Expanding Internationalism - A Conference on ... - Mary Jane Jacob

"borderline" between and within national comrmmities
How do we negotiate
those contentious borderline histories that are expressed in the
hyphenated, articulated peoples of our times - diasporic, refugee,
migrant, exilic: African-American, Latino-Chicano, Afro-Caribbean,
Sri-Lankan Tamil, Aboriginal-Australian, Indo-Kashmiri, Turkish
gastarbeiter, New Yurican
The cornnon coin of cultural exchange in modem societies, at the
international level, is still the national community and the national
culture, even though their representations may be more complex.
In the
current climate it is difficult to think of the politics of cultural
identity outside the national question. We celebrate the blossoming of
the "Prague spring" in the Winter of 1989 for much of Eastern Europe;
we
are painfully and quite properly reminded of the need for national
self-determination in South Africa and Palestine; we rightly deplore the
violations of national autonomy in the Carribean, now that it is
increasingly seen as the "backyard of the United States of America." We
have no option but to agree with Edward Said that "You want the right to
represent yourself, to have your own ethos and ethnos; "
but then his
qualification must be our urgent task:
"unless ... linked ... to a wider
practice which I would call liberation, beyond national liberation ... it
seems to me a violently dangerous and awful trap. "
Our vision must extend beyond the two familiar, if opposed,
positions that determine the terms of "international" discourse. We
cannot place ourselves in that Archimedian space of neutrality between
"world cultures," in a kind of mus~ imaginaire;
nor can we espouse the
nativist perspective that speaks assertively, on the basis of its own
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