Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience

NOT LIKE A NATIVE SPEAKER

NOT LIKE A NATIVE SPEAKER

ON LANGUAGING AS A POSTCOLONIAL EXPERIENCE

REY CHOW

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chow, Rey.

Not like a native speaker : on languaging as a postcolonial experience / Rey Chow.

pages cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-15144-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-15145-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-52271-7 (e-book)

1. Language acquisition—Social aspects.   2. Postcolonialism—Social aspects.   3. Sociolinguists—History.   I. Title.

P118.C523 2014

306.44—dc23

2014003450

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Cover Design: Jordan Wannemacher

Cover Image: Courtesy of Pearl Chow

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Ani, Calvin, and Pooja

What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die.

—Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended

The language apparatus is there somewhere in the brain, like a spider. It has a hold.

That might shock you, and you might ask Oh come on, really, what are you talking about, where does this language come from? I have no idea. I’m under no obligation to know everything. And besides, you don’t know anything about it either.

—Jacques Lacan, My Teaching

There is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. . . . There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

My answer to the question Can an African ever learn English well enough to be able to use it effectively in creative writing? is certainly yes. If on the other hand you ask: Can he ever learn to use it like a native speaker? I should say, I hope not.

—Chinua Achebe, The African Writer and the English Language

CONTENTS

Note on Non-English Sources

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Skin Tones—About Language, Postcoloniality, and Racialization

1. Derrida’s Legacy of the Monolingual

2. Not Like a Native Speaker: The Postcolonial Scene of Languaging and the Proximity of the Xenophone

3. Translator, Traitor; Translator, Mourner (or, Dreaming of Intercultural Equivalence)

4. Thinking With Food, Writing Off Center: The Postcolonial Work of Leung Ping-Kwan and Ma Kwok-Ming

5. The Sounds and Scripts of a Hong Kong Childhood

Notes

Index

NOTE ON NON-ENGLISH SOURCES

Because this is an English-language publication, non-English sources are given selectively rather than comprehensively, in a combination of conventionally adopted formats as is befitting the different contexts of discussion.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection of essays would not have materialized without the blessing of Jennifer Crewe, the president and director of Columbia University Press, who gave it first-rate professional guidance at every stage. To her and to Columbia’s production team, I am deeply grateful for an efficient and effective process of editorial advising, copyediting, design, and marketing. (Special thanks to copy editor Annie Barva for her very fine and meticulous work.) My appreciation goes also to the several anonymous reviewers of the book proposal and completed manuscript for their very enthusiastic readings and constructive suggestions.

Many of the issues addressed in the chapters had their beginnings in seminars I have taught at various points in the past decade and a half at Cornell, Brown, Princeton, and Duke. To the participants of these seminars, I extend my warmest greetings. I must also acknowledge the colleagues who in their capacities as journal or book editors kindly invited me to contribute articles and chapters that became the first published versions of some of the discussions to follow: Ralph Cohen, Ien Ang, Jing Tsu, David Der-wei Wang, Joseph S. M. Lau, and Leo Tak-hung Chan.

To Réda Bensmaïa, I owe the pleasure, among other things, of some extremely interesting conversations on Derrida, Bourdieu, Algeria, and bilingualism. Chris Cullens, Ken Haynes, and Austin Meredith have been indispensable sources of erudition, astute thinking, humor, and emotional comfort. Paul Bowman, Jeroen de Kloet, Song Hwee Lim, Livia Monnet, Michael Silverman, James Steintrager, Antonio Viego, and Robyn Wiegman, each in his or her own way, help sustain my belief in the kind of intellectual work we do, notwithstanding the world’s opinion otherwise. Kazuko Takemura and Leung Ping-kwan, who had passed away before this book was finished, remain unforgettable exemplars of charisma and integrity. I am forever indebted to my father, Chow Chak-hung, my sisters, Pearl and Enn, and their families for the indulgence they have lavished on me over the decades and across continents.

My life in the past few years would have been much impoverished without the assistance, collaboration, and camaraderie of Ani Maitra, Calvin Ka Man Hui, and Pooja Rangan. The thought of their fierce dedication to their own research brightens even my gloomiest day. I dedicate this book to the three of them with heartfelt gratitude and love.

.   .   .

Earlier and shorter versions of chapter 1 and chapter 3 were published respectively in New Literary History 39.2 (Spring 2008): 217–31, and 39.3 (Summer 2008): 565–80.

Earlier versions of chapter 4 were published in Communal/Plural 7.1 (1999): 45–58, and Global Chinese Literatures: Critical Essays, ed. Jing Tsu and Der-wei Wang (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 133–55.

An earlier, shorter version of chapter 5 was published in the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 1.1 (July 1997): 109–27 (Lingnan University, Hong Kong).

All of these previous versions have been substantially rewritten and expanded.

INTRODUCTION

SKIN TONES—ABOUT LANGUAGE, POSTCOLONIALITY, AND RACIALIZATION

Near the beginning of his memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama recalls a childhood encounter with a close-up photograph of a black man’s hands in a magazine at the U.S. embassy in Indonesia. Noting that the hands had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh, Obama’s narrative voice goes on:

He must be terribly sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybe, or an albino—I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn’t it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.¹

The adult Obama remembers the nine-year-old boy’s reactions as visceral: I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. . . . I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat . . . to demand some explanation or assurance. His embodied reactions devolved into aphasia: "As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear."² This loss of voice, as I will go on to argue, is a distinct form of what may be called, after Michel Foucault, limit experience, in which one reaches the end of certitude and touches the edge of the abyss. Although this description is still straightforward enough, another question looms: How might aphasia (as the limit of having voice or being able to speak) be understood simultaneously in relation to racialization, the other major factor in play in this story?

RACIALIZATION AS AN ENCOUNTER WITH LANGUAGE

Let me approach this question by way of an ad hoc genealogy of theoretically celebrated scenes. To begin with, Obama’s account, succinctly conveying the trauma that gripped the young mulatto, is as striking as Frantz Fanon’s anguished remembrance in Black Skin, White Masks of being fixed by others in a way that is overdetermined from without: Dirty nigger! Look, a Negro!³ In both situations, the piercing sensations of shock, debasement, vulnerability, and worthlessness are part of the obligatory reflexivity thrust upon the person of color, who cannot but be startled by his own and his own kind’s objectification in a predominantly visual register. In strangers’ habitual ways of gazing at oneself (Fanon) or in a chance discovery, through a photograph, of what another black person has done to himself (Obama), race is grasped and presented predominantly as a visual drama, which highlights what it is like to be seen as black in a society that treats being black with contempt, as something dirty.

Although chapter 1 of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is devoted to the Negro and language, the crucial link between racial objectification and the work of language often still seems inadequately probed in contemporary scholarship. Fanon, for his part, refers to language in the colonial context as an imposition on the colonized to master the colonizer’s language, even while the point of this mastery is, as he points out, an exchange for another kind of value in what he calls the racial epidermal schema. The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter—that is, he will come closer to being a real human being—in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language.⁴ The acquisition of (the French) language, in other words, becomes the acquisition of whiteness. This other biosemiotics, in which language possession is translated into and receives its value as skin color, is something that deserves much further elaboration than has usually been given. To begin such an elaboration, we must ask a deceptively simple question: What exactly is language here?

Consider again the exclamations Dirty nigger! and Negro! as reported by Fanon. These utterances are made, first and foremost, to name the other. Walter Benjamin’s writings on human language make him an interesting, if somewhat surprising, interlocutor at this juncture. Like some of his predecessors in the tradition of language philosophy, Benjamin discusses language in terms of a mental interiority, an inner capacity specific to humans. Although this approach is by no means remarkable, what is provocative about Benjamin’s reflections is their ambivalence, their Janus-faced quality of partaking both of religious mysticism and of early-twentieth-century revolutionary utopianism. In the case of language, for instance, Benjamin spotlights the act of naming, which, as his texts attest, conjures a divine notion of creativity. At the same time, as is characteristic of Benjamin’s thinking, naming is also the key to an arguably secularized perspective on community formation. The hinge is mimesis: as the definitive, lynchpin event in language, naming is associated with the mimetic, with the capacity to produce similarity. The name (and, by implication, human language) is, Benjamin writes, a nonsensuous form of similarity (because words are abstract rather than concretely physical entities); naming is what establishes a magical community with things that is immaterial and purely mental and that is symbolized by sound.⁵ In this equation between naming and mimesis lies what may be identified as a proto-sociopolitical move. By naming things, Benjamin suggests, we are in effect mimicking them—that is, becoming like them. To name (the other), to become like (the other), to form social relations (with the other): this is how we derive knowledge of the world.

If Benjamin’s theological and romantic ruminations are transposed onto a sociopolitical frame, what the name signifies is none other than a contact zone. The name is the place where symbolic correspondence, meeting, symmetry, reciprocation, and integration can, ideally speaking, be established with the world. This potential of a continuum—indeed, a match—between humans and the mute world of things makes naming an incomparably powerful, performative gesture: by naming something, we confer upon it an identity it does not otherwise have—an identity by which what is named becomes animated as our relation, our equal, our community; an identity by which what is named can touch (and affect) us as much as we can touch (and affect) it.

Precisely because of such potential for commonality and sameness, however, the name is eminently dangerous. The precarious flipside to correspondence and integration between namer and named becomes insuppressible when the gesture of naming is applied not simply to a mute world of things, as Benjamin has described it, but rather to other human beings—that is to say, when the name as such is no longer simply a designation but must also be received as a form of address, a call.⁶ This is how the name enters Fanon’s account.

The instant the black man is visually objectified is the same instant he feels being hailed into existence, as it were, through the names dirty nigger and negro. First published in French in 1952, Fanon’s account poignantly foreshadows the interpellation of the subject as Louis Althusser argues in his oft-quoted critique of ideology and ideology state apparatuses (first published in French in 1970). Notably, for purposes of analytic clarity, Althusser breaks down the process of interpellation into a sequence of two moments, embodied by two different personae walking along the street. First is the policeman (or some other stranger) issuing an anonymous call, the call that does not yet bear a specific name—Hey, you there! Then there is an acquiescent turning around, what Althusser describes as the 180-degree physical conversion, by the hailed person in response to that call. This turning around, a kind of feedback that is tantamount to a Yes, that’s me, completes the loop initiated by the anonymous hailing and constitutes the subject. For Althusser, it is in this second moment, when the individual reciprocates, believing/suspecting/knowing that it is for him, i.e., recognizing that ‘it really is he’ who is meant by the hailing, that ideology successfully completes its task of recruiting the subject.⁷

Since Althusser’s analysis became well known, it has typically provoked debates around the consistency and volition of this subjective or subjectivizing moment of turning around. Does the subject always (have to) answer the anonymous call? How do we know? Can he not ignore it or resist it? And so forth.⁸ In a similar vein, were we to transpose Althusser’s terms onto Fanon’s scene of the encounter with the namer of the black man, it would seem logical, at first, to raise questions about subjective consistency and volition as a way to counter the names/calls dirty nigger and negro. Couldn’t the black man refuse to answer and thus refuse the mode of address that is imposed on him? Wouldn’t it solve the entire problem if the black man simply does not recognize that he is being hailed and does not substantiate the anonymous call with himself or his own name? To be sure, Fanon himself has written in somber defiance: "with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation."⁹ At the same time, when taken as a whole, Fanon’s work points in a quite different direction, one suggesting rather that refusal or nonrecognition is not such a simple matter—that nonparticipation in the transindividual situation of racialization (or racializing interpellation) is in fact out of the question.

What is Fanon really describing, then, when he reports the incident of the humiliating objectification and address? It is the experience of a shock, registered both in embodied form (through his own blackness) and beyond corporeality, at what may be called an ineluctability or coerciveness of identification based on none other than the performative mimeticism that is the name.¹⁰ In the magical guise of touching and corresponding with the other, as Benjamin suggests, naming establishes the community (or, in the language of today’s social media, connectivity) in which the named object is given a life other than muteness. Yet precisely because such community relations replace (substitute, take over—indeed, usurp) muteness, the black person has nowhere to hide once the name is pronounced. With the unleashing of the name comes the obligatory realization that something substantive has taken place, that he has been addressed and called into existence in that flash of a moment dubbed with the devastating soundbites.¹¹ This phenomenon of a compulsory self-recognition operates at a level that goes considerably beyond the logical questions about subjective consistency and volition because the knowledge and authority it bears come from another scene, because the injunction of racialization has already been issued long before this particular encounter, before this particular black person enters the picture in an individuated fashion. What Fanon is describing, therefore, is not simply an instance of what we nowadays call hate speech, but also an ontological subtraction and contradiction: the laying-out of a trajectory of self-recognition from which the possibility of self-regard (or self-respect) has, nonetheless, been removed in advance. For the black person, this chance of self-recognition is held out in the precise form of his reduction or thing-ification: he can be/become (himself) by being/becoming less, by being/becoming diminished. A self-recognition for which he has to take off (minus) whatever self-esteem