Abstract
This paper investigates the
production of locality in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the
Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). The production of locality as
dramatized by the novel consists of two phases of local
spatialization in the context of time-space compression :
deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Yamashita employs
a specific narrative style that wavers between magic realism and
melodrama to address the uncertainty, rupture, and incongruity
derived from the condition in which transnational capitalism
exerts both negative and positive impacts on local places in the
margin. While the novel’s magic realist narrative mode manifests
the uncanniness of deterritorialization, its melodramatic mode
of narrative seems to reveal the process of reterritorialization
with which the local people come to terms with the condition of
globalization. It is within the process of reterritorialization,
I contend, that the issue of Asian ethnicity can be
investigated. In the novel, Asian ethnicity is redefined in
materialistic terms to serve as social agents and means of
cultural production whose power of mediation both challenges the
violence of Western capitalism and supplements the rupture and
the gap Western capitalism leaves behind in the local place.
Asian ethnic specificity is thus reformulated by means of
weaving family value and domestic cultural and imaginary
production together. The novel’s engagement with the production
of locality, consequently, opens up a discursive and imaginary
pattern that patches/matches the odd couple of magic capitalism
and melodramatic imagination in an Asian style.
Keywords: magic realism,
melodramatic imagination, the production of locality, Asian
ethnicity
In the field of Asian-American
literary studies, the two sides of the hyphenated term
“Asian-American” usually refer to two cultural entities, with
incompatible differences and hierarchical race relations. To be
Asian-American is to be caught in the liminal space of the
nation, vacillating not just between the two worlds, but also
between politics of cultural nationalism and those of
assimilation to the hegemonic cultural community. The nineties
witnessed a sea of change in global politico-economic scenarios.
For Asian-American ethnic groups, the designation of “Asia”
surpasses its old connotation as the origin of traditional
cultural imagination, calling for group loyalty and
authenticity. It also exceeds its function as a discursive
repertoire for the formation of cultural nationalism to indicate
something more pragmatic and tangible. “Asia” is now conceived
as a concrete geographical space, emerging on the cartography of
late capitalist globalization, forming a relation of production
with America or North America. The exchanges of capital,
technology, media, information, population, and labor grow
increasingly frequent between the two blocs, from which derives
a region of the Pacific Rim or Asia Pacific that challenges the
ethnic community formation based upon the politics of “claiming
America.”2
Within this nascent geopolitical
context, this paper will investigate the production of locality
in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
(1990). I argue that the production of locality as dramatized by
the novel consists of two phases of local spatialization in the
context of time-space compression: deterritorialization and
reterritorialization. Yamashita employs a specific narrative
style that wavers between magic realism and melodrama to address
the uncertainty, rupture, and incongruity derived from the
condition in which transnational capitalism exerts both negative
and positive impacts on local places in the margin. While the
novel’s magic realist narrative mode manifests the uncanniness
of deterritorialization, its melodramatic mode of narrative
seems to reveal the process of reterritorialization with which
the local people come to terms with the condition of
globalization. It is within the process of reterritorialization,
I contend, that the issue of Asian ethnicity can be
investigated. In the novel, Asian ethnicity is redefined in
materialistic terms to serve as social agents and means of
cultural production whose power of mediation both challenges the
violence of Western capitalism and supplements the rupture and
the gap Western capitalism leaves behind in the local place.
This specific ethnicity, thus, is empowered by the fact that
Japan is one of the driving forces of global capitalism
nowadays. In what follows, I will start my discussion through a
brief survey of the theories of the production of locality by
various cultural critics. Important as they are to frame the
investigation of the interaction between global forces and local
people, however, these theoretical constructions only tell half
of the story, since the novel is set in a remote region in the
Amazon Forest in Brazil. I therefore include the concept of
deterritorialization to try to fully explain the process of the
production of locality in the Third World.
The Production of Locality
The problem of the local has gained
increasing attention as the transnational flows of globalization
become the important factors that shape and reshape our everyday
cultural practices. While time-space compression in the process
of modernization spreads the logic of capitalism deep into the
remote regions of the world, reformulating their local modes of
production, it also creates a sense of crisis when the
“authentic” communities of the local place are threatened and
undermined. To cultural critics who are dedicated to the
conceptualization of theories of globalization, the local in
modernity takes on a dynamic meaning drastically different from
the pre-modern definition of the term. Instead of an enclosed
local community, whose cultural practice is shaped by its
face-to-face relationship with the immediate surroundings, the
local place is investigated in the principle of time-space
distanciation. As Anthony Giddens observes, in modernity the
idea of locality is a result of the increasing tearing away of
space from place. Using the term “locale” to refer to such a
local place, Giddens contends: “[L]ocales are thoroughly
penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite
distant from them. What structures the locale is not simply that
which is present on the scene” (1990: 19). Following Giddens,
John Tomlinson asserts that “locales are not merely
physical-geographical points or environments but, crucially,
physical settings of interaction” (1999: 52; italics in
original). Similarly, localities, as are suggested by Doreen
Massey, “are construction out of the intersections and
interactions of concrete social relations and social processes
in a situation of co-presence” (1994:138; original emphasis).
All three of them recognize the on-going process of negotiation
and interaction between the absent and the present, the local
and the global, place and space, and the concrete and the
abstract in the construction of locality. David Harvey,
furthermore, provides an even more sophisticated understanding
of the way global capitalism and local experiences come to
interact with each other. Like other cultural theorists, Harvey
conceives the production of place as a negotiation of all sorts
of interconnection and intersection. Yet, following Lefebvre, he
specifies the material experiences of globalization as the
important conduits through which social relations come to be
reshaped and redefined (Harvey, 1994:220-221). In other words,
the material experiences of modernity, i.e., capital,
technology, media, forms of communication etc., come in between
human and places to formulate not just one’s sense of place but
also all kinds of social relations.
The principle of the production of
locality as expressed by the above theorists appears to be an
objective formulation of how a local place comes into being in
the age of globalization. Yet, depending on the specific
location of the local place, the interactions between presence
and absence, the immediate surrounding and capitalist agents
could produce different impacts on different places. It is
important here to note that for places positioned at the far end
of Doreen Massey’s “power-geometry” (1993), globalizing forces
are experienced foremost as a shock, a rupture, and a force of
deterritorialization.
Deterritorialization in the Margin
“Deterritorialization” is the term
used by cultural critics to describe the ambivalent effect of
globalization upon local places. In such an experience, the
local is increasingly dis-placed and uprooted from its local
condition by distanciated forces. For Giddens, the formation of
a modern place as it is increasingly lifted out of or
disembedded from its immediate physical location is a natural
process, something that is built into the very making of the
local place. But such a sweeping generalization might not be
sufficient enough to investigate the uneven impact globalization
exerts on places that are not aligned with modernity through a
smooth transition of history. It is here that Doreen Massey’s
concept of power geometry becomes most relevant. As made
explicit by Massey, there is a distinctive power geometry of
globalization in which “different social groups and different
individuals are placed in a very distinct way in relation to
these flows and interconnections…. [S]ome are more in charge of
it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t;
some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are
effectively imprisoned by it” (1993:61). John Tomlinson notes
that globalization is an uneven process that works ambiguously
at different places. It privileges some and disadvantages
others, reproducing old and introducing new patterns of
domination and subordination (1999: 132). Depending on its
different access to the control center, each of the local places
is deterritorialized very distinctively. For places which
experience globalization at the far ends of power geometry, such
experiences could be a shock, erasing its original
anthropological significance, rendering its people mobile
physically, yet immobile socially or psychologically. It could
also create the uncanniness of cultural hybrid, conflating the
postmodern with the premodern, the Digital Age with the
primitive, cyberspace with mythical rites, etc. It is even more
complicated if we take into consideration the various boundaries
of social relations: nation, race, class, gender, ethnicity,
etc. as they are dissolved and reconstructed under the impact of
deterritorialization.
Reterritorialization and Cultural
Imagination
If Yamashita’s novel dramatizes a
panorama of the effects globalization brings to a locale in the
margin, it also strives to come up with a progressive formula of
how a deterritoralized place can start to reterritorialize
itself, to rebuild a local place, while in the meantime
annulling the forces of global capitalism that cause the rupture
between people and place, the uneven development among social
relations, and the gap between one’s social, physical standing,
and psychological well-being. Yamashita’s formula of
reterritorialization includes the process of cultural (re)imagining,
which is a point argued quite cogently by David Harvey. As I
have briefly shown above, for Harvey, social relations in a
certain place are often mediated across time and space through
capitalist cultural transaction and commodity exchange. In a
different context, Harvey also recognizes the power of
imagination as an important factor that constitutes one’s
identification with a place. By this he means to emphasize that
even though cultural production and material experiences of
modernity might affect our social relations and our relations to
a place, our imagination and the power of
representation, however, still play an important role in our
interpretations of and relations to a place (1993:17).3
It is important to note that the
concept of imagination proposed by Harvey is not one of romantic
fancy, but one made possible by means of inter-ethnic,
cross-class connections and collective memories across racial
boundaries. For Yamashita, such a cultural imagination is linked
especially with capitalist cultural production. That is to say,
cultural imagination is mediated through and produced by means
of global communication that connect people at disparate sites
of the globe with sounds and images via radio, cinema, TV,
cyberspace, etc. Yamashita’s idea is thus concordant with Arjun
Appadurai’s observation of global mediascapes. Appadurai writes:
The world we live in today is
characterized by a new role for the imagination in social life.
To grasp this new role, we need to bring together the old idea
of images, especially mechanically produced images (in the
Frankfurt School sense); the idea of the imagined community (in
Anderson’s sense); and the French idea of the imaginary (imaginaire)
as a constructed landscape of collective aspirations…. (1996:
31)
Appadurai’s observation points to a
new cultural imagination that is deeply engaged with and made
possible by the means of image production in the era of
globalization. What is especially relevant to Yamashita’s novel
in Appadurai’s formulation is the impact modern means of
cultural production have on the social and psychological lives
of the people. For Yamashita, innovative means of cultural
production provide the route through which local people connect
with one another on a cross-racial, trans-ethnic basis. While
they provide the way that holds together a multifarious imagined
community, the means of cultural production also open up an
interior space that was previously blocked by the forces of
deterritorialization. Yamashita’s project of
reterritorialization, thus, relies upon the strategy of
re-imagination fueled by material experiences of modernity to
counter the deterritorializing effects of globalization. And, as
my following arguments will make clear, it is the modernity of
Asia that gives substance to the collective cross-racial,
trans-ethnic imagination that constitutes the process of
reterritorialization.
Magic Realism and Melodrama
In Yamashita’s Through the Arc
of the Rain Forest, the Matacão in
the age of globalization, i.e., in time-space compression, is
caught in the vortex of high-speed transformation consisting of
constant deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This
globalizing process is entangled and intersected with the
regular production of locality in modernity, both enabling and
debilitating the (upward) social and spatial mobility of the
local people. Parallel to the struggle between two contradictory
forces that shape the life of the local place, Yamashita’s novel
is also intersected by two narrative styles, one magic
realistic,4
the other melodramatic. The two forms, however, are not
separated and entirely differentiated from each other. In fact,
the melodramatic form is the expression of the realistic axis of
“magic realism.”5
While the magic portion of the term is used as the vessel that
expresses what is fantastic and uncanny in posthumanist,
posthistorical time-place compression, the realistic
portion—melodrama--dramatizes the efforts on the part of the
trans-ethnic community to retain and reshape their social
relations, while struggling to anchor themselves in a place that
is increasingly losing its anthropological significance.
Magic realism is a literary mode
that incorporates two polar experiences and two conflicting
perspectives, one rational and mundane, the other supernatural
or uncanny yet accepted as part of prosaic reality. The
boundaries between the two are usually fluid and uncertain. Its
difference with fantasy lies in its setting, as magic realism is
often set in the modern world with realistic descriptions of
people and society, while fantasy is often linked with the
mythical world of far away places in ancient times. The mode is
greatly adopted to portray specific cultural political
situations in Latin American post/coloniality. The presence of
the magic is often an expression of the indigenous native Indian
cultural life, which exists in tandem with European rationality
articulated through a realistic mode. The hybrid nature of the
form addresses the specific condition of cultural hybridity that
is the daily reality of the colonial and the postcolonial. It
blends various uneven social experiences together: rural and
urban, Western and indigenous, agrarian and industrial,
emphasizing especially the process of mixing and bordering
within the context of the uneven power hierarchy that privileges
the West. The mode, however, is characterized by its political
intent to make salient the irony that emerges from the
juxtaposition and interaction between two forms of reality. Such
irony is often the weapon the writer uses to disturb the power
hierarchy that structures the social reality the characters
inhabit.
Yamashita translates magic realism
to delineate a local place in the margin caught in the whirlwind
of time-space compression in postmodernity. In her rendition of
the narrative mode, the fabulous and the uncanny do not always
point to the primitive or the indigenous; whereas the ordinary
and everyday experiences are not constituted by the pragmatic
reality defined by Western rationality either. There is a sense
in this novel that it is the transnational cultural flows that
implement the elements of uncanniness to the relatively banal
life experiences of the local community in the Third World.
On the other hand, the changing
social relations and the construction of locality unfold in a
melodramatic mode. The melodramatic conventions of the novel,
like the “magic” portion of magic realism, are reconfigured to
express the specific local cultural transition in a largely
deterritorialized, hybridized locale. In other words,
melodrama--what is often deemed as trite and sensational,
therefore lacking artistic value--is empowered to serve as a
textual innovation that is able to highlight the complex social
relations of the local people in globalization. To make my point
clear, I will try to differentiate Yamashita’s use of melodrama
from the conventional understanding of the form.
Traditional melodramatic mode of
narrative is often taken as a tool to support the traditional
and the mainstream ideologies in a relatively enclosed and
stable social environment. Originally a genre for mass-cultural
imagination, melodrama depicts highly personalized and intensely
enacted conflicts in ways that often evoke astonishment and
sense of excess.6
Peter Brooks explicates the characteristic features of
melodramatic mode of narrative as follows: “the indulgence of
strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematization;
extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy,
persecution of the good, and final reward of virtue; inflated
and extravagant expression; dark plottings, suspense,
breathtaking peripety” (1985: 11-12). Because of these banal and
sensational narrative features, melodrama and melodramatic modes
of narrative in fiction are rarely considered serious artistic
forms capable of expressing the complexity of human (un)consciousness,
multiple temporality, split subjects, and fragmentary
experiences of the real--those tissues and fabrics that
constitute modern and postmodern experiences. Brooks traces the
historical context in which melodrama is formed: “It comes into
being in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and
ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet where the
promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of
life, is of immediate, daily, political concern” (1985: 15).
Melodrama and melodramatic modes of narrative are, therefore,
often employed to “make the ‘real’ and the ‘ordinary’ and the
‘private life’ interesting through heightened dramatic utterance
and gesture that lay bare the true stakes” (1985: 14).
Yamashita takes up the narrative
mode to represent the sentiments, feelings, and human
relationships in the private sphere of the local people, which
are increasingly threatened and rendered vulnerable by the
hyperactive developments instigated by global capitalism. In
Yamashita’s hand, the banality and the superficiality of the
mode is transformed to address a different mass imagination, one
that is akin to postmodernist aesthetic populism. Because of
this rendering, melodrama becomes an appropriate form to address
the issues of family, and private feelings in trans-local,
trans-ethnic interactions mediated by Japanese cultural
production. By juxtaposing the uncanny imaginary and the banal
trans-local, trans-ethnic interactions in global cultural
production, Yamashita attempts to tackle the highly
contradictory, ambiguous, conflicting, and incongruous process
of the production of locality in the margin. In the following
analysis of the text, I will start by reading the novel’s magic
narrative in psychoanalytical terms, as it seems to be the most
powerful tool capable of fully illuminating the significant
relations of the novel’s specific narrative modes and its
global/local thematic engagements.
The Uncanny Experiences of
Deterritorialization in the Margin
Delving into the deep structure of
modernity, Anthony Giddens asserts that among other factors,
“[t]he dynamism of modernity derives from the separation of
time and space…” (1990: 16). He elucidates his points as
follows:
In premodern societies, space and
place largely coincide, since the spatial dimensions of social
life are, for most of the population, and in most respects,
dominated by “presence”—by localized activities. The advent of
modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering
relations between “absent” others, locationally distant from any
given situation of face-to-face interaction. In conditions of
modernity, place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric: that is to
say, locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of
social influences quite distant from them. What structures the
locale is not simply that which is present on the scene; the
“visible form” of the locale conceals the distanciated relations
which determine its nature. (1990: 18-19; original emphasis)
The use of the words “separation of
time and space,” “tearing space from place,” “phantasmagoric,”
all point to an increasing abstraction of the local social
relations and the ubiquity of invisible forces far away. Giddens
uses the words “disembedding’ and “lifting out” to highlight the
growing abstraction of social relations from local contexts. I
suggest reading such increasing phantasmagoria as the formation
of the Real that serves as the presymbolic substance of
globalization.7
The coming into being of the Real erases the significance of
those tangible and immediate local contexts in defining the
social relations of the place. It is as if the essence of the
place was sucked out of its husk by this invisible vampire—the
radical evil of the Real. Giddens maintains that the
disembedding is followed by the recombination of social
relations across time and space based upon trust; i.e. symbolic
tokens (most prominent among them, money) and expert systems.
Postmodernist theorists like Harvey and Jameson, however, are
prone to highlight capitalist logic and the exchange of
commodity as the means that reorganize local social relations.
Thus, in the case of time-space distanciation, the return of the
repressed does not make its uncanny appearance by way of the
spirit and the phantom, but in the multiple forms of money, the
abundant exploitable raw materials, advanced technologies,
corporate cultural machineries, media industries, and
communication networks. But what could be so uncanny about these
materialist displays that appear to be ever so regular,
familiar, rational, and real?
To be specific, what makes these
materialistic embodiments of modernity the forces of the uncanny
lies in the existence of a surplus value/enjoyment “that convert
things (pleasure objects) into their opposite,” to render
disgusting what is normally pleasurable (Žižek, 1993: 12).
Commenting upon Shakespeare’s consistent attention on the
paradoxes of “something begot by nothing”8 that find their
dramatic delineations in Richard II and King Lear,
Žižek perceives a change of the mode of production as the cause
of confusion and distortion that instigates the change of social
relations and the order of the world in Shakespeare’s times.
Like Giddens, Žižek posits the appearance of money as the means
by which “nothing begets something.” He expounds the historical
transition of Shakespeare’s times as follows:
It was no accident that Shakespeare
was so attentive to these paradoxes of “something begot by
nothing”… for he lived in a period of the rapid dissolution of
precapitalist social relations and of the lively emergence of
the elements of capitalism, i.e., in a period when he was able
daily to observe the way a reference to “nothing,” to some pure
semblance (speculating with “worthless” paper money that is only
a “promise” of itself as “real” money, for example), triggers
the enormous machinery of a production process that changes the
very surface of the earth. Hence Shakespeare’s sensitivity to
the paradoxical power of money which converts everything into
its opposite…. Lacan was well justified in modeling his notion
of surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) on the Marxian
notion of surplus value: surplus enjoyment has the same
paradoxical power to convert things (pleasure objects) into
their opposite, to render disgusting what is usually considered
a most pleasant “normal” sexual experience, to render
inexplicably attractive what is usually considered a loathsome
act…. (1993: 12-13)
This “nothing” is exactly the
process of abstraction Giddens promulgates to explain the advent
of modernity, and, as its consequence, globalization. While
Shakespeare lived and wrote in the beginning of the early
modern, Giddens’s historical positionality enables him to see
the surplus—the element of paradox that renders something
uncanny--as embodied in postmodernist institutional expressions.
As a contemporary Asian-American
writer who crosses multiple national and cultural borders,9
Yamashita sees the surplus of globalization from the margin
which is, far from being disrupted and rendered chaotic or
confused by the seminal logic of early capitalism, already a
finished product of “nothing begets something” in late
capitalist logic. In other words, unlike Shakespeare’s plays,
which often initiate a time of social turmoil or impending
disasters at the very beginning of the plays, Yamashita’s novel
begins with the infinite prospect of a local place in the
margin—the Matacão deep in the basin of
the Amazon Forest in Brazil. The utopia-like place is depicted
as a place full of hope, promise, and potentiality due to its
participation and exchanges with the global forces. Its very
vitality and fertility, paradoxically, is the outcome of
contamination and massive destruction caused by the
nonbiodegradable wastes accumulated and buried in other
populated parts of the world. The molten mass of these wastes
sinks down into the lower layers of the Earth’s mantle,
producing liquid deposits, which are subsequently squeezed
through underground veins to resurface in the virgin areas of
the Earth--the Amazon Forest. By the time it reemerges, a
miracle material is formed--a sort of wonder plastic that is
indestructible and malleable to be used as a raw material for
products of all kinds: “The remarkable thing about Matacão
plastic was its incredible ability to imitate anything…. Matacão
plastic managed to recreate the natural glow, moisture,
freshness—the very sensation of life” (Yamashita, 1990:142). The
uncanniness of the deterritorialized locale of the Matacão,
therefore, lies in the surplus value/pleasure of the plastic,
which is paradoxically both the elixir of life, the source of
beauty, health, and the force of the grotesque that turns the
beautiful, and the highly beneficial into the nemesis of a
plague.
The uncanniness of
deterritorialized locales can also be found in the metropolitan
center of New York City—GGG Enterprise, where the American
entrepreneur Jonathan B. Tweep works and eventually takes it
over. Like the Matacão, GGG, as the
source of capital which, unlike the Matacão,
occupies the upper level of Massey’s power geometry, cannot but
be deterritorialized by the force of capital to become one of
what French anthropologist Marc Angé
would have called the “non-places”—the places where organic
social relations and interactions are replaced by their
functionality in capitalist modernity. Serving as the nodal
points of a network of cultural flows, they are but “transit
points” and “temporary abodes” which no organic social relations
can be attached to and reproduced in.10
GGG’s transformation into a non-place starts at the time when
the company grows beyond the control of its creators, Georgia
and Geoffrey Gamble. By the time the stockholders take over the
company, the mechanism of corporate culture has already
dehumanized the place, turning it into a gigantic machine
constituted by “positions” and “offices” of all kinds. Yamashita
highlights GGG’s dehumanization by means of a uniform portrayal
of the clone-like female stuff, who are all characterized by “a
curly redhead with matching red nails and a Dallas telephone
operator’s voice” (Yamashita, 1990: 29). It is as if in order to
become a better “human” in the corporate culture, one has to
become non-human. Exactly because GGG is sustained not by
anthropologically significant human beings, but by functioning
particles and nodes in the corporate machine, the unassuming J.B.
can clandestinely become the invisible manipulator of the
company, and transmit the supermodern forms of corporate culture
into the Matacão.
A few of the characters positioned
on different locations of the global divisions of labor in late
capitalism also carry the magic of uncanniness: Jonathan B.
Tweep (J.B.), for example, our three-arm entrepreneur,
“single-handedly” (using his appendix arm) and stealthily
renovates and regenerates GGG Enterprises in New York and turns
the Matacão into a paradise for
investors, scientists, and interested parties of all kinds from
all over the world. J.B.’s surplus arm is an index of his
surplus value; namely, J.B.’s extraordinary gift of business
management, in which his human value lies, is paradoxically
derived from his active dehumanization of himself into a
functional and invisible node in the complex networks of the
company’s transnational operations. His very invisibility and
dehumanization guarantee his and the company’s viability.
And, of course, Kazumasa Ishimaru,
the Japanese immigrant with a ball twirling a few inches before
his forehead, cannot but be the very embodiment of uncanniness.
Even though Kazumasa’s life story does not dominate the complex
structures of the plot (his story is but one of at least 5 other
sets of stories surrounding other Brazilian civilians’ lives),
his appearance in the novel, no doubt, is the major factor that
we can still link up the novel with Asian-American literary
tradition (besides the fact that the author is an
Asian-American). Kazumasa’s appendage arrives, to quote Caroline
Rody, in “the thunderclap of postmodernity” (2000: 629), while
he was still a child in Japan. As Rody argues: the ball arrives
to disrupt any earlier story or
identity of which Kazumasa might have been a part and to spin
him into a realm of destabilized literary possibility, not to
mention a realm of migrancy, interethnic encounters, globalized
systems, an international trade in simulacra and rip-offs, and
competing religious, scientific, and touristic engagements with
a collapsing environment. (2000: 629).
The ball is therefore the
embodiment of the uncanniness of postmodernity that
redistributes our Asian immigrant on the power geometry of
globalization, up-scaling his class status and the nature of his
labor, thus alienating him from the earlier stereotypical
portrayal of Asian-Americans as manual laborers or railway
workers. Rachel Lee has pointed out that Kazumasa “seems a
subtle parody of a familiar archetype, the Chinese American
railroad worker…. Instead of doing the backbreaking work of
laying rails, Kazumasa—by virtue of his technical gifts (his
having a supernatural ball that can sense railway
deterioration)—renders travel more efficient by proleptically
remedying breakdowns before they occur” (Lee, 1999a: 242-244).
Lee, therefore, sees the ball as a narrative invention with
which Yamashita challenges an old Asian-American narrative
tradition that sought to integrate the labored bodies of the
immigrants as the functioning parties of the nation. Kazumasa’s
ball brings us to a postnational, global scenario dominated not
by “national utilities”, but by “competing capitalist units”
(Lee, 1999a: 244).
While I agree with the contention
that Yamashita is driving at postnational geopolitics with
regard to the portrayal of Kazumasa with the ball, I choose to
see the ball differently, not merely as a symbol of techniques
and skills that contribute to Kazumasa’s Asian immigrant social
upward mobility and his ability of transnational movement.
Rather, I read the ball first as a sign of Asian postmodernity
that renders Kazumasa a pseudo-cyborg, and second, as the
rupture, the cause and the route, the objet petite a of the
magic realistic narrative, calling for the intervention of
transnational community through a melodramatic lens.
First of all, the advent of the
ball occurs in Japan, one of the major political economic
players in the Pacific Rim. In the novel, Japan is portrayed and
highlighted, not according to its ethnic or cultural
characteristics, but its capitalist restructuring. No longer the
motherland to which Japanese-American turns to reinvent their
ethnic specificity or cultural memories, it is the source of
capital and technology that enables Kazumasa to become a pseudo-cyborg.
Donna Haraway defines cyborgs with the following features: “The
cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material
reality”; it is severed from its cultural or genealogical
origins, it “is resolutely committed to partiality, irony,
intimacy, and perversity”; it transgresses boundaries of all
kinds, it is willing “to formulate joint kinship with animals
and machine” (1991: 150-154). While Haraway concentrates on
sketching the cyborg’s possible features and infinite
possibility in upsetting and fracturing unified, hierarchical,
boundary-rigid subjects, and its potency in amalgamating with
both organic and non-organic beings, what is kept silent are the
material conditions that enable such imagination. Obviously,
cyborg imagination can only occur in locations with progressive
urbanization, advanced technology, solid scientific
infrastructures, and refined media industries and communication
systems. In other words, Japan has to become “one node of a
complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes” for
such imagination to take place (Appadurai, 1996:31). Kazumasa’s
ball, thus, points to the uncanniness of Yamashita’s nostalgia
for an ethnic imagined community that is associated not with
memories in the past but, as I will make clear in the following,
“memories” for what is possible in the future.
As the omniscient narrator of the
novel, who returns to tell the story after its disintegration in
the plague, the ball is also an uncanny narrator. The voice we
hear is uttered, not by the ball, but by the phantom of the
ball. In this manner, the ball as a narrator is laden with
memories and desire. As the ball claims, while it comes to the
end of story-telling:
By a strange quirk of fate, I was
brought back by a memory. Memory is a powerful sort of thing,
although at the time I made my reentry into this world, no
notice at all was taken of the fact. In fact, everyone was
terribly busy, whirling about, panting and heaving, dizzy with
the tumult of their ancestral spirits. This was one of these
monthly events under the influence of the full moon on a
well-beaten floor of earth on what had once been known, many
years before, as the Matacão. That I
should have been reborn like any other dead spirit in the
Afro-Brazilian syncretistic religious rite of Candomblé
is humorous to me…. Instead, brought back by a memory, I have
become a memory, and as such, am commissioned to become for you
a memory.” (Yamashita, 1990: 3)
The uncanniness of the ball
as the narrator lies in the fact that even if it is “brought
back by a memory,” the memory cannot be completed without its
story-telling. It seems that the memory—the cause of the ball’s
return--is paradoxically produced and completed at the very
moment it is articulated and embodied by the ball. The
trajectory of the ball’s memory thus reminds us of Žižek’s
description of the objet petit a, the object cause of
desire. For Žižek, the objet petit a is:
an object that is, in a way,
posited by desire itself. The paradox of desire is that it
posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., the object a is an
object that can be perceived only by a gaze “distorted” by
desire, an object that does not exist for an “objective”
gaze. In other words, the object a is always, by definition,
perceived in a distorted way, because outside this distortion,
“in itself,” it does not exist, since it is nothing
but the embodiment, the materialization of this very
distortion, of this surplus of confusion and perturbation
introduced by desire into so-called “objective reality.” (1993:
12; original emphasis)
The ball’s memory thus functions as
the desire which gives birth to the ball—the objet petit a—which
can only be perceived through the distortion of the
memory/desire.
But, whose memory and desire does
the ball embody? As the ball challenges the reader at the very
end of the novel: “Now the memory is complete, and I bid you
farewell. Whose memory you are asking? Whose indeed” (Yamashita,
1990: 212). The only hint the ball reveals is that it is not one
of those Afro-Brazilian religious spirits. And judging from the
tone of its own account—“That I should have been reborn like any
other dead spirit in the Afro-Brazilian syncretistic religious
rite of Candomblé is humorous to me”--it
might be something quite opposite to such local spirituality. I
suggest that we read the ball’s memory/desire as the
memory/desire of the radical Evil of the Real of globalization.
As Žižek emphasizes: “The object a is “objectively”
nothing, though viewed from a certain perspective, it assumes
the shape of “something” (1993: 12). The ball, the objet
petit a of postmodernist desire thus lends us an askewed
optic through which we see the distorted images produced by the
Real of globalization—the uncanniness of the Matacão
plastic, GGG and the three-arm American entrepreneur, Kazumasa
with the ball, the outburst of myriad products made of the
plastic, Chicolándia, the plague, and
other outlandish, uncanny factors of the novel—as if they are
prosaic, familiar, regular, and real.
The uncanniness of this awry look,
however, instigates “a nostalgic yearning for the ‘natural’
state in which things were only what they were… in which our
gaze had not yet been distorted by the anamorphotic spot” (Žižek,
1993: 12). In other words, to prevent taking the object a’s
awry vision for granted, to curb us from sliding into psychosis,
a symbolic order of the gaze is in order. Therefore the novel
invites us to read and see the stories told by the ball in the
Symbolic order of melodramatic soap opera. In the novel’s
foreword, the author inserts an “author’s note,” giving clear
instruction as to the genre of the story and the role such genre
plays in Brazilian collective imagination:
The story that follows is perhaps a
kind of novella, a Brazilian soap opera, of the sort
which occupies the imagination and national psyche of the
Brazilian people on prime-time TV nightly…. The prime-time
novella in Brazilian life is pervasive, reaching every
Brazilian in some form or manner regardless of class, status,
education or profession, excepting perhaps the Indians and the
very isolated of the frontiers and rural backlands. In traveling
to the most remote towns, one finds that a single television in
a church or open plaza will gather the people nightly to define
and standardize by example the national dress, music, humor,
political state, economic malaise, the national dream, despite
the fact that Brazil is immense and variegated. (Yamashita,
1990: “Author’s Note”)
It is important to note that the
Brazilian’s national pastime is not in any sense an “authentic”
local practice concentrating only on homogeneous historical and
spatial concerns. Rather, it is a vibrant engagement with the
mass media that is open and receptive to outside influences,
while in the meantime, it brings together the public’s
collective imagination as to their specific local cultural
practices. It is, therefore, not off the mark to say that in the
symbolic order of the soap opera, the surplus of globalization
is turned into fantastic interaction between what Arjun
Appadurai would have termed, the image, the imagined, and the
imaginary. As I have shown earlier, through the intersecting
relationship of the three terms, Appadurai attempts to show
imagination in globalization as a mediated process that
restructures our field of imaginary.
In Through the Arc, the
melodramatic plot of the novel provides just such a terrain in
which imagination works through various modes of capitalistic
mediation—technology, mass media, and corporate culture--to
invoke a new imagined community, thus constructing a different
pattern of desire. To make such terrain possible, Yamashita’s
reformulation of the concept of Asian ethnicity proves to be a
crucial move.
Reterritorialization, Melodrama,
and Asian Ethnicity
If the magic realistic thrust of
the novel makes salient the impact of deterritorialization upon
local culture, the melodramatic aspect of it affirms the process
of reterritorialization through an innovative reconstruction of
the concept of ethnicity. Historically, Asian ethnicity is often
represented through Orientalist discourses that put stress upon
its exoticism, its association with primitive modes of
production and lower class status, and its docility and lack of
masculine characteristics. In response to such discursive as
well as social racism, Asian- American writers tend to
resuscitate the masculinity of the ethnic members, to place its
labor class ancestors in positions where they can negotiate
their original cultural traditions and the demand of the nation.
In other words, they strive to claim America through the
strategies of cultural nationalism. The problematics with such
strategies lie in the fact that the concept of nation remains
bounded by White discursive construction, and the designation
that marks the specificity of the ethnic group — “Asia” grows
increasingly abstract and insignificant. On the other hand,
Asian ethnicity as a category of social relation is either
associated with Orientalist fantasy of the East, or nativist
longing for a cultural origin. Or it becomes a sign laden with
the traumatic memories of suppression, internment, and
exclusion.11
The 90s’ witnessed a growing
dissatisfaction with such identity politics. The rise of Asia in
the cartography of globalization provides new fuel for Asian
American communities to link up their social and economic
success in America with the success of the Asian economic
tigers. Evelyn Hu-DeHart argues that the two success narratives
converge “to produce the articulation of a new narrative: Asian
Americans as transnationals and bridge builders on the Pacific
Rim. As a grand, new narrative, it also posited an articulation
between Asia and America, with Asian Americans as the primary
instrument of this linkage and connection” (1999: 9). David
Palumbo-Liu, likewise, seeks to include Asia Pacific as a
determining factor that not only helps shape America’s sense of
the nation, but might eventually help restructure Asian/American
psyche and redefine their “space as Pacific Rim space and the
transnationalization of the local” (1999: 7).
Published in 1990, Through the
Arc heralds the shift to transnationalism in the arena of
Asian-American writing tradition. In the novel, Yamashita
dislodges the concept of ethnicity from its earlier attachment
to cultural nationalist longing for a sign of the origin. While
she reinserts the concept into an Asian-Pacific context with
vibrating global capitalist transactions, she simultaneously
projects it into the realm of futuristic fantasy. As Rachel Lee
suggests, Yamashita endows upon Kazumasa’s Asian ethnicity a
postmodernist, transnational quality of higher social standing,
metropolitan background, and the ability to move transnationally
(Lee, 1999b). It is, however, important to note that there is a
poststructuralist attempt on the part of Yamashita to
reformulate not just the “content” of ethnic components, but the
very forms and structures that define what we usually connect
with the concept of ethnicity. Rather than serving as the sign
of historical victimization, Asian (Japanese) ethnicity is
reformulated to serve as a functional social agent that produces
social imaginary through an Asian style cultural
production—karaoke--and creates a condition where trans-ethnic
coalition can be possible. On the other hand, the idea of
family, which was often taken as the site for the transmission
of ethnic cultural tradition in Asian- American literary
tradition, is reconfigured to serve as the stage on which
trans-ethnic social intercourses take place to bind together a
private sphere that is increasingly falling apart and rendered
into “non-places” by global forces.
Beside Kazumasa’s story, the
melodramatic plot of the novel consists of four other sets of
stories; three of them concern the Brazilian commoners’
interaction with global capitalism brought about first by the
commercial benefit of feathers and in plastic, later. In
contrast to the foreign influences represented by Kazumasa and
J.B., Through the Arc incorporates stories of various
local people from the lower social strata of Brazilian society:
Mané Pena, the Brazilian farmer who
discovers the commercial use of the feather, and the owner and
discoverer of the impenetrable field of solid substance called
the Matacão; Batista and Tania Aparecida
Djapan, the couple from São Paulo, who
successfully establish a thriving pigeon business through an
ingenious combination of local belief in miracle messages and
Tania’s smart business management; Chico Paco, the former
fisherman who alone establishes a cult by using substitutes in a
walking pilgrimage to carry out promises made to the saints; and
Lourdes, Kazumasa’s competent and loyal maid and his love
interest.
As grassroots samples of what can
be counted as the representatives of their racial, local, and
ethnic cultural specificity, these characters are surprisingly
devoid of any ethnographical “authenticity,” or anthropological
relationality to their historical past and cultural roots. It is
fair to say that the melodramatic narrative mode delineates
these local people in a way that deprives them of their
psychological depth and severs their connection with a linear
local history. Rather than well-rounded characters defined by,
and restricted to, their local cultural and historical
traditions, these characters seem but mere displays of local
“types” whose local colors are painted from the outside, not
characteristics that intrinsically creates conflict and
psychological development. Even though they are shown to
practice local religious rites, pilgrimages for answered
prayers, for example, the ridiculing accounts of the fad of
substituted pilgrimages immediately diminish the spiritual
significance of the rites. The organic relations between the
rites and the local community are, therefore, absent.
Nonetheless, it is this lack of
depth and psychological sophistication in terms of its
description of Brazilian local cultural life, that the
melodramatic valence of the novel is affined to postmodernist
celebration of “’aesthetic populism’—a kind of wonderment at and
valuation of everything ordinary and banal, an embrace and
incorporation of the whole degraded landscape of schlock and
kitsch, of TV series and Readers’ Digest culture, of
advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B
Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature with its airport
paperback categories….” (Jameson, 1984: 54-55; cited in Sobchack,
1991: 335). As the author’s note describes so vividly, what
brings the Brazilian local people together is not any religious
rites with cultural significance, but the “rites” of soap opera
watching that goes on every night, “which occupies the
imagination and national psyche of the Brazilian people”
regardless of their “class, status, education or profession.”
The locality of Brazilian community thus involves a different
framework of imagination with mediated images as its central
reference and dynamics of change and adaptation to what is new
and foreign, which eventually becomes part of the local
memories, even if they are given to them through mediation.
Depthlessness, banality, borrowed memories, enthusiasm for fad
and fashions created by mass media, receptivity to global
forces, and easy compliance to technology and global mechanism
of production and consumption--this postmodernist cultural logic
has become the local cultural logic that operates in the
melodramatic world of Through the Arc and eventually
defines its process of the production of locality.
Even though the novel discloses the
deterritorialized effect of globalization upon local places
through the exploration of the force of the uncanny, in the
melodramatic expressions of the text, the local people’s
encounter with capitalism seem to bring new opportunity for them
to reinvent their social and cultural identities. Free from any
allegiance to what is traditional and authentic, the grassroots
figures in the novel possess the remarkable ability to be
pliable, to bend and stretch to all situations that prove to be
beneficial for individual and collective survival. Man? becomes
a feather guru and honorary professor on featherology at a
university, who makes TV appearances from time to time; Tania
transforms herself from a housewife to a smart businesswoman
whose work sends her all over the world, and liberates her from
a jealous husband. Chico becomes Radio Chico when he turns his
free service into a radio station to mediate between those who
need substitute pilgrims and those who are willing to do the
job. While retaining his boyish, angelic charm, Chico Paco has
learned “to be verbal and vocal on the radio” (Yamashita, 1990:
163) like a disc jockey. In all three of the cases, what started
as local cultural practices are soon involved with, and mediated
by, the forces of media and corporate culture. Local belief
systems—pilgrimages performed in return to answered prayers,
miracle messages carried by pigeons and trivial hobbies of life
like the use of feathers to reduce the pressures of life, are
commodified and turned into fashions and money-making
businesses. The Matacão becomes a booming
town with the presence of Mané’s cult of
featherologists, Radio Chico and his radio station, pilgrims and
faithful listeners, Batista’s “Djapan Pigeons Incorporated”, and
on top of that, numerous speculators swarming into town to
attempt to locate, mine and manufacture the newly-discovered
plastic.
Yet the novel seems to suggest that
a remote Third World town’s involvement with globalization has
to strike a subtle balance between commercial prosperity in the
public sphere and intimate human relationships in the domestic
sphere. The novel’s plot development takes a downward spiral as
the characters start to feel the threat of the disintegration of
human relationships by characters traveling too far, moving too
much, and making too much money. Batista, for example, makes a
fortune out of the pigeon communication business. But as the
company’s operation turns global, he and his wife, Tania
Aparecida, start drifting away from each other. Chico’s invalid
playmate and homosexual love interest, Gilberto, likewise, after
recovering from his disability because of a miracle, becomes
hyperactive and grows out of control, and eventually dies in an
absurd accident while performing as a human cannonball.
Furthermore, the feathers that bring fame and fortune to Mané
cause the death of many cultists who jump from mysterious and
unknown high places in a feather-induced trance. Worst of all,
the feathers carry a kind of bacteria, which not only causes a
typhus plague, but is also responsible for the final downfall of
the Matacão, because the bacteria that
cause typhus are also capable of devouring the plastic.
Only Kazumasa, our Japanese
immigrant, survives the sudden fortune, the separation from
Lourdes, the kidnapping by J.B., and the disintegration of the
Matacão. And unlike Batista, he also gets
the woman. What is the cultural investment on Yamashita’s part
to arrange such a plot? And what kind of hero is Kazumasa? These
questions seem to provide the gangway through which we can start
to ruminate on the function of Asian (Japanese) ethnicity in the
age of globalization.12
As a type character, Kazumasa is
cast as kind-hearted, other-oriented, almost Christ-like, open
to cultural differences and easily assimilated to his
surroundings. With his ball he is skillful in the high-tech
world. He is employed by the railway company to detect track
deterioration back in Japan; in the Matacão,
he is pursued and hunted for his ability to locate the plastic
mine. Yamashita completes the profile of the Japanese immigrant
by adding Cousin Hirosi as Kazumasa’s alter ego. Indeed, Hirosi
does not have a story of his own; his sole function in the novel
is to embody Japanese talent in investment and finance which
Yamashita finds incongruous to Kazumasa’s characteristics, yet
necessary to paint a better picture of Japanese cultural
specificity in the age of globalization.
Kazumasa’s involvement with the
local community occurs when Batista accidentally writes about
him in one of his miracle pigeon messages. Inspired by the
miracle message and pushed by Lourdes, Kazumasa wins numerous
lotteries and finds himself a billionaire overnight. Unlike
other local people who capitalize on what were local cultural
practices, Kazumasa localizes his capital by giving away the
money to whoever stands in his charity line. Even though
Kazumasa is envisioning a return of the money to the people, the
outflow of money is balanced out and returned many times over
through Hiroshi’s international investments. Without his
knowledge, Kazumasa simultaneously becomes the biggest
shareholder of GGG and what the local people call the “Japanese
Robin Hood.” Here Yamashita seems to make a bold suggestion that
Asian engagement with global capitalism can work to mediate the
capitalists on top and the grassroots down below. Her plot
arrangements seek to topple the image of the “ugly Japanese” who
attempts to buy out real estate and enterprises in the West; she
also attempts to dismantle Asian-American discursive
constructions that link Asia or Asian-American communities with
the down-trodden in the third world. Indeed, Kazumasa feels a
natural kinship with the local people, but it is so not because
they share a history of suppression or white domination, but
because they share a dream of simple happiness based upon family
values, which are hard to come by while their world is quickly
deterritorialized by transnational cultural flows.
As a result, it is Asian-style
capitalism that seems to offer a solution for the uneven
development between the public and private spheres under the
influence of Western capitalism. As is shown above, Western
capitalism, represented by J.B. and GGG, turns the town into a
hyperactive money-making machine, a town in which people
experience upward social mobility and transnational movements at
the expense of personal relationship in the private sphere. In
other words, if western capital affects local people’s imaginary
pattern by offering them a better position from which they can
cross the boundaries of gender, class, race, and ethnicity, they
seem to do it with a sense of loss. What is experienced as
“surplus” in the novel’s magic narrative is expressed in its
melodramatic grammar through a feeling of incongruity, a sense
of loss, and an indefinite longing for something that can only
be experienced by people caught in the historical juncture
between the residual and the emergent forms of cultural life.13
Chico Paco’s mother, for example, insists on a country life
style while living in his fancy Matacão
apartment by installing a clay wood-burning stove in his modern
kitchen and taking taxi to wash clothes by the river everyday.
Mane Pena, likewise, also experiences the contradictory effect
the commercialization of feathers has brought upon his life. He
discovers the soothing effect of feathers which can help people
relax. But the process in which the feathers are commodified
brings increasing pressure on Mane to find the most exotic, and,
therefore, the most relaxing, feathers. In other words, the more
he contributes to featherology, the less he is able to enjoy the
effect of the product. His fame and wealth in the public sphere
thus cause his alienation from his laid-back Brazilian life
style.
In the novel, the feeling of
rupture, of incongruity, of something missing is expressed by
the use of the word saudades. Saudades is
described as a specific Brazilian bittersweet feeling of longing
and nostalgia. For different people it means different things.
For Kazumasa it is his feeling and longing for Lourdes; for
Tania Apacida it is her “wanderlust, which kept her from staying
anywhere long enough to form attachments …. Perhaps, it was part
of something the Brazilians called Saudades, the
bittersweet sensation of exuberant but temporary joy. To have it
all the time, you have to keep moving on and savoring memories”
(Yamashita, 1990: 174). Tania’s liberation through the feeling
of Saudades, however, leaves Batista a lonely man. Both
Kazumasa and Batista are suffering from the pain of separation
from their loved ones. Overcome by the feelings of despondence
and despair, they weep and wail while calling the names of their
loved ones. The overt emotionalism expressed through the
delineation of the characters’ sentimental reactions to their
loss, and their nostalgia for their loved ones might be
perceived as trait of bad tastes and artistic flaws. But in my
view, Saudades is an important emotional component that
provides the disintegrating community a link with their
anthropological significance. It is a nostalgic emotion that
makes possible a longing for home and family at the time when
their anthropological function and significance are increasingly
emptied out.
While family and home are rendered
into non-places, Yamashita inserts a substituted place where
people gather to express their feelings and formulate
trans-ethnic relationships—cousin Hirosi’s karaoke chain stores.
In contrast to GGG’s Matacão office
building, where human traits and human relationships are
completely wiped out, the karaoke stores are shown as the sites
where human feelings find their expressions. This banal and
shallow form of entertainment provides an imaginary mechanism
through which one is able to reattach to one’s human feelings
and human worth. Both Kazumasa and Batista frequent Hiroshi’s
karaoke store during times of depression and longing. As part of
Japanese postmodern inventions, karaoke satisfies the desire of
ordinary people in many aspects. Unlike movies—what Benjamin
calls the works of art in the age of mechanical
reproduction—karaoke does not just seduce and channel the
audience’s gaze and desire through its image reproduction. With
the accompaniment of an entire orchestra, produced by the sound
system, and the visual image on the screen to respond to all
emotions expressed through the song one sings, one is able to
embody, stage, and project ordinarily unutterable emotions. The
expressions of feeling through kinetic, vocal, musical, and
image production and reproduction thus create a site where
subjective mood and emotions interact with the work of art in
the Age of Asian mechanical reproduction to produce a specific
mode of imagination: an imagination that is able to soothe the
pain inscribed by the gap and the rupture created by the
transition from deterritorialization to reterritoralization at
the local place.
The domain of feeling, sentiments,
and emotions is usually left outside the consideration of
serious artistic writings. Even within the discursive terrains
of minority literature, it appears relatively insignificant and
inconspicuous in front of grand issues like history, memories,
and resistance. Through the narrative mode of melodrama,
Yamashita takes up the issue of private feelings, the inner
chamber of ones’ heart, as the site where an ethnic form of
capitalist cultural production can start to construct a pattern
of imaginary expression fit for those who are left behind,
thrown outside the institutions, caught in between mobility and
immobility. Yamashita thus reinvests on postmodernist “aesthetic
populism” to give it a materialist history, and to endow upon
its banality and shallowness, not a depth, but an ethnic
position on the cartography of globalization. From that position
Yamashita draws down a route for trans-local, trans-ethnic
grassroots imagination.
Conclusion
To investigate the Matacão’s
process of reterritorialization through Harvey’s formula of the
construction of place, we find some interesting and significant
modifications. In the novel, the logic of global
capitalism—corporate culture, the principle of production and
consumption, media and communication, commodification of
cultural expressions and religious rituals—indeed change the
social relations in the Matacão. People
who are formerly situated at the lower strata of social
scale—domestic women, farmers, fishermen—find ways to reinvent
themselves by means of becoming deeply involved with global
forces. A domestic woman becomes a global traveler, a farmer
becomes a TV celebrity, and a fisherman becomes a DJ/prophet.
Yet, as they enjoy the immense possibility of mobility, attract
thousands of audience and listeners ready to take in whatever
they have to say, they seem to have less ability to locate
themselves, and less worthwhile things to say. They are situated
in the non-place on Massey’s map of power geometry. Unlike
Harvey’s New York City citizens, who are able to re-imagine
Times Square—the symbol of speculative, gaudy capitalism—as the
landmark and the spectacle, in front of which all classes can
intermingle to produce collective memories and to inspire a
sense of community (Harvey, 1993:17-18), the Matacão’s
plastic production fails to create such an opportunity for
re-imagination. While the powers of imagination and
representation gradually die out in the sector of western
capitalism, they are redistributed to Asian capitalist cultural
production. The banality and superficiality of the specific
grassroots forms of expression, plus Kazumasa’s sentimentality,
become the only source of imagination.
Through the Arc of the Rain
Forest challenges Harvey and Massey’s theories accordingly.
While Harvey maintains that it is possible for people to
reinterpret and re-imagine local places originally constructed
for the sake of profit and speculation, turning them into a
place where cross-racial coalition can be formed and collective
memories evoked, Through the Arc demonstrates that the
uncanniness of global capitalism might confine and restrict
Third World people’s imagination within its logic. Massey, on
the other hand, is concerned with the uneven power relationship
at different ends of the power geometry in time-space
compression. The worry is that transnational cultural flows
might not be able to benefit or affect people evenly; some might
become immobilized because others turn out to be highly mobile.
The novel shows that the success in promoting yourself through
the mediation of transnational cultural products or institutes,
the ability to cross racial, gender, class, and ethnic
boundaries, and the opportunity to move and travel, might not be
able to compensate for the losses resulting within the domain of
the home, domestic space, inner feeling, and private
relationships. Its melodramatic form seems to address the
failure of such a domain in the face of the magic capitalism;
yet, in the meantime, it struggles to come to terms with such
failure through an Asian immigrant with his capital, technology,
kind heart, karaoke, and a specific power of imagination for
trans-ethnic coalition through sentimental bounding. Asian
ethnic specificity is thus reformulated by means of weaving
family values, domestic cultural and imaginary production
together. The novel’s engagement with the production of
locality, consequently, opens up a discursive and imaginary
pattern that patches/matches the odd couple of magic capitalism
and melodramatic imagination with an Asian style.
Bibliography
Angé, Marc.
Non-places: Introduction to the Anthropology of
Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995.
Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and
Difference in the Global Culture Economy.” Modernity at
Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:
Minnesota UP, 1996. 27-47.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic
Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of
Excess. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
Dirlik, Arif, ed. What’s in a
Rim: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea.
Boulder, Colo.: Weatview P, 1993.
---. “Asians on the Rim:
Transnational Capital and Local Community in the Making of
Contemporary Asian America.” Amerasia Journal 22.3
(1996): 1-24.
Giddens, A. The Consequences of
Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg
Manifesto.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. 149-81.
Harvey, David. The Condition of
Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change.
Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1989.
---. “From Space to Place and Back
Again: Reflections on the Conditions of Postmodernity.” Ed.
Jonetal Bird. Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global
Change. London: Routledge, 1993. 3-29.
Hu-Dehart, Evelyn, ed. Across
the Pacific: Asian Americans and Globalization.
Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism,
or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review.
146 (July-August 1984): 53-94.
Lee, Rachel. “Asian American
Cultural Production in Asian-Pacific Perspective.” Boundary
2. 26.2 (Summer 1999): 254-56.
---. “ Global-Local Discourse and
Gendered Screen Fictions in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the
Arc of the Rain Forest.” The Americans of Asian American
Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999. 106-138.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production
of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Massachusetts:
Blackwell, 1991.
Massey, Doreen. “The Political
Place of Locality Sutdies.” Space, Place and Gender.
Cambridge, UK: Polity P, 1994. 125-45.
---. “Power-geometry and a
Progressive Sense of Place.” Mapping the Futures: Local
cultures, global change. Ed. Bird, Jon. London and New York:
Routledge, 1993. 59-69.
Palumbo-Liu, David.
Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
Rody, Caroline. “Impossible Voices:
Ethnic Postmodern Narration in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and
Karen Tri Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest.”
Contemporary Literature. 41.4 (2000 Winter): 618-41.
Slemon, Stephen. “Magic Realism as
Postcolonial Discourse.” Magical Realism: Theory, History,
Community. Eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora, and Wendy B. Faris.
London: Duke UP, 1995. 407-26.
Sobchack, Vivian. “Postmodern Modes
of Ethnicity.” Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity & the American
Cinema. Ed. Lester D. Frideman. Urbana and Chicago: U of
Illinois P, 1991. 329-52.
Tomlinson, John. Globalization
and Culture. Cambridge: Polity P, 1999.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and
Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Through
the Arc of the Rain Forest. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1990.
---. “Karen Tei Yamashita.”
Interview by M. S. Murashige. Words Matter: Conversations
with Asian American Writers. Ed. King-Kok Cheung. Honolulu,
HI: U of Hawaii P, 2000. 320-42.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime
Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.
---. Looking Awry: An
Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.
London: MIT P, 1993.
Notes:
-
The
completion of this article was made possible by a research grant
provided by National Science Council (NSC-91-2411-H-005-003). I
am much obliged to the generosity of NSC. I also want to express
my gratitude to my research assistants, Yi-ting Luo and Su-hong
Liu for their ardent help in all aspects of the project. The
generous and insightful comments from two anonymous reviewers
help me trim out the redundant details to give the article a
clear contour. I appreciate their time and attention for an
underpaid job that is crucial for elevating academic expertise.【回本文】
-
For the
definition of the terms “the Pacific Rim” and “the Asian
Pacific,” see Dirlik (1993). The term is usually economically
defined as a supraregion formed through a network of economic
zones located across the Pacific that transcend the borders of
nations. As Dirlik argues, although the term of the Pacific Rim
refers to a certain geographical location, it is fundamentally
an “ideation constructs” characterized by human activity and
interactions among cultural and economic networks. For his ideas
on Asian American community in the age of globalization, see
Dirlik (1996).【回本文】
-
Using Times
Square in New York City as a case in point, Harvey suggest that
though the place is created as a representation of what is
speculative, commercial and gaudy, New York citizens however
have turned the place into a site where people from all classes
and races can mingle. The commerce-oriented place thus invites
imagination and evokes collective memories, while in the mean
time it seems to cross the boundaries of all forms of social
relations. See Harvey (1993: 17).【回本文】
-
In an
interview Yamashita defies the term “magic realism” as a proper
generic label for her novel. But the contexts of her comments
suggest that what she defies is the attempt to link Brazil with
any sort of primitive myth or indigenous fantasy. For her there
is no authentic Brazilian native culture to support a magic
realistic mode that sees the local cultural as in any sense
fantastic, mysterious and uncanny. She explains: “…the whole
idea of the book being any sort of magic realism is on the edge
of making no sense. Brazil has a very middle-class structure
that involves international technology that comes from this
country and from Japan, yet next door you have people who have
no relationship to that technology or who use that technology in
a manner that has nothing to do with it…. And that’s the kind of
thing Through the Arc is trying to convey about living in
a country that’s both developing and developed—and has an Indian
and aboriginal culture that is undiscovered and dying.” See
Yamashita (2000: 328). As my following arguments will make
clear, I use “magic realism” not to underscore the uncanniness
in the local, native, and aboriginal culture vis-à-vis
a rationalistic First World presence. Rather, it is the
uncanniness of the global forces that is rendered magical
realistic.【回本文】
-
Stephen
Slemon’s definition of magic realism is relevant here. He argues
“The term “magic realism is an oxymoron, one that suggests a
binary opposition between the representational code of realism
and that, roughly, of fantasy. In the language of narration in a
magic realist text, a battle between two oppositional systems
takes place, each working toward the creation of a different
kind of fictional world from the other.” While I do not stress
the blurred boundary between magic realism and melodrama in my
arguments, it is important to note that since the driving forces
behind deterritorialization and reterritorialization are
identical, the distinction between the two processes and the
line between the two modes of narrative cannot be all that
clear. See Slemon (1995: 409). 【回本文】
-
See Brooks
(1985).【回本文】
-
Žižek’s
definition of the Lacanian Real best illuminates the elusive,
ambiguous feature of the Real of globalization. He writes: “The
Real is the fullness of the inert presence, positivity; nothing
is lacking in the Real—that is, the lack is introduced only by
the symbolization; it is a signifier which introduces a void, an
absence in the Real. But at the same time the Real is in itself
a hole, a gap, an opening in the middle of the symbolic order—it
is the lack around which the symbolic order is structured. The
Real as a starting point, as a basis, is a positive fullness
without lack; as a product, a leftover of symbolization, it is,
in contrast, the void, the emptiness created, encircled by the
symbolic structure” (1989: 170). In my reading, the Real is both
the starting point and the product and leftover of the Symbolic
of the globalized world. As the beginning, the Real of
globalization designates the pervasiveness, the ubiquity of
transnational cultural flows; yet, as the leftover of the
Symbolic order constituted by such transnational flows, or
forces from far away, the Real simultaneously functions as the
kernel of emptiness, lack and scar created by the transnational
flows. Wherein lies the radical evil of the Real. While it might
appear to be an all-encompassing force of fullness, providing
standardized, homogeneous cultural goods, its fullness is based
upon a depletion of local specificity. The use of the idea of
the Real, thus, prescribes the return of the repressed in a
seemingly abundant, opulent, and prosperous transnational social
historical context.【回本文】
-
Žižek
defines this phrase as the logic of desire that posits its own
cause, i.e., the objet petit a, paradoxically as
the embodiment of the surplus of confusion introduced by desire
into the “objective reality.” The objet petit a,
therefore is both the cause and the route through which desire
sees its own embodiment in reality. See Žižek (1993: 12).
【回本文】
-
Yamashita is
a Japanese American writer who was born in the United States,
but had lived and written in Brazil for 10 years before she
moved back to Southern California in 1984. 【回本文】
-
The French
anthropologist Marc Angé defines
“non-places” as follows: If a place can be defined as
relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space
which cannot be defined as relational or historical, or
concerned with identity will be a non-place…. A world where
people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit
points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or
inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squads, holiday clubs and
refugee camps, shantytowns…); where a dense network of means of
transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where
the habitué of supermarkets, slot
machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through
gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus
surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the
temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others)
a new object. (Augé, 1995:78 cited in
Tomlinson, 1999:109). 【回本文】
-
For a
detailed discussion of Kazumasa as a revised version of earlier
Asian American male characters/railroad workers, see Lee (1999a:
242-250). 【回本文】
-
Recent
Asian- American studies have stressed upon the individual
literary tradition of different ethnic group to avoid
universalizing a certain ethic group’s specific experiences of
diaspora as the experiences for the bigger community of
Asian-America. I conflate Kazumasa’s Japanese-American identity
with his Asian-American identity because, while Kazumasa’s life
story originated from Japan, Yamashita’s portrait of Kazumasa as
an improved version of Asian-American male character seems to
respond to and attempt to challenge Asian-American writing
tradition as a whole, not just Japanese-American writing
tradition. Kazumasa’s earlier profession as a railroad engineer,
for example, appears to resonate with Chinese-American railroad
workers found in Maxine Hong Kingston’s and Frank Chin’s texts.
Kamzumasa’s transnational traveling from Japan to Brazil and his
involvement with a trans-ethnic community also makes it hard for
us to situate him as a prototype Japanese-American male
character. 【回本文】
-
Raymond
William uses “the dominant, the residual, and the emergent” to
define different moments of cultural expressions. See Williams
(1977: 121-27). 【回本文】
