Four Views on Ethnicity Author(s): Linda Hutcheon, Homi K. Bhabha, Daniel Boyarin, Sabine I. Glz Source: PMLA, Vol.

113, No. 1, Special Topic: Ethnicity (Jan., 1998), pp. 28-51 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463407 . Accessed: 26/10/2011 12:16
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Four

Views

on

Ethnicity

LindaHutcheon

Crypto-Ethnicity
LINDAHUTCHEONis university professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto, Saint George Campus. Her most recent books includeIrony'sEdge:

TheTheory Politics Irony and of

(Routledge,1995) and, withMichael Hutcheon, Opera:Disease, Desire, Death (U of NebraskaP, 1996). Her currentresearchfocuses on rethinkingliteraryhistory using comparative rather than national models. She is also continuing her collaborative work on the intersection of medicine and literary-musical culture.

WHEN I WENT from being a Bortolottito being a Hutcheon,my social and culturalinteractionswithin a predominantly Anglo-Saxon environmentchanged;my ethnic identitybecame encrypted,silenced, unless articulatedby choice-a pointed lesson in the constructednessof concepts of ethnicity. Like me, Cathy (Notari) Davidson, Marianna (De Marco) Torgovnick, and Sandra (Mortaro) Gilbert are crypto-Italian teachersof English. What we do not share,however,is nationality:they are ItalianAmerican,while I am ItalianCanadian.I thereforemay have a somewhatdifferentexperienceof ethnicityand its encrypting.' Withouta melting-potideology or a pluralistnationalidentityto rally around,Canadians-be they British, Chinese, Italian,Pakistani,or Somali-have only the model of officially defined multiculturalismwith which to constructtheir sense of self-in-nation. I first became awareof the differentpolitical associations of the word multiculturalin Canada and the United States duringthe so-called culturewars. While political denunciationsof multiculturalism-seen as a reconfiguration national of from the perceived loss of a single common cultureidentityresulting were frequentenough in the United States, most often the termwas used therein a more limited sense to define the dominantideology on college campuses, which was said to be contaminatedby political correctness. Dinesh D'Souza was not the only one who worried about the "ethnic cheerleading"implied in certain curricularchanges (33); Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,too expressedconcern aboutpotential"ethnicchauvinism"in the multiculturalacademy ("Studies"288). Some scholars worriedthat multiculturalism's politics of differencemight simply be anotherway of ensuring white supremacy(Wiegman);others voiced related fears that interest in ethnic studies would elide the historical realities of race throughthe use of a Europeanimmigrantparadigmas the masternarrative of difference(San Juan 132).2Nevertheless,in the United States,the

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associations of multiculturalismsoon broadenedbeyond race and ethnicity to include issues of gender,sexual choice, and occasionallyclass. In contrast, multiculturalism in Canada is not so much a question of the canon or of campus politics as a legal matter of national selfdefinition. Canadians'self-understandingis in partforcibly defined by its designationas multipleratherthan single. An early usage of the term multicultural appears in a 1970 report of the Royal Commission on entitledThe CulturalContribution the Bilingualismand Biculturalism of ethnic groups"referredto all who were not OtherEthnic Groups."Other aboriginal.Fromthis reportcame a 1971 policy statementby PierreElliott Trudeau, Canada'sprimeminister,and in 1988 the Act for the Presof in ervationand Enhancement Multiculturalism Canada.The Canadian Charterof Rights and Freedoms also articulatesa commitmentto protecting the nation'smulticultural heritage.Such legal provisionsare perof Canadian hapstypical politicalsociety, which the politicalphilosopher CharlesTaylorhas characterized "morecommittedto collective proas vision, over against American society that gives greaterweight to individual initiative"(Reconciling 159). In Quebec, as in polyglot (and thus misnamed)English Canada,there exists a "pluralityof ways of belonging" thatTaylorcalls "deepdiversity"(183). It is no accident that it was Trudeau,the fierce federalistopponentof who formulatedthe policy statementaboutmulticulQuebec separation, turalismin the early 1970s. Changing Canada'sself-image from bicultural to multicultural was not simply a recognition of a demographic reality;it had a political purposeand, in some people's eyes, a political result (see Multiculturalism). the night of the 1995 separationreferOn endum, Quebec's premier,JacquesParizeau,lamentedthat the (French) quebecois chance for independencehad been ruinedby what he controversiallyreferredto as "moneyand the ethnic vote."3It is also no coincidence that national multiculturalpolicies were introducedat the same time that Quebec was developing its own discourses of decolonization, derived from francophonetheorists such as Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon. For some, these policies still function as implicit barriersto the recognitionof both quebecois demandsfor independenceand aboriginal peoples' land claims and desire for self-government. The novelist Neil Bissoondath, a self-proclaimed assimilated Canaas dian, has voiced other objections to multiculturalism official governmentpolicy. In Selling Illusions:The Cultof Multiculturalism Canada, in Bissoondathwrites thathe does not feel as if he is partof the Trinidadian communityin Canada,that he moved away from the West Indies to start a new life, to expand his horizons, to move beyond the confines of his cultural heritage. Yet not all Canadian immigrants arrive with such choices and hopes, and many have suffered the displacementof forced emigration.The ease of acculturationBissoondath experienced has arguably been made possible by the very policies he is attacking:before 1971 Canadawas anything but hospitable to immigrants,especially to

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nonwhites.However,Bissoondathis respondingat least in partto the idea of governmentinterventionin ethnicity and culture,which he regardsas a personalmatter,and to the reductionof ethnic and racial differenceto folklore or, worse, ethnic food festiinstitutionalized,grant-supported vals and parades. Historyand geographyconspiredto createethnic enclaves in Canada. Unlike the United States, Canadaexperienced no drive westwardfrom an Atlanticbeginning;instead,as Cole Harrisputs it, a disjointedarchipelago was settled one island at a time by variousEuropeangroupswith different technologies and economies, not to mention languages and customs. The result was "densenetworksof kin and local traditionsthat amalgamatedelements of the differentregional backgroundsof founding populations into distinctive folk cultures"(465). Some Canadians fear thatthese cultureswill be reifiedinto compulsoryand limiting identity labels and that, as a resultof the nationalpolicy of multiculturalism, "familialgenealogies ... or biologism"could become definingterms of 27). One possible reply to concernsaboutreifisubjectivity(Kamboureli cation is thatany sense of ethnicityis boundto be configureddifferently in a new place because of the inevitable changes that come with displacement: an outwardmanifestationof this process is the lack of culturalresemblanceToronto'sLittle Italy bears today to late-1990s Italy. Taylorhas arguedthat one reasonfor this discrepancyis that humanlife is dialogic: it is formed in relation to other people and other customs ("Politics"32). To use Michael Fischer's terms, ethnicity is something "reinventedand reinterpreted with each generationby each individual. ... Ethnicityis not somethingthat is simply passed on from generation to generation,taughtand learned;it is somethingdynamic,often unsuccessfully repressed or avoided" (195)-even by crypto-ethnics,whose avoidanceand repressionof theirethnicitycan go publicly unnoticed. Some Canadianslament the absence of a syncreticmelting-potideoldifferencein the name ogy that,at least in theory,would aim to transcend of nationalidentity.Instead,differenceis officially supported.But a mahow to respect differjor dilemmahauntsthis form of multiculturalism: ence without advocating the concepts of ethnic purity and authenticity thathave led to civil strife in otherpartsof the world.Dialogue based on recognitionof mutualotherness-that is, on everyone'sethnicity-is one model for dealing with the unavoidableclashes and interpenetrations of cultures.It is in the meetingof culturesthatethnicityis lived (see Pivato, Echo 57 and Contrasts30). As a second-generation ItalianCanadianlivin a multiracial multiethnic and I do not feel at all caughtbetween ing city, "theexperienceof loss and of being otheredin a web of old and new culturalregisters"(Kamboureli22); for me ethnicity has much more to do with the process of "inter-reference between two or more culturaltraditions"(Fischer201)-and not only the two whose names I have borne. In a provocative, even prophetic, essay entitled "A Critiqueof Pure Pluralism,"WernerSollors urges that the classification of writers and

Four ViewsonEthnicity

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critics as members of ethnic groups be understood as a "very partial, at temporal,and insufficientcharacterization best" (256). In arguinginstead for a dynamic "transethnic"focus based on the complexities of "polyethnic interaction"(257), he emphasizes the dangers of timidly of choosing to speak with the "authority ethnic insiders ratherthan that of readersof texts" (256). When Sollors states that "literature [can] become recognizableas a productiveforce thatmay Americanizeand ethnicize readers" (275), he implies that readers are what they read. Perhapsreadersare also how they read, as Gates suggests when he argues that "underthe sign of multiculturalism, literaryreadingsare often guided by the desire to elicit, firstand foremost,indices of ethnic particularity,especially those that can be construedas oppositional,transgresWars"8). The influenceof ethnicity,like that sive, subversive"("Culture of race and gender,on the act of interpretation hotly debated,but like is the cultural construction of "nationness,"the cultural construction of ethnicity may also be a "formof social and textual affiliation"(Bhabha, "DissemiNation" 292)-for readersas for writers,since both are formed in an order of words and both emerge as a function of by being placed differentand, for some, of conflictingencodings. Such encodings clashed for me when, as an Italian Canadian,I considered becoming a professionalreaderand writer.I wonderedwhether teachersof English inevitablydo ethnicallyEnglish readings.I received education in English literary studies in Canadaand my undergraduate thereforelargely withinthe normalizing,ethnocentriccontext of Leavisite humanism: immigration Britishprofessorsof Englishhad guarthe of anteed that Leavis's "greattradition"would be my tradition. In other words, I was taughtto do what FrancisMulhem calls "Englishreading." The realizationof this insidious form of crypto-ethnicity-in which the Englishnessof English was occulted in favorof the universal-may well be what drove me into Italianstudies and finally into comparativeliterature at the graduatelevel; it may even have dictatedmy choice of theory as a researcharea,for I believed that such a metadisciplineofferedme at least a potentialmeans to deconstructuniversals.I had a growingawareness that in the academy, as well as in my Italian family, the English constituteda specific ethnic group,not the generalculture. I saw in comparativeliteraturethe hope of learningto respect difference as well as encouragingculturaldialogue. That I became a cryptoethnic at about the same time I chose my field and research area may seem like one of life's strangeironies. Yet I found losing the markerof my ethnic identity by turnsliberatingand constricting.In the 1970s the name Hutcheonwas a form of protectivecoloration-I could pass as an English teacher in the ethnic sense-but by the 1990s things had changed considerably. I now find myself living in a culture that officially-by law and in most social and political situations-values difference and views ethnic diversity more with pride than with simple tolerance.The multicultural dynamicin Canadais of course not utopian;

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racism and intolerancedo not end because of official policies. But in the last twenty years, crypto-ethnicityhas ceased to be the protectivemask of assimilationit once was, for global as well as local reasons:the polyethnic, diasporic world of the 1990s allows for multiple postmodern identities(Buell 214). Michael Ondaatje'sIn the Skin of a Lion, a Canadiannovel, offers a in strikingvisual metaphorfor crypto-ethnicity a scene involvingan Italian Canadianman evocatively namedDavid Caravaggio.He is in prison for theft when he learns that his name is a carrierof ethnicity, a mobile attractorof scorn and abuse, for he is called "wop"and "dago."One of his tasks while in prison is to paintthe roof of the penitentiary blue-he lives up to his namesake's profession. As he goes thereby ironically about this job, he realizes that he is losing his sense of the boundaries between blue sky and blue roof. With this realizationcomes a sense of liberation and empowerment. He not only gains the visual illusion of freedom; in an act of cunning self-cryptography,he has his fellow inmates paint him blue so that the boundariesbetween himself, the roof, and the sky are erased.Caravaggiothen escapes. There have been such liberatingmoments for me as a crypto-ethnic, moments when the imprisoningboundariesof puristnotions of ethnicity could be challenged merely by being Italianwhile others thoughtI was English or Scottish. But this doubleness and its pleasures underlie the ideal. I know from my daily reality of Sollors's interactive"transethnic" has experiencethatcrypto-ethnicity establisheda dynamic(and healthy) tension within me between how I was taught to read and how I now read. And the crypto-ethnicmarkerI once valued as a protectivemask I now appreciateas a reminderof the constructedness all forms of ethof nic identity.

Notes
'By crypto-ethnicity I mean the situation of immigrants whose family name was changed when they arrivedin a new land or women like me who marriedat a time when social custom meant taking a husband'ssurnameand who suddenly found more than the nominalmarkerof theirethnicityaltered. 2CornelWest argues that Europeanimmigrantsarrivedin the United States perceiving themselvesas Irishor Sicilian and had to learnthatthey were white "principally adoptby Blacking an Americandiscourse of positively-valuedWhiteness and negatively-charged ness" (29). In Canadathe process was not this straightforward because of a smallerblack populationwith a very differenthistory.However,one worryamong Canadianscholarsof ethnicityis thatEuropeanethnic minoritieswill be homogenizedas white. 3Thevote was 50.56% againstseparation; almost 93% of eligible voterscast ballots.Parizeauclaimed thatthe 49.44% who voted for separation 60% of Francophones represented in the provinceandthatthereforethe so-calledpure laine 'purewool' quebecoishad indeed voted for independence.

Four ViewsonEthnicity

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WorksCited
Bhabha, Homi K. "DissemiNation:Time, Narrative,and the Marginsof the Modem Nation."Bhabha,Nation 291-322. --, ed. Nation and Narration.London:Routledge, 1990. Bissoondath, Neil. Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalismin Canada. Toronto: Penguin, 1994. Buell, Frederick.National Cultureand the New Global System.Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. D'Souza, Dinesh. "The Big Chill? Interview with Dinesh D'Souza." With Robert MacNeil. Debating PC.: The Controversyover Political Correctness on College Campuses. Ed. Paul Berman.New York:Dell, 1992. 29-39. Fischer,Michael M. J. "Ethnicityand the Post-modemArts of Memory."WritingCulture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley:U of CaliforniaP, 1986. 194-233. Gates, HenryLouis, Jr."Beyondthe CultureWars:Identitiesin Dialogue."Profession93. New York:MLA, 1993. 6-11. ."'Ethnic and Minority' Studies." Introduction to Scholarship in Modern LanEd. guages and Literatures. JosephGibaldi.New York:MLA, 1992. 288-302. Heartlandand Hinterland: Harris,R. Cole. "Regionalismand the CanadianArchipelago." A Geographyof Canada.Ed. L. D. McCann.Scarborough: Prentice,1982. 459-84. Ethnic Anthologies: Representationsof Ethnicity." Ariel Kamboureli,Smaro. "Canadian 25.4 (1994): 11-52. Mulhern,Francis."EnglishReading."Bhabha,Nation 250-64. Multiculturalism:Retrospectand Prospect. Spec. issue of Journal of Canadian Studies 17.1 (1982). Ondaatje,Michael. In the Skinof a Lion. Toronto:McClelland, 1987. Pivato, Joseph, ed. Contrasts: ComparativeEssays on Italian-Canadian Writing.Montreal:Guernica,1985. .Echo: Essays on OtherLiteratures. Toronto:Guernica,1994. San Juan, S., Jr.Racial Formations/ Critical Transformations: Articulationsof Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1992. Sollors, Werner."A Critiqueof Pure Pluralism."ReconstructingAmericanLiteraryHisHarvard 1986. 250-79. UP, tory. Ed. SacvanBercovitch.Cambridge: Taylor,Charles. "The Politics of Recognition."Multiculturalism: Examiningthe Politics of Recognition.Ed. Amy Gutman.Princeton:PrincetonUP, 1994. 25-73. . Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism. Montreal:McGill-Queen'sUP, 1993. West, Corel. "TheNew CulturalPolitics of Difference."Out There:Marginalizationand Culture.Ed. Russell Fergusonet al. New York:New Museumof ConContemporary MIT P, 1990. 19-36. Art;Cambridge: temporary Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham:Duke UP, 1995.

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HomiK Bhabha

On the IrremovableStrangenessof Being Different

HOMI K. BHABHA, visiting professor in the humanities at University College, London, and the Chester D. TrippProfessor of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, is au-

thorof TheLocation Culture of

(Routledge,1994) and editor of

Nation and Narration(Routledge, 1990). He is working on projects in vernacular cosmopolitanism, cultural rights, and the ethics of literary cultural translation.

WHAT are the dialectics of recognition in contemporarycultures of diversity? What are the anomalous, antagonistic, or ambivalent locations of culturaldifferencein the new world order,and how can they be articulated? And how can an ethical relationbe achievedwith what Clifford Geertzcalls the "irremovable of strangenesses" the "uses"of diversity (120)? A useful startingpoint for grappling with these questions is to read JacquesDerrida'sspectraland schematiccomments on interethnicwars in the new internationalism, to read againstthe grain.In the ten-word but telegram in Specters of Marx, on the new world order,Derrida argues that the public sphere is both articulated through and disturbed by "techno-tele-media apparatusesand new rhythms of information and communication"(79). The particular force of these new media, distinctive for their "acceleration"and "dis-location"lies in their capacity to disturbthe assumptionsof nationalontopology-the specific conjuncture of identity,location,and locutionthatmost commonly definesthe particularityof an ethnic culture.In the dislocationsof postmodernmedia, the idea of historicalcultureand of ethnic affiliationmust be conceptualized througha problematicbreakin the link between "the ontological value of present-being-the political subjector culturalcitizen-and its situation in a stable and presentabledeterminationof a locality, the topos of native soil, city ... " (82). Derridasuggests thatthese displaceterritory, ments underminethe ontopological tendency, for the nation "is rooted first of all in the memory or anxiety of a displaced-or displaceablepopulation.It is not only time thatis out of joint, but space, space in time, racism,community,blood, and spacing"(83). But even more important, bordershaunt the new internationaland have gained remarkableideological and affective power. The anxiety of displacementthat troubles national rootedness transforms ethnicity or culturaldifference into an ethical relationthat serves as a subtlecorrectiveto valiantattemptsto achieverepresentativeness and moralequivalencein the matterof minorities.For too often these efforts result in hyphenatedattemptsto include all multiple subjectpositionsrace,gender,class, geopoliticallocation,generation-in an overburdened juggernautthatrides roughshodover the singularitiesand individuations of difference.I want to articulatea particular relationthroughDerrida's thoughts on ethnicity and ontology, but without allowing rootedness to be underminedby the displacement of peoples that structuresthe national imaginary.

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In the narrowpassagebetweenrootednessand displacement,when the archaic stability of ontology touches the memory of cultural displacement, culturaldifference or ethnic location accedes to a social and psychic anxiety at the heartof identificationand its locutions. This passage opens an unsettling space that adjudicatesamong differences and constructsepistemologicalboundaries amongcultures.As Freudwrites,anxlike ontopology, is an archaic, atavistic "cathexis of longing ... a iety, defensive reactionto the felt loss (or displacement)of the object"(66). Anxiety keeps visible and present both the moment of birth as a trace and the displaced state and in that sense constitutes a transitionwhere cannotbe negatedand must be continually strangenessand contradiction and workedthrough.Anxiety is a culture'slonging for place negotiated and its borderlineexistence, its objectlessness that does not lack an objective, the mediatory moment between a culture's ontopology and its displacement, the tryst between the phantasm of rootedness and the memoryof dissemination. Anxiety's asymptotic existence is finely captured in a poem by the entitled"Anxiety": Chicago-MysorewriterA. K. Ramanujan as Notbranchless thefeartree ... as Notgeometric theparabolas of hope.... is Flames haveonlylungs.Water all eyes. Theearth boneformuscle.... has Butanxiety to canfindno metaphor endit.

(11)

Anxiety standsas a frontierpost that providesa space of representation, a strategyof readingthat"no longer concernsa distancingrenderingthis or that absent,and then a rapprochement renderingthis or that into presstructure ence."In a "layingbare [of] the substitutive itself,"the ontology of cultural identity confronts the anxiety and memory of its displacement. This enunciatespace is an "overlapwithoutequivalence: fort:da" (Derrida,Post Card321). Such a rhetoric(and an analytic) of anxiety is both the symptom and the substanceof much influentialwriting on the ethical ethnographyof contemporarycultural difference. In "The Uses of Diversity,"Geertz charges the traditionalnotion of culture as self-containedness with the estranging,ethical responsibilityof encounteringdiversity and thus engaging with strangenessat the moment of its enunciation.This process Geertzwrites, "by representing and us "make[s]us visible to ourselves," everyoneelse as cast into the midstof a worldfull of irremovable strangenesses we can't keep clear of" (120). The location of this strangenessis not "the distant tribe enfolded upon itself in coherent difference"but a disjunctive, anxious terrainof "suddenfaults and dangerouspassages"

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(117, 119). Because these hazardsproducemoral asymmetrieswithin a collectivity, strangenesses are more oblique and shaded, less easily set off as anomalies, "scrambled together in ill-defined expanses, social and spaces whose edges are unfixed, irregular, difficultto locate"(121). Geertz splendidly concludes, "Foreignnessdoes not startat the water's edge but at the skin's"(112). And yet Geertzdoes not fully grasp the amnioticstructureof cultural spacing as a temporalmovementthat crosses culturalboundaries.In his argument,the moral dilemmas arising from culturaldiversity are insistently representedthroughspatial metaphorsthat constitute"puzzles of "[I]ll-defined expanses,""social spaces whose edges are unjudgement." fixed,"uneventerrains, clefts, andcontours-these "dangerous passages," are offered as the ethnographicconditions for a new culturalepisteme. Geertz'sbrilliantspatializationof the contingent,incompletetemporalities of ethical-politicalenunciationas a landscapeof juxtaposedterrains of knowledge installs him in an Archimedian position from which he meditates,"[T]heworldis coming at each of its local points to look more like a Kuwaitibazaarthan like an English gentlemen'sclub (to instance what, to my mind-perhaps because I have never been in either one of them-are the polarcases)"(121). In a response to Geertz'slecture, RichardRorty largely assents to the idea of diversity as a collage of juxtaposed differences and admits that "[l]ike Geertz,[he has] neverbeen in a Kuwaitibazaar(norin an English gentleman'sclub)"(533). From the perspectiveof these resolutely postmodern savants, the "irremovablestrangenesses"of diversity suddenly "Wecan urge the construction becomes everydayliberal proceduralism. of a world orderwhose model is a bazaarsurrounded lots and lots of by exclusive privateclubs,"Rorty suggests, as he envisages the postmodern bourgeois liberal ambling between the equivocations of the bazaarand the moral equivalences of the club, "encouragingthe diversity of doctrines and the plurality of conflicting and, indeed, incommensurable conceptionsof the good"(533, 532). As a postcolonial native who learned his morals in an Indianbazaar and picked up literaturein what some (too hastily) consider an English gentlemen'sclub (Oxford),I see the relationbetweenbazaarand club as more agonisticand ambivalent. Between them lies the anxiouspassagewithout equivalence:fort:da"-to be traversedin the search "overlap for truthresiding in the encounterbetween the ontological culturalimpulse and the memory of the displacementsthat make nationalcultures possible. I take my lesson fromA Passage to India, perhapsthe greatest of all novels about the complications between orientalbazaarsand English clubs: Thereis no painting scarcely carving thebazaars. verywood and in The any seemsmadeof mud,the inhabitants mudmoving.So abased, monotoof so nousis everything meetsthe eye, thatwhenthe Gangescomesdownit that

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to back mightbe expected washtheexcrescence intothesoil. Housesdo fall, and aredrowned rotting.... people and ... Onthe secondrise is laidoutthe littlecivil station, viewedhence to different place.It is a cityof gardens.... Chandrapore appears be a totally and Thetoddypalmsandneemtreesandmangoes pepulthatwerehidden behindthe bazaars nowbecomevisibleandin theirturnhidethebazaars... with and [T]heysoarabovethelowerdepositto greetone another branches aftertherains leaves,andto builda city forthebirds.Especially beckoning do theyscreenwhatpassesbelow,butat all times... theyglorifythecityto the cannotbelieve the Englishpeoplewho inhabit rise, so thatnew-comers it to be as meagre it is described, haveto be drivendownto acquire as and disillusionment. (Forster 4-5) Forster seems to guide the eye from the lowly bazaarto the European club, the civilization on the rise in the city of gardens.But just as he establishesthe self-containednessof cultures,the readerbecomes awareof the overlapping,oscillating energies of the Ganges that drive everything down and the bird-filled trees that act as a lofty screen for the bazaar. The alienation and anxiety is inscribed in the hidden line of trees that become visible and in turnhide the bazaars.The trees form a boundary that establishes and then displaces the cultural ontopology, screening and revealing, enclosing and disclosing. At the same time they provide an essential passage throughthe culturaldivide, standingbetween oppositions and sowing confusion.These are"thefear tree[s]"of "nakedroots and secret twigs. / Not geometric"like parabolas. Between bazaarand club, the fear tree casts each site of differenceas incomplete and thereforemakes possible the colonial dialectic of mastery and misrecognition,sexuality and power that creates the narrative. The proceduresof "rationalist" rationality(a clarificationthat Bernard Williamsurges) and due process breakdown irretrievably both bazaar in and club, in courtroomand civil station-the anxious echo of Forster's Marabar Caves ensuresthat.But havingovercomethe anxietyof cultural designationand alienation,the ethical relationseems to returnto the private and protected realm. Aziz reconstructshis personal life at home, writing illogical poems on oriental womanhood(althoughin one poem he bypasses motherhoodand motherlandand goes "straightto internationality" [Forster329]). Adela learns the lesson on the surface of her body as a servant removes cactus thorns. In her anxious-some call it hysterical-delirium, she repeats endlessly, "In space things touch, in time things part"(214). If anxiety reveals a negotiation with the "irremovable strangenesses" of culturaldifference, what role do violence, reparation,and historical agency play in the fate of culturaldifference within colonial space and historicaltemporality?FrantzFanon has famously said in TheWretched to of the Earththat"thezone wherethe nativeslive is not complementary the zone inhabitedby the settlers.The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higherunity"(38). Fanonprovidesan accountof colonial

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fort:da." ontopology in which there is an "overlapwithoutequivalence: He then derives a revolutionaryand reparativeethical position through the strategicaffect of psychic and social anxiety.From the splittingand disintegratingof the personality subject to mental illness, he produces some of his notions of social transformation historicaltrauma.Psyand chotic and projective mechanisms that inform the everyday life of the colonized are transmuted the agency of subaltern into actionby "lay(ing) hold of this violence which is changing direction"(58). "The native's challenge to the colonial world is not simply a rationalconfrontation," Fanonwrites;"it is not a treatiseon the universal,but the untidyaffirmation of an originalidea"(41). Fanon affirms his ethics of agency by acknowledging the desire for land-for ontopological belonging-as the most "concrete symbol of breadand dignity"(44). But in the performative process of revolutionas action and agency-the search for equality and freedom-natives discover that their life, breath,and beating hearts are the same as those of settlers:"TheNegro is not. Any more thanthe white man"(Fanon,Black Skins 231). This ethical-politicalproximityis antagonisticto the Manichaeancompartments the racialdivide and sets the scene for the ethics of of revolution.In Fanon'srevolutionary creed, "thething which has been colonized becomes man duringthe same processby which it frees itself" (Wretched 36-37). However,this "thing"is not simply the colonizer and the colonized. It is the historicalrelationality,the interstitialin-between that defines and divides them into antagonisticsubjects. (Fromthis perspectiveit would be possible to elaboratethe issues of genderand sexuality thatFanonfails to articulate.)The "thing" representsthe takingup of a position,as EmmanuelLevinaswould say, beyond the ontologicalconsciousness of difference,in relationto the anxiety of a liberatoryhistory whose object remainsto be fulfilled. As Fanonexplains, decolonization starts for the native with a blank first page on which is inscribed the complete disorderof the desire for decolonizationand the continuitiesof historicaltransformation which it is a part.For the colonizer,the posof of change is also experiencedas a terrifyingfuture.The anxious sibility struggle for the historical consciousness of freedom that eschews transcendence-or a higherunity-derives from violence an ethics thattakes of responsibilityfor the otherin the transformation the "thing." In "OnViolence" Fanon insists that the native's moralityis concrete: "it is to silence the settler'sdefiance,to breakhis flauntingviolence-in a word to put him out of the picture"(Wretched44). But this does not representFanon's final position or his sense of ethical reparation.Levinas capturesthe anxiety of proximity:an ethical relationcan exist where nor subjectsare unitedneitherby a syntheticunderstanding by a subjectobject relation but where one subject concerns or is meaningful to the other(116). In the final chapterof The Wretchedof the Earth, Fanon produces a credo for the nationaland international relation:

Four V/ewsonEthnicity

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From moment andyourlikeareliquidated so many the like you dogsyouhave to retain as yourimportance....Youmusttherefore weighas heavily youcan in that uponthebodyof yourtorturer order his soul,lostin somebyway, may finditself oncemore.... Andthenthereis thatoverwhelming silence-but of course bodycriesout-that silencethatoverwhelms torturer. the the (295) Is this plot of proximity a vindication of violence? I do not believe so. But Fanonis suggestingthathumansubjectscan and must wage wars of recognition in the knowledge that historical freedom and cultural survival exist in the midst of antagonism.Overwhelmthe torturer's silence, andheed the body's cry! The proximityof bodies at the edge of waterand skin and in the transfer ethical weight from the white man'seyes to the of torturedblack man's body marks the possibility of a kind of freedom. This is a freedomthatdoes not demanduniversalframesor synchronous knowledges but that will allow the silence to inscribe the raveling and unravelingbetween the psychic body and its political weight.

WorksCited
Derrida,Jacques. The Post Card: FromSocrates and Beyond.Trans.Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. . Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work Mourning,and the New Inof ternational.Trans.Peggy Kamuf.New York:Routledge, 1994. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, WhiteMasks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann.New York: Grove, 1967. . TheWretched the Earth.Trans.ConstanceFarrington. New York:Grove, 1991. of Forster,E. M. A Passage to India. New York:Harcourt,1952. Freud, Sigmund. Inhibitions, Symptoms,and Anxiety. Trans. Alix Strachey.New York: Norton, 1989. Geertz,Clifford."TheUses of Diversity."Michigan QuarterlyReview25 (1986): 105-23. Levinas,Emmanuel.Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans.Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987. A. Ramanujan. K. Selected Poems. Delhi: OxfordUP, 1976. A Rorty,Richard."OnEthnocentrism: Reply to CliffordGeertz."Michigan QuarterlyReview 25 (1986): 525-34. Shameand Necessity. Berkeley:U of CaliforniaP, 1993. Williams,Bernard.

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Daniel Boyarin

Jewish Cricket
DANIEL BOYARIN,the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (1990), Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (1993), A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity(1994), and Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexualityand the Invention of the Jewish Man (1997), all published by the University of California Press. He is at work on two books, Midrashor the Mutilation of the Phallus and Esau's Heel: ChristianOrthodoxy and the Foundationof RabbinicJudaism. BOSE, an early disciple of Freud and the founder of psychoanalysis in India, once sent Freud a depiction of an English gentleman, remarking that he imagined Freud resembled the image.' Freud responded that this comment ignored certain "racial" differences between him and the English. Freud's origins as an Ostjude crossed his aspirations as a bourgeois European. He was both the object and the subject of racism at the same time. From the perspective of the colonized, Freud might look like a white man; from his own perspective, as from the dominating white Christian's, he was a Jew, every bit as racially marked as an Indian. Many critics, however, miss the pathos and desperation of Freud's colonial mimicry. At the end of Moses and Monotheism, immediately after the discourse on the great man as Aryan father, Freud makes the following statement: Why the people of Israel,however,clung more and more submissivelyto their God the worse they were treatedby him-that is a problemwhich for the moment we must leave on one side. It may encourageus to enquirewhetherthe religion of Moses broughtthe people nothingelse besides an enhancementof theirself-esteem owing to theirconsciousnessof havingbeen chosen. And indeed anotherfactorcan easily be found. Thatreligion also broughtthe Jews a far granderconceptionof God, or, as we might put it more modestly,the conception of a granderGod. Anyone who believed in this God had some kind of sharein his greatness,might feel exalted himself. For an unbelieverthis is not entirely self-evident; but we may perhapsmake it easier to understandif we point to the sense of superiorityfelt by a Briton in a foreign country which has been made insecureowing to an insurrection-a feeling thatis completely absentin a citizen of any small continentalstate. For the Britoncounts on the will send along a warshipif a hairof his head is hurt, fact thathis Government and that the rebels understandthat very well-whereas the small state possesses no warshipat all. Thus, pridein the greatnessof the BritishEmpirehas a root as well in the consciousness of the greatersecurity-the protectionenjoyed by the individual Briton. This may resemble the conception of a (112) grandGod. The Jew is the epitome of the citizen of the small state with no warships and indeed "he" is not a citizen of any particular state. Freud is arguing that the Jews' "grander [more sublime] conception of God" as their sublimation (masculinization) of physicality and desire provides them with an alternative to the warships and state power that they do not possess. After this encomium to imperial power, Freud invokes the prohibition against making images of God as a sign of the "triumph of Geistigkeit over sensuality, or, strictly speaking, an instinctual renunciation" (112)-characteristics encoded as sublime, male, and Protestant in Freud's cultural

G.

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world (see Boyarin 244-70). Symptomatically,Freud goes on to write of "ourchildren,adults who are neurotic,and primitivepeoples" and of one. The social orderby the patriarchal the succession of the matriarchal connectionsbetweenthese expressionsare clear,but it is vital to remember that it was the Jews who were brandedas neurotic in fin de siecle centralEurope. Freud'sclaims for the superiorityof the Jews are closely relatedto his recoding of submissivenessas masculineratherthan feminine. By readto ing the "inclination intellectualinterests"as a resultof the dematerialization or sublimation of God, Freudbrilliantly asserts that the Jewish male, by circumcisionand by devotionto interior,"feminine"studies, is less more masculinethanthe muscularGreek,who is less restrained, able to "renounceinstincts"(115, 116), and thus paradoxicallyis less "male" thanthe Jew. This masculinity is bolstered by the infamous analogy that Freud draws between "declaring that our God is the greatest and mightiest, althoughhe is invisible like a gale of wind or like the soul,"and "deciding that paternityis more importantthan maternity,althoughit cannot, like the latter,be establishedby the evidence of the senses" (118). Freud thus seeks to reinvest the Jews with the phallus in an almost pathetic quest for the "self-regard"(116) that the nineteenth-century"emancilacked. Like otherJews of his time and pated"Jew of Austro-Germany Freudcompensatesfor the absence of an asset prohibitedto Jews. place, In a recent readingof this passage, GayatriSpivak confounds Jewish desire for the Europeanphalluswith Jewishpossession of it. In a section of her essay entitled somewhat ominously "Arabsand Jews" (54), she establishesa binaryoppositionbetween the MaghrebiwriterAbdelkebir Khatibi (the Arab) and the French Lacanian Daniel Sibony (the Jew). Ultimately, however,the Jew is Sigmund Freudand thus in some sense Moses, the originator of monotheistic universal cultural imperialism, and in Spivak's text Sibony, the French Lacanian, is only his stand-in. The Jew, for Spivak, is simply the same as the Europeanwhite man, the colonialist, and indeed in a sense the progenitorof his predation.2 of The crucial move in Spivak's argumentis her characterization Sibony as "shiftingthe lines fromtwo Peoples of the Book to an opposition which reflects the vicissitudes of the long losing streak of the by-now lesser team: Arabagainst French."Thus Spivak binds Sibony "theJewwith MartineMedejel, "a Gauloise marriedto a ish Franco-Maghrebin" Moroccan"(55). Both Sibony and Medejel indeed representthemselves as French vis-a-vis a non-French other, yet Sibony, who was born in NorthAfrica and who bears a distinctlyNorthAfricanand Jewishname, is no more French than Medejel's husband. Nevertheless, in Spivak's in discussionof the treatment France(allegedlyby Sibony) of an aphonic three-year-old of NorthAfricanMuslim origin, "Sibonyis the wellboy placed male migranthelping cure the problemsof underclassmigrants. His hold on the Frenchness of French society may be minimally more

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secure because of his Jewishness,althoughthere are plenty of historical ironies behind this claim" (56). There are more than historical ironies here,for althoughSibony is certainlya "well-placedmale migrant," many NorthAfricanJews in Franceare not male or well-placed, and there are North African Muslims in France who are as well placed as Sibony is (andjust as male).SpivakassumesthatSibonyis indeedthe "well-placed" Jewish therapistwho treatsthe underclassArabboy. Sibony,however,is not the therapist; he is commenting on the work of "un therapeutede langue arabe"'an Arabic-speaking therapist'who treatedthe boy "etfort bien" 'and very well' (Sibony 83). Howeverfamiliar,the oppositionbetween Araband Jew that Spivaksets up is false. Sibony has just as much rightto the identificationArabas the patientdoes (see Alkalay). A bit of in "fieldwork" Belleville would make my point betterthanwordswill. To be sure, the rhetoricof Sibony's essay seems to identify him with Frenchness,a move redolentof Freud'sassumptionof Englishness. Insofar as Sibony himself insists that the contact is between Arabic and French,rejects the possibility of hybridity,and insists that his own Arabic identitybe left behind,he engages in the same processof self-erasure, of mimicry, as Freud does in his attemptsto appropriatethe universal phallus for Jews and to make them full membersof the brotherhoodof the universal spirit. Spivak forecloses the possibility of Sibony's and Freud'spain and dislocation,of a postcolonial anguishas vivid in its repressionas Khatibi'sor her own:3 of Sibonyseemsnotto carethatthe so-calledcountry originhasa different modeof existencetoday,elsewhere; is notsimplyhispast andthepast of It his patients. seemsto ignorethatthecutting thegraftis alsothedeath He of of thehost,theloss of a language, if the"country origin" considered that of is as alibibutnotin illo tempore, circumcision notsublating prehistoric is a casin tration thesecases. (56) Another misreadingoccurs when Spivak comments on Sibony's descriptionof his boyhood in a djamad,an Islamic school, in the Maghreb. The teacherrefers to the "Sacrificeof Ishmael"as a radicalact, and Sibony commentsthathe ignores the fact thatthis is "unemodulationinteressantede sa version originale dite sacrificed'Isaac et ecrite 15 siecles plus tot" 'an interesting modulation of the original version, which is called the sacrificeof Isaac and which was writtenfifteen centuriesearlier' (88). For Spivakthis commentis a sign of Sibony's"visibletie with the universalizing Fatherwho is the Subject of Science"-that is, with Freud.But the struggle over the sacrifice of Isaac or Ishmael is not between universalizing subjects of science and natives but between Arab Jews and Muslims-both very particularnatives. (For Frenchmenit is here but the NorthAfricanJew. irrelevant.) Sibony is not the Frenchman And although the language of the scientific is a markerof a desire for the universality, subject(sujet)markshimself as of the Maghreb.

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Circumcision is not merely a "male bond" between Sibony and the boy (Spivak 58) but a graftbetween Jew and Muslim and a cut between both of them and France.As Jonathan Boyarinhas noted (58-59), in Albert Memmi's autobiographicalnovel The Pillar of Salt, the narrator, a Jew growingup in Tunisin the 1930s, describesbeing on a streetcar with and variouscharacters-a Bedouin, a Frenchwoman,a "Mohammedan" his two-and-a-half-year-old and a Djerbangrocer.The grocerbegins son, a socially accepted form of teasing, asking the little boy whetherhe has been circumcisedyet and offering successively higherbids for his "little and animal," eventuallysnatchingat the child's groin in mock frustration the boy's real terror.This episode brings the narrator back to provoking a remembered scene in his kouttabschool (the NorthAfricancounterpart of the East Europeanheder).In the teacher'sabsence, the class followed an anarchic impulse: the students "felt that [they] needed one another and discoveredthat [they] were a crowd ... [then] soon returnedto ancestraltraditionsand decided to play, like adults,at circumcision." They chose one of the youngerboys as the victim and carriedout a mock circumcision, acting the roles of their fathersand their futureselves, until the victim burstout crying and they all collapsed into helpless laughter. The scene from his school, in which the narrator simultaneouslyidentified with the victim and was thrilledto be partof the crowd performing the sacrifice, allows him an imaginativeidentificationwith the Muslim child in the trolley who, unlike a Jewish infant, will in fact be aware of the cut to be made on his body. The sentences that link the two partsof the chapterconfirmthis association:"CanI ever forget the Orient?It is deeply rooted in my flesh and blood, and I need but touch my own body to feel how I have been markedfor all time by it. As thoughit were all a mere matterof culturesand of elective affinities!"(169). Memmi is both postulating an Orientfrom a position outside it and identifying with it. He is assertingas a link to fellow "Orientals" what is usually takento be exclusively Jewish, rendering the ironies in Sibony's situation all the more palpable. Spivak's misreadingof Sibony generatesor is generatedby her mistakingof Freud.Sibony,like Freud,is in between.He also, less eloquently thanMemmi andcertainlythanKhatibi,evokes an Orientfroma position outsideit andsimultaneously identifieswith it. Spivakproducesa brilliant in her discussion of Frenchcricket, an appropriation colometaphor by nized childrenof the English game. Both girls and boys can play French cricket, and "the wickets [are] stable, usually subtropical trees" (60). Frenchcricket is a peculiarset of parodic,shifting appropriations the of cultureof the metropolis.However,like Memmi,Jews havealwaysplayed their own forms of Frenchcricket,inhabitingthe intersticesbetweenthe colonizer and the colonized and seen by both as the other.Memmi plays Jewishcricket.Spivak,who misreadsFreud(andSibony) like a latter-day betweenthe Jew andthe European, Bose, discountsthe "racialdifference" even when the Jew is an ArabJew seeking his own Frenchness.

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Insteadof being universal,the Jews once were-maybe still are-trying to become universalaftermillenniaof standingfor difference,of being embarrassinglyvisible. Freud'sother ethnological texts, Totemand Taboo (1912-13) and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), can be read as symptomatic of his desire for an unambivalent whiteness, not as the transparent signifierof such whiteness. Like many other symptoms,they are unpleasantindeed. Readingthese texts symptomatically does not defuse or excuse their racist import but may help bracketit within a criticalevaluationof what remainsuseful for projects This perspectivedoes not explain away or deny of culturaltherapeutics. or the triumphalism racism, but it does help to framethem in a different historicalcontext. Defense and apologetic as types of mimicry are dangerously close to triumphalism,and identification with oppressors always produces oppression. However, the observationthat the terms of the apologetic are drawnfrom the value system of a dominatingculture, a system internalizedby the dominated,is profoundlyrelevantto an unof derstanding textual and historicalprocesses. "Freudhad certainlyassumed an implicit identity for the analyst as a writes (194), an asserwhite Europeanman,"KalpanaSeshadri-Crooks tion with which I can only agree.I would interpret sentence,however, this in a sense thatwas perhapsunintended its authorbut thatnevertheless by residesin the syntax:Freudcertainlyassumed(puton) an identity(mask) for the analyst(himself, cast as off-white, Jewish,effeminate)as a white Europeanman. It is not difficult to see why victims of British imperialism (such as Spivak)-the "rebels"-might readthis passage differently. Freud sought to escape the characterizationof his people as feminine and accomplishedthis aim by stigmatizingothers.To dodge the stigmatization of Jews as weak and submissive, Freudinsisted that Judaismis masculine and aggressive. And when Spivak remarkssomewhatacerbically, "Transcendental imperialismby this Freudianaccount is a Jewish game accidentally played by the British"(60), she recognizes that this Freudianclaim is a form of colonial mimicry,since she is explicitly alluding to Ashis Nandy's remark"Cricketis an Indiangame accidentally discoveredby the English"(1). And yet Spivak leaves a tantalizingamhere.4For the biguity aboutwhetheror not she accepts Freud'sargument Jews no more invented"transcendental thanthe Indiansor imperialism" the Jamaicansinventedcricket.

Notes
'Seshadri-Crooks185. On Bose in general, Seshadri-Crooks illuminating. is 2WhenI questionedSpivakaboutusing Khatibiand Sibony as stand-insfor theirrespective peoples, she denied that allegorizationwas her intent. I continue to find it difficult to

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interprether text any other way. In the narrativeone Arab (Khatibi) interactswith a Jew (Freud),and one Jew (Sibony) interactswith an Arab boy; thus the title "Arabsand Jews" certainlyseems to give an archetypalstatusto these interactionsif not quite to theiractors. 3Spivakwrites thatthese feelings are anointedwith a "different hybridity"while Sibony (67). gets only the dubiousdistinctionof "a privilegedaccess to a secure Frenchness" 4In Spivak's terms, do Jews play English or Frenchcricket?A note suggests that she in fact agrees with Freud:"This is not an argumentfor a similaritybetween the British and the Jews. (The two are not, of course, mutuallyexclusive.) It is an analogybetweenthe enduring spirit of Imperialismof the EighteenthDynasty of Egypt, carriedforwardby the Jews' contactto the cultureof thatimperialismthroughMoses's governorship the spirit and of the BritishEmpire.As we shall see in the case of Fanon,it is an argument cricketers" for (72n55). But what is the point of this analogy if the Freudianaccountis only a fiction?The notion in the Freudianaccountthatuniversalismis a productof imperialistpower seems to me sound, or at any rate plausible.However,ancientHebrewmonotheismis not transcendental or universalist in its claims; it assumes those traits only when temporal power is addedto the mix in the latest avatarsof the RomanEmpire(Boyarinand Boyarin).

WorksCited
Alkalay,Ammiel.AfterJews and Arabs:TheRemakingof LevantineCulture.Minneapolis: U of MinnesotaP, 1992. Boyarin, Daniel. Unheroic Conduct:The Rise of Heterosexualityand the Inventionof the JewishMan.Contraversions: Studiesin JewishLiterature, and Culture, Society. Berkeley: U of CaliforniaP, 1997. Boyarin, Daniel, and JonathanBoyarin. "Diaspora:Generationand the Groundof Jewish Identity."Identities. Ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 305-37. in Boyarin,Jonathan.Thinking Jewish. Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism: ThreeEssays. 1939. The StandardEdition of the CompletePsychological Worksof SigmundFreud.Ed. and trans.James Strachey with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey,and Alan Tyson. Vol. 23. London: Hogarth, 1955. 3-317. Memmi, Albert.ThePillar of Salt. 1955. Trans.EdouardRoditi. Boston: Beacon, 1992. Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket:On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New Delhi: Penguin, 1989. Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. "The Primitive as Analyst." Cultural Critique 28 (1994): 175-218. Sibony, Daniel. "Effets d'entre-deux-langueset exils d'origine." Cahiers intersignes 1.1 (1990): 81-90. Spivak, GayatriChakravorty. "Psychoanalysisin Left Field and Fieldworking:Examples to Fit the Title."Speculationsafter Freud:Psychoanalysis,Philosophy,and Culture. Ed. Sonu Shamdasaniand Michael Munchow.New York:Routledge, 1994. 41-76.

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Four Views on Ethnicity

Sabine GbCl I.

How Ethnic Am I?
SABINE GOLZ, I. associateprofessor of comparativeliterature and Germanat the Universityof Iowa, is the author of The Split Scene of Reading: Nietzsche/ Derrida/Kafka/Bachmannand of articles on Ilse Aichinger,InJurekBecker, geborgBachmann, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, and Esther Dischereit. She is workingon a book-lengthproject on Karoline von Ginderrode's readingnotes. ONE FINE MORNING I found myself called on to confess my "German" ethnicity. My response, naturally, was to go looking for an exit. Yet such escapes, as one learns from reading Kafka, are not easy to come by. Could I deny the charge, dispute its presuppositions, have someone testify in my favor, or-extravagant hope-even produce an alibi? Of course, I could argue that my ancestors were not so much German as Swabian, Prussian, Danish, and even (yet more distantly and legendarily) Italian and Spanish. Or I could seek refuge in, for instance, Jacques Roubaud's efficient deconstruction of provable ethnic origin in "Is Le Pen French?" Roubaud considers the implications of Jean-Marie Le Pen's definition of a French person as someone whose parents are both French: Si Le Pen etait frangais, selon la d6finition de Le Pen, cela voudraitdire que, selon la definitionde Le Pen, la mere de Le Pen et le pere de Le Pen auraientete eux-memes francaisselon la definitionde Le Pen, ce qui signifierait que, selon la definitionde Le Pen, la mere de la mere de Le Pen, ainsi que le pere de la mere de Le Pen ainsi que la mere du pere de Le Pen, sans oublierle pere du pere de Le Pen auraientete, selon la definitionde Le Pen, francaiset par cons6quent la mere de la mere de la mere de Le Pen, ainsi que celle du pere de la merede Le Pen ainsi que celle de la mere du pere de Le Pen, et celle du pere du pere de Le Pen auraientete francais selon la d6finitionde Le Pen et de la meme maniereet pour la meme raison le pere de la mere de la mere de Le Pen, ainsi que celui du pere de la mere de Le Pen ainsi que celui de la mere du pere de Le Pen, et que celui du pere du pere de Le Pen auraientete francais,toujoursselon la meme definition,celle de Le Pen d'oiuon deduirasans peine et sans l'aide de Le Pen en poursuivantle raisonnement ou bien qu'il y a une infinitede francaisqui sont n6s francaisselon la definition de Le Pen, ont vecu et sont mortsfrancaisselon la definitionde Le Pen depuis l'aube du commencementdes temps ou bien (15-16) que Le Pen n'est pas francaisselon la definitionde Le Pen. If Le Pen were French according to the definition of Le Pen, this would mean,accordingto the definitionof Le Pen, thatLe Pen's motherandLe Pen's father would themselves have been French according to the definition of Le Pen, which would mean, accordingto the definitionof Le Pen, that Le Pen's mother's mother, as well as Le Pen's mother's father and Le Pen's father's mother,without forgettingLe Pen's father'sfather,would have been French, er Jemandmu3fte Josef K. verleumdethaben, denn ohne daJ3 etwas Boses getan hdtte,wurdeer eines Morgensverhaftet. Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wronghe was arrestedonefine morning. FranzKafka,Der Procefi (The Trial)

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to of the of according thedefinition Le Pen,andconsequently mother Le Pen's as as mother's father, well as thatof mother, well as thatof Le Pen'smother's Le Pen'sfather's mother thatof Le Pen'sfather's and also father, wouldhave of beenFrench to according thedefinition Le Pen,andin the samewayand of forthesamereasons father Le Pen'smother's the as mother, wellas thatof as Le Pen'smother's mother that and father, well as thatof Le Pen'sfather's would havebeenFrench, according thesame of LePen'sfather's still to father, the definition, oneby Le Pen the one fromwhich,by continuing reasoning, maydeduce without trouble andwithout helpof Le Pen the eitherthatthereis aninfinity French of peoplewho sincethedawnof the of to of beginning timewerebornFrench according the definition Le Pen, livedanddiedFrench to of according thedefinition Le Pen,orelse thatLe Penis notFrench to of according thedefinition Le Pen.' But even if Roubaudwere authoritative a witness and even if I could as some ground with his help, wouldn't my motives for temporarilygain trying to make an escape be questioned?Wouldn'tthe very impulse to escape be takento confirmmy guilt? In postwar(West) Germany,"being German"was not somethingone went arounddoing in public. The proclamationand elaborationof national, racial, or ethnic identity in general-and of Germannessin particular-had all the wrong associations.Any categorizationof people by such means was taintedand deeply suspectboth politically and ethically. On the basis of such evidence, I could now expect my very hesitationto to Gerperform"as a German" be diagnosedas the most quintessentially man thing aboutme. My continuedresistancewould merely suggest that the guilt might be even greaterthan at firstsuspected. In the postdeconstructivecontext of the 1990s, the practiceof elaboratingethnic and other sorts of culturaland group identitieshas become popularonce again. And yet afterdeconstruction, ethnicitycan no longer be a truth.It mustbe somethingconstructed, potentiallymultiple,hybridWernerSollors's use of the word inventionin the tiized, and interstitial. tle of his book TheInventionof Ethnicityindicatesthis change: and as By callingethnicity-thatis, belonging beingperceived others beby to one in longing anethnicgroup-an "invention," signalsaninterpretationa modem a postmodercontext. and (xiii) If I am uncomfortable under ethnic "arrest,"Sollors's relation to the "postmoderncontext" seems not altogether untroubledeither: he perceives it as an "assault": Is it possible to take the postmodern assaultseriouslyand yet to adhere to somenotionof historyandof individual collectivelife in the modand em world? (xi) In the absence of a credible theory that would uphold the claims of referentiality, the meaning of these inventions slips and threatens to

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disappear.In response to this problem, Sollors offers a redefined conception of ethnicity: is forcesurviving fromthehistorical [E]thnicity notso mucha deep-seated the and feature a contrasting of past,butrather modem modernizing strategy. an ... It marks acquired that conmoder senseof belonging replaces visible, cretecommunities....It is nota thingbuta process-andit requires constant detective workfromreaders. (xiv-xv) Sollors shifts the meaningfrom actualcommunitiesthatconstructions of could still designate to the activity of subjects who desire to ethnicity belong to such communities. Ethnicity is transformedfrom something one is into somethingone does. But what if one had acquirednot a "modernsense of belonging"but rathera desire not to belong-or at least a desire to keep open the possibility of not belonging as an emergency exit throughwhich one could give the (always potentially overeager)detectives the slip? The idea of ethnicity would move from a model of acknowledgmentor denial of a (more or less obvious) truthto a choice between two modes of and two desires in reading. Sollors's redefinition thus also makes room for the possibility of choosing not to belong-an option I consider indispensable. For only the option of doing otherwise can preventthe invention from becoming essentially indistinguishablefrom the old notion of inhorrors. escapabletruthwith all its attendant The experienceof being at home has as its uneasy but necessarycomIn plementthe experienceof being a foreigner.2 1977, as an undergraduate, I spent my first year abroad,at a universityin Ohio. Many students there casually mentionedthat they were "German" too. Yet I also knew that I was the only student from Germany on that campus of fourteen thousand.When I attendedin close succession a readingby Elie Wiesel and a studentperformance Cabaret,my sense of my strangesingularof ity intensified.Both events seemed to single me out from the whole large audienceas theiruniqueaddressee.I suddenlysaw myself as an isolated, spotlighted point in a darkenedroom filled with a mass of people that seemed inertand unreal. If this was a moment of essentialism, accordingto which I felt that I was the only "genuineGerman" among the studentson thatcampusand the only addressee of those performances, the sensation was hardly a comfortableone. Nor was it one that made me feel in any way at home in a community. If one interpretsthat moment as one that founded an identity,that identity was the exact opposite of a collective one. And if the momentwas aboutbeing "German," was not aboutbeing ethnically it so. At such a moment, rather,one is beyond language-both utterlyexposed and completely invisible, both central to significance and mute, fallen out of any signifyingorder. One is simultaneously only accused the and the only judge. The works of FranzKafkaand IngeborgBachmann bear tracesof events of this sort.

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Kafka's Joseph K. grows more and more exhausted in the course of his trial. Most of the time, he still makes distinctions carefully, but there are moments when he must take a break on the divan in his office. In a passage Kafka deleted, Joseph K. lapses into half sleep, and the distinctions between those who are connected to the court and those who are not blur: [H]ier im Halbschlafmischten sich alle, er vergaBdann ... die grol3eArbeit des Gerichtes,ihm war als sei er der einzige Angeklagteund alle anderngienwie gen durcheinander Beamte und Juristenauf den Gangen eines Gerichtsgebaudes, noch die stumpfsinnigstenhatten das Kinn zur Brust gesenkt, die Nachdenkens. Lippenaufgestiilptund den starrenBlick verantwortungsvollen (348-49) Here in this half sleep they all got mixed up: he forgot the great work of the court;he felt as if he were the only accused and all others were mingling like the officials and lawyers in the corridorsof a courthouse;even the dullest had their chins lowered to their chests, their lips pursed, and wore the rigid gaze of responsiblethought. The neglect of the necessary distinctions leads Joseph K. from the feeling that he is "the only accused" to a "breakthrough" in which he suddenly emerges on the side of the judges. The side of the judges, however, is a forbidden place for Joseph K. The Trial could not have continued with Joseph K. in the role of a judge. Thus Kafka censored the passage, reestablished the distinction, and rescued his novel.3 Whereas Kafka's novel maintains the perspective of the accused, Bachmann's story "Ein Wildermuth" explores the situation of a judge obliged to try a murderer whose last name is the same as his own. As the trial proceeds, the judge grows increasingly restless "weil er seinen Namen immer wieder lesen muBte als den eines Fremden" 'because he had to read his name again and again as that of a stranger' (217-18): Und sein Name warhier in einem iiblen Marchen.... Die Vorkommnisse, die in die Aktengeschriebenwaren,hattenihn sonst nie derartbewegt. Nie jedenfalls hatteer gefragt,wie zu einem Namen ein Mord,ein zertriimmertes Auto, eine Unterschlagung, Ehebruchkamen.Es warihm selbstverstandlich, ein da3 NamendavonKundegabenunddaBVorfallesich mitjenen Namenzusammentaten,an denen man Angeklagteund Zeugen erkennenkonnte. (218-19) And here his name was partof a nasty tale .... The incidentswritteninto the files had neverbefore moved him like this. Never,at any rate,had he wondered how a name came to be associated with a murder,a smashed car, an embezzlement, an adultery.It was self-evident to him that names gave information about such things and that incidents got together with those names by which one could recognize defendantsand witnesses. As in Kafka's fragmented chapter, the difference between the accused and the judges collapses, and with it crumbles the self-evidence of names, the possibility of articulating truth by means of language and thus

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of reachinga definitiveand intelligible verdict.In the course of the trial, tries too hardto confess-and succeeds only in makingthe the murderer story more and more untellable.Finally the prosecutorcalls the lost assembly back to reality "mit seiner schneidendenStimme" 'with his cutting voice' (225). At that moment the judge screams, and from then on he is unfitto practicehis profession. verkanntesie baldauswendig, Er las die BerichteundStellungnahmen, in und die wie suchte, ein Unbeteiligter, Geschichte sichzu erzeugen dannin aus die sichzu zerschlagen, manfurdie Offentlichkeit demVorfall gemacht sich Er hatte. alleinwuBte daBkeineGeschichte ausdenElementen fiigen ja, sich daB ein undkeinSinnzusammenhang vorzeigen sondern nureinmal liel3, war worden durch Einschlag Geistesin den des sichtbarer Unfallverursacht in seinenGeist,dernichttaugte,mehranzurichten derWeltals eine kurze (215) kopflose Verwirrung. and soonknewthemby heart, triedas if he were He readthereports opinions, to insidehimself thento smash piecesinsidehimself and to uninvolved create the storythathadbeenmadeof the eventfor thepublic.He alone,afterall, connection demonknewthatno storycouldbe forgedandno meaningful had but the strated thata visibleaccident beencausedonlyoncethrough imwhichwasnotfitto causeanygreater on havocin pactof thespirit his spirit, confusion. theworldthana short, panicked What happensto the judge yields no story and no judgment.His silence merely marksthe site of an impact, a place where something has fallen out of language, where something defies any attempt to forge a story aboutit. In the eventsthatdisruptKafka'snovel andthatoccasion the silence of Bachmann's judge, a momentof self-reflexivitymakesa hole in language. Kafka's novel reasserts itself against that event, whereas Bachmann's story insists on it. After the incident,the judge-accusedlives with and in those moments of incommensurabilitythat defy language's referential grip.This is a subjectthat maintainsnot the distinctionsbut the exit, the kind of subjectJulia Kristevaadvocatesin "Women's Time":
This process could be summarizedas an interiorizationof thefounding separationof the socio-symboliccontract,as an introduction its cuttingedge into of

the veryinterior everyidentity of whether or sexual,ideological, subjective, so forth. Thisin sucha waythatthehabitual increasingly and explicit attempt to fabricate scapegoat a victimas foundress a societyor a counter-society of of maybe replaced the analysisof the potentialities victim/executioner by whichcharacterize identity, subject, each each eachsex. (210) The potentialitiesof this victim-executioneror judge-accused are those of a subjectthatknows it will not be able to confess its identityin a name. Names that signal ethnicity (like all other names and like languagein general)acquireor fail to acquiresignificance-casually, ironically,cat-

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astrophically-depending on whetheror not (and how) people read one anotherand themselvesin termsof such names. The comfortnames provide for some and the dangersthey pose for others grow proportionally with the "self-evident" faith "thatnames [give] information... and that incidents [get] togetherwith those names by which one [can] recognize defendantsand witnesses."Inversely,inventionsof ethnicitycan be more cheerfullyindulgedthe less seriouslythey take themselves.However,the scene of the crime, of mortification arrest,is located elsewhere.And and elsewhere,too, is the potentialfor laughterand for makinga getaway. "Yes, I am Germantoo,"those studentsin Ohio used to say. And I too am happy to say these words occasionally. But in those moments, they mean almost nothing. An English translationof the Latin alibi is "elsewhere."I have found my alibi.

Notes
'I would like to thankJean-Jacques Poucel for helping me locate and translatethis text. All othertranslations my own. are 2See Rosi Braidottion this issue: "Cultural the identitybeing externaland retrospective, most immediateeffect of the Australianexperience was to make me discover the depth of which was far from a simple notionor a single experience.Not only was my Europeanness, I a white immigrant,when comparedto the aboriginesbut also I was off-white (a 'wog,' or a 'dago') when comparedto the Anglo-Australian minoritywho ran the country.... It was by opposition to the antipodeanpsyche and culturalidentity that I found out, often at my own expense, that I am, indeed, a European.I often wonderwhetherthis awarenesswould have been so acute had I not experienced the loss of Europeanroots through migration. Can culturalidentity emerge from an internaldynamic, or is it always external, that is to say oppositional?"(9). 3Fora more detailed reading along these lines of The Trial as well as The Castle, see Golz, chs. 4 and 5.

WorksCited
Ed. Bachmann,Ingeborg.Werke. ChristineKoschel, Inge von Weidenbaum,and Clemens Munster.Vol. 2. Munich:Piper, 1982. 4 vols. and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Braidotti,Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment FeministTheory.New York:ColumbiaUP, 1994. Golz, Sabine. The Split Scene of Reading: Nietzsche/Derrida/Kafka/Bachmann. Atlantic Highlands:Humanities,1997. Kafka, Franz. Der Procefi. Roman in der Fassung der Handschrift.Ed. Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1990. Kristeva,Julia. "Women'sTime." The KristevaReader.Ed. TorilMoi. New York:Columbia UP, 1986. 188-213. Roubaud,Jacques.Poesie, etcetera:Menage. Paris:Stock, 1995. The Sollors, Werner. Inventionof Ethnicity.New York:OxfordUP, 1989.