the force of a cut (or separation) that is fundamental to the way language operates.

Either from within (such as a name that turns out to be more than a name, a name that contains in it an address and a call) or from without (such as an act of interpellation that cannot materialize without the respondent’s turning around), this cut introduces a bifurcation, which remains empty insofar as it holds out different promises, whether in the form of an imagined community or in the form of police surveillance and seizure. Benjamin’s and Althusser’s accounts, with their respective emphases on mimetic correspondence (between naming and the named) and structural symmetry (between the policeman issuing the call and the hailed subject turning around), draw on the cut as such but at the same time conceal its force/violence in the formal elegance of mutuality. Fanon’s “dirty nigger” and “negro,” in contrast, place this force/violence at center stage, revealing “amputation” to be 6

C6505.indb 6

INTRODUCTION

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

the jagged edge in the racialized scene of interpellative contact. In Fanon’s reading, racialization demands to be grasped first and foremost as an experience of language, not least because lingual relations are themselves caught up in the aggressive procedures of setting apart that racialized naming and interpellation ineluctably intensify. Racialization, Fanon’s writings suggest, makes it impossible not to notice the cut as asymmetrical, nonmutual, and unsuturable and in that way brings us much closer to the rawness of the aphasia that afflicts those who bear the brunt of the cut’s force/violence.12

AP H AS IA, D IS F IGUREM ENT, SKIN TON ES

Returning now to Obama’s story, we can say that aphasia or speech loss (triggered in this context by his becoming aware of the effects of racialization) is a phenomenological condition, which in turn gives rise to a new kind of thinking.13 With the evocativeness of what can only be termed figuration, this thinking alerts us to how skin, the surface that is often assumed to be natural to us, is in the case of the person labeled black a charged interactive medium (like language):14 even as one transcribes and expresses oneself through skin, as one must, it also wounds and humiliates one. As a potentially hurtful object or artifact understood in these terms, skin, as the young Obama learned, lends itself to commodified chemical treatments in America, where attempts at a makeover (turning oneself white) simultaneously mean attempts at hiding oneself (covering up blackness). (Fanon, too, refers to the laboratories trying to produce “a serum for ‘denegrification’ ” that would allow the Negro to “whiten himself and thus to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction.”15) The “uneven, ghostly hue” of the black man in the photograph seen by the young Obama is, we might say, the remainder and reminder of such an attempt at self-making through selfdefacement or self-deletion. It is as though the black man, recognizing himself in the name and interpellation “dirty nigger” and “negro,” as disseminated ubiquitously in American and global culture, has at once responded, “Yes, that’s me,” and proceeded to cross or literally white himself out: “No, that is me.” The failed chemical makeover leaves its mark on the black man’s body INTRODUCTION

C6505.indb 7

7

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

surface—his medium and connection to the world—in the form of a permanent disfigurement. Like a botched copy, his skin will forever bear the unattained tones of whiteness (the promise of happiness, as Obama points out), that preferred color, language, and voice with which it tries, in vain, at once to speak and hide itself.

With its ingredients of self-devalued skin tones, efforts at self-disguise and self-renovation through assimilation, and a double disfigurement (a defective correction of something already deemed defective) that must henceforth be borne on the skin’s (sur)face for all to see, this remarkable episode narrated by Obama provides a constellation of the issues I would like to raise with this book. To underscore how meanings in one register infiltrate and become entangled with meanings in another in the thinking made possible by racialized aphasia, I am, as readers will have noticed by now, deliberately conflating the visual and audial significations of the word tones. Operating at the border between shade and sound, the word underscores the irreducibility of language as a phenomenological actor, one whose ways of revealing what is at stake can be quite surprising and spot-on. Along these lines, let me offer another example of the use of the word tones in the comparable sense of an epidermalization of naming and calling.

Consider the increasingly common experience that consumers in Englishspeaking countries have with service people answering phones in India and the Philippines. For everything from airline reservations to home appliance repairs, banking assistance, and electronic gadget technical support, people in the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere are now accustomed to talking across continents to agents working at the “offshore call center,” the felicitously named corporatist communications establishment that facilitates international business transactions through a specifically racialized linguistic relation: Indians with the “know-how” of British English or Filipinos with the “know-how” of American English. As dramatized in the documentary Diverted to Delhi (dir. Greg Stitt, 2002) and the novel One Night at the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat,16 in order to compete and qualify for the coveted job as a call-center agent, prospective employees must undergo a period of training, comprising nothing short of a process of ideological conversion in Althusser’s sense. Not only must the employees become 8

C6505.indb 8

INTRODUCTION

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

acquainted with the commercial products they are representing, but they must also acquire an aesthetics of performativity, whereby they sound right or sound like what is deemed acceptable to the customer. If they happen to be reserved in their habits of self-expression, for instance, these prospective employees must incorporate—must learn to enact by voice—the preferred American way of sounding cheerful, confident, and enthusiastic, including the not-so-subtle way of pronouncing certain words: “Sure!”17 Indeed, the somewhat antiquated English spoken by some Indian agents is one reason some U.S. companies have reportedly turned to the Philippines as an alternative hub for these outsourced services. Unlike the Indians, “Filipinos learn American English in the first grade, eat hamburgers, follow the N.B.A. and watch the TV show ‘Friends’ long before they enter a call center.”18 In bringing up the figure of the offshore call-center agent, I intend less to reiterate the issue of the exploitation of cheap labor in the globalized economy—a point that, although undoubtedly valid, is not my focus—than to underscore a racialized scene of what, to borrow a concept from A. L. Becker, may be called “languaging.”19 Like the black man in the photograph who had attempted to dye his skin white, the brown and yellow offshore call-center agents (or prospective agents) are obliged to give themselves a bodily makeover. In a situation in which contact is strictly telephonic, is not the voice de facto an (objectified, artifactual) exterior and surface, not unlike the skin, on which is now inscribed an explicit demand, left over from an unequal historical relation?

Are not the upbeat, Americanized tones of voice required of these agents, who inevitably come across as foreigners with “accents,” a variant of that “strange, unnatural pallor” on the black man, in that these tones, too, are unattained and unattainable skin tones, bearing in this case an audible record of being cut (into)—of being racialized by language and languaged by race? Insofar as these brown and yellow people must adapt their bodies— the shapes of their mouths, their lips, their teeth, and their tongues as well as their vocal cords—to the manner of self-expression deemed acceptable

by North American and other English-speaking customers, are not their skin tones also disfigurements, the defective corrections of what is already deemed defective?

INTRODUCTION

C6505.indb 9

9

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

Notwithstanding its matter-of-fact name, the offshore call center is thus, we might say, eminently spectral in the multiple conceptual, practical, and cross-cultural reverberations it brings forth. Beyond the official products and services being transacted, and nearly two centuries after the infamous “Minute on Education” (1835), the British imperial document by Thomas Babington Macaulay that advocated the dissemination of English as a means to breed a new class of Indians who could better serve the interests of the British Empire,20 what do these transcontinental calls conjure? What kinds of self-recognition cum self-deletion are happening as the agents respond to the equivalent of the hailing, “Hey, you there!” when they pick up the phone, as they must in order to make a living, and with what kinds of physical as well as psychological conversions? If the offshore call center is the scene of a literal calling and vocation in the age of globalization, does not this scene embed in its smooth operability the memory of that earlier scene, whereby the colonized were recruited into the ideological state apparatus that was English? Between language as a cut/inscription and skin tones as a double disfigurement, between speech as expression/communication and speech as devaluation/humiliation, what are the specific forms of libidinization that need to be articulated among language, (post)coloniality, and racialization?

AN OVERVIEW OF T HE CHAPTERS

Chapter 1, with its focus on Jacques Derrida’s autobiographical reflections on his anguished relationship to the French language, serves both as a summation of some of the issues outlined in this introduction and as a lead-in to the rest of the book. Derrida offers the paradox that as an Algerian Jew raised in the context of French colonialism, he has one language, yet that language is not his. His elaboration of this “monolingualism of the other” may be read as a way of handling the aphasia and double disfigurement that, as I have suggested, are fundamental to the racialized encounter with language in (post)coloniality. Meanwhile, Derrida’s reference to the French language as an absolute “habitat” invites a juxtaposition of his account with 10

C6505.indb 10

INTRODUCTION

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

the concept of “habitus” as made famous by an unlikely ally, Pierre Bourdieu. In particular, in Bourdieu’s work on the Algerian Kabyle merchants and their creative methods of confronting the preemptive, capitalist trading system imposed by French colonialism, I find the refreshing possibility of an ethnographic approach to Derrida’s work—of seeing as a special form of political resistance his lifelong dedication to language as deconstruction.

While enabling us to raise questions about monolingualism and multilingualism, however, Derrida’s interventions also leave open unsettling issues about the ongoing unevenness among languages and cultures.

Such unevenness is in part what continues to fuel debates about language in postcolonial cultures and societies. With the main title borrowed from remarks made by Chinua Achebe, chapter 2 revisits the important debate between Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on the language choices faced by postcolonial African writers. Should they write in a former European colonizer’s language such as English or a native African language such as Gĩkũyũ?

This discussion is extended to include concepts from Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, among others, to flesh out a framework for thinking about language as involuntary memory, self-estrangement, and lived experience.

Drawing on memories of language acquisition and practice as a child and adolescent in the Anglo-Chinese school system in British Hong Kong, I also raise the vexed question of linguistic nativism—as personified in the figure of the native speaker—in the context of what I call the “xenophone,” the foreign-sounding speech/tone, and argue for a revision of language practices in postcoloniality that can encompass quotidian and seemingly simple but in fact ideologically loaded phenomena such as accents and intonations.

The open and unhealed wounds of language, if they may be so called, are often accompanied in contemporary theoretical writings by investments in affects associated with loss, such as mourning, melancholia, and nostalgia over irretrievable origins. Chapter 3 explores these affects in relation to another key problematic of languaging: translation. With reference to a variety of modern literary and theoretical texts, including those by Ba Jin, James Clifford, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, and Paul Ricoeur, among others, and through an understanding of translation as an intercultural and interlingual phenomenon, I suggest that the affects of loss need to be rethought INTRODUCTION

C6505.indb 11

11

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

in contemporary cultural politics, especially as native languages and cultures are in the translational process of being dismantled, abandoned, reorganized, and/or reclaimed. Might not there be possibilities of democratic thinking and intercultural equivalence in the midst of this process, and how might such possibilities be rearticulated to postcoloniality and racialization? The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of Achebe’s controversial reading of Joseph Conrad and with citations from Derek Walcott’s criticism of Western melancholia in relation to non-Western lands such as the Antilles.

Chapter 4 discusses the work of two Hong Kong authors, Leung Pingkwan, a well-known poet, essayist, and fiction writer, and Ma Kwok-ming, a cultural critic, both of whom make copious references to food consumption in their evocations of contemporary Hong Kong urban culture. In what at first seems an odd addition to a series of discussions about language, postcoloniality, and racialization, this focus on eating is, I suggest, a way to foreground an orality other than the voice. Such a focus carries special import in postcolonial Hong Kong because of the minoritized status occupied by Cantonese, most Hong Kong residents’ native language, in relation to the official Chinese speech, Mandarin (Putonghua). The writings of these Hong Kong authors may thus be read as experiments of and with a muted or aphasic nativism, one that must seek, against the din of nationalism, alternative corporeal passageways for meaning making. For both Leung and Ma, writing about ingestion—that act of swallowing that, wittingly or unwittingly, signals an endurance of injustice in the form of voicelessness—becomes a tactic of capturing things, people, relationships, and life forms that are systemically occluded or obliterated, especially in the wake of Hong Kong’s repatriation to China.

Chapter 5 offers a mini-memoir of a type of language work done in British Hong Kong—Cantonese radio plays, together with the related labors of scriptwriting, manuscript copying, recording, and film adaptation—as I recall pieces of a childhood spent with a mother who was a radio broadcaster, scriptwriter, and producer. Their self-referentiality aside, these memories are introduced here as a singular form of historicity definitive of a (post)colonial setting in which language practices are inseparable from intracultural as much as intercultural class stratifications. While Hong Kong was still a 12

C6505.indb 12

INTRODUCTION

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

British colony, it was entirely acceptable not to know Chinese. Indeed, not knowing Chinese was hardly a social stigma, as such nonknowledge rather conferred something enviable on those who for one reason or another did not have to know the indigenous tongue: an elevated social status. Even so, within the so-called indigenous scheme of things, Cantonese, most Hong Kong residents’ native language, was and continues to be treated as an inferior or inauthentic version of Chinese. (For these reasons of class, the foreigners who tend to acquire fluency in Cantonese are, to this day, typically laborers, such as the Filipina and Indonesian domestic helpers and other low-wage earners from elsewhere, including mainland China; these people often have no choice but to become promptly proficient in this very difficult language.) With reference to some of my mother’s work from the 1950s to the 1970s, I reflect on how radio readily deconstructs the metaphysics of presence through none other than the voice itself, which in this case operates much less as a privileged bearer of logocentrism (as Derrida’s early work suggests) than as a sign of the fundamental sensorial fragmentation brought about by acoustic technology. What happens when the voice as such is not some “inner” thing, but, like writing, an artifact—a type of sound effect?

Instead of the alimentary canal, as discussed in chapter 4, soundtracks became the passageways wherein an orality other than the standard, official tongues (English and Mandarin) was created and played out in my mother’s fictions on the air.

LANG UAGE: A P OS T COLON IAL, P OS T RACIAL P ROS THETICS?

In the age of digitization, human communications are rapidly adapting to the dynamics of the computer screen and the electronic keyboard, which in turn have led to unprecedented adjustments in corporeal and psychic behaviors. As sensorial experiences undergo transformation by high-tech visual and audial media with their special codes for social exchange and interactivity, the much older medium of verbal language, which works by metaphor and syntax, often involving temporal deferment and reflective delay rather INTRODUCTION

C6505.indb 13

13

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

than instantaneity in the generation of meanings, becomes newly thought provoking in ways that cannot be reduced to the more utilitarian modus operandi of cosmopolitics. In colonized and postcolonized contexts, where the complexity of languaging is compounded by the classic, existential, and political confrontation between colonizer and colonized, typically through a coerced bilingualism at the expense of indigenous languages,21 the lingering work of language in the form of skin tones and sound effects as well as mute inscriptions demands a revamped order of conceptualization. Although much has been written in the field of Francophone studies on the connections between colonization and language by authors such as Fanon, Derrida, Albert Memmi, Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Édouard Glissant, Nancy Huston, and their contemporaries, a comparable set of critical reflections on languaging as a visceral and emotional as well as intellectual limit experience is, to my knowledge, relatively lacking—and long overdue—in Anglophone postcolonial studies. (The debate between Achebe and Ngũgĩ on the politics of writing in English and in native African languages, discussed in chapter 2, is a notable exception.) I have conceived the present collection with the objective of addressing this lacuna.22 The colonized’s encounter with the colonizing language, an encounter that forms the basis of many of my discussions, has typically been represented in postcolonial studies in negative terms, as the severance of an original connection (the mother tongue) and as the deprivation of linguistic autonomy, spontaneity, and integrity. Inevitably perhaps, this overwhelming sense of a negative imprint has likewise shaped my intuitive reactions to the subject, though not without ambivalence. To that end, let me make a counterintuitive proposal: notwithstanding the shock, humiliation, rage, and melancholy involved, the colonized’s encounter with the colonizer’s language offers a privileged vantage point from which to view the postcolonial situation, for precisely the reason that this language has been imposed from without.

From the experience of language as a foreign object with which the colonized must wrestle in order to survive, the colonized is arguably more closely in touch with the reality of languaging as a type of prostheticization, whereupon even what feels like an inalienable interiority, such as the way 14

C6505.indb 14

INTRODUCTION

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

one speaks, is—dare I say it?—impermanent, detachable, and (ex)changeable.23 In this extreme conceptual shift lies a chance of overturning the burden of negativity that tends to attach itself tenaciously to languaging as a postcolonial experience. The libidinal or figural logic that accompanies racialized language relations can then, perhaps, proceed beyond the familiar, subjective feelings of loss, insult, injury, and erasure that imbue so much of postcolonial thinking and writing. Rather than being signs of inferiority, for instance, aphasia and double disfigurement can be conceptualized anew as forms of unveiling, as what expose the untenability of “proper” (and proprietary) speech as such. This conceptual shift is proposed here less for the purpose of celebrating a new origin of language in the experiences of the “wretched of the earth” than for clarifying a simple fact: namely, that the intellectually sophisticated ways of coming to terms with language as known to some of us—with their stresses on error, failure, defacement, disappointment, nonarrival, and so forth—have a vital parallel in the process of racialization, the shadowy tones of which are typically borne by those who are deemed inferior. Should not these shadowy tones, what I have been calling skin tones, be finally grasped as a form of prosthetics, something that can and must be undone and remade?

By featuring in two chapters examples of language practices from Hong Kong, this collection aims to exceed the more familiar boundaries of Anglophone studies. The discussions about the orality of food consumption, deterritorialized writing, and radio broadcasting with its technical deployments of sounds and scripts in an Anglo-Chinese setting are seldom available in English-language postcolonial studies, but they are, I believe, entirely germane to a critique of languaging as a postcolonial experience. At a time when China has become a contagious obsession around the world, the inclusion of Hong Kong opens a space for considering the evolving peculiarities of speaking and writing in Chinese languages in conjunction with postcolonial globalization.

Although it is well known that the Chinese script, as an embodied practice with its acquired discipline of brushstrokes, has been undergoing systematic simplification in modern times (including being transcribed by way of romanization and phoneticization),24 the accelerated abstraction and (in INTRODUCTION

C6505.indb 15

15

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

some respects) dysfunction of Chinese writing in the digital age are yet to begin to be theorized. Rather than writing in longhand on paper, for instance, it has become increasingly typical to click and tap on the electronic keyboard or to draw characters with one finger on the smartphone screen, the tablet screen, or the computer trackpad. Languaging-as-experience in this context involves, I contend, an intricate set of shifts and adjustments triggered by machines: the forgetting, on the one hand, of once collectively internalized, miniaturized body movements (all those carefully composed brushstrokes) and, on the other, of the accompanying visual imaginaries that are part of a literate person’s psychic as well as physical sense of time and space. Especially for those who have known the Chinese language since before it became trendy at the turn of the twenty-first century, the contemporary, computerized encounter is often accompanied by a process of disruption and unlearning. Steadily dissipating are not only memories of calligraphic compositions and practices of nuanced attentiveness formed since childhood, but also an entire habitus cultivated through the semiotics of the script. Such epochal shifts and adjustments are, of course, at the same time turning Chinese handwriting into a monumental art form, one that is based on an increasingly arcane type of manual practice and craftsmanship.

Against the amnesia and oblivion surrounding traditional Chinese handwriting as a communal, quotidian practice, Chinese as such is meanwhile entering a new phase of international prominence, its exponentially increasing numbers of users rivaling those of English. As more and more people of different cultural backgrounds attempt to “dye” the skins of their voices with the tonal patterns of Mandarin (Putonghua), how might Obama’s account of the black man who tried to white himself out and Fanon’s account of being called “dirty nigger” and “negro” be reconceptualized? Is there a link somewhere between these earlier incidents of racialized languaging encounters and the ascendance of the Chinese language as triggered by the rise of the People’s Republic of China as an economic superpower? How does the global dissemination of Chinese (in part through a state-sponsored facility such as the Confucius Institute) mediate and intervene in the lingualepidermal encounters among nonwhite peoples—such as those between Chinese and Africans—as well as between whites and nonwhites? Likewise, 16

C6505.indb 16

INTRODUCTION

7/30/14 1:12 PM

Copyrighted Material

given the staunchly nationalistic mandate of the People’s Republic as imposed on China’s economic, cultural, and ethnic minorities, how does the Chinese language become, under certain circumstances, a means of intraracial class discrimination, which is typically displayed toward those who, even though they may be designated Chinese, may not know, speak, or write the language properly?25 To the extent that these critical relations among language, postcoloniality, and racialization are at the core of contemporary global divisions of labor (economic, intellectual, and cultural representational), this collection of essays may be considered a sequel to my 2002 book The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. How to listen, speak, read, and write; how to understand language as a way to injure and destroy others; what counts as native and what counts as foreign; how to strive for self-recognition even as one must efface oneself in the process of speaking and writing? Most important, how not to essentialize loss even when loss is embodied and intimately felt, but rather to treat loss itself as . . . a kind of prosthetics? These questions of languaging are clearly also, to use the terminology from the earlier book, questions of biopolitics. Through a constellation of figures—the Algerian Jewish French monolingual, the xenophonic nonnative speaker, the traitorous cultural translator, the Cantonese-speaking writer of Chinese, the radio broadcaster of dramatized fiction, and a host of others—the following pages highlight distinctive points of entry into what promises to be an inexhaustible topic.

INTRODUCTION

C6505.indb 17

17

7/30/14 1:12 PM