Nomadic Intellectuals: Asian Stars in Atlanticland

Abstract

'Hybridity' and 'globalization.' Magic words. They can generate academic con ferences. Salman Rushdie, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Arjun Appadurai, Gyan Prakash, Lata Mani, Gouri Vishwanathan, Akhil Gupta, Dipesh Chakra barty, Amitav Ghosh, Talal Asad, Pal Ahluwahlia. Magic names for the part. Draw cards for conferences. These names flag the world of Asian intellectuals of the diaspora and their cul tural productions. Whether empirical, theoretical or literary, their contributions have been striking. They have also gathered legitimacy because they espouse positions deemed politically correct within liberal quarters in the West. With out necessarily implicating every one of those named above, let me summarize some dominant strands of argument in the cultural productions around them. Collectivized in arbitrary fashion, the individuals named above stand as an illustrative sample for certain politics of identity in the contemporary world. For anti-essentialism and anti-nationalism. For cosmopolitan rationality and its secularism. For the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny postmodern world of heterogeneity. For the celebration of borderlands, homelessness, decentered ambiguity, het erogeneity, and blurred genres. The birth of such journals as Diaspora, Public Culture, Social Identities, and Identity in and around the 1990s is testimony to the power of this strand of emphasis. But this work is marked too, on occasions, by positivistic constructions of Aunt Sallies, whether 'culture' as fixed and discrete entity or specific 'nation' as 'homogeneous,' that are then decimated by their powerful prose. As Daniel, also South Asian, recently notes in passing: most poststructuralists and post modernists are not only like their structuralist counterparts but paradoxically also like the positivists they shun: they are nominalists in the extreme (1998: 77). Take the early programmatic statements presented in such felicitous prose by Appadurai (1988 and 1991). He argues for a genuinely cosmopolitan ethno graphic in anthropology in contemporary times, practice that could cope with the transnational cultural flows and the deterritorialization of the