under the sign of empire—transporting lolita · concentric 31.2 july 2005 42 under the sign of...

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 31.2 July 2005: 41-64.

Under the Sign of Empire—Transporting Lolita,

Surviving WTO, Remapping Taiwan∗∗∗∗

Lili Hsieh

Duke University

Abstract The paper uses the example of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A

Memoir in Books, as an entry point to examine the juncture between the

imperial disguise of English language/literature and the call for localized

resistance, as seen in the pursuit of national identities, the reconstruction/

reterritorialization of national history, and the reimaginings of national culture

and literature in Taiwan. Reading Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude, I

argue that their Deleuzian/Bergsonian macrocosmic historiography can only

achieve its universal validity when it takes up, rather than excludes, the

microcosmic histories of the particulars. Turning to Leo T. S. Ching’s Be-

coming “Japanese,” I point out that while it is important not to lose sight of

the self-other, white-colored binary or hierarchical structure, post-colonial

critics will gain, following Ching’s theoretical model, by factoring in the

political and economic issues of class, which intersect and complicate the

binary structure of master-slave in the colonial Empire. In conclusion, I return

to the status of English as world literature in the era of global Empire.

Keywords

globalization, empire, multitude, Taiwan, world literature, post-colonialism,

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze, Leo Ching, Lolita

∗ I would like to express my gratitude to the guest editor, Professor Ban Wang, and the editors of

Concentric, the anonymous reviewers and my dissertation advisor, Toril Moi, for their incisive reading and excellent suggestions. The present paper is an extended version of a presentation given at the conference, “Born of Desertion: Singularity, Collectivity, Revolution,” organized by the Marxist Reading Group at the University of Florida, Gainesville in March 2003. I also thank Michael Hardt and other conference participants for their comments.

Concentric 31.2 July 2005

42

Under the Sign of Empire

That a book with the title of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A

Memoir in Books (2003) has become a national bestseller in the United States after

the invasion of Iraq is no coincidence given the logic of Empire, a logic which the

two leftist activists and scholars, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, have cogently

portrayed in their two books, Empire (hereafter as E) and Multitude (hereafter as M).

Critically and commercially acclaimed,1 Reading Lolita in Tehran nevertheless en-

joys a symptom of global capitalism, whose professed worldliness often disguises

an Orientalist gaze avidly transfiguring its Muslim Other—lying at the fault-lines of

the Judaeo-Christian empire—into symbolic capital based on palpable differences.2

But the exoticization shown in the “dangerous liaison” between a transgressive

signifier, Lolita, and a contested, or even “excluded,” locale of prohibitions, Tehran,

goes far beyond the logic of objectification described by Edward Said in Oriental-

ism.3 Rather than the unchanging Arab man—“centuries of experience and no

wisdom” (Said 230)—invented by T. E. Lawrence, Reading Lolita in Tehran sells

the image of defiant female revolutionary bodies draped in hijabs and chadors,

ready to erupt once exposed to the catalyst taboo yet “good” western enlightenment.

Its success, therefore, is hardly untainted by its marketable juxtaposition of

1 The book, recommended by the renowned novelist Margaret Atwood, has been favorably

reviewed by various important presses, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Guardian. The New York Times calls it “a re- markable new book” and “thoughtful” (Kakutani 6). The Atlantic Monthly places it in the category of “certain books by our most talented essayists” (Simpson 104).

2 By “fault-lines,” I am naturally referring to Samuel P. Huntington’s controversial essay, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Huntington proposes that major global conflicts result not from political or economical but ideological or cultural clashes. See Huntington. Crude as Huntington’s analyses are, as Etienne Balibar candidly commented in the Q & A section of his lecture entitled “Europe: A Vanishing Mediator,” it is chilling to see that in dealing with the “crises” of the North Korean nuclear plan and Iraq, Washington acted as if it had Huntington’s article out on the table in their foreign policy meetings. Balibar’s lecture is widely available on different websites. See, for example, 19 June 2005 <http://fbc.binghamton.edu/balibar1102.htm> for the English version.

3 As for the argument that the author Azar Nafisi is a native Iranian, therefore exempt from Said’s critique of Orientalism, I would urge readers to reconsider the essentialist presumptions, which bind any author to the country of his/her birth. Like many diasporic intellectuals, Nafisi is currently a professor at a prestigious research university in the U.S. (i.e., The Johns Hopkins University). One can also safely assume that as she wrote in English, she knew her primary readers would be in the West.

Hsieh Under the Sign of Empire

43

differences—cultural clashes—that sell extremely well to benevolent, middle-class

American readers.4

Although generally applauded for its progressive advocacy of the autonomy

and resistance of women in Muslim culture, Reading Lolita in Tehran can also be a

gloomy reminder of how “protestant ethics/ethnics” acts benevolently as the mere

double of “the spirit of capitalism.”5 Rich and vivid in autobiographical details

about the author’s experiences with Iranian students and local literary censorship,

the novel is nevertheless more about politics—or rather, political correctness—than

literary interests. While Nafisi’s pedagogy, which brings a selection of Western

literary classics into the cultural context of the Middle East, is highly interesting,

what makes the book finally an unsatisfactory read is the one-way, centrifugal gaze

that the author seems to assume with her title “Reading Lolita in Tehran.”6 One

might ask: what makes Nabokov’s controversial novel, Lolita, the representative of

Western classics, since the title obviously appeals to the theme of “East-meets-

West”? Reading Humbert as a sheer oppressor who “attempts to orphan Lolita by

robbing her of her history” (Nafisi 37), Nafisi forces the crude duality of a pedo-

philic Humbert and victimized Lolita into a national allegory of Muslim patriarchy.

Other than the fact that one is given very little introduction to Persian culture and

history, apart from the constant and sometimes excessive descriptions of the

physical appearance and attire of her students, the novel makes me most un-

comfortable because of its lack of any attempt to “look back at” the imperial center

(and erstwhile “Great Satan”), the United States of America. After all, Persia (or the

greater Islamic Middle East) is not the only culture in which a book like Lolita will

shock and challenge. The author of Reading Lolita in Tehran appeals to English-

speaking readers by reinforcing the stereotypical cultural differences between the

benevolent, tolerant Western readers and its backward, oppressive, sometimes ri-

diculous and violent Other, forgetting that Nabokov’s Lolita was in fact banned in

4 To add a note to the contradictory nature of such “benevolence,” in my hotel room when I was

attending the 2004 Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA), I found in the drawer of the night stand a copy of the Qu’ran, laid nicely next to the Bible. The “religious multiplicity” showcased in the hotel room, however, does not tally well with the extremely right-winged thrust of Bush’s campaign, which allegedly won the election precisely because of its stress on Christian values.

5 “Protestant ethnic” is a term coined by Rey Chow in her recent book, to critique the American progressive, right-winged ideology which “tolerates,” even embraces the racial or ethnic otherness without problematizing the fundamental unstableness and power structure underlying the categories of race or ethnicity.

6 Besides Lolita, the other three novels/novelists that Nafisi deals with in the book are Scott Fitzgerald’s, Henry James’s, and Jane Austen’s.


44

France in 1956, “apparently because of complaints from the British embassy that

too many susceptible tourists were buying it and smuggling it home.”7

What motivates me to take up the example of Reading Lolita in Tehran,

however, is not the “correct” interpretation of Lolita—after all, Lolita is only one of

the four specimen cases, albeit a privileged one, that the author deals with in her

book; nor am I particularly interested in deconstructing the self-other differences

which the book helps to sustain rather than critique. Rather, intrigued by the book’s

success, I want to trace the Western underlying ideological shift, which Rey Chow

describes as the “liberalist turn from genocide to benevolence,” forwarding not just

tolerance but encouragement of differences (Chow 10-17). Indeed, if a book flaunt-

ing Muslim otherness manages to capture the market as well as win critical acclaim

amidst the military and ideological war against the Islamic world, one has a reason

to suspect that Rey Chow has a point when she centralizes the role of cultural

differences in the new regime of biopower:

In its modern usage, designating a kind of cultural condition that is

descriptive of all human beings, ethnicity has, to all appearances,

shifted from its early, religious significance as a term of exclusion and

a clear boundary marker (between Jew and Gentile, Christian and

heathen) to being a term of inclusion, a term aimed at removing

boundaries and at encompassing all and sundry without discriminating

against anybody. (Chow 25)

Precisely because the turn to differences and otherness holds, a return of the

Orientalist gaze to the site of the center is all the more indispensable. Without the

returning look or the centripetal gaze, one becomes free-flowing in the “trafficking”

of Lolita, pushed farther and farther away from the “site”—the “non-place”—of the

power “back” home as one’s eager eyes are diverted to the exotic scene of the

“oppressive regime” of Iran.

7 Please see Wood. The censorship of Lolita goes farther than the cold-war, right-winged

ideology of the 1960s. Although in 1956 and 1958 the novel was published respectively in the United States and the United Kingdom, censorship came back when Stanley Kubrick, in 1962, shot his film version. State and local governments not only “used licensing laws to prevent movies from being shown,” according to Martin Garbus, they also aggressively sought to ban the book “under then-existing obscenity laws [...] in schoolrooms and pulled them off store shelves” (9). Even in the 1990s, when Adrian Lyne re-did the film, it sat on the shelf for two years before it was released because the Hollywood distributors were so afraid of this sumptuous black comedy.


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If Rey Chow’s critiques of multiculturalism disrupt the ideological trope of

“axes of evil” by returning the gaze to the grandiose image of the Western ego, the

implicit “self-other” bipolar structure, on which Chow’s analyses are hinged, is

radically rethought by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their theory of globali-

zation. For Hardt and Negri, the Hegelian self-other binary opposition, which is,

according to them, operative in the work of postcolonial critics such as Homi

Bhabha, misses the mark because it fails to recognize a novel structure of power,

i.e., that of the Empire. Under the sign of Empire, the distance between self and

other, center and the periphery, falters as all is deterritorialized, entering the service

of the capital and the global market.

What is Empire? What happens to differences and cultural specificities under

the sign of Empire? Do differences still matter? These are questions I would con-

tinue exploring in the following pages, following the cue of Hardt and Negri’s

theory of globalization. If, as Hardt and Negri suggest, cultural differences are

simultaneously upheld and flattened in the logic of Empire, we need to ask if titles

such as Reading Lolita in Tehran still sell “cultural differences”; and if so, if they

play with differences the same way as, say, Huang Renyu’s (黃仁宇) Hexun hepan

tan zhongguo lishi (赫遜河畔談中國歷史 Reading Chinese history on the bank of

the Hudson River). The mind-boggling scramble of geopolitical localities brings

forth several questions I would like to address in this paper: Are the rhizomatic

“lines of escape” or deterritorialization8 the only way out of the eternal return to the

“same difference” of Power? If the sites of the local, such as Tehran and female

body, become a “delicious paradox” in the logic of global capitalism,9 how do we

then account for the unrelenting production of meanings and values that bind these

locales to hierarchical signifieds such as the high and low, the barbarian and the

cultured, or the first and the third? How does the Deleuzian “pet metaphor”10

of

flow, or Hardt/Negri’s emphasis on “network,” tally with Franz Fanon’s evocation

of the Manichean world when he criticizes Mayotte Capécia for “marrying up the

social ladder”?11

Why, we would ask, do theorists of class, global capitalism,

8 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateau. Deleuze and Guattari contrast the rhizomatic

with the arborescent. While the latter is hierarchal, striated or binary, and territorial, the former is smooth, deterritorialized, revolutionary and emancipatory.

9 “Delicious paradox” is a term I borrow from Lila Azam Zanganeh’s review. Cf. Zanganeh. 10 Metaphor, however, is a poor term to account for Deleuze’s “inventive” use of language,

especially given that Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly deny that their concepts such as the machine, BwO (Body without Organs), becoming-woman/animal/imperceptible, etc., are not “metaphors.”

11 See the chapter, “The Woman of Color and the White Man,” in Fanon, Black Skin White Masks.


46

globalization, and Empire, such as Hardt, Negri and to a certain extent even

Deleuze and Guattari, seem to be in irreparable conflict with theorists of race and

postcolonialism such as Rey Chow, Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon? In short, my

question, to put it in the words of Gilles Deleuze, is: can one interweave the smooth

and the striated? As I will show by an examination of the use of English language

and literature, at stake is not an “either-or” dilemma between the theory of globali-

zation and postcolonial critiques, but a double-vision that has a grip on the “re-

cognition of the novelty of the structures and logics of power that order the con-

temporary world” (E 146), one which does not lose sight of the spectral binarism

that continues to produce hierarchical meanings. By turning from Reading Lolita in

Tehran to “reading Empire in Taiwan,” I will show in this paper that we need to

rethink as well as reinvent the local lest it becomes a “delicious paradox,”

something “piecemeal” which is readily appropriated by global capitalism.

Reading Empire in Taiwan

The main idea of Hardt and Negri’s wildly successful book, Empire, is de-

ceptively simple. In the book, which was followed by Multitude in 2004, Hardt and

Negri give a cogent account of the emergence of the new global capitalist order,

which they call the “Empire,” and based on a positive way to think about a new

revolution within the Empire and against the Empire led by the oppressed col-

lectivity, which they call the “multitude.” Empire and multitude are therefore new

and potentially powerful concepts—a new “toolbox” to put it in Foucault’s terms—

that are not only theoretical but practical seeds of action, a different perspective

from which to imagine and create new realities.

In light of this idea of “Empire,” however, Taiwan seems to be a special case.

Far from being a potential site of resistance or anti-global capitalism, Taiwan is

now striving vigorously to be “hooked up with the international community”12

As

12 “To be hooked up with the international community,” or “yu guoji jiegui” (與國際接軌) has

been a popular slogan. Type in “hooking up with the international community” in Chinese Yahoo, one gets more than 205,000 entries. Variegated issues are premised by the call to be hooked up with the international community: the debate on adaptation of pinyin system, the Taiwanese High Speed Rail, educational system, arts, finances, public health, Taiwanese arts, etc. The debates triggered by the recent article by Long Yingtai (龍應台), entitled “Where is Athens?: On the Crises of Taiwanese Internationalization,” are good examples manifesting the collective desire for internationalization and some worries of its discontents.


47

if reliving the old paradox that classical Marxism fails to account for, namely, why

the proletariat fights for their own oppression as if it were their salvation, Taiwan’s

more favored globalization as seen in such endeavors as joining the WTO and

WHO seems to buttress Hardt and Negri’s idea of Empire while undermining their

utopian imagination of the multitude. Reading Empire in Taiwan, we may ask: in

what way is Taiwan inscribed in the Empire? How do we understand the de-

centering and deterritorizing forces of global capitalism in this case, when labor and

capital do flow between Taiwan and the “First World,” but with such a dis-

hearteningly uneven circulation and distribution? With Taiwan’s colonial past and

highly ambiguous political situation in the standoff with China, how do we under-

stand the logic of an Empire which threatens to supercede the divides sanctioned by

Nation-State sovereignty, a highly emotional and political issue which nevertheless

still preoccupies the critical and political imagination of many Taiwanese citizens,

politicians, activists, and scholars alike?

To refocus our attention on the site of a “Third World” country, I shall hasten

to add the caveat of Hardt and Negri’s warning against Third Worldism here.

Perhaps not unlike Virginia Woolf, who burns the word “feminism” in Three

Guineas (1938), Hardt and Negri suggest that the term “third world” has become

obsolete: “With this objective convergence and accumulation of struggles, Third

Worldist perspectives, which may earlier have had a limited utility, were now

completely useless” (E 264). Their point, like Woolf’s, is not that a world of sexual

and racial equality has finally materialized; quite the contrary, precisely because the

scope of the battle is more far-reaching, they argue that an effective counter-attack

on Empire has to upgrade the old “third-worldism”—read post-colonialism—to

have global democracy and global citizenship in mind. With the authors’ caveat

about a short-sighted Third-Worldism noted, however, reading Empire in Taiwan

cannot but prompt an honest, if obvious, question: how do we understand, and

subvert the painful situation in places like Taiwan, when globalization is not at all

about becoming global, but becoming “more like the First World”? How do we

understand Hardt and Negri’s repeated insistence, via Michel Foucault, that “There

Is No More Outside” when it is clearly the desire to get inside that underlies the

slogan, “getting hooked up with the international community”? Or, if this status of

the outside is now transformed into profitable differences that can in return feed the

Empire machine, we might ask, what options lie beyond differencism/Third

Worldism and universalism/Empire? Under the sign of Empire, the authors predict,


48

the “multitude” will erupt and humanity will be revived.13

If the multitude, the

quasi-religious concept of a new revolutionary body,14

is disruptive of the center,

i.e., imperial power, it is by no means aligned with the marginal, for Hardt and

Negri also untiringly detach it from any locale or subject: “A multitude is an ir-

reducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude

must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity,

or indifference” (M 105). The question, it seems to me, remains: would this revived

humanity allow dignity of differences and identities? Or maybe we should think of

multitudes (plural) instead of a seemingly monotheistic notion of “multitude”

(singular)?15

Readers of Empire are familiar with the authors’ critiques of post-colonial

studies, with the idea that post-colonialists like Homi Bhabha are fighting with an

obsolete enemy. Bound by the specter of Self-Other dialecticism, their resistance

qua “politics of difference” will no longer be effective in the new order of the

global market, which they call “Empire”; worse still, it will reinforce the me-

chanism of Empire, which is “nurtured” by differences. “Empire is not a weak echo

of modern imperialisms but a fundamentally new form of rule,” they claim (146).

Born from the crisis of the former imperialism and modern capitalism, or itself a

reaction to this crisis, Empire is a new evolving machine—an upward spiral, which,

unlike Arrighi’s closed cycles, once triggered by the manipulation of abstract

symbols would allow no turning back of the clock.16

It would regenerate itself even

13 It should be noted that Hardt and Negri, like Deleuze and Guattari, are against “humanism.”

One can also argue, however, that they, like Marx, are the true humanists, as they claim in their utopian manifesto: “This project leads not toward the naked life of homo tantum but toward homohomo, humanity squared, enriched by the collective intelligence and love of the community” (E 204).

14 Kwan-Hsing Chen (陳光興) points out in his introduction to the Chinese translation of Empire that the term “multitude” is an old term, which existed as early as the fourteenth century. In fact, multitude is the English translation of “mixed body,” “crowd,” “mass” from the Bible. For example, in “But Jesus withdrew himself with his disciples to the sea: and a great multitude from Galilee followed him, and from Judaea” (Mark 3.6), and “But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. / And he called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear, and understand (Matthew 15.9-10). In many interviews, Hardt himself does not shy away from pointing out the biblical reference in the term “multitude.”

15 In the sequel, Hardt and Negri comment on the problem of singularity and plurality of the concept of multitude: “The people is one. [...] The multitude, by contrast, is not unified but remains plural and multiple” (99). The authors regard the alternative term, multitudes (plural), as a loose composite that cannot fully account for the unity and wholeness—in a word, singularity—which is obviously needed in the revolutionary concept of multitude.

16 For details please see Arrighi.


49

when one part of its “body” is completely corrupted. It is therefore not too far-

fetched to compare Hardt and Negri’s logic of Empire to Darwin’s evolution. “Dif-

ferences” to Empire are what “variations” to Natural Selection: the former in effect

support the latter. Contrary to the old imperialist regimes that are blood-thirsty for

an Outside to strengthen their sovereignty, for Hardt and Negri, Empire has neither

center nor outside; it does not even have a “place.” The authors claim that in-

formatization brings decentralization and deterritorialization, which lead to a mixed

constitution. A very mixed way to understand Empire indeed, the Deleuzian “Body

without Organs” is a variation that may prove to be the fittest—in the Darwinian

sense—in this “creative evolution.” Yet this comparison with evolutionism is not

meant to accuse the authors of vulgar scientism; rather, it makes us reexamine the

binary oppositions such as strong and weak, or top and bottom by prioritizing

instead the chains of changes. Contrary to the disclaimer of some social Darwinists

that millionaires are the fittest, in natural history and evolution theory we see that

dinosaurs are not the ones who survive: the fittest are not necessarily the strongest,

but the most flexible and hybrid. What is more, in evolution, the illusion of the

purity of species or race is gone, as is the myth of Nation-State sovereignty. In

Empire, you find the Third World in the First World—“the sweatshops of New

York and Paris can rival those of Hong Kong and Manila” (E 335); conversely, you

find the First in the Third. In short, if Empire is high on the evolutionary ladder, it

mounts the top of the pyramid only by overcoming all territorial divides to become

a monstrous machine of hybridity.

Powerful and creative as Hardt and Negri’s political re/deterritorialization is,

my initial example of Reading Lolita in Tehran shows (albeit in a twisted way), that

the desire for local specificities does not simply become extinct. It is from the fore-

closed site of the local, e.g., Taiwan, that one can read Empire and Multitude to

rethink the seamless machine of the Empire. In his critical introduction to the

Chinese translation of Empire, Kwan-hsing Chen writes:

The insufficiency of the book Empire lies in its lack of discussions

about the problems in areas outside Euro-America, such as Asia,

Africa, and Latin America—[the book is dismissive of] the problems

of how these areas are integrated into Empire, and what the interlocks

or intricacies in their local histories are. Resulting from this lack is a

faulty strategy: The authors can only point to a general notion of

multitude trans-historically, but cannot suture the specificities of

multitude with different historical contexts. (28; my translations)


50

Thus while Hardt and Negri claim that Taiwan and South Korea have broken away

from the “Third World” and have entered the time of post-modernity since citizens

holding service jobs are over 50% of the population and the rapid growth of the

internet and virtual communication in China and India means the displacement of

physical labor by immaterial labor, this is, Chen argues, really a simplification of

complex eco-political realities. Chen’s harshest critique comes from this discontent

with the lack of concerns with local histories and specificities in Hardt and Negri’s

discussion:

To look for the common enemy, a synthetic and linear History is not

really in keeping with their stance of anti-reductivism. The authors

emphasize that they are looking at the problem from the perspective of

multitude, but the subaltern population in the areas of poverty is not

their referent point. Are they in reality looking at the world from top of

the pyramid? (29; my translation)

While Chen seems to call for a more culturally and historically specific

regionalism to challenge Hardt and Negri’s at times breezy generalization about

global capitalism, it seems to me important to note that the true points of divergence

stem from their radically different orientations of writing and interpreting history.

For Chen, a “synthetic and linear history” cannot account for the local; it betrays

Hardt and Negri’s anti-reductivist benevolent agenda. Therefore, Chen opts for a

culturally and historically specific perspective, i.e., a regionalist approach, which

unfolds a microcosmic history capable of discerning “different operative social

logics in different localities” (29). Hardt and Negri’s vision of history, in contrast, is

notably one of macrocosmic, as is Darwin’s evolution theory or Bergson’s Creative

Evolution. In fact, it is the “filiation” with such a macrocosmic history—to taking of

history “as a whole,” as Deleuze constantly stresses—that characterizes Henri

Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as a

philosophical “assemblage.”17

The question then becomes: is a macrocosmic his-

tory in conflict with a microcosmic history? If not, why the tension? Why do the

17 I understand that “filiation” has a negative connotation in the context of Deleuzian philosophy.

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari use “filiation” to refer to Oedipal filial feelings, and posit “alliance” to denote lateral bonds. See the chapter entitled, “Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men” in Anti-Oedipus. The question for me, however, is how a horizontal “loyalty” differs from lineage. By “assemblage,” Deleuze and Guattari try to convey a totality (a whole), which is open and not terrorized by totalitarianism. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, especially 503-05.


51

authors have to exorcize the local, particular, microcosmic historiography in order

to come up with a common, universal, macrocosmic History from which Empire

emerges?

To set the debate between Hardt/Negri and post-colonial critics against the

background of these two perspectives on historiography, it seems the contestation

surrounding such spatial or territorial signifiers as the “global” and the “local”

becomes sophistical or merely rhetorical if we fail to see the more radical difference

in their basic conceptions of temporality. It is a difference, not a contradiction, for

we are not at all sure if different local histories will prove this universal History of

Empire ill-founded, or if a macrocosmic view of history will really need to shun

localized differences. The two sides seem to see things from different perspectives,

or at different levels. If this demarcation between micro- and macrocosms appears

to send us back to the old dialectic of the particular versus the universal, to He-

gelianism in short,18

perhaps the real problem is not so much that of the political

efficacy of such concepts as Empire and Multitude; instead, as Alain Badiou’s

critique of Deleuze’s philosophy shows,19

at stake is a more fundamental philo-

sophical dilemma: how can we read this universal History of Empire without

thinking of transcendence? Can this macrocosmic History not be a master narrative?

If we turn to Empire, we find that examples and references to capitalism outside

Euro-American territories are plentiful: there is no lack of “local stories” in this

book. But beyond this, they are claiming that all the local stories share a common

World History, which passes from modern capitalism to postmodernism, or as they

prefer to say, from imperialism to Empire. Although this Empire is far from being

hierarchy-free and egalitarian, to think in terms of Nation-States, or nationalism, to

think of local differences will be missing the point. Something is encompassing all

these local narratives, and it is Empire. At most, every local narrative is an am-

biguous story; and it leaves to our discretion how “global” the story is.

Hardt and Negri would say that any binarism, e.g., that between microcosmic

and macrocosmic historiographies, traps us in a conundrum or vicious circle. In-

stead of being cornered by the binarism of the “All,” i.e., multiplicities advocated

18 Please refer to Hegel. It can be noted that Hardt and Negri’s critiques of post-colonial studies

in fact parallel Deleuze and Guattari’s distaste for Hegelianism. Deleuze writes: “What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics” (“Letter to a Harsh Critic” 6). In Empire, Hardt and Negri write, “the specter that haunts Bhabha’s analysis and that coherently links together various opponents is the Hegelian dialectic, that is, the dialectic that subsumes within coherent totality the essential social identities that face each other in opposition” (144).

19 In his book on Deleuze, Badiou (in-)famously reads Deleuze as re-introducing a metaphysical system of Oneness. Please see Badiou.


52

by cultural relativists, and the “One,” i.e., monotheist and transcendentalist meta-

physics, they insist that we can “have our cake and eat it too” by choosing the

“None.” They write: “the space of imperial sovereignty [...] is smooth. [...] In this

smooth space of Empire, there is no place of power—it is both everywhere and

nowhere. Empire is an ou-topia, or really a non-place” (E 190). Yet if the escape

from Hegelian dialectics and binarism lets us jettison a spectral negativity once and

for all, one might ask: Can we really think of the “non-place” without any nega-

tivity? A foreclosed terror, anxiety and despair can undermine Hardt and Negri’s

hopeful project of Multitude. According to Hardt and Negri’s repeated claim that

“There is no longer an outside” of/to the global market, we are faced with only two

half- (or non- ) choices: globalization, i.e., informatization, or starvation, i.e.,

extinction. To cling to regional differences, the professed “outside,” is to seal one’s

death sentence; on the other hand, to be “hooked up with the international com-

munity” is no different than submitting oneself to the totalitarianism of Empire.

Hardt and Negri’s proposal is that we completely forget about site, place,

nation, and sovereignty, so that the non-place of multitude will turn around and bite

off the head of Empire. In this context, it is indeed paradoxical to invoke a place—

or, even more problematic in a different way, a nation—called Taiwan. However,

we might ask, to echo Hardt and Negi’s wording, in what way does the “imagined

community” of Taiwan echo that of the illusory “America, America” (E 380)?

There must certainly be disparities, for without them a title like Reading Lolita in

Tehran (or, “Reading Empire in Taiwan”) would not make sense. There have been

debates about whether Taiwan is post- or even pre-modern ever since the translation

of Fredric Jameson’s books some twenty years ago. Would the problem of

Empire—or, alternatively, of globalization—come to the same thing? Can we talk

about Taiwan’s “globalization” without re-invoking the ghost of periodization as in

the debates over Taiwanese postmodernism? On what basis can we claim that what

we see in Taiwan are not symptoms of modernization, but signs of Empire?20

In Empire, as in the theory of post-modernism, the major criteria of judgment

are again modes of production and class struggle. We can see that, having under-

20 Like Fredric Jameson, Hardt and Negri reject the concept of a radical break and draw a

developmental and temporal passage from modernity through postmodernity to globalization. In this view, the order of Empire supercedes the previous regimes of modernism and postmodernism. That is to say, problems pertaining to the age of Empire are no longer those of the previous regimes, such as sovereignty, subjectivity, difference, and identity. Many of Hardt and Negri’s critics disagree particularly on this issue and insist that many phenomena and problems that have come from “globalization” are in fact old problems and have been existing ever since the beginning of modernity.


53

gone transformation from an agricultural to an industrialized mode of production,

Taiwan is now thriving to transform itself into an island of semi-conductors, a

crucial hinge in the network of the global economy. The slogan to get “hooked up

with the international community” is really a literalization of the desire to stay in

the global network, i.e., Empire, as a nexus. While activists protested against the

WTO in Seattle in 1999, in 2002 most Taiwanese celebrated the island’s hard-won

entry into the WTO.21

Like intellectuals of previous generations who embraced the

notion of modernization, now many Taiwanese intellectuals uncritically advocate

the need to join the game of “globalization.” Their interests lie in the fact that only

through globalization will Taiwan share in the free market in which informatization

and technology morph into profits. For them, globalization is not a choice; there is

certainly no “staying out” for Taiwan.

So far the analysis of Taiwan’s situation seems to tally well with the line

suggested by Hardt and Negri. Indeed, as Hardt and Negri deftly show, capital is

decentering and deterritorializing, a process that can be further achieved through

technologization and informatization. However, with technology and information

“capital” is no longer just monetary; we have to think of “symbolic capital” as in

Bourdieu’s concept of “educational” or “cultural capital.”22

With “symbolic” I am

talking of Lévi-Strauss’s “zero-symbol,” which suggests a different kind of cir-

cularity and exchangeability, and Lacan’s “symbolic,” which is an anchoring point

of the Law and the subject. Symbolic capital is a way of characterizing the problem

of the privileging of English in Taiwan not just as a cultural phenomenon produced

by the uneven development of capitalism in Empire, but as indicative of what is

really at stake—English, when it is symbolic capital, is the stake. The problem of

trying to speak good English in Taiwan is at once the same and a different problem

from the speaking of good French in Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks.23

Indeed,

Hardt and Negri in Multitude show more sensitivity to the issue of language as both

the symbolic order and the symbolic capital as they write:

Language maintains hierarchical relations in at least three respects:

within each linguistic community with the maintenance of signs of

social superiority and inferiority; among linguistic communities, de-

termining the dominance of one language over others—for example,

21 Since 1992, Taiwan has been applying to become a member of the WTO for over a decade. 22 For details please refer to Bourdieu. 23 See also Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.


54

the dominance of global English; and within technical languages as a

relationship between power and knowledge. (132)

Yet their observations on linguistic community can be pushed farther, for the

problem here is no longer that of the superiority of races or cultures embodied in the

superiority of their languages. English has become a survival kit in the evolutionary

ladder of global capitalism; thus the brutality of the self-imposition of this in-

formatization relies on educational capital, and English is most necessary when

most information is primarily in English.

Translating the English language into a form of cultural and symbolic capital

in the era of globalization enables us to see the conjunction between two important

revolutionary agendas: the Marxist revolutionary theory of class and post-colonial

critiques of race. Amidst the fervor in many “Third World countries” to become

“anglophonized,” language seems to be the key to “passing”—in all senses of the

word. (And it is strange to think about good English alone might allow the “black”

man to pass as “white.”) The author of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian émigré,

is a good example of one who passes as an international writer. But can the su-

periority of one race or one culture really disappear? Is the Self/Other dialectic in

Bhabha’s and other post-colonial critics’ analyses of “mimicry” really not relevant

any more? It seems, I would argue, that we are really dealing with a string of

complex “effects” which point to two culprits: global capitalism and the further

ramifications of unbalanced racial and cultural relationships. Therefore, along with

the WTO and “getting hooked up with the international community,” in Taiwan

there is an unabashed fetishization of English. Speaking good English means not

just a personal preference but the degree of one’s suitability in a globalized world.

But one does not only speak good English to be global; the fashion of dying one’s

hair red or blonde, the over-evaluation of American degrees and U.S. dollars show

that, again, in this mimicry, the old Master/Slave dialectic still holds sway, even if

both master and slave have morphed into a “Body without Organs” and become

more and more amorphous.

Superficial as fashions are, when one culture is fashioned according to the

image of another, it is symptomatic of an uneven power relation in which domi-

nance only returns in different clothes. If the global market is a network, we should

see that the flow in this network is often one-sided and as such we are not done yet

with the old specter of imperialism. More precisely, power relations within this

network are still striated and there is no flattening of the hierarchy by asserting a

common signifier. In Taiwan, not in America, English is a form of symbolic capital


55

that can be cashed in as “real” capital; in Taiwan, whoever appropriates the cultural

capital by speaking good English has a powerful ticket to enter the new game of

“global citizenship”—and global citizens are more mobile, more fluid, more

“multiple,” and usually much richer than every one else. Of course it can also be

argued that even in America there are issues of “cultural capital”: some speak with

more socially acceptable accents than others. And in America there are truck drivers,

as in Taiwan. The fact that informatization and technologization allow some

Taiwanese to come to the First World, or to function in Taiwan the same way as

those privileged classes do in the First World, already proves that it is not

nationality or cultural identity which creates the class fault-lines.

My point here is not to make Taiwan a more class-divided society than, for

example, America. The point is that the disparities are innate in the divides of

cultures/races/nationalities. The situation is: an American truck driver will certainly

have more cultural or educational capital if he should desire to teach English in

Taiwan. A TV commercial in Taiwan many years ago that stages a conversation

between two homeless people in the U.S. shows best, with no intended irony, the

cultural capital of the English language: Homeless A—“I don’t have any education

or money, and I am hungry”; Homeless B—“So why don’t you go to Taiwan to

teach English?” These two homeless persons will certainly have an easier time, now

that English education has become compulsory beginning from the first year of

elementary school (and many kindergartens include it “voluntarily”) in Taiwan. The

situation, then, is ambiguous; it is not easy to grasp the utopian concept of “multi-

tude” as a common ground and common language for our global struggle. If the

post-colonialists are still waging war against the old enemy, maybe it is because the

old enemy co-exists with the new. There is no telling—at least it is not immediately

clear to me—which is a more bitter war.

Deterritorializing Empire, Remapping Taiwan

One might ask: so what are our options? If this uneven situation suggests

America is still the old imperialist power, the king in the aristocratic constellation

of Empire, can we resist English? If we can, then why am I writing this in English?

Pushing this logic to the extreme, ultimately one would ask: should we raise the

national flag and stop reading Lolita, Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jane Austen,

Shakespeare, and eventually, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri? While de-


56

anglification sounds like a suicidal project, de-signification is underway in Taiwan

precisely because of the same resentment against the imperial/imperialist body. In a

political climate like that of today’s, it is helpful to re-read Empire to re-new our

strategies of counter-attack against the old, common enemy, the Empire. What

Hardt and Negri can offer for a local cultural politics in Taiwan is the rethinking of

class and capital in what taken primarily as cultural, national, and socio-

psychological struggles.

Hardt and Negri’s sometimes reductive reading of post-colonial critics not-

withstanding, they make an important point: for post-colonial studies to wage a

subversive war against colonialism, racism and imperialism, one cannot lose sight

of the common enemy: the global capital and the production of global power. In the

Taiwanese context, a work, which successfully integrates the local narrative, or the

analysis of identity formation, with unusually cogent critiques of capitalism, is Leo

T. S. Ching’s Becoming “Japanese”—Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity

Formation (2001). In this book, Ching gives an interesting account of a different

empire—that of the pre-War Japan. In his analyses, a few specificities of Japanese

colonialism and imperialism can be identified. First, unlike Euro-American im-

perialism, which operates according to the dialectic logic of Self/Other, Japan’s

imperialism was already a reaction to it. While the former functions through the

logic of exclusion, the latter tried to congregate and to assimilate by way of de-

fending against the threat of Euro-American imperialism. Secondly, Japan’s form of

imperialism established the capitalist structure of colonial Taiwan. It was during the

reign of Japan’s “Pan-Asian Empire” that Taiwan started to have its power plants,

corporate companies, industrialization, even primary and secondary schools.

Thirdly, unlike intellectuals in the colonies of Europe, Taiwanese intellectuals were

most ambivalent about Japan’s colonialism and their own colonial identities. In

some cases, they did not denounce their identity as “Japanese imperial subjects,”

while holding on to their Taiwanese identity. Being Taiwanese was, curiously, not

in conflict with being partially “Japanese.”

Why wasn’t there an “outside,” a real “Self-Other” opposition? Ching ex-

plains this from the perspective of local, material history: Japan had been es-

tablishing in Taiwan an infrastructure of capitalism which actually benefited the

intellectuals, i.e., Bourdieu’s nouveaux riches, who were then mostly landowners of

the privileged classes. After the Second World War, Taiwan’s decolonization was

managed by itself. Because of the U.S. victory in the Pacific war and its control

over Japan, there was no need of a ferocious struggle against the former colonizer

on the part of Taiwan and no brutal confrontation and honest self-examination


57

vis-à-vis its old colonies on the part of Japan. The fight over the war debt became

largely ideological: for Japan, there was no sense of guilt, and for Taiwan no

destructive resentment. Thus even after the war, Taiwanese are still “becoming

Japanese.” Ching’s study seems to point to a blind spot in most post-colonial

studies, especially those which find identity to be an antidote to colonization: even

with the trend toward rethinking issues of identity in Taiwan after the rise of

post-colonial studies, the anti-colonial movement will be in vain because Taiwan

has never really questioned the other side of colonialism, capitalism. Because of

this “political unconscious,” identity in Taiwan is forever a split issue. On the one

hand one wants to be “Taiwanese”; on the other, Taiwanese is inseparable from

“Japanese.”

Looking at Ching’s analysis, which focuses on the region of Taiwan in the

context of Hardt and Negri’s notion of Empire, a new question emerges: what role

does Japanese colonialism play in making Taiwan ready for “globalization”? Indeed,

what does “preparedness” mean, when local history is said to be subservient to a

universal, macrocosmic history of Empire? This question in fact breeds many more

questions that hit at the heart of Empire: does this particular history (or historical

particularity) influence how we might read Empire as the universal? To address

these questions without returning to any binary thinking, we should look at them

again from a different angle. In fact, we might ask: in what ways are these two

Empires different? Are they only “differences of degree,” as Hardt and Negri might

say of Empire, rather than differences in nature?24

Are there conflicts between the

powers of the old imperialism and the new Empire in Taiwan? Or does the new

Empire simply supercede the old Japanese Empire? Finally, as to the critiques or

problems of identity: what are the similarities (or dissimilarities) of these problems

regarding the two different historical contexts in the same locale, Taiwan? Is the

desire to speak good English another colonial complex? How do we find a

sufficient language for the critique of the colonial complex within the global order

of Empire without dismissing the formation of cultural or political identity as

secondary or mid-guided? Playing between Hardt/Negri’s macrocosmic Empire and

Ching’s microcosmic case study, the final question might be: can one really have

24 In the chapter entitled, “Passages of Production,” Hardt and Negri return to Lenin to trace the

conceptual genesis from imperialism to Empire. For Lenin, “imperialism [is] a structural stage in the evolution of the modern state” (E 232), a “linear historical progression,” which Hardt and Negri see to be continued in the transformation of imperialism to Empire with the annihilation of the Outside. The differences between the two modes of Empire, therefore, can be said to be evolutionary or developmental. In other words, they are different by degree, rather than in essence. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, especially the section 231-41.


58

one’s cake and eat it too without “being trapped,” as Deleuze mockingly says of his

critic?25

In fact, it is also Deleuze who points to the possibility of tackling these

questions: to have a common yet localized language, to “kill two birds with one

stone,” this is the passage, the in-between, the “vanishing mediator” which we

should turn back to. In short, we should take a closer look at the problem of

translations—or, in other words, the process of “becomings.”

To accuse globalization of being a new form of colonization and to see

Empire as the new clothes of the old emperor is a familiar trope, one from which

the book Empire diverges. The uneven structure of powers in the new world situ-

ation, according to its authors, is not arborescent but rhizomatic. That is to say,

there are fault-lines, but you do not transcend these lines to find the solution in one

encompassing figure. In this sense, the symbolic capital attached to the English

language in Taiwan and elsewhere is already an effect of the uneven powers of

Empire, but this does not point to America as the major or only culprit, as was

Japan during its occupation, when the Japanese language was used as an imperialist

tool to assimilate or interpellate Taiwanese people as imperial subjects. The song

“America, America” creates the illusory site of America as a utopian referent point,

but this place called America does not exist—or, it has been deterritorialized and is

now everywhere, even in Taiwan. What I am interested in here is not to argue how

America, like other old colonial centers, still controls, for example, more than half

of transnational or supranational organizations like the WTO. There is no denying

that America is the only superpower—the authors of Empire explicitly said that.

Perhaps we must take the “Spiderman” ideology that “with greater power comes

greater responsibility” in reverse and say that America, by undertaking its (self-

imposed) “greater responsibilities,” ends up with greater power. But the key point

here is that one should not be held captive by the concept or trope of a site of power

(such as America), for in (the) Empire power functions without a center or a place.

It is also true that this power is more penetrating because it does not function only

as a way of control but as regeneration. Thus I want to suggest that we consider

whether these two readings of Empire conflict with each other. To have a theory of

Empire does not mean we merely “overturn” nationalism and imperialism. Even if

the old sovereignty of the Nation-State is outdated by (the) Empire, even if

“America” does not exist and the “nation” is an illusion and the “Empire” itself may

be nothing but a functional mask. A critique of Empire implies an analysis of all of

its “organic parts.”

25 See Note 18.


59

Reading Lolita under the Sign of Empire

Let us now return to the problems of a global English literature and Third

World countries. The seeming contradiction between Orientalism and the common

struggle of the Multitude is not a new one: the life and work of one of the most

familiar names in Chinese literature attests to its endurance. Upon reading my

dissertation chapter on Eileen Chang, which explores the political and historical

“structures of feelings” underlying the “ignorantsia” of her Western readers, my

American advisor, a disarmingly genuine First World “white” feminist,26

grace-

fully acknowledged her appreciation of my introduction of Eileen Chang and said in

all modesty, “After so many years working on feminism and women writers, I am

ashamed that I have never heard of Eileen Chang!” This has led me to reconsider

the problem of the domination of the Western canon and that of cross-cultural

“translations.” That Eileen Chang, who wrote and published some of her master-

pieces in English, failed to reach a dedicated feminist like my advisor is by no

means an isolated incidence. Chang’s “desolate gesture” is the flip-side of Nafisi’s

spectacular success: both suggest André Lefebvre’s insight that behind every

literary text there is always a process of prewriting, or what Raymond Williams

coins as “structures of feelings,” that prepares its reception, recognition, and trans-

lation.27

The complex processes of prewriting, writing, and translation are what

make up literary canons, and thus too, the incognito status of someone like Eileen

Chang, and/or the “ignorance” of those western readers whom she strove to address.

The “poetological motivations” and “poetological constraints” (Lefebvre 7) of each

text determines whether it is read or not as well as the ways it is read by different

readers.

26 I understand that both “white” and “first world” in this context are pejorative epithets. I

describe my advisor as such in order to highlight the problems behind some critiques many “first-world” feminists often encounter. For example, in Rey Chow’s last chapter of The

Protestant Ethnic and The Spirit of Capitalism, entitled, “When Whiteness Feminizes…,” her critiques of Toril Moi seem to conflate with her general discontents with “white Anglo-American feminists.” Although Moi, after her publication of What Is a Woman? (1999), might not be inclined to defend her deconstructive stance in Sexual/Textual Politics, it seems to me that Chow’s harsh reading of Moi as too essentialist and French- or Euro-centric, neglecting the latter’s critiques of Cixous and Irigaray, suggests an interesting paradox in post-colonial feminism. One wonders why it is acceptable for “Third World feminists” such as Gayatri Spivak and Rey Chow herself (Third World in what sense?—one might ask, as Spivak’s academic career is rooted in the West) to adhere to deconstructive theorists such as Jacques Derrida, while Moi’s foregrounding of French theorists—Kristeva along with Derrida—is fishy and “Euro-centric.”

27 Cf. Williams; Lefebvre.


60

I brought up the case of Eileen Chang, a case of “well-equipped failure” in

Nafisi’s words (203), because her “beautiful yet desolate gesture” of “writing The

Rouge of the North in America” is in a stark contrast to Nafisi’s wildly successful

Reading Lolita in Tehran. That the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran only uses

western literature—Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Pride and Preju-

dice—as a tool of political pedagogy in her relationship with her Islamic students is

no more “poetologically” revealing than Eileen Chang’s not being read at all by her

American readers or, similarly, her being read by Chinese/Taiwanese readers as

quintessentially Chinese. As Lydia Liu points out, in the traditional framework of

comparative literature, which inadvertently bypasses power structures to form pairs

of analogies, questions such as “Why is there no epic in Chinese literature?” or “Is

there a civil society in China?” are indeed wrong-headed.28

Invoking Eoyang, Liu

argues: “The obverse questions are rarely, if ever, asked: Why are there no dynastic

histories in the West? Why has the West produced no counterpart to the Shijing (詩經)? Are there equivalents to the lüshi (律詩) and zaju (雜劇) forms in the West? If

these challenges to lacunae in the West strike one as slightly absurd, then we must

consider the possibility that the original questions might be equally pointless” (Liu

7). Liu therefore reorients translingual practices to focus on what she calls the

“manners of becoming” (16) and “conditions of translation” (26).

While neither Liu’s “manners of becoming” nor Ching’s “becoming

‘Japanese’” has the Deleuzian “becoming-minority” in mind as reference,29

I am

proposing here that to effectively undermine the imperialist overtones in Reading

Lolita in Tehran and to have a larger framework for critiques of imperialism/

Empire, one can in fact experiment with seeing one form of becoming through the

lens of the other. In the spirit of Deleuzian politics, territorialized resistance such as

construction of Taiwanese identity or revival of the local is not only a faulty,

striated line of deterritorialization; it is futile. Therefore, one suspects that a dif-

ferent book with more local histories and a more Persian perspective, such as the

28 A similar question we might add to Lydia Liu’s list is “Does Chinese thinking have a system

of metaphysics?” 29 “Minority” in the context of Deleuzian philosophy is not to be confused with the ethnic

category used customarily in the U.S. to replace “people of color.” In “What is a Minor Literature?” Deleuze and Guattari characterize minor literature, of which Kafka is a prime example, as follows: first, a minor literature is one that is written in a “deterritorialized language,” such as Kafka’s Jewish Prague German; secondly, everything in minor literature is political; thirdly, everything in it takes on a collective value. For details please see Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, especially 16-18.


61

one that the reviewer of The Guardian would like to see,30

would fall short in the

arena of the critiques of global Empire and the protestant ethic/ethnic of be-

nevolence. More likely, without the paradoxical juxtaposition of an imperial object,

Lolita, and Islamic subject, Tehran, a localized account of literary or aesthetic

enjoyments in Iran would repeat the fate of Eileen Chang’s “under-“ or “un-

writing” in English literature. However, to dismiss the gap between English

language and Islamic culture is to echo the paradoxical and deeply problematic

project which Nafisi seems to be undertaking in Reading Lolita in Tehran: to

“dictate freedom”—an oxymoron indeed—as if the liberation of the Iraqi people

could truly be achieved by a U.S. military invasion. “The desperate truth of Lolita’s

story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of

one individual’s life by another (Nafisi 33; emphases Nafisi’s)—this claim, which

implies a political agenda of liberation, is disturbingly reminiscent of the language

of missionary crusades. In this light, “becoming” indeed can be more violent than

politically savvy. How many wars have been waged in history, under the disguise of

benevolent pedagogy, in order to make the other “become Christian,” “become

civilized,” “become Westernized”?

My first encounter with Lolita was in a class on modernism taught by the

theorist of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson. As the obscene love and melancholic

narrative of Nabokov have led me to such western philosophers as George Bataille,

Pierre Klossowski, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan—a passage which has been

well-trodden indeed—it also has opened the way to an unexpected encounter: the

unsuccessful endeavor to pass off Eileen Chang as an Anglophone writer. In Evelyn

Nien-Ming Ch’ien’s recent book, Weird English (2004), she sees multilingual

writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Junot Díaz and

Arundhati Roy as events in the ambivalent global climate of multiculturalism.

Ch’ien de-canonizes Nabokov as a middle-writer—i.e., a translator—who trans-

forms an unorthodox, uncanny, and foreign English into a “weird” global language

that only becomes worldly through a translingual or multilingual performativity. It

is true that some writers, because of the “accident of birth,” do not have Nabokov’s

fluidity in the transnational flows of such writerly events, Eileen Chang, whom we

might call a missing chapter in Ch’ien’s Weird English, keeps the celebration of

free-flowing nomadism and deterritorializing mappings at bay.

30 The reviewer Paul Allen writes: “Although Nafisi’s classes start with Shahrazad and the

Thousand and One Nights, the book concentrates on the western literature that has been her academic subject; references to the great Persian tradition are few, and all the more frustrating because they can be so telling.” Cf. Allen.


62

However, at the end of the day, it seems that Hardt and Negri do have a point

in insisting on the a priori of Empire. Under the sign of Empire, the reading of

Lolita together with Empire may be only complement or mirror image of not

reading Eileen Chang. In any event, there is no escape from the dominance of the

English language—even when someone like Nabokov occasionally succeeds in

“taking English from its behind” and forcing it to give birth to a weird “offspring.”31

To take Empire from its behind, to allow a monstrous prodigy to come into being—

to become—it is our turn to read and write, in English as well as Chinese, Chinglish

or Spanglish, in a multitude of languages.

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<http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,1039915,00.html>.

Arrighi, Giovanni. Long Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1994.

Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. 1997. Trans. Louise Burchill. Ed.

Sandra Buckley, Michael Hardt and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota

UP, 2000.

Balibar, Etienne. “Europe: A Vanishing Mediator.” Lecture. Duke University,

Durham. 2003. 19 June 2005 <http://fbc.binghamton.edu/balibar1102.htm>.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgment of Taste. 1979. Trans.

Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1984.

Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. Weird English. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2004.

Chen, Kwan-Hsing (陳光興). “Diguo yu cudiguohua de wenti” (帝國與去帝國化的問題 Empire and Problems of De-Imperialization). Diguo (帝國 Empire).

Trans. Wei Ben and Lee Shangyuan. Taipei: Shangzhou, 2002. 23-41.

Ching, Leo T. S. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of

Identity Formation. Berkeley: U California P, 2001.

Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York:

Columbia UP, 2002.

31 I am, of course, alluding to Deleuze’s famous formulation of his own philosophy in his letter

to Michel Cressole. Deleuze writes of his engagements with various philosophers: “I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to seethe history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous” (“Letter to a Harsh Critic” 6).


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Deleuze, Gilles. “Letter to a Harsh Critic.” Trans. Martin Joughin. Negotiations.

New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 3-12.

—— and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. Trans.

Mark Seem, Robert Hurley, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota

P, 1983. 1996.

—— and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. 1975. Trans. Dana

Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

—— and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

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Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New

York: Grove P, 1967.

——. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove P,

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Garbus, Martin. “When the Censor Was in the Statehouse.” New York Times 20

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Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2000.

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Hegel, G. W. F. “The Ethical Order.” The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Trans. A. V.

Miller. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1997. 267-94.

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About the Author Lili Hsieh received her Ph.D. from the Literature Program at Duke University in 2005 and

will join the Humanities Forum and English Department at the University of Pennsylvania as

a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the years 2005-07. Her other publications include: “Arm-

Chair Spectatorship: Disability as an Allegory of ‘Per-versive’ Viewing Pleasures in Suite

16,” ATENEA 25.1, Special Issue on the Discourse of Disability (June 2005): 143-54;

“Global Democracy and the Iraq War: An Interview with Michael Hardt (邁克爾．哈特訪談：從美伊戰爭談全球化民主 Michael Hardt fangtan: cong meiyi zhangzheng tan

quanqiuhua minzhu),” Shengchang (生產 Producing), ed. Wang Minan, vol. 1 (Guilin:

Guangxi shifan daxue, 2004) 211-27; a shorter version of the same interview in Taiwan as

“The Tragic-Comic Modes of Globalization after the Iraq War: An Interview with Michael

Hardt,” BNEXT 59 (June 2003): 112-17; and “Emotions at War: Anger and Indifference in

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas,” forthcoming in JNT: The

Journal of Narrative Theory. [e-mail: [email protected]]

[Received 31 December 2004; accepted 19 May 2005; revised 2 June 2005]

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