Reframing Global/Local Poetics in thePost-Imperial Pacific: Meditations on‘Displacement,’ Indigeneity, and Area Studies

I. Displacing the US-Area Field Imaginary: For 'displacement,' the OED tracks the quasi-materialist tangle of the English semantic record when it tells us that rulers, plants, waters, feelings of aggression, and day-laborers all can be displaced, that is, shifted, removed, deflected--in short, put out-of-place by some disruptive structural, biological, or tactical shift, as revealed in the OED's macroinstance of creative destruction from 1880, "the displacement of human labor ... through machinery" ("displacement"). Nowadays, with the more ethereal rise of diaspora discourse, borderlands paradigms, and postcolonial dissemination models of subjectivity into power across the professional US academy, displacement has become a virtually normative concept/tactic by which to talk of, track, and organize the makings of literature, knowledge, community, and culture. What Gayatri Spivak pedagogically embraces in her own transnational work as the "practical structure of deconstruction as reversal-displacement" ("Explanation and Culture: Marginalia" 377) (1) has had a far-reaching impact upon the disciplinary regimes, area formations, and the fast-coming-unglued "field imaginary" of the fast-globalizing 1990s. (2) The multi-sited editors of Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial Perspectives note that "rearticulated notions of exile and diaspora" have become so commonplace by now in Anglo-American postcolonial discourse that 'displacement' is registered not just as a specific effect of post-independence history but, much more free-floatingly, is being used "as a condition and a trope for cultural criticism itself" (Mufti 2). (3) Working his way from the emergent and peripheral into the theory-dominant sector, (4) Homi Bhabha can serve as a synedochic instance for this large-scale US shift to install outer-national frameworks valuing postcolonial displacement, as when he writes in "The World and the Home:" Where the transmission of 'national' traditions was once the major theme of a world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees--these border and frontier conditions--may be the terrains of world literature. The center of such a study would neither be the 'sovereignty' of national cultures, nor the 'universalism' of human culture, but a focus on those 'freak displacements.' (449) (The quoted term is Nadine Gordimer's) emanating from postcolonial societies and reflected in its "unhomely" writing. Bhabha urges this "unhomely" mode of writing weird counter-English, even as he repetitively foregrounds the out-of-synch, off-center, and culturally doubled lives of postcolonial subjects not all quite situated (well-placed) like himself in the English Departments at Harvard, Chicago, and Oxford. (5) As another global sign of this trans-disciplinary shift warping the field practices of the 1990s, diasporic discourse arose (as in the work of Paul Gilroy on the Black Atlantic and Stuart Hall on ex-imperial England et al.) to register disjunctive, multi-sited, and transnational modes reflecting what James Clifford calls "dwelling-in-displacement" that prior nation-centered models of assimilation, citizenship, ethnicity, and settlement could not account for. As Clifford registered the 'displacing' effect of this shift to register diasporas upon US and British cultural studies in his travelling-theory study Routes, "[d]iasporic language appears to be replacing, or at least supplementing, minority discourse" (254-55). Displacement, we might recall, in the more psychoanalytical mode of libidinal agonistics, can register the discursive shift of aggression away from a powerful father-figure towards one less powerful emerging figure, to masquerade retaliation or occlude dissent (Bullock 232). Resisting free-floating homologies of travelling as a de-nationalizing movement of "cosmopolitican" theories, peoples, and ideas, Timothy Brennan has urged the geo-materiality of this subliminal recognition upon post-colonial studies: that "'displacement,' far from being neutral, is designed precisely to force readers to remember the involuntary travel of deportation, migrations, and war" (17). …