Global Bodies/Postnationalities: Charles Johnson's Consumer Culture

Abstract

FED UP WITH HER HUSBAND'S ABSORPTION in kungfu culture of Seattle, Evelyn Johnson finally explodes: can't be Chinese. She can't imagine Rudolph's longing for a new body, for a new self, as anything but his longing for a new ethnonationality. 'I think it's strange! Rudolph, you didn't grow up in China,' she said. 'They can't breathe in China! ... They all ride bicycles, for Christ's sake! They what we have. Her xenophobia grants transnationality of wants but not multidirectionality of transcultural desire. Exasperated by his wife's failure understand his new preoccupation, Rudolph patiently explains that he doesn't want be Chinese: 'I only be what I can be' (SA, 91). What Evelyn experiences as his violation of cultural codes by which a black couple endures oppression of middle-class middle age, as his debasement of familiar modes of identity formation, Rudolph scripts as a purely personal project of self-salvaging. And he does so echoing U.S. Army's famous slogan of early 1980s-Be All You Can Be-a slogan meant recode post-Vietnam military as site of postpatriotic self-realization.2 Indeed, as title of Charles Johnson's story intimates, China (1983) troubles itself locate dynamics of re-embodiment elsewhere, beyond Washington that is already nation's other, peripheral Washington. To degree that Rudolph's new body is predicated on a globalizing media-distribution network, story anticipates moment of globalization when, as len Ang has put it, every identity must define and position itself in relation cultural frames affirmed by world system.' At same time, story describes a process of self-realization released from physical/metaphysical binary; it posits an ontological alternative what Eldridge Cleaver long ago called Western between Mind and Body that structures the gulf between two races.4 It is as though story longs teach us obsolescence of both the nation and the body. The lesson begins not with philosophy but with a question about everyday life: How does transnational flow of goods and services extend consuming subject's affiliative horizon, and how does it thus revise (or leave unrevised) existing accounts of ethnic, national, and mass subjectivity? Rudolph Jackson is a fifty-four-year-old national employee, a post office worker with high blood pressure, emphysema, flat feet, skinny legs, a big belly, and a pecker that shrinks to no bigger than a pencil eraser each time he sees