DOING CULTURAL STUDIES INSIDE APEC: LITERATURE, CULTURAL
IDENTITY, AND GLOBAL/LOCAL DYNAMICS IN THE AMERICAN PACIFIC
THIS
ESSAY OFFERS a critical genealogy of U.S. imperial dynamics in the Pacific by
examining the discursive tactics of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
and the emerging hegemony of transnational capital in the region. It tracks the
dynamics of globalization and movements towards localization under which
“Asia-Pacific” is being constructed into a postcolonial, if not postnational,
identity as a coherent region of teleological belonging. The essay invokes
literary and cultural producers in order to force upon “Asia/Pacific” a
critical awareness of its own regional unevenness, alternative possibility,
spatial contestation, and desublimated otherness. “Asia/Pacific” can thus
become a critical signifier for a cultural and literary studies (inside APEC, as
it were) in which opposition, location, indigeneity, and an alternative
discursive framing of the region can be articulated.
Gathering a range of energies and possibilities under its neo-hybrid banner,
“Asia-Pacific” is used these days in all kinds of enchanting ways. We can
speak of “Asia-Pacific cuisine”—it’s a hit at gourmet restaurants of
creolized invention like Roy’s in Hawai’i Kai, Omei in Santa Cruz, and
Indigo in Chinatown of Honolulu, and it shows up on menus at the Lai Lai
Sheraton in Taipei and the Hyatt Regency in Seoul. There is likewise a
mushrooming array of new Asia-Pacific art magazines, architectural symposia,
fashion and interior design spreads, and literary journals that cash in on the
mysterious allure of this sign. This popular usage bespeaks a postmodern utopia
of post-orientalist consumption: the multiplex styles of “Asia” and “the
Pacific” promise to meet and fuse in an expressive synergy called
Asia-Pacific, and little harm will be done except to purists of cultural
borders, nation-mongers, or diehard pre-modernists who refuse to dream in the
late-capitalist future over the world’s biggest ocean.
More than stylistic promise or commercial slogan, “Asia-Pacific” also serves
as a political-economic signifier to bespeak and mediate the border-crossing
expansionism—if not will to transnational community—emerging in this
“borderless” region. This trope of Asia yoked to Pacific is used to mobilize
the cash-driven transfusion and to drive the megatrends of transnationalizing
economies in the region, which, without such a user-friendly geopolitical
signifier, does not yet exist in anything like a coherent geopolitical or
cultural framework. In such a discursive framework, our everyday spaces and
lives inside the creativity and chaos of the Pacific are being shaped, coded,
and reorganized under this “Asia-Pacific” banner. This cheery vision of
regional coherence and geopolitical unity demands critical and global/local
interrogation. What I want to do in this U.S.-situated analysis is to expose the
hegemonic vision of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation by looking at
discrepancies of identity, uneven locality, and struggle in the region (in
inside/outside places like Hawai’i and Taiwan). At the same time, I want to
explore the possibility (for transnational literary and cultural studies) of
developing a more globally and locally situated Asian Pacific Cultural Studies
bent upon dealing with these very tensions and uneven dynamics of “contested
localized knowledges” spreading across Asia/Pacific.