Country of Exiles (21 page)

If in the past, as American historian Gary Gerstle has said, “a powerful nationalism” “suffocated” the country’s “hyphenated identities,” by the 1990s no one was suffocating: the multicultural
view held sway, reinforced by the weakening of Western influences and by the resurgence of ethnic-tribal identities around the world.
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At its best multicultural cosmopolitanism argues for a tolerance for other people’s beliefs and manners; at its worst, it puts people into groups with divergent identities, sometimes bordering on an older racialist thinking which talked of “German Science” or a “Jewish Science.”
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Many multiculturalists emphasize biology over history, race over place, demography over culture, as the driving forces in history, a position destined to offend many Americans. This particular form of cosmopolitanism, moreover, sees no hope for assimilation; indeed, it maintains that, ever since there were immigrants, the United States had “coerced” millions of people to “assimilate.”
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But there is another side to academic cosmopolitanism, the fluid side, which insists that boundaries of all kinds—especially between groups—must be viewed with suspicion. “I revel in fluidity,” said Cornel West of Harvard in 1994. “I always think that we are in process, making and remaking ourselves along the way.” What we need, he believes, is a “transgender, transracial, transsexual orientation of social motion, social momentum, social movement.”
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(“We are becoming fluid and many-sided,” Robert Jay Lifton writes in the very opening sentence of
The Protean Self
.)

Thus, the fluids, rather than dwelling on multiculturalism (which, to some degree, implies boundaries although not territorial boundaries), applaud the nimble self able to take many shapes.
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This position, too, has roots in various strands of the American past—in the liberal, universalist outlook itself, which asserts that people are free to choose whatever identities they wish, impervious to where (or into what situation) they are born; in the bias of twentieth-century social science, which viewed progress as an outcome of the demise of old place relationships
(those tied to land, villages, regions, or countries); in the secularization of the academy after 1920, which was carried out, above all, by liberal Protestant university presidents, who sought to establish a non-Christian international outlook on American campuses; and in the contributions of Jewish-Americans who entered the academy after World War II, many bearing an outlook hostile to exclusionary notions of place.
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The fluid view could also be traced to the countercultural movements of the 1960s, which affirmed unimpeded self-invention.
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Modern fluid cosmopolitans, however, further radicalized this position; after 1980 they extended self-invention into all areas of life (gender, sexuality, race, anything once viewed as fixed or biological). They also turned their attention to the “border,” the “borderland,” the “boundary.”

In 1990, editor of the
Journal of American History
, historian David Thelen, announced plans to publish articles on “borderland studies”—on how “individuals in the past construct[ed] multinational and transnational processes as they met everyday needs in the borderlands between cultures.”
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Around the same time there was a flood of books, articles, conferences, and dissertations dealing with borders. By the late nineties, the cult of the border had risen to new heights and borderland scholars treated borders as the source of all culture-making. “Culture is by nature heterogeneous,” said José David Saldivár, professor of ethnic studies at Berkeley, “and necessarily works through the realm of borders.”
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Some scholars even temporarily left their campuses to study life on the border, to document and photograph its fluidities. In 1996, Mary Ellen Wolf, professor of French at New Mexico State University, took leave from her academic job to photograph the many Mexican transvestites who made their living as prostitutes on the border between California and Mexico.
Wolf admitted (in a journal interview) that “it’s become all too common now to think of the border as a metaphor for fluidity, and in this way forget that it’s a real place.” Yet she could not resist revealing in her pictures “the stories of crossings that take place in multiple registers and on a daily basis.” Besides, she confessed, “I find myself wanting to cross, to go away from myself and the institution that I’m identified with. Of course, it would be wonderful to learn if any of the theory debated and absorbed in the university has a connection to life as it is lived, to life in the streets, and, in this case, to life in the borderlands.”
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Besides singling out life on the borders for special scrutiny and praise, some academics also believed that the
transgression
of borders was the best way to achieve the best humanity.

Richard Sennett, sociology professor at New York University, stands out as a fascinating and complex exponent of proteanism, often taking positions that are at odds with one another. In his most recent book,
Corrosion of Character
(1998), which deals with the impact on work of modern capitalism, he seems opposed to proteanism and to the crossing of boundaries.
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Flexible corporate practices, he says, have transformed workers into “fragments” and made them accept “instability,” “uncertainty,” and “incompleteness” as normal. The new capitalist order has forced workers into chronic acts of “becoming.” Above all, it has robbed workers of their power to form “sustainable narratives” and, thereby, undermine trust. Character, Sennett argues persuasively, cannot develop when people have little control over their own life histories. “Flexibility,” he insists, “cannot give any guidance for the conduct of ordinary life”: only “durable and sustained paths of action” can do that.
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Yet, in nearly all his other work, Sennett admires the very qualities which, in this book, he criticizes.
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In
Conscience of the
Eye
(1990), for instance, a book about Christianity and cities, he argues that life flourishes when people reject “fixed” categories of identity and engage “the incompleteness” of the “outside” world. Maturity begins when people “tear down the walls that keep them inside,” when they let the outside inside, and when they abandon those Christian ideas that have nurtured “interior” reflection and a stable sense of self. Christianity supports qualities, Sennett says—permanence, completeness, sequential order, the “inner life”—that have kept people from responding to the diversity of the urban outside. Moreover, these qualities don’t even exist, especially in the big cities. What does exist, Sennett says, are “strangers,” “impermanence and chance,” “discontinuity and disorientation,” “fragmentation,” and “chaos” which people must accept if they wish to live well and humanely. “Displacement rather than linearity,” he says, “is a humane prescription.”
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For Sennett, in this book and others, a mature humanity comes not when people seek wholeness or linear narratives, but when they encounter the unstable
borders
of society. “In the ecological structure of ponds or on the wild land,” he says, invoking a biological analogy to illustrate his point, “the most intense activities take place at contested borders.… Less conflicted spaces behind the borders are less active. The social center is at the physical edge.”
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Sennett’s purpose is to show that creative life happens not in the cores of societies but at their “permeable” perimeters.
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But there is more; for Sennett also believes that wisdom begins when people risk reaching across boundaries in the act of becoming. “In crossing a boundary,” “people can see others as if for the first time.” “Recognition scenes that might occur at borders are the only chance people have to confront fixed sociological pictures routinized in time.” “At a boundary one transgresses one’s identity, as one had known it in the past.”
“Self-understanding occurs when suddenly a person becomes aware of crossing boundaries.”
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On their face, the multicultural and fluid sides of academic cosmopolitanism seem at odds; but they are, in fact, quite at home with each other. For one thing, both, in differing degrees, consider such concepts as “difference,” “otherness,” and inclusion as central to their vision. Robert Lifton, a fluid cosmopolitan, affirms what he calls “multilocalism” and says “inclusiveness is vital.” David Hollinger, an historian at Berkeley, argues in his 1995 book
Postethnic America
for “postethnicity” or for a mentality that generates “cosmopolitan instincts” without forfeiting the ethnic “rootedness” of the past.
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At the same time, advocates of both views share an anxiety about territorial place, which pulls people in, defines their lives, and establishes clear laws and standards of exclusion and inclusion.

From the multicultural angle this view is expressed in Walzer’s notion that America is not a state in any territorial conventional sense. “The fundamental contrast between Europe and America” is one “between territorially grounded (‘tribal’) and groundless (‘multicultural’) difference,” he says. In America, Walzer’s “ethnic particulars” are suspended in air, perpetually adrift like milkweed seeds, never touching ground, a position Walzer (and other multiculturalists) think also determines the character and limit of patriotism in America. In terms of land, language, and common memories, American patriotism does not exist at all, Walzer thinks. What patriotism does exist—what really does unify Americans—is directed not at places but at political principles or abstract ideas of justice, which all must defend if they wish to go on living as “ethnic particulars.”
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Fluid cosmopolitans think similarly about place. Thus, Sennett argued in 1995 that traditional ways of organizing places had only cemented differences and excluded others. What we need now, he claims, is a fluid sense of place forged within
the “fleeting and fragmented” elements of urban life where strangers meet. “Place-making based on exclusion, sameness, or nostalgia is socially poisonous and psychologically useless,” he insists. “Place-making based on more diverse, denser, impersonal human contacts must find a way for those contacts to endure.”
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Impersonality “must” offer the ground for “a more sociable, truly cosmopolitan existence.”
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After 1980, finally, another group of academics, all emigré intellectuals, contributed their own postcolonial variation to the academic cosmopolitan theme. Fleeing countries that seemed torn in pieces, most of these scholars had “no positive feeling for the state at all,” as one postcolonial academic has said.
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They arrived in this country disposed to see America itself as a land in pieces. And they also added their own angles, above all those of exile and diaspora.

In recent years, a vast literature has emerged to describe the ordeal of all people in motion. Much of this literature, however, differs from that of the past, which often depicted exile, and even simple migration, as terrifying and blighted. The philosopher George Santayana wrote in 1912 that “the most radical form of travel, and the most tragic, is migration.”
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Years later, in 1978, Orlando Patterson, Harvard University sociologist, echoed this view; in an article on migration in Caribbean societies, he observed the “deleterious” impact that incessant “mobility” and “uprootings” had had on regional Caribbean cultures, forming a “modal personality devoid of trust” and preventing the rise of “relative stable structures” basic for enduring social health.
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Recent fiction, too, recounts the tragedy of exile. In 1996, W. G. Sebald published the hauntingly beautiful
The Emigrants
, a novel based on experiences of three members of his family who were exiled from Germany as a result of the Nazi assault on the Jews. Sebald showed what happens when a culture dares to expel its most loyal citizens, whose “beautiful
names” were “so intimately bound up with the country they lived in and with its language.” Such evictions end in death or despair for the exiled and for the exiler (and for all those touched by the exiling mentality), in a world “hopelessly run down” and “ruined … by the insatiable urge for destruction.”
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By the 1990s, however, exile was for the most part no longer understood as tragic by many educated commentators—despite the misery in places like Bosnia or the Congo—but as worthy of “celebration.”
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Many people also invoked diaspora to describe what they thought to be their experiences in America. Years ago, the concept of the diaspora was confined mostly to the traumatic experience of Jewish exile; but just as in the case of “outsider” and “border,” the term “diaspora” has been freed of its dire trappings and redefined to reflect the identities of many mobile groups, even tourists.
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The new group of migrant intellectuals in particular have laid claim to the dynamics of exile and diaspora.
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Among the most influential of these scholars have been highly educated Asian Indians who grew up “in the elite sectors of the postcolonial world,” as one of them has written.
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They carried with them to America memories of humiliation, inflicted first by the British and then by their own Indian states which had worked to dismantle the system of privilege from which many in this group had benefitted.
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Critics of nationalism, sensitive more to its pretensions (or, as Prasenjit Duara, historian at the University of Chicago, has said, to its “ubiquities, changeability, and fungibility”) rather than to its merits, they looked at such concepts of nation-state and citizenship largely as Western propaganda foisted on the world. Among the many international scholars recruited by universities and colleges, they were after 1985 “pacesetters” in the American inquiry into all aspects of “place,” from nationalism and borders to migration and patriotism.
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