Reframing Global/Local Poetics in thePost-Imperial Pacific: Meditations on‘Displacement,’ Indigeneity, and Area Studies (2003)

I. Displacing US-Area Field Imaginary: For OED tracks quasi-materialist tangle of 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, revealed in OED's macroinstance of creative destruction from 1880, the displacement of human labor ... through machinery (displacement). Nowadays, with more ethereal rise of discourse, borderlands paradigms, and postcolonial dissemination models of subjectivity into power across professional US academy, displacement has become a virtually normative concept/tactic by which to talk of, track, and organize makings of literature, knowledge, community, and culture. What Gayatri Spivak pedagogically embraces in her own transnational work practical structure of deconstruction reversal-displacement (Explanation and Culture: Marginalia 377) (1) has had a far-reaching impact upon disciplinary regimes, area formations, and fast-coming-unglued imaginary of fast-globalizing 1990s. (2) 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 that 'displacement' is registered not just 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 emergent and peripheral into theory-dominant sector, (4) Homi Bhabha can serve a synedochic instance for this large-scale US shift to install outer-national frameworks valuing postcolonial displacement, when he writes in The World and Home: Where transmission of 'national' traditions was once major theme of a world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, colonized, or political refugees--these border and frontier conditions--may be terrains of world literature. center of such a study would neither be 'sovereignty' of national cultures, nor '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 he repetitively foregrounds out-of-synch, off-center, and culturally doubled lives of postcolonial subjects not all quite situated (well-placed) like himself in English Departments at Harvard, Chicago, and Oxford. (5) As another global sign of this trans-disciplinary shift warping field practices of 1990s, diasporic arose (as in work of Paul Gilroy on 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 '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 more psychoanalytical mode of libidinal agonistics, can register 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 a de-nationalizing movement of cosmopolitican theories, peoples, and ideas, Timothy Brennan has urged geo-materiality of this subliminal recognition upon post-colonial studies: that 'displacement,' far from being neutral, is designed precisely to force readers to remember involuntary travel of deportation, migrations, and war (17). …