(..) We need to explore what Homi Bhabha calls "the uncanny of cultural difference:
"cultural difference becomes a problem not when you can point to the Hottentot Venus, or to the punk whose hair is six feet up in the air; it does not have that kind of fixable visibility. It is as the strangeness of the familiar that it becomes more problematic, both politically and conceptually...when the problem of cultural difference is ourselves-as-others, others-as-ourselves, that borderline" [.1 989:72]
Why focus on that borderline? We have argued that deterritorialization has destabilized the fixity of "ourselves" and "others." But it has not thereby created subjects who are free-floating monads, despite what is sometimes implied by those eager to celebrate the freedom and playfulness of the postmodern condition. As Martin and Mohanty (1986:194) point out, indeterminacy, too, has its political limits, which follow from the denial of the critic's own location in multiple fields of power. Instead of stopping with the notion of deterritorialization, the pulverization of the space of high modernity, we need to theorize how space is being reterritorialized in the contemporary world. We need to account sociologically for the fact that the "distance" between the rich in Bombay and the rich in London may be much shorter than that between different classes in "the same" city. Physical location and physical territory, for so long the only grid on which cultural difference could be mapped, need to be replaced by multiple grids that enable us to see that connection and contiguity-more generally the representation of territory-vary considerably by factors such as class, gender, race, and sexuality, and are differentially available to those in different locations in the field of power.
(Akhil Gupta, James Ferguson "Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference")
"cultural difference becomes a problem not when you can point to the Hottentot Venus, or to the punk whose hair is six feet up in the air; it does not have that kind of fixable visibility. It is as the strangeness of the familiar that it becomes more problematic, both politically and conceptually...when the problem of cultural difference is ourselves-as-others, others-as-ourselves, that borderline" [.1 989:72]
Why focus on that borderline? We have argued that deterritorialization has destabilized the fixity of "ourselves" and "others." But it has not thereby created subjects who are free-floating monads, despite what is sometimes implied by those eager to celebrate the freedom and playfulness of the postmodern condition. As Martin and Mohanty (1986:194) point out, indeterminacy, too, has its political limits, which follow from the denial of the critic's own location in multiple fields of power. Instead of stopping with the notion of deterritorialization, the pulverization of the space of high modernity, we need to theorize how space is being reterritorialized in the contemporary world. We need to account sociologically for the fact that the "distance" between the rich in Bombay and the rich in London may be much shorter than that between different classes in "the same" city. Physical location and physical territory, for so long the only grid on which cultural difference could be mapped, need to be replaced by multiple grids that enable us to see that connection and contiguity-more generally the representation of territory-vary considerably by factors such as class, gender, race, and sexuality, and are differentially available to those in different locations in the field of power.
(Akhil Gupta, James Ferguson "Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference")
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