On Not Speaking Chinese. Postmodern Ethnicity and the Politics of Diaspora (Ien Ang)

This article demonstrates that the "unevenly scattered imagined community of the diaspora itself cannot be envisioned in any unified or homogeneous way." Ang hopes to get away with this self-empowering indulgence of her ethnic privilege, by moving beyond the particulars of her mundane individual existence (544) In essence the author is trying to illustrate how, in this case, ‘Chineseness’ ( or any other label for that matter) is a label who makes everything the same but in reality its meanings are not "fixed and pre-given, but constantly renegotiated and rearticulated, both inside and outside China in this case (or any other country). In sum, Ang aants to unravel some of the possibilities and problems of the cultural politics of diaspora.

The first idea that I wanted to point out was her brief discussion of Stuart Hall’s politics of self-representation and how it is not an establishment of an identity per se but a strategy to open up avenues for new speaking trajectories. For some reason it made me think of my partner who is Greek. The two of us often use our ‘labels’ to define the differences between us; my partner is Greek and I’m French Canadian. He also uses his Greek identity as a way to justify the need to go to Greece to supposedly to find his roots. The problem with this is that he is only Greek by origin and by name. He does not speak the language nor does his family (except for his grandfather) and he does not adhere to any practices or traditions. The only time that they have demonstrated this ‘identity’ to me was the very first time I visited them in their hometown for Easter. At Easter dinner they followed an old Greek tradition of a game of breaking eggs. My partner was shocked that his mother had prepared it and said: "of course because you’re here, we decide to actually be Greek. We’ve never done this before." I'm trying to think of what this story I have just recall means in terms of politics of self-representation. If it's not an establishment of a specific identity, what exactly is it? Is he not satisfied or conflicted by his too stable and uneventful identity as a Canadian? Why does he choose to sometimes really promote his Greek identity and then other times, make it seem like it's not of significant importance.

The second point I found significant in this article was when she quotes from the memoir of Ruth Ho which spoke to the contradictions and complexities in subject positioning. Ho says: "Are the descendants of German, Norwegian and Swedish emigrants to the USA, for instance, expected to know German, Norwegian and Swedish?"(556) I immediately thought of it as a double standard and that by not having such expectations of European emigrants, we are expecting more ‘authenticity out of those who are ‘visible’ minorities. I agree with Ang when she says that it this double standard is "an expression of the desire to keep Western culture white". I also think that the idea the politics of diaspora trying to keep non-white or non-Western elements from entering our culture is somewhat true. It is interesting that we are perplexed when a ‘visible’ minority does not speak their language of origin or practice cultural traditions and accuse them of being inauthentic but yet we do not want that authenticity to infiltrate itself into our ‘white culture.’