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December, 2000 | |
Volume 3, Issue 3 | ||||||
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Past Issues About dis/content Editorial Collective Contributors Contact Us Submissions Links Home |
“Transculture,” Civil Society, or Capitalism?:
An Interview with Delia Aguilar May Penuela: I’d like to begin by revisiting your article “Questionable Claims: Colonialism Redux, Feminist Style” that appeared in Race and Class. In this article you critique those who embrace “globalization” exclusively as a concept of transnationalism and transculture, a popular trend in the US academy, thus obscuring analyses of international and global political economy. Can you comment further on this issue? Delia Aguilar: What immediately prompted my writing about “transculture” in that article was a team-taught graduate class that I had occasion to take part in several years ago. Although the six or so faculty designing the course were, I’m sure, cognizant of the globalized economic order serving as the backdrop for our discussions, the direction of our thinking was guided by its proposed title: “Critical/Cultural Spaces.” As one might surmise, a course so labeled would indeed present an unwarrantedly optimistic view of globalization, one that applauds the “borderless world” of transnationalism purportedly now come into existence, seeing in this apparent seamlessness a radical decentering and displacing of Western culture. I think NAFTA had not yet been three years in place, and there was no foreshadowing then of protests against powerful international bodies staged in Seattle, the other Washington, and Prague. High-tech communication and cheap access to information superhighways, especially, were cheered as heralding entirely new channels for instantaneous exchanges that would now include every remote corner of the world, resulting in the evolution of a “transculture” with its presumably leveling consequences. It is probably no exaggeration to say that we indulged in unmitigated flights of fancy, the kind that a group constituted by race and class privileges and academic training is prone to. After Arjun Appadurai’s five “scapes” were presented, my thoroughly mundane contribution – globalization and women migrant workers from the “Third World,” calling attention to the culpability of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – was new and disturbing information to everyone. It was also decidedly out-of-sync with Appadurai’s rendering of diaspora as amorphous, flowing, and deterritorialized, and globalization as a “global cultural economy.” We talked about “transculture” in ways that were completely dissociated from anything that might imply or invoke the social relations of production. Unspoken was the assumption that the realm of production had been replaced by consumption as the activity of the historical moment, for hasn’t post-Fordism obliterated the working class, along with the assembly line? In the wink of an eye, consumption had emerged as a new kind of labor, and we were the new workers! This concept of “transculture,” then, fragments the social totality by claiming detachment from class and production. Ironically, this presumed detachment only functions to reinforce the commodifying process of the capitalist division of labor, now international, in which everything translates into cash or exchange value. Along with the discourse of transculture came associated notions of borderless landscapes in whose interstitial spaces diasporic communities of transmigrant individuals improvise and reconfigure their fluctuating identities. No room here for nationalism, in all instances retrograde, anti-imperialist nationalism having become (in a global cultural economy), thankfully, a thing of the past. Next Section Table of Contents |
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