◆Recent discussions of interstices between races, ethnicities, nations, states, and cultures produce a delicate and complex concept of hybridity within the context of globalization and transnationalism. Critics and theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Eti...
◆Recent discussions of interstices between races, ethnicities, nations, states, and cultures produce a delicate and complex concept of hybridity within the context of globalization and transnationalism. Critics and theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Etienne Balibar, Jahan Ramazani, James Clifford, Richard Kearney, Walter Benn Michaels, Aihwa Ong, and many others have grappled with the project of transnationalism by unknotting this complicated intermixture of the terms which span from global, diasporic, postnational, postcolonial, hemispheric, and transnational. But this project of "cultural translation" still remains problematic.
◆What is at stake in this new discursive dynamics are diasporic subjects and borderline areas of cultures, both of which derive their origins from migration from the home country and assimilation to the host country. Diasporic subjects such as whites, blacks, Asians, hispanics, and what not, become the minority of the host country when they manage to assimilate to the latter, while maintaining their home country's culture and tradition. In the history of religions and other disciplines, diaspora has been employed as a geographic and sociological category. However, in recent postmodern cultural studies, "diaspora consciousness" moves beyond the essentialist concepts such as ethnicity and race, and comes to denote hybridity, heterogeneity, identity fragmentation, double consciousness, roots and routes, and multi-locationality. This disapora consciousness is a product of cultures and histories in collision and dialogue, and diasporic subjects are distinct versions of modern, transnational, and intercultural experience.
◆In this context of diasporic identities and hybridity, multiculturalism has attempted to explain the new forms and complex discursive practices in the contemporary global village. Amy Gutman, David Theo Goldberg, Will Kymlicka, Bhikhu Parekh, and Stephen Castlesbelong to such attempts. They provide a critique of the mono-cultural mono-national myth of a nation-state and envision a multicultural community in which the rights for cultural preservation and community construction are prerequisite, thereby proposing multiculturalism as the revisionist alternative for assimilation policies of immigration of the nationalistic origin. However, the logic of multiculturalism is not sufficient to provide a global phenomenon of the diasporic identities and hybridity.
My argument is that networks of transnationalism can provide a clue to unknot the complicated intermixture of terms which span from diaspora, postcolonialism, and postnationalism. I will investigate the nature of the concepts of diaspora, colonialism, and nationalism from the contradictory counter-concepts of diasporic double consciousness, postcolonialism, and postnationalism, in attempts to retrieve the embedded signifying chains of transnational cultural logic.
◆My attempt is to superimpose a discursive anchor of the concept of the cultural translation on the contemporary critical geographical mappings in the areas of Asia, North America, Carrebean islands, South America, and Europe, thereby constructing a scaffolding of contact zone or tangential point of interstitiality of the triadic borromean knots of national, postnational, and transnational. In short, The cultural logic of transnationalism can be demonstrated in connection with cultural hybridity, diasporic consciousness, and cross-national commodification, and flexible citizenship. For this attempt, the group members of the transnatuonalism and cultural translation project team will pariticipate (giving papers, discussing the relevant topics, and collecting data and writing/pulbishing about the topic under consideration) variuous international conferences, including MLA, ACLA, IASIL, ELLAK, and what not, in order to encounter the the real events of the transnational cultural translation.