The Need for Worlds Beyond

Abstract

26 A & Q The Need for Worlds Beyond Eleanor Ty What is exciting about the approach of Verge and recent work on globalization is the premise of a worldview that is no longer based on divisions between first and third, developed and developing, or North and South, but one where the economic, cultural, and ecological globalization of the last thirty years has forced us to rethink origins, master–slave, and colonizer–colonized dichotomies. Asia has gone “global,” and the decentered approach of Verge offers a good paradigm for thinking about the world today. The G7 superpowers used to be made up of mainly Western countries, but the G-20, countries with major economies that account for 80 percent of world trade and two-thirds of the world population, now include five Asian countries: Japan, China, India, South Korea, and Indonesia. The Internet and the increasing digitization of materials contribute to the shift in power and influence between knowledge and cultural producers and consumers. Web 2.0 Internet-based services, which enabled social networking sites, communication tools, and the growing ubiquity of mobile devices, have also been factors in the way culture and information have been shared and distributed. In other words, center and periphery are moving closer together. If I could go back and relive my undergraduate and/or graduate education , I would have made a more concentrated effort of keeping up the study of the Asian languages that I grew up with in my childhood years. In my case, the languages were Chinese (Mandarin and Hokkien) and Filipino (Tagalog). Growing up as a Chinese Filipino in Manila in the 1960s and early 1970s, we studied English, geography, history, music, and math and English in the morning; had an hour of Filipino language and literature; and then studied arithmetic, Chinese literature, geography , history, letter writing, singing, and ethics in Mandarin in the afternoon from first grade on. The idea that we were being asked to learn three languages and speak a different dialect (Hokkien) at home didn’t seem to faze us. All the students at St. Stephen’s were cultural polyglots who not only learned to negotiate linguistic codes but also to acquire cultural competence in three ethnic communities. I remember learning to sing and do the hand motions for the song “Happy Talk,” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, in our “English” music class, and then later learning to perform a Chinese traditional folk dance to the Taiwanese song “A Li Shan” (阿 里 山). Most of the students, of course, had never been outside the country, so these places existed simply in A & Q 27 our imagination. In our Pilipino class, we studied the legend of the narra tree. The particular triangular relationship between these cultures stems from a history of colonialization, immigration, and settlement in the Philippines of which I was only vaguely aware. We were living examples of “global Asians” before the term global became fashionable. It was only with my family’s immigration to North America (Canada) that I became increasingly more Anglo-centric and Westernized. Instead of continuing my study of Chinese and Filipino, I studied French and German at high school and university. This end to the study of Asian languages was also an end to the study of the histories, philosophies, and cultures of Asia, which I very much regret. Although I was happy to have specialized in English literature, and to have studied Canadian and British history, I believe that a more in-depth knowledge of Asian cultures and histories , facilitated by the study of one or two Asian languages, would make me better equipped to engage in global conversations today. One work that has remained useful for my thinking about local and global identities is Susan Stanford Friedman’s “‘Beyond’ Gender: The New Geography of Identity and the Future of Feminist Criticism,” which was published in her book Mappings in 1998. Though Friedman’s chapter begins with feminist figurations of identity from the 1970s to the end of the 1990s, she argues that what is needed is to go “beyond” gender to other spatial and geographical concepts of identity. Friedman believes that we should focus on geography and location instead of categories of male...