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Postmodernism, Urban Ethnography, and the New Social Space of Ethnic Identity
Author(s): Michael Peter Smith
Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Aug., 1992), pp. 493-531
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657707
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Forum
Postmodernism, urban ethnography, and the new social
space of ethnic identity
MICHAEL PETER SMITH
Universityof California, Davis
The relentlessly self-reflexive ways of representing reality now fashionably
termed "postmodern"are flourishing in an increasingly wide range
of domains. In social theory, postmodernism has been used to characterize
the diverse philosophical work of such Continental post-structuralist
theorists as Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault. Commentators
have identified a multiplicity of other postmodernisms in
architecture, the visual arts, literature, performance, television, video,
film, music, and fashion.1 The term has entered the debate on urban
form largely by way of the impact of postmodern architecture on the
built environment of cities. It has entered the realm of urban theory by
way of debates in urban sociology, anthropology, geography, and political
science, on the interplay among global socio-spatial restructuring,
the cultural transformation of cities, the formation of personal identities,
and the politics of collective action.
In an otherwise skeptical article on postmodernism and urbanism,
Sharon Zukin points out that postmodernism "sounds right"in urban
studies because it intuitively resonates "withthe fragmentation of geographic
loyalties in contemporary economic restructuring and its
expression in new urban polarities."2 Yet Zukin's periodizing reading
of postmodernity, along with that of David Harvey3and Frederic Jameson,4
tends to treat questions of culture and personal identity as direct
byproducts of new political-economic arrangements and their sociospatial
impact on the material form and social structure of cities.
Indeed, thanks to Jameson and Harvey, the term postmodern is now
often equated with the late-capitalist or "post-fordist"historical period
and its putatively hegemonic regime of flexible accumulation.
While rendering contemporary cultural and political changes comprehensible
within an essentialist, structural Marxist framework, these
ways of reading the postmodern ignore a growing body of ethnographic
studies which describe the ways that the everyday practices of ordinary
people, their feelings and understandings of their conditions of existTheoryand
Society 21:493-531, 1992.
? 1992 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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494
ence, often modify those very conditions and thereby shape rather than
merely reflect new modes of urban culture.5 Current efforts in the
debate on postmodernity to subordinate cultural processes to the master
discourse of Marxist political economy also downplay the ontological
and epistemological challenge which poststructuralist philosophy
poses for all forms of essentialism. While "post-fordist"forms of economic
organization, and the global restructuring of capital and labor
may be related in complex ways to certain postmodern aesthetic and
cultural practices, they are certainly not equivalents. The relationships,
if any, among aesthetic postmodern styles, the so-called "post-fordist"
epoch in political economy, and the movement of poststructuralist and
deconstructive methods from philosophy to the social sciences requires
careful specification.
The development of postmodernism as method of sociopolitical analysis
and cultural critique is a principal concern of this essay. Yet, it is
important to specify the boundaries of the postmodern at the outset,
because the critique of the tyranny of totalizing social theory that follows
is not well served by the current tendency to deploy "postmodernism"as
a totalizing device which conflates and thus obscures the differences
among the various postmodernisms now on the scene. Kirsten
Simonsen6 and Michael Dear,7 assessing the implications of various
"postmodern conditions" for the theory and practice of urban planning,
have usefully distinguished basic differences between postmodernism
as a style (as in architecture, art, and literature), as an epoch (as
in Jameson and Harvey's critiques), and as a method (as in poststructuralism
and deconstruction). The latter variant, which informs this
essay, constitutes a revolt against rigid conventions of language and
method in intellectual discourse and textual representation. It is extended
in the analysis that follows into a deconstructive critique of the
closed systems, grand narratives, and totality theories of modernism
itself (e.g., liberalism and Marxism). The aim of my anti-essentialist critique
is to cross some of the borders currently separating the literatures
of postmodernism as a deconstructive method, urban ethnography as
cultural critique, and ethnic experience in urban time-space in order to
gain a better purchase on the politics of personal and ethnic identity
under our present globalized conditions of existence.
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495
Postmodernism and the remaking of social analysis
In the social sciences, advocates of postmodern methods for the conduct
of social research are now actively engaged in debates with positivists,
neo-Marxists, essentialist feminists, traditional ethnographers,
and virtually all social researchers who seek to uncover general patterns
in history or human behavior ratherthan recognizing the diversity
of individual, group, and cultural difference.8 The belief in the autonomization
of the cultural imaginary from the realm of economic necessity
is reflected in this new trend in social inquiry. Postmodernism as
method has refocused attention from the macro-structural context of
social life to the realm of the everyday,i.e., to micro-political relations
of power, domination, resistance, and struggle, particularly as these
articulate with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, ecology, and locality.
When postmodern social scientists such as Stephen Tyler assert, with
rhetorical flourish, that "discourse is the maker of this world, not its
mirror,"9they condense the idea that the occasions, spaces, and modes
of representation are themselves forms of power rather than mere
reflections of power residing in the real, material 'facts of life,"and the
"big structures,"1' through which the power of class, capital, or the
state are expressed. Hence, the focus on discourse as the space of the
"self-production of society" shifts our attention from macropolitics to
micropolitics, the social spaces where networks of power relations
"subsisting at every point in a society""1are formed, reformed, and
transformed.
This return to the "local" and the historically particular represents a
growing skepticism concerning the Enlightenment project of rationality:
the use of rules of thought to achieve propositions of universal or
"global"validity.'2In renouncing the enlightenment quest for foundationally
grounded thought, which Lyotard terms "master-narratives,"
the postmodernist moment in social science stands in opposition to
both liberal and Marxist political-economic reasoning. It calls into
question the idea that there can be any firmly grounded master discourse
of economic development, political liberation, or social change.
Totality theories, including those rooted in neo-classical economics
and historical materialism, are appropriately viewed as reductionist in
that they ignore elements of cultural life that they cannot explain or
marginalize them as exceptions, often in the "soft"areas of culture, art,
feelings, or desire. Marginalizing or excluding cultural practices tends
to deny their importance as historical modes of agency in society. In
these ways, postmodern social research harkens back to Nietzsche's
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496
insight that no totalistic system of thought can capture and "fix"a world
of endless becoming.
In this spirit, the Gramscian quest for new forms of oppositional agency
resonates in the debates in postmodern social science at the point
where the literature on contemporary ethnographic practice articulates
with that on the rise of new social movements.'3 This articulation calls
to our attention the meanings of the social actions of heretofore "marginal"
people, movements, and social forces. It suggests the need for
closer study of the "marginal"in order to discern the formation of new
"subject positions," grasp emergent counterlogics to the prevailing
modes of domination in society, and give voice to the polyphonic patterns
of accommodation and resistance to domination.
Given this attention to historical specificity, plurality, and difference,
postmodern social analysis questions the projection of a universal,
trans-historical subject such as the working class as a privileged repository
of agency. Orthodox Marxism's emphasis on the centrality of the
mode of production in shaping social roles and forming class structured
subject positions de-emphasizes the domains of culture, emotion,
and desire. The cultural mediation of signs, as well as people's everyday
expressions of emotion and desire, even if distorted by the media
images of consumer society, represent possible oppositional forces to
capitalist reproduction that are unrecognized in the class struggle
model of social change and reduced to epiphenomenal status in the
periodizations of Harvey and Jameson.
Just as postmodernism as method resists efforts to reduce the complexity
of human action to economic explanation "in the last instance," so
too does it reject totalistic biological or psychoanalytical explanations
of the wellsprings of human action. For methodological postmodernists
the cultural mediation of material life is central. This is nicely illustrated
in Anthropology as CulturalCritique,where anthropologists George
Marcus and Michael Fischer embrace the central thesis of Marshall
Sahlins's work, Culture and Practical Reason.'4 Marcus and Fischer
share with Sahlins the anti-essentialist assumption that the ways in
which human needs are satisfied through the exploitation of nature and
social relations are constituted is by systems of signification that give
cultural meaning to human action. Accordingly, they write: "There
is ... no such thing as pure nature, pure need, pure interests or material
forces, without their being culturally constructed.... [C]ulturemediates
all human perceptions of nature ... understanding these mediations is a
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497
much more important key to explaining human events than is mere
knowledge of ecological and material limits." 5 In the view of "culture"
developed in this essay, the languages people possess and the circuits of
communication in which they are implicated are resources as well as
limits. They constitute the terrain for the contestation, as well as the
reproduction of cultural meanings, for resistance as well as accommodation
to dominant structures of power and ideology.
This emphasis on the cultural construction of social agency through
individual and group acts of accommodation and resistance to the
prevalent modes of domination in society has significant implications
for urban research. In urban theory, the focus upon new forms of
human agency in the making and remaking of cities has brought an
increasing number of urban researchers to a realization that the people
participating in urban political and social life are actors "making
choices within a structure of constraints that then modify that structure."'6They
are more than mere "actees"whose behavior is impressed
upon them by structuralforces and socialization processes.'7
Following from this recognition, there has been a renewed emphasis in
urban research upon studying the locality as the place where local
struggles, and alternative discourses on the meanings of "global conditions"
are played out.' This requires examining at close range but in
rich contextual detail the specific historical conditions of these local
sites of cultural appropriation and resistance as enacted in the everyday
lives of ordinary men and women. Since consciousness springs from
both people's material circumstances and from their perceptions and
cultural understandings of these circumstances, an ethnographic
approach is increasingly viewed as an indispensable route to knowledge
of the ways in which consciousness is actually formed and how it
changes over time and space. As cogently stated by Andrew Sayer,
"Even where locality studies do seem quite successful in rendering political
and other behavior intelligible, political economy without ethnography
leaves the reasons for that intelligibility implicit:the behavior
seems intelligible only to the extent that it resonates, not because we
have articulated the constitutive structure of understanding or feeling."'9In
light of this renewed interest in the interplay between urban
political economy and the cultural practices of daily life, how does the
debate on postmodern knowledge address the epistemological and ontological
question thatPolanyilong ago termed "personalknowledge"?
At every point in the intersubjective communication of events and
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meanings, postmodern social analysis problematizes knowledge and
meaning. Ironically, despite the fact that the postmodern intellectual
current eschews totalizing grand theories, postmodernism as method
offers a totalizing critique of realist and materialist theories of representation.
It problematizes both the text and the context. Epistimologically,
at the level of textual representation, it questions not only what is
known, the "outthere"of historical reality,but also the knoweror storyteller
and the reader or receiver of knowledge. Ontologically, at the
level of contextual interpretation, it problematizes the subject as a
bounded social actor inexorably situated in a context that is itself historically
contingent, and socially constructed. This immensely complicates
the question of human agency.
If only because of the breathtaking sweep of this critique, the debate on
postmodern knowledge deserves to be addressed carefully by urban
researchers. To avoid misunderstanding, it is equally important that this
often muddy and sometimes polemical critique of objectivity in the
social sciences be synthesized and critiqued with clarity and parsimony.
My discussion of postmodern social science is therefore intentionally
presented in what aesthetic postmodernists would doubtless characterize
as a linear, logical, and hence decidedly "modernist"form. My purpose
is to broaden the debate on modernity rather than hastily to
embrace or to denounce the postmodern moment in the philosophy of
social science.
Questioning textuality: The challenge to realist representation
Postmodernism as method calls into question the possibility that any of
us can know an "out there,"a real object of investigation existing apart
from the systems of signification through which the world is described
and understood. This is done by explicitly challenging the notion of
realist representation. In postmodern epistemology, even the apparently
most direct medium of knowing, the camera's documentation of the
"out there" is not a depiction of unmediated reality; rather photographs,
like all other forms of perception, are filtered by "thediscursive
and aesthetic assumptions of the camera holder."2" Likewise, the meaning
of a story told by a historical narrativeis produced by the frame of
reference, often implicit, assigning patterned regularity to the flux of
everyday existence. In short, discursive practices structure the flow of
the "out there." No ahistorical, universalist, or essentialist entity, like
"homo faber"or "homo economicus," can give unifying meaning to his-
tory.
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This does not mean that the terrain of knowledge and meaning in the
social and human sciences is reduced to pure subjectivity or the chaos
of the living city. Rather, discursive practices are always embedded in
social relations of power and ideology which readily authorize some
representations of the "out there" while impeding others. For this reason,
postmodern epistemology problematizes the knower as much as
the known. Rejecting both the romantic notion of the transcendentally
creative artist and the modernist notion of an intellectual avante garde
capable of pursuing universal reason, postmodern social science fundamentally
historicizes the process of "writing culture," questioning
Enlightenment notions of authorial objectivity, originality,and authority.In
treating knowledge as a social product, emanating from and limited
by historically specific and culturally mediated discursive practices,
postmodern epistemology rejects both the rationalist quest for general
laws of history or human behavior and empiricist efforts to ground
knowledge in the "hardfacts"of an "external"material world.
The postmodern analysis of the "deathof the author"is a curious move
that tends to undercut what it inscribes. To debunk the autonomy and
originality of the individual "author,"as well as to challenge the positivist
notion of social scientific verifiability,postmodern cultural critiques
have used parody, meta-fiction, experimental writings of ethnographic
"findings,"and even what is termed "intertextual appropriation" (or
direct copying, as in the case of the appropriated photographic images
of Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine, and Terry
Gilliam's filmmaking in Brazil). Yet in thereby producing quite novel
forms of creative expression, their challenge to authorial originality is
undercut even as the challenge to scientific verifiabilityis reinforced.
Despite this apparent contradiction, there is an important lesson to be
derived from the postmodern discussion of the constitutive structureof
understanding. In historical as in literary discourse, even presumably
descriptive language constitutes what it describes. The film Brazil, for
example, selectively appropriates elements of earlier films such as 1984
and A Clockwork Orange, in constituting something new; it does not
merely copy, and hence objectively describe what it appropriates, but
creates new meanings by its juxtaposition of images and signs. Likewise,
the "travel writing" of colonial discourse relied upon "description"
to fix, construct, and hence master the colonized object. It vividly
detailed the habits, customs, speech acts, and bodily practices of conquered
peoples in order comprehensively to "know,"and hence implicitly
control, the colonial subject, thereby "enabling itself to transform
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500
the descriptively verifiable multiplicity and difference into an ideologically
felt hierarchy of value."21Interpretation, in short, is an unavoidable
dimension of descriptive narrative.In this same way, the contemporary
social historian selectively "presences the past" in writing a historical
text; the cultural anthropologist selectively edits the tapes that
give voice to his or her ethnographic subjects.
This constitution of meaning, however, is not an individual invention,
but a social product. In the normal course of writing social science, the
choices of an author are not made arbitrarily or in vacuo, but with
some reasonably well-defined audience in mind. This audience is clearly
the reader of the text, and the receiver of the communications imparted
in it. Yet because the reader is at least implicitly present beforethe-fact
in the mind's eye of the writer, the text is at least implicitly a
collaborative production.
Postmodern epistemology seeks to make this implicit social production
of knowledge explicit. The postmodern project amounts to an almost
Brechtian effort to elevate the reader or receiver into an active participant
in the meaning-making process. A central purpose of the postmodern
discursive style of irony, collage, pastiche, and intertextual
appropriation is to make explicit to the reader the cultural structuring
of narrativereality.These often all too obvious self-reflexive intrusions
of the writer into the story being told are designed to let the reader
know that we can only know "reality"as it is produced by cultural
representations of it.22Because of the inseparability of knowledge and
power, there are no value-free narrativechoices. For postmodern writers
and social commentators the distinction between social scientific
methodologies and literary studies thus begins to blur,as do such intellectually
limiting binary dualisms as the political and aesthetic, power
and ideology, historical and self-referential knowledge, life and art.23
The more careful of the postmodern analysts of the social production
of knowledge, such as literary theorist Linda Hutcheon, are quick to
back away from the post-structuralist position (in my view wrongly)
attributed to Derrida, that there is no material or social reality outside
the text. Rather, in social scientific discourse as in literature,it is necessary
to recognize that: "[a]llwe ever have to work with is a system of
signs, and ... to call attention to this is not to deny the real, but to
remember that we only give meaning to the real within these signifying
systems."24If symbolic systems necessarily mediate the material world
and its historical context, how does postmodern social analysis interThis
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501
pret the semiotic mediation between contextuality and social action?
What can urban studies learn from this theorization?
Questioning contextuality: Constituting the subject, social action,
and context
Postmodern theory challenges the Enlightenment belief in rationalactor
models of social action, be they individuals cognizant of "universal
reason" or collective actors conscious of material self-interests.
Both liberal and Marxist theories of the subject are rejected as essentialist
because both offer a reductionist view of the relationship between
consciousness, agency, and social change. Both offer competing
abstract categories - the "individual"and "class"- as carriers of a unifying
and coherent capacity for universal, transhistorical, if not transcendental
agency.
There has been much talk in the debate on postmodernity on the problem
of the "decentered subject."Just what is meant by decentering, and
who is the subject? How is subjectivity related to human agency? How,
in turn, are acting human subjects empowered and constrained by their
historical context? What can we learn from this debate about the social
construction of personal and ethnic identities in our contemporary historical
context in which local life has become globalized and the world
has, in important ways, become a single social space?
In postmodern social analysis, the subject is decentered precisely
because there are no clear-cut roles waiting for subjects to occupy in
pursuit of their historical mission. Rather, there are a multiplicity of
roles that people come to play in history.These produce a "self"experienced
not as a single, completed identity, but as multiple, incomplete,
and partial identities, formed in historically specific relation to the different
social spaces people inhabit over time.25Viewed in this light, the
constitution of personal identity is best understood as necessarily contextualizingand
historicizingthe subject in all his or her spatial particularities
and temporal contradictions.
Postmodern subjectivity is thus inextricably implicated in sociality.The
social production of subjectivity is embedded in symbolic processes of
signification that give meaning to "subject positions" formed, to be
sure, at the intersection of such structural categories as class, gender,
race, ethnicity, and sexual identity, but always emergent within specific
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502
"language games," and their discursive practices.26 Accordingly, subjectivity
is neither natural nor universal, but fragile, decentered, and
emergent, like a candle in the wind, always in process of being formed,
unformed, and reformed through communication and the semiotic
exchange of signs. At the level of the formation of consciousness and
agency, how else can we explain recent developments in Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union in which all that was deemed
solid has indeed melted into air?
Chantal Mouffe has been especially clear in positing the connections
linking the cultural mediation of subject positions, the "decentered"
subject, the formation of personal identity, and the constitution of
human agency. Personal identity, Mouffe insists, emerges out of sociality
in highly differentiated social formations and complexly organized
civil societies that now render its formation fluid and, in her view, radically
open. In the contemporary context, neither liberalism nor Marxism
offer an adequate theory of the subject, particularly as these theories
fail to develop adequate explanations for the coalescence of subject
positions into political action. In their place, Mouffe argues:
[Ilt is indispensable to develop a theory of the subject as a decentered, detotalized
agent, a subject constructed at the point of intersection of a multiplicity
of subject positions between which there exists no a priori or necessary
relation. Consequently no identity is ever definitively established, there
always being a certain degree of openness and ambiguity in the way the different
subject positions are articulated. What emerges are entirely new perspectives
on political action, which neither liberalism - with its ideal of the
individual who only pursues his or her own interest - nor marxism - with its
reduction of all subject positions to that of class - can sanction, let alone
imagine.27
Just as class and individualist theories of personal identity and collective
action are rejected by postmodern theorists, so too are radically
decentralist theories that give historical and ontological priority to "the
community" as the ultimate source of coherent identity and social
action. As Mouffe, once again clearly states:
Many communitarians seem to believe that we belong to only one community,
defined empirically and even geographically.... But we are in fact always
multiple and contradictorysubjects, inhabitants of a diversity of communities
(as many... as the social relations in which we participate and the subjectpositions
they define), constructed by a variety of discourses and precariously
and temporarily sutured at the intersection of these subject positions.'2
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503
These intersections are crucial elements in the processes of self, group,
class, ethnic, and racialformation in any social system.
In the version of the cultural politics of ethnic and racial formation
recovered in the analysis that follows, the presumed global cultural
homogenization of what Frederic Jameson calls "consumer society" is
strongly challenged. Like my past criticisms of the totalizing tendencies
of various versions of modernization and development theory,29this
effort to reshape social theory into a more fluid and flexible mode of
social analysis rests upon a recognition of growing cultural differentiation
and the multiplication of marginally situated forms of social agency
as accompaniments of and potential modes of resistance to the
homogenizing logic of global consumer society.
Viewed in light of the foregoing analysis of contextuality, the much
heralded global context of urban life itself is not an objective structure
existing "out there,"but an intersubjective and contested set of understandings
about material, cultural, and historical permissions and constraints.
Defining the context of opportunities and constraints upon
social action (e.g., defining "global conditions") is itself a continuous
process of contest and struggle in which the historical practices of
people are actively inserted as articulations, which mediate, and in turn
modify, the permissions and constraints. Articulations do not merely
voice new social identities; they also may alter the "rulesof the game."
As I read contemporary "global conditions," the social relations constructed
at the intersections of emergent subject positions have become
significantly more complicated at the present time by a variety of structural
changes in what has come to be termed the "modern world system."Class
formation has been especially complicated and impeded by
the combined and uneven effects of several interrelated global developments
impinging on national and local social relations. These include
the trans-territorialization of production, the restructuring of labor
processes and the attendant fragmentation of national working classes,
the globalization, speed, and instantaneity of mass communications,
the end of the Cold War,global geo-political restructuring,the renewed
acceleration of transnational migration, and the ethnic reconstitution
of localities and regions now taking place on a global scale. These dramatic
changes have affected prevailing structures of work, residence,
and social intercourse at the level of the locality, impinging on peoples'
everyday experience in urban time-space. They have reconstituted the
opportunities for and constraints on communication.
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504
The global-local interplay in urban life has thus become a driving force
in both the structuration of cultural practices and the move to integrate
the cultural analysis of the local practices of everyday life into research
on the political economy of urbanization.3"Andrew Ross, the co-editor
of the journal Social Text nicely captures the complex and emergent
character of this difficult move to interpret local practices in light of
their changing global context. According to Ross:
The comforts provided by the totalizing, explanatory power of marxist categories
are no longer enough to help us make sense of the fragmented and
various ways in which people live and negotiate the everyday life of consumer
capitalism. This is not to say that the structure of multinational capitalism,
with its new global grid of information and its new international divisions
of labor, is beyond explanation, or without significance. On the contrary,
it is to say that such an explanation cannot in itself account for the
complex ideological processes through which our various, local insertions
into the global economy are represented and reproduced.3
By my reading, the complex global changes I have just enumerated
have created new material and cultural conditions conducive to the
political production of a multiplicity of local "voices,"including potentially
oppositional voices to dominant modes of signification and
power. Under these conditions, differences of race, gender, class, ethnicity,
sexuality, locality, and region, and their complex interplay in discourses
where personal and group identities are formed, have become
incipient social bases of new discursive practices and hence of the
emergence of new subject-positions. Although affected by the presently
accelerated velocity and scope of international capital circulation,
state restructuring,and demographic migration, these emergent discursive
practices spring from interpersonal communication. They thus
operate in and through local or at least relocalized conditions of cultural
production. Yet the "local"itself has become globalized as transnational
modes of communication, streams of migration, and forms of
economic and social intercourse continuously delocalize and relocalize
the social spaces of cultural production.
What are the political implications of these transformations for our
understanding of the politics of personal identity and collective action?
A good deal of postmodernist writing on "new voices" in both urban
ethnography and the analysis of new social movements has assumed
an explicitly oppositional political stance. For example, the originality
of Laclau and Mouffe's approach, when compared to the literature on
new social movements in general, is that they see identity as something
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505
formed in discourse and hence reformed in political struggle. In Rousseauian
fashion, they comprehend political process, as Rosenthal
notes, as a problematic of "identitiesput a risk, rather than of a contest
between actors whose identities (and hence 'interests') are already
given...."32 Nevertheless, because neo-Gramscians like Laclau and
Mouffe assert an interpretive logic of difference - of and-also - as
preferable to the dualistic logic of either-or, the epistemological and
ontological argument of postmodern social analysis has been interpreted
as a necessarily conservative political position by some feminist and
Marxist critics.33By eschewing foundationalism and empowering personal
identity, postmodernism though is said to depoliticize the collective
struggle against domination. This is because the priority given by
postmodernists to the plurality of the differentover the duality of the
other in constituting social relations of ethnicity, race, class, gender,
sexuality, locality, and region rejects the political strategy by which the
binary dualisms of capital-labor, center-periphery, male-female, and
assimilation-ethnic purity, are converted into an either-or logic. In
much Marxist and feminist discourse on power, the "marginal" is
turned into the "other,"whose only self-respecting strategy is to displace
the center by revolutionary struggle.
Despite its tone of radical possibility, the postmodern discourse on the
different, its critics claim, is for the most part silent on questions of
political strategy even as it claims to be radically open to the multiplicity
of voices by which opposition to domination actually emerges in
history. In my view, because they have overlooked the political implications
of the radical anti-essentialism of postmodern cultural theory, its
critics have been too quick to jump to the conclusion that sociohistorically,
postmodernism proffers an implicit political theory of pure tolerance
or worse still, of anemic pluralism that fails to address adequately
questions of contextual constraint and structuraldominance.
This conclusion ignores the foregoing analysis of the social construction
of context that is part of the stream of postmodern thought that
has sought to interpret the meaning of contextual opportunities and
constraints from the vantage point of Gramsci's theory of articulation.34Cultural
theorist, Lawrence Grossberg, expresses this problematic
relationship among subject, agency, and context in postmodern
theory thus:
The problem of interpreting any cultural text, social practice, or historical
event must always involve constituting a context around it.... But contexts
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506
are not entirely empirically available because they are not already completed,
stable configurations, passively waiting to receive another element. They
are not guaranteed in advance, but are rather the site of contradictions, conflicts,
and struggles.... In Gramscian terms, any interpretation ... [or]historical
practice is an articulation, an active insertion of a practice into a set of
contextual relations that determine the identity and effects of both the text
and the context. Articulation is the continuous deconstruction and reconstruction
of contexts. These articulated connections are sometimes fought
over, consciously or unconsciously, but in any case, an articulation is always
accomplished ... and will always have political consequences.35
What are the political implications of this theory of articulation for our
understanding of power relations and the processes that change these
relations? By rejecting the notion of "historicalnecessity," and instead
focusing on the arena of cultural politics as a contested terrain, the
postmodern theory of articulation implies that people are never merely
passive instruments of elite domination, class hegemony, or natural
instinctual drives. Rather, as social beings, with capacities for interaction,
communication, and the insertion of praxis into life, people are
social and political actors engaged in struggles with, within, and sometimes
against their understood context. In "reallife" relations of domination-subordination
exist, but they are always complexly constituted,
and often actively contested.
For this reason, the postmodern quest to understand the social production
of culture has turned to the realm of the everyday and to the
methods of ethnography.The goal of this methodological turn is to gain
insight into how articulatory practices are actively inserted in the particular
locales of everyday life and how these articulations, in turn,
empower or disempower their audiences.36Postmodern ethnography is
increasingly seen as an experimental project capable of giving voice to
these articulations.What is new, as the sayinggoes, about this approach
to ethnographic practice?
Urban ethnography as cultural critique
Postmodern ethnography seeks to involve directly the ethnographic
subject in the process of signification and the production of meaning,
to give "voice" to his or her view of the world. Stephen Tyler terms
postmodern ethnography a form of "cooperative story making,"a quest
on the part of the researcher to recover and evocatively communicate
to the reader a local narrative about the life-world of the subject, a
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507
story produced by mutual dialogue rather than imposed by an authorial
script. This approach is intended to produce a "cooperative evolved
text" in which neither subject, nor author, nor reader, no one, in fact,
has the exclusive rightof "synoptic transcendence."37
Because social reality is historically constituted, because there are no
master narratives except those constituted by us, the central task of
postmodern ethnography becomes the reexamination of the subject's
past, by engagement in listening and conversation in order to explore
new meanings and intentions. These meanings are not viewed as pregiven
"data"to be uncovered by the researcher; rather,they are socially
constituted and hence contestable representations of history produced
by intersubjective dialogue. In this mode of interrogation, one purpose
of dialogue is to enable the subject to become an active producer of
meaning rather than an object of the projected meanings of the re-
searcher.
In these respects, postmodern ethnography is both similar to and different
from the earlier Schutzean phenomenological approach to the
social construction of reality and the ethnomethodology of Harold
Garfinkel.38 Like these earlier approaches, postmodern ethnography
seeks to unearth the meaning of the social world through intersubjective
conversations aimed at capturing the intentionality of human
agents within particular social contexts. Unlike these earlier approaches,
however (which have been used in the social sciences to posit
an alternative social-scientific "micro"truthviewed as closer in texture,
concreteness, and proximity to "reality,"than are generalizations derived
from various abstract, deductivist "macro"social theories of the
structuration of social life) postmodern ethnography makes no pretense
to scientific truth. Indeed, strictly speaking, it is not part of the
discourse of a separate language game called "science."Rather, in style,
method, and stance, it is an intentionally provocative, evocative effort
to transcend the modernist binary oppositions of micro versus macroanalysis,
structureversus agency,and science versus artin social analysis.
In its effort to bridge the gap between art and the social science, postmodern
ethnographic writing appropriates from the realm of literature
such expressive styles as rhetoric, metaphor, subjectivity,and narrative,
which modernism had radically separated from the discourse of
"science."The self-conscious goal of this appropriation is to produce
an evocative text that simultaneously gives voice to its subjects and
shapes the way the sociocultural processes presented in the text are
registered and made sense of by the reader.
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508
As already noted, the reader's presence looms large in postmodern
social analysis. The postmodern ethnographer views the researcher as a
kind of translator, broker, or mediator between the world of social
practice and the way the practices of everyday life are interpreted in the
world. This view of ethnography as an interpretive human science and
the ethnographer as a socially embedded storyteller is perhaps best
expressed by James Clifford in his introduction to the influential book,
WritingCulture:
Ethnography is actively situated between powerful systems of meaning. It
poses its questions at the boundaries of civilizations, cultures, classes, races,
and genders. Ethnography decodes and records, telling the grounds of collective
order and diversity, inclusion and exclusion. It describes processes of
innovation and structuration, and is itself part of these processes.39
Postmodern ethnography seeks to grasp and contextualize the complex,
heterodox, and often contradictory elements of the ethnographic
subject's past experiences and present conditions that combine in shaping
personal identity. It views the social construction of personal identity
as a socially contested, historically modifiable process. As argued
above, in the contemporary period of globalization, analysis of the
social roots of personal identity has been rendered more difficult by the
ineffectuality or incompleteness of the "grandnarratives"of the past in
rendering meaningful the rapidly shifting boundaries of territory,community,
and self. These foundational analytical frameworks reduced
social complexity and transcended historical specificity by projecting a
theory of consciousness and social action based either upon an ahistorical
"individual"subject who is a maximizer of utility, or upon the
universal subject's class position within the social relations of production.
At the present moment, the decomposition of class structures
within the borders of nation-states and their reconstitution as social
relations of production operating on a global scale far removed from
the immediacy of the subject'slived experience, have rendered the conventional
grand narrative of class struggle especially problematic as a
theory of consciousness and collective action. Likewise, the demograpic
transformation of localities by the accelerated flows of transnational
migration is modifying the social relations of community that
had grounded traditional ethnographies in convergent social spaces of
culturalproduction and place.
In this fluctuating historical context, postmodern ethnographers
Marcus and Fischer offer us a useful opening for moving beyond the
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509
theoretical limits of the binary categories of global versus local, structure
versus agency, and modern versus post-modern historical epochs
in envisioning the formation of peoples' consciousness and identities.
In their characterization of contemporary "global conditions," Marcus
and Fischer depict a world still full of cultural differences but in which
most, if not all, cultural worlds have been penetrated by various aspects
of modern life. "What matters then," they state, "is not ideal life elsewhere,
or in another time, but the discovery of new recombinant possibilities
and meanings in the process of daily living anywhere."40
Marcus and Fischer call their project anthropology as cultural critique.
They seek to unearth the recombinant possibilities of contemporary
life by studying the ways that in daily life people in various life situations
appropriate, accommodate to, or resist the structuralimperatives
and cultural logics of their own time and place. The identification of
various modes of accommodation and resistance to similar structural
constraints and forms of social control places the motif of power-domination-accommodation-resistance
at the center of the project of postmodern
ethnography. Not only does the centrality of this motif mark
postmodern ethnography as different from traditional phenomenological
research, it also constitutes a useful strategy for uncovering new
opportunities and recombinant possibilities for daily living, discerning
new forms of oppositional practice, and mapping the actual complexity
and diversity of what, from the vantage point of grand theory, seems to
be an increasingly homogeneous world.
In the hands of an army of micro-sociologists, conventional ethnomethodology
has been used to wage war against the truth claims of
various macro-structural theories, whether classic formulations of
Marx or Durkheim, or the more contemporary functionalist readings
of Althusser or Wallerstein. By positing the context of social life as no
less a social construct than the narrative texts of peoples' everyday
lives, postmodern ethnography avoids this combative rhetoric of the
macro vs. micro reality debate in the social sciences. This does not
reduce the project of post-modern ethnography to the trivialpursuit of
idiosyncratic petit narratives.Rather, in the hands of its best practitioners41
it asks the big questions to little people. By asking people first to
construct their understanding of the opportunities and constraints they
face in the world in which they live, and then to talk about the ways in
which they appropriate, accommodate to, or resist the forms of power
and domination, opportunity and constraint that they encounter, postmodern
ethnography does offer us something new, namely a chance to
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510
overcome by a contextually situated petit narrative,the fruitless eitheror
rhetoric that has too often marred the structure-agency debate in
social theory. By creating a non-scientific and hence non-"scientistic"
social space within which social researchers can exercise imagination,
freeing their thought processes from the imperatives of pre-theorized
conceptual categories, in short, by opening up science to art, postmodern
ethnographers posit a radically open and contingent spirit of inquiry,
a highly tentative yet curiously courageous "vision quest" that
resonates well with the awesomely radical discontinuities we are all
now experiencing at the level of "globalconditions." Moreover, by refocusing
ethnographic inquiry amidst all of this flux upon the powerdomination-accommodation-resistance
motif, postmodern ethnography
gives us an intelligible starting point at the level of the constitution
of subjectivity for understanding the complex dynamics of which
new subject positions emerge in and through, for and against such
presumably "global"phenomena as urban social-spatial restructuring,
transnational migration, the end of the Cold War, the break up of the
Soviet Union, and the bubbling cauldron of ethnic and racial conflict
currentlybeing stirredby symbolic politics throughout the world.
Moreover, by their rejection of various grand narrativesof the past, the
leading postmodern ethnographers clearly assume a critical rather than
a reactionary stance toward social history. Their position is reminiscent
of architectural theorist Paolo Portoghesi's celebration of the
"presence of the past" in postmodern architecture. Making the past
present through selective appropriation, whether in an ethnographic
interview or in a work of art, is an implicit critique of the totalizing tendencies
of various modernisms, particularly their tendency to obliterate
the past in the name of universal reason. If Hutcheon is correct
that the postmodern attitude toward the past "is always a critical reworking,
never a nostalgic 'return,"'42then postmodern ethnography
can be viewed as an oppositional rethinking of the past, a critique of
dominant modes of historical explanation, a rejection of a historical
script cast as a series of over-generalized epochal patterns in favor of a
close scrutinyof the culturally specific nature of each past. The political
aim of this turn to historically specific social practice is to foster a
greater acceptance of heterodoxy rather than to make new centers of
domination out of "marginal"races, classes, ethnic groups, genders, or
sexual identities.
Postmodern thought has been frequently attacked from both left and
right as culturally relativist, if not nihilist. Yet, the political project of
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511
post-modern ethnography can be interpreted as precisely the opposite.
In Michael M. J. Fischer's words, postmodern ethnography constitutes
a reaffirmation or rediscovery of the existentialist ontology, namely:
"makingour taken-for-granted ways recognizable as sociocultural constructs
for which we can exercise responsibility."43As stated more
lucidly by Linda Hutcheon, the basic assumption of postmodern analysis
is that: "there are all sorts of orders and systems in our world and
that we create them all.... They do not exist "out there,"fixed, given,
universal, eternal; they are human constructs in history.... The local,
the limited, the temporary, the provisional are what define 'postmodern'
truth...." 44
Viewed in this light, postmodern ethnography constitutes an explicitly
oppositional project. It denies that the researcher can position an
objectified, scientific "self" outside of sociocultural processes. Yet
paradoxically, it insists that the investigator can intersubjectively experience
the lived contradictions of larger social systems as they are
"imploded" into the social relations and everyday lives of the ethnographic
subject.45The central goal of oppositional post-modern ethnography
is thus multidimensional: the creation of an evocative "petit
narrative;"an exposure of the concealed limitations of the "author's"
vantage point; a critique of the often-assumed transparancy of the
representation of "external"reality; and an acknowledgment that, in
James Clifford's terms, interpreters of social reality "constantly construct
themselves through the others they study."46
There is, of course, a danger inherent in the postmoder ethnographic
effort to assume a subject position of tentativeness, if not authorial passivity
in "recording"the pure, authentic voice of the "marginal"and the
"different."Cultural voices are historically contingent, not timelessly
pure. The temptation to capture the essence of a local voice, inscribed
as a heroic challenge against the oppressive forces of modernization
precisely mirrors the problem of exoticizing the "other"as a radically
strange being that characterized colonial discourse. Commenting critically
on the efforts of anthropologists (modernist or postmodernist) to
evoke the "essence" of "Indian-centered" narrative, Susan Hegman
powerfully derides such academic efforts to represent "authentic"cultural
voices. Her critique retains the "postmodern" theory of knowledge
by recalling that the subjects of ethnographic inquiry are as much
embedded in historical time and space as are the ethnographers. In her
words: "Contemporary Navajos are neither the shadow of a European
nor... radically strange beings, but people working within multiple culThis
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512
tures, value, and belief systems - adapting, inventing, preserving and
defending where they see fit."47
The version of postmodern social analysis recovered here rejects foundational
thought not out of a sense of nihilism, but out of a recognition
that the abstractions of grand theory tend to ignore the historically specific
localized conditions and global context of cultural production.
Postmodern social inquiry, viewed in this light, is not a blueprint for
intellectual despair. Rather it requires a provisionality premised on a
willingness to cross border zones, consider the cultural improvisations
that are part of daily life at the boundaries, and in these sites of intercultural
production, critically rework the representations and intellectual
constructs through which we have come to know the world.
The social production of ethnic identity
"Ethnicity"is one such provisional, historically conditioned social construct.
Ethnic identity is not a thing outside the self imposed by "acculturation";nor
is it an automatic consequence of "descent."Rather it is a
dynamic mode of self-consciousness, a form of selfhood reinterpreted
if not reinvented generationally in response to changing historical circumstances.48As
a deeply emotional component of personal identity,
ethnic identity is socially constructed and reconstructed as people respond
to the changing material conditions, semiotic codes, power relations,
and relations among groups shaping a specific time and place.
Ethnicities are often conceived of as timeless essences, purified identities
pitilessly torn asunder by the inexorable march of "modern times"
and its various material driving forces (e.g., capitalism, market and production
relations, the media, the bureaucratic state). Ethnicity, in short,
is deployed as a trope for the "local"and the cultural presence of the
social relations of various local ethnicities is about to disappear as the
material superiority of the "advanced world system" engulfs and colonizes
the life-worlds of marginal peoples. In the newer view of postmodern
ethnographers, foreshadowed a decade ago in the insightful
research of Sahlins and Rosaldo,49 such exoticized local cultures have
been reconceived as creative arenas of conflict, invention, innovation,
and emergence in which local ethnicities, by their cultural practices
selectively adapt to, appropriate, and resist the forces and practices of
modernization and in the process both modify global structural and
cultural processes and reinvent themselves. Clifford has called this
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513
newer view of ethnic authenticity a "local present-becoming-future."'5
The implication of this view is that ethnic identity and difference are
socially produced in the here and now, not archeologically salvaged
from the disappearing past.
Ethnic consciousness, like all forms of collective identity, does not
spring sui generis from "objective"conditions such as nationality, geographical
origin, or racial attributes. Just as class consciousness does
not arise automatically out of the mode of production (which is itself a
socially and politically mediated legal construct), so too is ethnic consciousness
a relational construct made possible through articulatory
practices. Ethnicity is socially produced largely through group-level
interactions. These establish the ethnic identify of a group by specifying
its relations with other groups. Ethnic identity is shaped by contested
rhetorical explanations of inter-group similarities and differences.51 As
a form of imagined community, ethnic consciousness is continually
shaped and reshaped by the gestural, the ritual, and the semiotic
exchanges of discourse.
It is crucially important to realize however, that, despite their currently
fashionable invocation in the rhetoric of postmodern cultural politics,
the play of "difference,"and "marginality,"and hence contests over the
meaning of ethnic identity, also operate within various "marginal"subcultures.
Marginal groups are not pure, monolithic, essentialist entities.
Rather, differently gendered relations, generational, occupational, and
local residential experiences, as well as divisions of labor operate
within households and all social levels and among all social groups.
This means that even within the same "ethnic" household unit the
"implosion" of macro-structural social divisions, contradictions, and
systems of signification are subject to interpretation by differently
situated social actors. This tends to produce "a multiplicity of responses
to a commonly perceived situation of marginality....
52
The stringing together of lists of different "marginal"voices in the literature
on ethnicity and social movements, as well as in the field of literary
criticism more generally - e.g., feminists, ethnic groups, gays, students,
environmentalists - often obscures more difference than it
reveals. Not only does such analysis treat each group as monolithic,
thereby suppressing their various and multiple internal differences
(e.g., the cultural heterogeneity of "Latinos" and "Asian Americans,"
the intellectual heterogeneity of various strains of feminism, the status
heterogeneity of "whites,"and the class heterogeneity of all the above),
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514
it also posits, as one male feminist critic points out, one "vast, undifferentiated
category, 'Difference,' to which all marginalized or oppressed
groups can be assimilated, and for which women [or "blacks,"
"students,"or "immigrants"]can stand as an emblem."53Such conceptualization
of difference simply evokes the list maker's oppositional
agenda ratherthan speaking in credible heterogeneous voices.
Frederic Jameson, a leading Marxist cultural critic of postmodernism,
is guilty of this transgression in The Political Unconscious, when he
speaks of the need to "reaudition"the oppositional voices of women's
and gay literature, black and ethnic cultures, "naive"and marginalized
folk; he further reduces these unique and internally divergent voices to
impotence by claiming that such "non-hegemonic cultural voices" need
to be reinscribed in terms of "thedialogical system of the social classes"
if they are to overcome hegemony.54For all his warts, Jameson at least
recognizes the centrality of political discourse in the social construction
of consciousness.
Political discourse is a rhetoric of likeness and difference. It contests
representations of power relations based on differences. Yet which differences
count as salient determines who has "voice"and who does not.
Because of the internal differentiation among social groups, it is by no
means an easy task to fulfill the exhortation to let marginal groups
"name themselves" through their voices and everyday practices. The
"self"named in this way often represents a partial,selective recovery of
past understandings deployed in internal contests over group identity.
This is well illustrated by a recent intense racial controversy in Hawaii,
a state often held up as a model of peaceful racial and ethnic relations.
The controversy began when a white student at the University of
Hawaii wrote a letter to the school paper complaining of what he
termed "caucasian bashing" at the university. A university teacher of
ethnic Hawaiian descent, who directed the Center for Hawaiian Studies,
wrote a rejoinder to the newspaper, citing examples of white
oppression of ethnic Hawaiians, who tend to occupy positions at the
bottom of the Hawaiian social structure. She chastised the student for
failing to understand the meaning of racism and suggested that he
should leave the state. When the student did precisely that, flying home
to Louisiana, the professor was criticized by some students and colleagues
for abusing her position of authority.She defended herself with
the following articulation:"Thishas been my position for 15 years. I am
a nationalist. I am asserting my claim to my country."Her supporters
publicly defended her rightto free speech.
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515
This rhetorical exchange was not really surprising, confined as it was,
to the individualistic terrain of rights discourse in the classical-liberal
political marketplace. What was perhaps more surprising, and certainly
more intriguing, from the standpoint of the social construction of ethnicity,
was the fact that representatives of several of Hawaii's many ethnic
groups, including ethnic Hawaiians, also strongly criticized the professor,
accusing her of being "un-Hawaiian"by raising her issues so
stridently. They argued that the "Hawaiian way" is to be circumspect,
patient, and gentle, noting that the very word "aloha"alludes to human
warmth. In response to this claim that quiescent solidarity was the
essence of being "Hawaiian,"the Hawaiian Studies director inserted the
following articulation into the group discourse over cultural identity: "I
am not soft. I am not sweet, and I do not want any more tourists in
Hawaii."55
The effort to give voice to authentic marginal sensibilities is further
complicated by the conflation of ethnicity, race, class, and culture often
encountered in internal conflicts over group identity. This is vividly illustrated
in the recent controversy between black film maker Spike Lee
and poet Amiri Baraka (LeRoy Jones) over the right to interpret the
meaning and legacy of Malcolm X. Lee has been shooting a film on the
life of Malcolm X amidst considerable furor,largely generated by Baraka's
preemptive assault upon Lee's entitlement to give voice to his version
of Malcolm X. The black nationalist poet and playwright attacked
Lee's credibility at a political rally in Harlem, proclaiming: "Wewill not
let Malcolm X's life be trashed to make middle-class Negroes sleep
easier."Baraka exhorted his crowd to write to Lee, warning him "notto
mess up Malcom's life."56
Spike Lee's response, while granting the right of "anyone and everyone"
to their own interpretation of Malcolm X's story, was equally vituperative
in challenging Baraka'sclaim to be an authentic spokesman for
Malcolm's legacy. In a column published first in Newsweek and widely
syndicated, Lee, like Baraka, used the discourse of class to settle the
presumably racial issue. "Infact,"proclaimed Lee, "whenMalcolm was
alive, Amiri Baraka was down in Greenwich Village running around
with Allen Ginsberg and living that 'Jungle Fever' beatnik-bohemian
life style...." Responding to Baraka'scharacterization of Lee as a bourgeois
liberal, Lee characterized Baraka as a limousine radical, stating
that "after the ... rally to protest the film, Baraka, the Black Marxist
Revolutionary, jumped into a black limo and sped off down Lenox
Avenue, past the lumpen proletariat of Harlem. And he calls me a
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516
"middle class Negro!"57This rhetorical exchange clearly conflates race,
class, and culture. Not only do both would-be voice givers imply that
the essence of black racial experience is rooted in underclass status,
they also suggest that black intellectuals who can lay claim to slightly
more proximity to the lumpen proletarian experience have a greater
entitlement to speak for "blackpeople" than those above them in the
hierarchy of social classes. Both of these would-be marginal voices fail
to acknowledge the diversity of the experience of being black in America
or the class and gender differences that are part of that experience.
The controversy does reveal, nevertheless, some of the complexity of
the seemingly straight-forwardpostmodernist project of giving voice to
marginal sensibilities and constructing a political space in which racial
and ethnic "others"can name themselves.
As can be seen from these examples, the formation and reformation of
racial and ethnic identity comprise a fascinating vantage point from
which to gain a purchase on the constitution of social subjects. In the
remainder of this essay, I will add another layer of complexity to this
question by entering the social space of popular culture. My purpose in
this move is to illustrate concretely the interplay of immediate and
mass-mediated communications, state structures and the commercial
marketplace, power and the sign in the emergence of ethnic identity. In
my view, the question of the emergence of a pan-ethnic "Latino"social
identity is particularly germane to the postmodern project. The new
social space, at once localized and global, through which transnational
migrants from Latin American countries to the United States are constituting
an existence which is both here and there, then and now, poignantly
illustrates the need to dissolve the global-local dichotomy as an
either-or construction of reality, reconstituting it in and-also terms.
Transnational migrants from Latin America to the United States have
already done so in their practice. It is time for social researchers to
become attuned to the significance of this new social space of ethnic
identity and culturalpolitics.
The new social space of "Latino"ethnic identity
In a very insightful recent essay, "LivingBorders: Buscando America,"
Juan Flores and George Yudice have explored some of the ways that
"Latino" identity in the United States is being negotiated and constructed
through struggles over language.58Their analysis is important
because it represents one of the first serious efforts to expand the
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517
notion of the "public sphere" to include terrains such as the family, the
consumer marketplace, and popular culture, heretofore treated as
purely domestic, or private, or matters of taste. In my view, both the
political enfranchisement of "Latinos"and their economic incorporation
within consumer society are equally public terrains where linguistic
conflicts basic to the formation of personal and group identity are
fought out. This move expands the public sphere to include cultural, as
well as political space, or perhaps more precisely, it expands the question
of "whatpolitics is about" to encompass cultural struggles over the
constitution of ethnic identity.
The cultural politics of ethnic difference is multidimensional. It includes
political conflicts over public policies designed to reduce the
heterogeneity of Spanish-speaking nationalities now part of the U.S.
social system to the manageable ethnic category "Hispanic" around
which the state's social benefit and control systems can be more readily
constructed. It encompasses, as well, the patterns of accommodation
and resistance to mass-mediated images of ethnic and racial identity
found in consumer advertising, the recording industry,prime-time television
programs, MTV, and the representations contained in news
reporting. Most importantly, from the vantage point developed in this
essay, the cultural politics of ethnic difference also encompasses the
emergence of new forms of ethnic identity springing from contests
among voices at the margin and on the border.
Contestedborders
The "border"is a powerful metaphor in postmodern social analysis.
The "border tensions" of postmodernism as method have blurred
boundaries between genres and disciplines, high and popular culture,
theory and practice, and a host of binary oppositions - center-periphery,
global-local, assimilation-ethnic purity - which validate or authorize
restrictive cultural images of social actors, inscribing them in terms
of fixed being rather than fluid becoming.59 Modernist social actors
were often viewed as stable, if not natural subjectivities rather than
socially constituted and hence contestable representations. In Culture
and Truth,Renato Rosaldo uses the metaphor of "bordercrossings" to
challenge this view, envisioning the formation of ethnicity as a process
of "interculturalborrowing and lending," and viewing immigration as a
dynamic process of cultural heterogeneity, improvisation, blending,
and creativity rather than as a timeless site of cultural loss.6" The borThis
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518
der metaphor also has been directly linked to the social construction of
personal and ethnic identity in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Mestiza6' a brilliant autobiographical quest for selfhood by Gloria
Anzaldia, a Chicana lesbian-feminist poet and fiction writer.
Both of these works recognize that the domain of popular culture has
been an important channel through which new forms of "traditional"
ethnic music have crossed borders to influence the formation of ethnic
consciousness. Such new expressive forms are an important part of the
process of ethnic self-naming and self-formation. Popular "Latino"
musical performers like Ruben Blades and Los Lobos have reaccentuated
heretofore "private" and local speech genres to underline,
indeed culturally celebrate some everyday practices - e.g., the dress,
speech rhythms, dialects, and patterns of inflection - of "Newyorican"
salsa, and East L.A. ranchero rock - in the public domain of popular
music and dance.
Flores and Yudice play nicely upon two of the distinctive "border tensions"
of Latino salsa music that underline its multifaceted possibilities
for expressing becoming. First, the music itself is positioned as music
on the border of intersecting musical forms - pop, rock, jazz - loosely
centered around Caribbean rhythms.The result is a new hybrid form of
fusion music, which has implications for the emergence of new forms
of cultural and political identity in the wider society in which a new
form of pan-ethnic music has forged some common bonds among
"Latinos"of different nationalities and historical experiences prior to
their settlement in the United States. Flores and Yudice suggest that
this is precisely what happened in New York City where "Latino"salsa
music cut across not only musical styles, but also across all of the social
classes and Spanish-speaking nationalities living in New York. A
second border tension of salsa music (as well as other forms of "ethnic"
music) stems from their structurallocation in the commercial entertainment
world itself, resting as it does on the boundary between advertising
bent on reaching and selling the "Hispanic"market and the culture
of experience out of which a new "Latino"collective consciousness is
emerging.62
An intriguing point suggested by this analysis is that the very acts of
consumer capitalism of appropriating emergent "Latino"patois to sell
products in segmented markets catering to ethnic "taste"opens up a
new social space in the commercial sphere explicitly blocked in the
liberal-pluralist political marketplace (where it is easier to articulate
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519
individual rights than group needs) through which self-named "Latino"
social agents can express and negotiate new cultural forms that act
back upon the wider culture.63
In my view, once such subculturally familiar cadences (or "local narratives,"
if you will) become more widespread and familiar, they are
capable of becoming reinscribed with a wider and more explicitly political
content. The development of the popular musical crossover cultural
politics of the "Latino" salsa of Ruben Blades is an interesting
case in point. Blades entered the pop musical scene by way of local and
regional stories celebrating the everyday cares, troubles, pleasures, and
enjoyments of marginal subcultures surviving and affirming their vitality
on the streets of New York City.Yet, having attained a measure of
fame, the form that this has provided has given him the space to produce
musical sounds that express wider, more "global,"and more explicitly
politicized themes, but still written in quite historically specific
narratives. His work situates the global in the local, grounding the
abstract narratives of peace, freedom, and social justice in the immediate
conditions of everyday existence.
Ruben Blades's songs speak expressively to the present situation of
Latino immigrants to the United States faced with pressures of discrimination,
assimilation, and economic marginalization.64Blades has
frequently crossed musical boundaries by joining with other pop musical
stars including Sting, Elvis Costello, and Lou Reed, in mutual
appropriations of media and messages. In "The Miranda Syndrome,"
written with Costello, the opening verse and chorus speak of the false
promises of transnational migration.
"The Miranda Syndrome"
"Shethrew good money after bad.
She bought a ticket to America, a Coca-Cola, and a magazine,
but in the final reel she knew she'd see Justice...
In an office without windows they declared the world was flat
and decided to create a fool for the world would believe that.
All for a song and dance and an edible hat.
Carmen Miranda, won't you come home?"
Blades's voice frequently situates the emergent "Latino"self within the
historical memory of the transnational migrant's immediate, albeit
highly mediated, "globalcontext."In giving voice to that identity, one of
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520
Blades's main themes has been the construction of a Latino identity
based upon opposition to the "globalalliance"between the makers and
shapers of U.S. foreign policy in "El Norte" and reactionary social
forces in Latin America. Blades's song, "In Salvador," develops this
theme while crossing yet another border by appropriating the rhythms
of reggae music to evoke the links among violence, fear, and officially
sanctioned political repression in El Salvador, which has been the chief
driving force of Salvadoran migration to the United States.
In "InSalvador,"Blades sings, "No one can protect your life..... Judges
that condemn you have no names.... Men who kill have heroes that
play soccer too, and argue with their kids about the world."Since death
could come from any quarter,from "thegentleman that lives next door,
or the guy who goes with you to work,"fear is the basic force moving
society, "thepoker game that runs the town."Invoking the metaphor of
global imperialism, Blades ends his reggae tune rhetorically: "Think
they know in Rome what'sgoing on?"
The musical form of "In Salvador" is as central to Blades's political
objectives as is its blunt content. His crossover from salsa to reggae
entails a direct challenge to the conventional binary opposition of form
versus content in the social construction of reality.Blades has said that
he turned to the reggae rhythmfor this song because he associates reggae
with political consciousness and because its simple musical form
does not get in the way of its lyrics. "InSalvador,"is Blades's reading of
the contemporary global context of Salvadoran politics and society. As
he explains on the jacket blurb of the album "Nothing but the Truth,"
which includes "In Salvador": "Wehadn't even mixed the song when
Hubert Anaya, the head of Salvador's Human Rights Commission was
killed in broad daylight, as he was taking his kids to school. No matter
what the official Duarte, or State Department propaganda says, the violence
in El Salvador will continue unless a political solution is achieved.
There can'tbe peace without justice."
In a related song, "Disappearances,"Blades's condemnation of institutionally
sanctioned political violence is further "globalized"by his collaboration
with Sting, a master practitioner of the new global cultural
politics of rock music, and by their joint incorporation of Argentina
into a shared "Latino"anti-hegemonic motif. The main voice in "Disappearances,"
is the voice of a brother whose sister, Altagracia, has been
missing for three days. The brother describes Altagracia's last journey
from work to school, recalling the clothes she wore the day she disapThis
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521
peared. He evokes the frustration of his fruitless search for his sister,
depicting the wall of silence he encounters at police headquarters and
at the hospital. Blades and Sting then give voice to the following reading
of the interplay between inside and outside, identity and difference:
"Wheredo people who disappear go to?
Look in the water and in the high grass.
Why do they disappear? Because we're not all the same.
When do they return?Every time our thoughtsbringthem back.
How can we talk to the disappeared ones?
With our emotions, from our insides."
Ruben Blades has tried to define the boundaries of an emergent Latino
identity by downplaying differences among various Latin nationalities,
calling attention to the difficulties faced by transnational "Latino"
migrants to "El Norte," characterizing Latin America as a single social
space, whose people's everyday lives are intimately affected by the
power of the "global alliance," and forging a meaningful identity for
Latinos through acts of opposition and resistance to the social mechanisms
and forces comprising that alliance. A fundamentally different
reading of "El Norte" and of the kind of identities that are being
formed by the transnational migration experience can be found in the
contemporary nortefio music of the San Jose, California based musical
group Los Tigres del Norte. Los Tigres offer an alternative construction
that seeks to build upon the appropriations found in the daily
experiences of transnational Mexican migrants in the United States,
adding these to their past experiences to create an emergent PanAmerican
"Latino" identity rather than forging that identity in strict
opposition and resistance to "the North's" structural and cultural
oppression.
Norteno music is a polka-like, accordion-driven musical style reminiscent
of Louisiana black cajun zydeco rhythms. It was originally
indigenous to the border states of Mexico and of the United States
from California to Texas. Once seemingly doomed on both sides of the
border because of its association with the lowest strata living in the
borderlands, under the influence of groups like Los Tigres, it has
become popular to a much wider audience of Latino youth on both
sides of the border, reaching as far north as Chicago and as far south as
Central and South America. The music of Los Tigres directly speaks to
the borderless or "transnational"identity of Latino migrants living in
the fluid social space of the transnational migration stream. For examThis
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522
pie, Los Tigres's 1988 grammy award winning album is entitled,
"Gracias/... America/... Sin Fronteras (Thankyou/... America/...
Without Borders). On that album and through such songs as "Vivan
Los Mojados" (Long Live the Wetbacks) and "Tres Veces Majado"
(Three Times Wet), the quintet extolls "Pan-American"solidarity. Yet
Los Tigres' definition of "America"is much broader than the conventional
appropriation of that term in the United States.
The key themes at the heart of the group's appeal are precisely those
addressing: (a) transnational migration as a normal condition of everyday
existence, (b) the transnational migrant stream as a new social
space around which personal identitites can be constructed, and (c) the
barriersthat the politically constructed borders of nation states impose
on the transnational migrants' existence and identity and that, in their
view, ought to be resisted by culturalpolitics.
A recent Los Tigres concert in Oakland, California illustrates the interplay
of these themes in the band's performance. As described in a
review of the concert, the lyrics of Los Tigres del Norte's songs:
consisted primarily of a compendium of nations, states, and cities in the
western hemisphere, moving south to north, beginning with Argentina. As
the bright stage lights ... focused on the crowd of some 4,000, mostly young
Mexican-Americans and Mexicans, Jorge [the lead singer] placed special
emphasis on the northern Mexican states, adding "yo soy" [I am from] to
Michoacan, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Nuevo Leon, and Sinaloa. He ended the list
with de Californiayo soy."5
This central theme of transnational "Latino"lives without borders is
perhaps best condensed in Los Tigres' 1986 hit "FronteraInternational,"in
which they sing, "Border!International border! Open up so I can
come across.... International Border! If we are all created equal/Why
do you divide the land?"
The differences in tone expressed in the alternative efforts to construct
socially a "Latino"ethnic identity by Ruben Blades and Los Tigres del
Norte, their different stress on the driving forces of transnational
migration (i.e., the twin push of political-economic repression and U.S.
foreign policy versus the pull of forging a life and a self by crossing
borders), and their different constructions of "El Norte" are in part
explicable by important historical differences between Central American
refugees and Mexican migrants currently part of the transnational
migration stream, as well as differences stemming from the long historiThis
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523
cal trajectory of transnational migration between Mexico and the
United States, as opposed to the contemporary globalization of transnational
migration to encompass a multiplicity of more recent, often
forced, migrantflows from the Central and South American and Caribbean
countries. These differences illustrate that important internal differences
continue to exist among the many nationalities that might lay
claim to a "Latino"ethnic identity. Yet, the fact that both Blades's salsa
and Los Tigres' musica norteniohave made the turn to an explicitly cultural
politics and are attempting to forge a new "Latino"identity that
transcends the borders of the nation state, suggests that the growing
interest in the globalization of culture is a question that is of more than
merely academic significance.
Under contemporary historical conditions of globalization, social and
cultural phenomena can no longer by analyzed and understood at the
level of the nation state. Cultures, as socially constructed systems of
representation and meaning, must now be conceptualized in all of their
global scope and complexity. Contests over the representation of personal
and collective identity and the categories through which identity
is filtered (class, race, gender, ethnicity, and nation state) must recognize
that the world is now a single social space.
Guillermo Gomez-Pena, a Latino writer originally from Mexico City,
was recently asked to characterize his ethnic identity. His answer
underlines the emergent multicultural character of that identity, the
desire of various others to "fix"the fluidity of ethnic identity in "place"
(thereby conflating geography and culture), and the necessarily contested
character of all representations of ethnicity. As translated in a
brilliant paper by Roger Rouse, Gomez-Pena suggests what happens at
the level of individual consciousness when ethnicity is viewed as part of
a global journey in a transnational migration stream and the world is
viewed as a single social space: "Today,eight years after my departure,"
Gomez-Pena states, "Icannot answer with a single word, for my 'identity'
now possesses multiple repertoires: I am Mexican, but I am also
Chicano and Latin American. On the border they call me 'Chilango' or
'Mexiquillo,' in the capital 'pocho' or 'norteiio,' and in Spain
'sudara'... my companion Emily is Anglo-Italian, but she speaks
Spanish with an Argentinean accent; and together we walk among the
ruins of the Tower of Babel of our American postmodernity."66
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524
New frontiers
In this article, I have tried to spell out a way forward in urban studies
and a remaking of social analysis that eschews essentialism without
abandoning the socio-critical power of theoretical discourse. Many of
the contemporary writers on social construction, in reacting against the
functionalist logic of various structuralisms, have moved so far in a
voluntarist direction67that they seem to have forgotten that once constructed
human inventions act back upon their creators. Socially constructed
borders, in their turn impinge upon, and in some degree either
enhance or oppress human lives. In the case of ethnic identity, as Rosaldo
states, the point is not to declare it socially constructed and stop
there, "but to show in historical perspective how it was invented and
with what consequences."68
This is precisely what I have tried to do with the Blades and the Los
Tigres del Norte songs. They illustrate that historically particular narratives
can be large as well as small, global as well as local; they show
that the way to move beyond essentialism is to avoid reduction of social
processes to single causes rather than to avoid historical narrative per
se. Historically sensitive analysis requires attention to macro-structure
as well as micro-motives, and their interplay in historically particular
detail. Such analysis poses its questions neither purely locally nor
synoptically globally, but at the boundaries and in the border zones
where these social spaces intersect and emergent social subjects interpret
and deal with their conditions of existence.
The distancing of grand theory from its subjects of inquiry objectifies
and thereby masters. The crisis of the master discourse stems not from
a rejection of theorizing per se, but from the loss of the legitimating
power of the major narratives of modernism to compel belief. Such
monocausal theories of domination are doomed to failure as blueprints
for social analysis and political practice. By insisting on the centrality of
sexism, racism, or class exploitation as the fundamental basis of
oppression, without carefully examining the interplay among different
forms of domination in different historical contexts, these alternative
essentialisms hinder the kind of social analysis that facilitates the anticipation
of emergent patterns of both conflict and cooperation among
social forces and hence the political production of coalitions based on
a fluid and flexible theory of identity politics. By insisting that only
class struggle or sisterhood can transform social relations in general,
such essentialisms fail to give due attention to the social production of
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525
meanings that address the multiple forms of oppression confining historical
actors in particular time-space configurations - for example:
black underclass youth in Chicago, triply-dominated Latina cannery
workers in California, "newimmigrant"men and women occupying different
ethnic enclaves in the underground economies of the United
States and Europe, transnational Latino and Latina migrants forging
new borderless social spaces, and other emergent subject positions. In
so doing, they fail to comprehend, let alone anticipate, the emergence
of new social subjects, forces, and movements.
The postmodern anthropologists believe that new types of ethnographic
practice, experimental field methods, and writing strategies can
best expose the contours of the global systems of power reflected in
conventional representations of third-world "others" and their societies.
Feminist theorists have correctly pointed out that the postmodernist
emphasis on culture as an emergent, contested communicative
process is not entirely new; that postmodernist ethnography's key
themes - that culture is composed of contested codes, that language
and politics are inseparable, and that constructing the "other"entails
relations of domination - have been around at least since Simone de
Beauvoir's The Second Sex first called attention to the boundary construction
of the woman as "other,"by which Western masculine identity
was formed. The basic feminist complaint is that at precisely the time
that women and non-Western people have begun to form their own
subjectivity,speaking for themselves, postmodern epistemology undermines
the ontological status of the subject.69Yet recent feminist writing
about difference has begun to reassess this initial move, itself becoming
polyvocal, stressing the diversity of women's experience, and the salience
of race, class, ethnic, and other differences among women. Partially
in response to criticisms by women of color that the women's
movement spoke with a white, middle-class, female voice, the feminist
literature had begun to analyze the interplay of race, class, gender, and
ethnic identities and experiences in the social relations of different
groups of women (and men).
The related feminist and Marxist critique of postmodernism, which
faults it for lacking an explicit theory of agency and an agenda for positive
struggle misses the point that the denaturalized critique of representation
at the core of postmodern social analysis is a necessary precondition
for any type of effective agency. The focus upon the process
of cultural production of politically and socially salient differences in
race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexual preference are intended to
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526
show, as art theorist Victor Burgin points out, that the meaning of such
differences is "something mutable, something historical, and therefore
something we can do something about."7'
In the cast of the social construction of ethnicity that "something"is a
greater capacity to mediate politically and socioculturally modify social
relations within and among ethnic groups by creative symbolic action
than is acknowledged by those who conceive ethnicity either in naturalistic
terms, regarding ethnos, like eros and thanatos as a deep structural
dimension of consciousness, or in essentialist terms as a component
of personal identity so rooted in past historical memory that
little can be done by human agency in the present to shape its character
or temper the antagonistic posture of ethnic groups toward ethnic
otherness and difference. This is an especially important insight to bear
in mind as we think about the meaning of the contemporary resurgence
of ethnicity as a political force manifest in growing racial and ethnic
tensions in U.S. cities, militant ethnic nationalism in Europe, the ethnic
war in Yugoslavia, the rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union, the tribal
and racial conflicts in South Africa, and the ethnic unrest in various
other tinderboxes throughout the globe. If ethnicity is constructed and
reconstructed by articulatory practices growing out of contemporary
conditions and power relations among social groups and the interpretive
meanings people give to them, rather than out of some timeless
or primordial dimension of human existence, then creative leadership
by political and cultural elites and public intellectuals, as well as the
everyday interventions of ordinary people into the flow of racial and
ethnic discourse, do matter,perhaps more than we are now prepared to
imagine.
The approach to urban ethnography and the social construction of personal
and ethnic identity developed in this essay invites the notion of
politics as a site of de-naturalizing critique. My focus on the social and
ideological production of meaning through discourse views "culture"as
the fluid and dynamic effect of representations not their source.71The
production, reproduction, and transformation of signs, narratives, and
images becomes a humanly created, and hence radically changeable
structure of feelings and understandings. Hence, the politics of culture
is neither the "master science," nor the "master discourse," but an unavoidable
and unavoidably contested terrainof human becoming.
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527
Acknowledgments
Portions of the first half of this article were written as part of the 1990-
91 Albert A. Levin Lecture Series, "Representing the City: New
Theory, New Politics, New Practice," sponsored by the College of
Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University. I wish to thank Sharon
Zukin for initially encouraging me to write on the interplay of postmodernism
and urbanism after I delivered some remarkson the subject
at an annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. Roger
Rouse deserves thanks for his insightful comments on an earlier draft
of the article, as does Dorothy Suhr for her assistance in the preparation
of the manuscript. I also found the reviews provided by Theoryand
Society's Editors quite helpful and have selectively appropriated and
occasionally (but, I hope, artfully) resisted their suggestions while writing
this final version.
Notes
1. See Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
2. Sharon Zukin, "The Postmodern Debate over Urban Form," Theory, Culture &
Society (1988): 431.
3. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
4. Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,"
New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92; Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer
Society," in The Anti-Aesthetic, H. Foster, editor (Bay Press: Port Townsend, WA,
1983), 111-125; Jameson, "Marxism and Postmodernism," New Left Review 176
(July/August 1989): 31-46.
5. See the ethnographies cited in Michael Peter Smith, "Urbanism: Medium or Outcome
of Human Agency?" Urban Affairs Quarterly (March 1989): 353-358. See
also Michael P. Smith, Bernadette Tarallo, and George Kagiwada, "Colouring California:
New Asian Immigrant Households, Social Networks, and the Local State."
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (1991): 250-268.
6. Kirsten Simonsen, "Planning on 'Postmodern' Conditions," Acta Sociologica 33
(1990):51-62.
7. Michael J. Dear, "Postmodernism and Planning," Society and Space 4 (1986): 367-
384.
8. For a sense of the flavor of these debates see, for instance, James Clifford and
George Marcus, editors, WritingCulture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography
(1986); Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen,
"The Postmodern Turn in Anthropology," Signs 1 (Autumn 1989): 7-33; and
Jameson, "Marxismand Postmodernism," 31-46.
9. Stephen A. Tyler, The Unspeakable (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1987), 171.
10. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York:
Russell Sage Foundation, 1984).
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528
I1. Connor, Postmodernist Culture, 224.
12. Stanley Aronowitz, "Postmodernism and Politics," Social Text 18 (1987/88): 99-
115.
13. Compare, for instance, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology
as Culture Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Clifford and
Marcus, WritingCulture;with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy (London and New York: Verso, 1985); and Carl Boggs, Social
Movements and Political Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
14. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976).
15. Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 142.
16. Leith Mullings, editor, Cities of the United States: Studies in Urban Anthropology
(Columbia University Press: New York, 1987).
17. Michael Peter Smith, "Urban structure, social theory and political power," in Cities
in Transformation, Michael Peter Smith, editor (Sage: Beverly Hills, 1984), 9-27;
M. P. Smith, City,State and Market (New York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988);
M. P. Smith, "Urbanism: Medium or Outcome of Human Agency?" 353-358;
Robert Fisher and Joe Kling, "Community Mobilization: Prospects for the Future,"
UrbanAffairs Quarterly25 (2 December 1989): 200-21 1.
18. See Philip Cooke, "The Postmodern Condition and the City," Comparative Urban
and Community Research 2 (1988): 62-80.
19. Andrew Sayer, "The 'New' Regional Geography and Problems of Narrative," Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space 7 (1989): 256.
20. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York and London: Routledge,
1988), 7.
21. Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory," Social
Text 17(1987): 6.
22. See Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 121.
23. Charles Bernstein, "Centeringthe Postmodern," Socialist Review 17 (6, 1987): 52.
24. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 230.
25. See Stuart Hall, "BraveNew World," Marxism Today (October 1988): 24-29.
26. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,passim.
27. Chantal Mouffe, "Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?" in Universal
Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism, Andrew Ross, editor (University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1988): 35.
28. Ibid., 44; see also Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New
York: Routledge, 1989).
29. See Michael Peter Smith, The City and Social Theory (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1979); M. P. Smith and Richard Tardanico, "Urban theory reconsidered:
Production, Reproduction, and Collective Action," in M. P. Smith and J. R. Feagin,
editors, The Capitalist City: Global Restructuring and Community Politics (Basil
Blackwell: Oxford and New York, 1987), 87-110 for critiques of Weberian, Chicago
sociology, and Rostowian variants of modernization theory.
30. See Smith and Feagin, editors, The Capitalist City: Global Restructuringand Community
Politics; Sayer, "The 'New' Regional Geography and Problems of Nar-
rative,"255-257.
31. Andrew Ross, "Introduction,"in Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism,
Andrew Ross, editor (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1988), xv.
32. John Rosenthal, "Who Practices Hegemony? Class Division and the Subject of
Politics," Cultural Critique Spring (1988): 29.
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529
33. See, for instance, Sabina Lovibond, "Feminism and Postmodernism," New Left
Review 178 (November/December 1989): 5-28; and Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity.
34. Lawrence Grossberg, "Putting the Pop Back into Postmodernism," in Andrew
Ross, editor, Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism, 167-190;
Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy;Mouffe, "Radical Democracy:
Modern or Postmodern?"; Hall, "BraveNew World."
35. Grossberg, "Putting the Pop Back into Postmodernism," 168-169, emphasis
added.
36. Ibid., 169.
37. Stephen A. Tyler,"Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to
Occult Document," in Clifford and Marcus, editors, WritingCulture:126, 129.
38. See, for example, the essays by Garfinkel and other devotees of ethnomethodology
in Graham Button, editor, Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991).
39. James Clifford, "Introduction: Partial Truths," in Clifford and Marcus, editors,
WritingCulture, 2-3, emphasis added.
40. Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 122.
41. I am thinking here, for example, of the works of Renato Rosaldo and Roger Rouse
cited below in notes 49, 60, and 66, as well as the field studies discussed in Marcus
and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique.
42. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 12.
43. Michael M. J. Fischer, "Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory," in Clifford
and Marcus, editors, WritingCulture, 194-233.
44. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 43.
45. See George E. Marcus, "Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern
World System," in Clifford and Marcus, editors, WritingCulture, 165-193.
46. Clifford, "Introduction:PartialTruths," 10.
47. Susan Hegman, "History, Ethnography, Myth: Some Notes on the 'Indian Centered'
Narrative," Social Text23 (Fall/Winter 1989): 145, 153.
48. Fischer, "Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of Memory," 195.
49. Renato Rosaldo, Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1980); Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985).
50. James Clifford, "Of Other Peoples: Beyond the 'Salvage Paradigm,'" in Hal Foster,
editor, Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number 1 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987),
128.
51. Dean MacCannell, "Reconstructed Ethnicity: Tourism and Cultural Identity in
Third World Communities," Annals of TourismResearch 11 (1984): 375-391.
52. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 62.
53. Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism," in The
Anti-Aesthetic, Hal Foster, editor, (Port Townsend, Wash.:Bay Press, 1983), 62.
54. Frederic Jameson in The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1981).
55. Richard Halloran, "Rare Storm over Race Disturbs a Melting Pot," New York
Times (26 December 1990): A10.
56. San Francisco Chronicle, (21 August 1991): El.
57. See Spike Lee. "Who Owns Malcolm X?" San Francisco Chronicle (21 August
1991): E1.51. See also S. Alan Clarke, "Black Politics on the Apollo's Stage: The
Return of the Handkerchief Heads," (San Francisco: Paper prepared for delivery at
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530
the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1990 September),
for excellent examples of internally contested representations of "black poli-
tics."
58. Juan Flores and George Yudice, "Living Borders: Buscando America: Languages
of Latino Self-Formation," Social Text24 (1990): 57-85.
59. For a lucid discussion of related tensions, see Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism,
Chapter 1.
60. Renato Rosaldo, Cultureand Truth:TheRemaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1989), Chapter 9.
61. Gloria Anzaldia, Borderlands:La Frontera:The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/aunt
lute, 1987); see also Sergio Elizondo, "ABS: Aztlan, the Borderlands,
and Chicago," in Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomeli, editors, Aztlan: Essays on
the Chicago Homeland (Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989);
and Hector Calderon and Jose David Saldivar, editors Criticism in the Borderlands
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991) for other representations of
the borders and boundaries of Chicano and Latino ethnicity.
62. Juan Flores and George Yudice, "Living Borders: Buscando America: Languages
of Latino Self-Formation," 59-80.
63. Lest readers think that this terrain may be a less significant social space of ethnic
formation than envisioned in the argument presented here, it should be noted that
in the United States the influx of new minorities from Asia and Latin America has
been accompanied by the substantial rate of growth in foreign-language radio
stations and television networks. During the 1980s for example, the number of
Spanish language network affiliates in the U.S.A. tripled, rising from 25 to 75.
Moreover, on cable television three Spanish networks, Univision, Telemunde and
Galavision, currently offer programming that is carried by over 500 cable systems.
Catering to the 25 million Latinos now in the United States, these outlets advertise
the services of local immigration laywers alongside their commercials for Pepsi
Cola. On such foreign language outlets coverage of social and political issues often
sharply contrasts with that provided on the mainstream networks. A case in point
germane to the essay is the coverage of the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. The
major networks focused on the voices managing the invasion while the San Francisco
based Univision station, KDTV, featured the voices of Panamanian citizens and
aired an interview with the now-deposed Manuel Noriega. This same station won
the Guillermo Martinez Marquez award in 1990 for programming on the problems
faced by Latino immigrants in California public schools. Reflecting the transnational
character of its vision, the station also won the prestigious George Peabody
Award in 1986 for its coverage of the Mexico City earthquake. See Annie Nakao,
"Foreign-Language Stations Booming, Influx of Minorities Creates TV Market for
Asians, Latinos," San Francisco Examiner (15 September 1991): B1, B4, for additional
examples.
64. Xavier Totti, "The Making of Latino Ethnic Identity," Dissent Fall (1987):
537-543.
65. Lee Hildebrand and Melanie Curry, "Songs Without Borders," East Bay Express
(26 July 1991): 18.
66. Roger Rouse, "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism,"
Diaspora 1, 1 (Spring 1991): 8.
67. See, for instance, Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American
Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Eugeen E.
Roosens, Creating Ethnicity: The Process of Ethnogenesis, Frontiers of AnthropolThis
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531
ogy 5 (Newsbury Park, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1989).
68. Rosaldo, Cultureand Truth:TheRemaking of Social Analysis, 27.
69. Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Ballerino Cohen, "The Postmodern Turn in Anthropology,"
1-15.
70. Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory:Criticism and Postmodernity (Atlantic Highlands,
N.J.:Humanities Press International, 1986), 108.
71. Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 7.
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