ABSTRACT
I would supplement Yoshimoto’s second sentence: It is also the mis-recognition of difference that feeds fantasies such as Orientalism. And it is fantasy that feeds misrecognition. Not only the colonists and their descendants misapprehend the Other. The colonized and their descendents, Frantz Fanon predicted, would misapprehend themselves, and in so doing, usher in-Fanon was, of course, thinking of Africa, not Asia-a period of neocolonialism in which indigenous peoples would replay the genocidal roles assumed by European invaders. That prediction has been realized in post-colonial African genocides. In his study of Fanon, Ayo Sekyi-Otu (1996, 20) notes that in the “postcolonial world … the agony and ecstasy of the particular-became the nightmare of absolutism.” For Fanon, a “dying colonialism” foreshadowed black skin with white masks.The binaries structuring colonialism’s cultural cannibalism and genocide became reinscribed within postcolonial cultures. In the North American academy, such reinscription has been achieved through the establishment-and audible in the “rancor” (Grande 2004, 91) —of identity politics. “What … are the political and ethical consequences of attributing centrality to race?” Sekyi-Otu (1996, 13-14) asks. He continues: Does it result in an indiscriminate and genocidal antagonism toward the Other on the one hand, and, on the other, the tyrannizing protectionism of racial confraternity, a separatist chorus so mystified by its own chant
of togetherness that it stifles the anguished cries of other languages of separation and subjugation, old and new-class, gender, ethnicity? (Otu 1996, 13-14)
The separatist chorus that is North American identity politics threatens to subsume the particular into “absolutes,” including totalizing phrases such as “indigeneity.” In such a phrase, where is acknowledgement of the diversity and hybridity of indigenous nations and cultures (Grande 2004, 3, 95; Ng-A-Fook 2007a)? Where is the recognition of internal differences? Do these not disappear into generalizing claims such as, for instance, indigenous cultures respect elders (Grant 1995, 212) or that African Americans (regardless of class or gender or region or historical moment) and “other ethnic groups of color” require for academic achievement so-called “culturally-responsive teaching” (Gay 2000, 13, 25), itself a totalizing instrumentalism (Gay 2000, 111).2Through the self-righteous indignation of contemporary identity politics, the concrete “culture” one claims to represent disappears into abstractions, totalized into generalizations recapitulating, if through reversal, the stereotypes fabricated by the colonizers (Conn 2004, 196). Moreover, in the totalizing, nostalgic abstraction of “culture,” the capacity for self-critique fades. “Sometimes,” Harootunian (2002, 165) points out, “the mere enunciation of cultural difference and thus identity is made to appear as a political act of crowning importance when it usually means the disappearance of politics as such.” In our time, “identity” (and not just the hybrid kind) has become a “closet idealism,” as “cultural agency [becomes] unmoored from, or relatively independent of, the field of material forces that engender culture” (Cheah 2006, 94; Grande 2004, 92; Jay 2005, 60). The “psychic syntax” of identity politics is narcissistic exhibitionism. Recall the 1930s négritude movement in France (Young-Bruehl 1996, 492; Kesteloot 1991) or more contemporary invocations of a pre-colonial African identity (Pinar 2001, 861 ff.), the former of which fantasized blackness as an unchanging cultural core of intuition, rhythm, sentiment, and creativity, the latter emphasizing manhood and morality. In both, blackness is always and everywhere beautifully and self-righteously non-European, non-technological, non-imperial. Having dismissed European cultures as monolithic and as only evil, there are descendents of the colonized-some of whom are our colleagues-who become trapped in a hall of mirrors, projecting onto the European-American Other the bifurcating elements they themselves have internalized through colonization. Speaking of this curse of colonialism, Masao Miyoshi (2002, 45) points out: Once survival and self-defense cease to be a desperate necessity, however, identity politics often turns into a policy of self-promotion, or, more exactly, a self-serving sales policy in which a history of victimization becomes a commodity that demands payment. It can pervert itself
into opportunism and cannibalism…. In the name of multiculturalism, one privileges one’s own identity, while making merely a token acknowledgement of the other’s whom one proceeds to disregard when an occasion for help arrives.
