第5期2010年5月
雄韬伟略当代外语研究
N o.5
M ay2010后殖民理论的反思与期待
罗伯特 杨教授访谈录
罗伯特 杨 生安锋
(美国纽约大学；清华大学，北京,100084)
摘要：本访谈详尽地探讨了后殖民主义的种种议题，包括其未来发展趋势及其在中国的变异和作者的期望等等问题。在访谈中，罗伯特 杨高瞻远瞩地回顾了后殖民主义理论在世界各地的运用及其与当地语境结合后产生的种种变异，剖析了当代民族主义的兴起与蜕化，分析了比较文学所面临的问题与未来；也谈到东方文化尤其是中国文化和印度文化中的种种问题。杨自命为一个 马克思主义异议分子 ，他探讨了自己对马克思主义的批判性吸收和创新以及 第三世界 这一术语的问题。杨还谈到自己所建立的后殖民主义 宏大叙事 、后殖民主义在神学等领域的新思路、后殖民主义与生态批评关注点的契合、后殖民主义与现代性的关系等等议题。
关键词：后殖民主义，民族主义，第三世界，马克思主义异议分子
[中图分类号]I021 [文献标识码]D [文章编号]1674-8921-(2010)05-0001-17
Sheng:Pro fessor Young,you have beco me ver-y influential in China since the1990s,w hich w as almost tw enty y ears ag o.And y our definition of the postco lonial Trinity,w hich refers to Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak,and H omi Bhabha,has been so influential that in the field of contemporary w estern literary theories,every one know s them and reads their w o rks,lar gely becau of yo ur intro duction. So in a n,you are actually the founder o f the discipline becau,w hile the critics w ere theorizing in their ow n special field,it s you who clarified the field of postco lonial study and drew interesting connec-tions among different theorists.Equally im por tant, w hile peo ple s know ledge of the postcolonial critics remains so limited,partly due to their w riting style and their exo tic Eng lish(here we think of Spivak and Bhabha),it w as you w ho actually intr oduced them to the w ider audience and to the w or lds outside of Eng lish countries,deepened readers understanding of their co ncepts,and helped popularize their for-m idable theories.So m any people beg an to know the critics v ia your w ork.Could w e say that in a n you are mor e important to the reader s than the theo rists themlves?Did y ou prom ote their postco lonial theo ries as a counterbalance of the Euro centric theo ries?
Young:Well,I do n t think I am mo re im po r-tant than them:they w ere the true pioneers of the field.A s for me,I w as loo king for alternatives to
作者简介：罗伯特 杨是当代英语文学及后殖民主义研究领域的先驱和最有影响力的学者之一。曾任牛津大学文学批评理论及英文教授,2005年受聘美国纽约大学任朱利叶 希尔维(J ulius S ilver)英文和比较文学讲座教授。
生安锋，文学博士，清华大学外语系副教授，研究方向为西方文论、比较文学和英美文学。电子邮箱:saf e@tsinghua.edu the historicism in theories o f histo ry that I discusd in the first par t o f m y book White My thologies a trajectory that many years later Dipesh Chakr aborty w o uld retrace and develop in a different w ay in P r ov incializ ing Europ e.What I found was a Euro-centrism that w as so consistent that it in so me n baffled me,ev en w ith Sartre,w ho w as the perso n m ost aw ar e of the w orld outside Euro pe.H e w as the French philo sopher w ho w as m ost concerned w ith third w orld issues,the friend o f Frantz Fano n, w ho w rote the preface to The Wr etched of the Earth.
H e spent a lot of his time and energ y promo ting his concern w ith third w orld politics in the1960s.But even Sartre in his Cr itique of Dialectical R eason: T heory of Pr actical Enmbles,whi
ch is his bo ok about history,in som e n,releg ated that other w o rld to a m arginal space.So it w as r eally rem ark-able,I tho ug ht,the degree to w hich people either focud on Europe or on the w orlds outside Europe, but never put tho tw o together.T hey never emed to find it a pro blem that so much historical and cultural w ork w as Eurocentric in its perspectives.
A nd that s w hy I lo oked at the w ork of Edw ard Said,Gay atri Spivak,and H omi Bhabha,even though at som e level,they didn t even really have an answ er to my question,w hich w as actually ho w to w rite history how you could w rite a different kind of history outside the confines of the boundar ies o f the West.They didn t form ally address that issue,but I co uld e,reading their wo rk that they had ideas about how to achieve such thing s,that their w ork was about tr ying to transfo rm our perspectives o n the w ay,that a w hole t o f related issues w ere discusd and conceptualized w hat w e w o uld no w call a postcolo nial perspective.In fact,w hen I w as
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春分的由来w riting White M y thologies,w hat I had o riginally in mind w hen I w as planning the bo ok w as to devote just one chapter to a discussio n o f their w ork.I was g oing to put them to gether as a so-to-speak third w o rld contingent, which was intended to,in some n,not balance the r est of the boo
k (w hich discusd Eur opean Marx ist philosophers of histo ry)but at least suggest av enues for explor ation fo r future w o rk.But w hen I started w riting about them and thinking thr oug h the issues they raid, as happens so often in academic w riting,the thing got bigger.So instead of writing one chapter,I w rote three chapters,devoting one to each becau I g ot com pletely taken up w ith the issues they prented.
And yes,I did offer w hat in1990w as the fir st acco unt o f the w o rk of tho three w riters,and I w as the first per son to put them tog ether as a field.
H av ing said that,I didn t actually u the term postcolonial. T hat w asn t a w ord w e ud at that tim e.T he term postcolonial w as r eally brought in by the boo k by Bill Ashcroft et al.w hich w as published in1999the year before White M y thologies called T he Em p ire Wr ites B ack.T hey ud po stco-lonial in a particular,ahistorical w ay.It didn t really take o ff as the term for the field until the m id 90s.T hat w as w hy the term postco lonial doesn t occur in the orig inal edition of White My thologies, but nevertheless,as y ou said,o ne can e now that w hat I w as do ing w as in a n marking the em er-g ence of the field.At that time I was trying to position them in relation to the philosophy of histor y of w estern M arx ism and in some n my full answ er to the question that I raid in White M y thologies really came later,in P ostcolonialism:A H istor ical I ntroduction,in w hic
h I developed a more historical, if still theor etical narrativ e,charting the emergence of a different histo ry,a history that normally g ot blo cked o ut,w as nev er connected to the M ar xism pr oper of Europe but that w as much later.So in som e n the H istor ical I ntr oduction is a book w ritten as an answ er to m ylf,to the original questio ns w ith w hich I beg an White My thologies.
In retro spect now,tw enty years later,I think that history has show n that I w as rig ht picking tho three thinkers abov e anybody el in terms of contem po rary intellectuals do ing a different kind of w ork.I mean they were the people w ho w ere shifting things,o pening up the field.I don t think y ou can really sugg est anybody el at that tim e w ho w as doing the same kind o f w ork.So for me they w ere and they remain the thr ee sig nificant figures w ho indiv idually in different w ays(of cour they knew each other and read each o ther s w o rks so they w ere no t entirely par ate),w ere initiating w hat came to be called Postco lonial Studies.What I w as doing at that point w as something a bit different, raising a different question that has now become an inter est of the Subaltern Studies histor ians,becau I w as absorbed in the question of histo ry philo soph-ically.What is interesting about Spivak and Bhabha is that their w r iting is not primarily historical, w hereas w ith Said,there is certainly a v er y stro ng histo rical perspective.Perhaps it w as becau of that,that in fact I gave him the hardest tim e o f the three.I w ould say no w that I w as too critical of S
aid in that bo ok,for actually his perspective in g eneral is the one that I have w orked w ith my lf in terms of the w ay he histo ricizes cultur e,puts culture ag ainst history,w hich is really w hat I do.
A nd theo ry is part of that culture,just as culture r elates to history.T hat s w hat Said is looking at.
A nd that s m y inter est too.
Sheng:Thank y ou.Now Professo r Edw ard Said has pasd aw ay.If you w ant to re-map the postcolo nial theo rists,w o uld you still include G.C. Spivak and H omi K.Bhabha?Who el are the m ost influential po stco lonial theo rists in the current w o rld?
Young:Well,that s an interesting question becau it opens up the w hole question o f w here the postcolonial is today.Wherever it is,I w ould certainly include Bhabha and Spivak.I m ig ht include my lf. T he other s w hom I w o uld include w ho I think have done the most significant kind o f w ork are generally speaking the Indian political scientists and histor ians.
Sheng:T he Subaltern Studies g roup?
Young:Yes,the Subalter n Studies g roup bas-i cally.I do mention the Subaltern Studies histo rians in White My thologies,but I do n t treat them as substantially as I mig ht hav e done.No w I could not bu
t include m ore fully histo rians such as Ranajit Guha,w ho really initiated Subaltern Studies as an ant-i nationalist,ant-i CPI(Com munist Par ty of India)Naxalite pro ject,and then the main fig ures after him who w o uld be Par tha Chatter jee,Dipesh Chakr abarty,and Gyan Prakash.T here ar e other im por tant fig ur es as w ell in that g roup,and one should add the Latin Am erican Subaltern Studies histo rians also.That gr oup as a gr oup has done som ething extremely important.They hav e r eally put a mark on both the w riting of history g enerally, and also on the w ay that postcolonial studies o perates for they have given it a historical dimension,w hich I think has been both very radical and pow erful.So they are the people w ho w ould imm ediately spring to my mind if I w as to map the field today for they have been the ones defining the field.There are m any others o ne could add,tho ug h of co ur the perspectives of postcolo nial studies have been taken up in so many fields no w that it is har der to maintain the n of people w orking prim ar ily in a sing le arena.
Sheng:Is Ella Shohat very critical of Bhabha and Spivak?
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当代外语研究
Young:She has been quite critical many y ears ag o,but she herlf is a po stco lonial critic w ith a ve
ry different agenda focusing o n the identity of Jew s in the M iddle East.T here w as a time w hen it w as most characteristic of postcolonial critics fo r them to be critical of other po stco lonial critics, w hich w as perhaps a sym ptom of field formation, of people defining the par am eters of w hat they thoug ht the field sho uld be.Terry Eag leton makes the point som ew here that the w ay yo u beco me a postco lonial critic is to denounce Edw ard Said and the w ho le field of postcolo nial studies and that pro vides the initiation cerem ony for becom ing a postco lonial cr itic.Of cour he w as w riting w ith his tongue in his cheek.H o wever,there w as a period in the1990s,particular ly after Aijaz Ahm ad s I n Theor y(1992),w hen everybody w as denouncing ev ery bo dy el,everyo ne w as claiming to be m ore po litical than tho u,so that in the end it became very narcissistic and co mpletely futile in my view, missing the w hole point o f w hat Postcolo nial Studies is suppod to be about,w hich is to bring about chang e in the w or ld.So o ne of the rules,in fact the only r ule w e had w hen I founded my journal I nter-ventions in the late1990s,w as that w e w ould not publish any of the ad hom inem or ad feminam attacks on o ther critics.We never publish anything like that.And I think actually since that time,the situation has improv ed.People hav e found better things to do than just attacking other critics(usually more eminent than themlv es)which incr easingly em ed to me to be a futile w aste of time if you don t like the w or k that is o ut there,w hy not w r ite som ething better y our lf?T hat is not to say that w e should not be able to m ake cr itical r em ar ks about the
军团菌病field,about certain ideas in the field,but it beg an to feed on itlf,if you like som e people have v ir tually m ade their career s out of attacking others.I don t object to anybody having particular pro blems w ith issues in postcolo nial theor y.I think Ella Shohat s criticism s,for ex ample,abo ut the idea of the postcolonial are to the point.She is also doing very interesting new w o rk,and there are many other peo ple as w ell.In fact,w hen you are looking at the people w ho have really defined and shifted the field,it has never been tho w ho spent their time w hinging,objecting to the po litics of this or that other critic.
Sheng:In China,there are a lot of misr eadings and misinter pretations of the po stco lonial theo ries and co ncepts,such as the u of postcolonialism to pro mote nationalism and esntialism in g ener al.
H av e yo u found similar phenomena in other coun-tries?What can be done by the cultural critics?
Young:I am no t so fam iliar w ith w hat has been going on in China but I hav e found this a little bit elw here,fo r ex ample in Eastern Eur ope.T here w as a flow ering o f interest in postcolonial criticism in Eastern Europe in the1990s,when peo ple said: w ell,w e w ere co lonized to o by the Russians for for-ty or more years and now w e are free,and som etimes this took the form as it did in
other postcolonial countries,of an asrtion of nationalism,a retriev al o f national identity.In gener al it is a particular r eading,I suppo ,of postcolonialism itlf that can manage to find a source for natio nalism in it. T he stor y that postcolonialism tells is one in which nationalism is very important,historically it w as very im por tant,in terms of r esisting co lonialism so in g eneral w e could say that it w as ant-i colonialism that invoked nationalism,w hile it has been Postcolo-nialism that has critiqued nationalism.Typically w hat happened,let s say,in Afr ica w hen countr ies achieved independence w as that the nationalism became,if yo u like,unhealthy,and often led to form s of co rruption and so o n and so forth.So very often postcolonial w riters such as Ngugi w a Thiong o and Chinua Achebe and many others,have a trajectory w ith the early novels quite nationalistic and then after that they becom e mo re and mor e disillusioned w ith the state,if no t the nation,as is the ca w ith m any Indian po stco lonial w riter s and theor ists.So in g eneral it s unusual fo r postcolonial theory to be ud in an uncritical w ay in term s of nationalism, ex cept w here people feel ther e really is a situation w hich r equires the kind o f existence of nationalism, that is,w here the nation has not y et com e into being.And one ex ample of that w ould be the one associated w ith Said himlf,focud on the situa-tion of Palestine in the M iddle East.Clearly,if y ou haven t got a co untry,then natio nalism has a different register to it,becau that s w hat you are try ing to achieve.
社区生活Sheng:It is still constructive.
Young:Yes,I m ean in some n they ar e the last nationalists if yo u like.But of cour,there are o ther ex amples of a flow ering of nationalism in par-ticular in the regions w here peo ple u postcolonial theory as a w ay of developing regional identities, for example w ith the Basques in Spain,or in Indo-nesia.And then there is the w hole questio n of,if you like,Orientalism in g eneral,w hich is the w hole language that co untries in the East,peo ple in the cultures of the East,feel in terms of the pow er structur e betw een East and West.In the Muslim w o rld there is a stronger n of being a subaltern culture that has been hum iliated and arro gantly dom inated for o ver a century,par ticularly since the dism em berment o f the Otto man Empire after the First Wor ld War and the fo unding of the state of Israel after the Second,leading to the unresolved situation in the Middle East today.And m ay be that s a kind of nationalism,or a kind of transnational natio nalism.With respect to China,yo u can tell me
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后殖民理论的反思与期待 罗伯特 杨教授访谈录
more than I w ould know but it s also a kind o f,if you like,ant-i Orientalism,it s an asr tion against
the power structure of Orientalism that Said described
and that s certainly also been the ca in Japan.I know that people have ud Said in or der to develop
a kind of rev er Or ientalism,w hich in Said s terms
of co ur miss the point.
Other areas I suppo using the kinds of ideas w ould be in countries like Turkey,w here the g roups
and political par ties w ho are resisting the idea that
Turkey sho uld become part of Eur ope are very keen on Said,becau his w ork allow s them to push
ag ainst the Eur opeanization of T urkey and to asrt
复方地龙胶囊a non-Eur opean identity fo r T urkey and for the
Muslim w or ld generally.So postcolo nial theory, w hich is itlf m ultifario us in any ca,does have
different functio ns in different places.I would alw ays
ex pect that in any theory.Said himlf in his essay T raveling Theory argues that when theory travels,
it never looks ex actly the sam e,becau it is adapted
to lo cal conditions,so that it can be ud for local
purpos,and then very often yo u get people com ing along and say ing,w ell this is not the real thing becau the w ord or idea orig inally meant X and yet here it is being ud to m ean Y,w hich is w rong.But that s becau it has travelled.And that itlf can be a creative m ove,for that is how theories get developed,in cultural tr anslation.If it is alw ays X w herever it appears in the w or ld,then it w ould simply be o perating in the w ay a scientific theory should w ork,that is,if I com e up w ith a cor rect scientific theory,it sho uld w o rk in any labor ator y anyw here in the w o rld in exactly the same w ay.Repeatability show s w hat it is true.If it w orks differently in China from the w ay it w or ks in the U S,then scientifically that cannot be true theory.It cannot be scientific.The theory w ould be w rong.But in the ca of the humanities,philosophy and theory are not like that.Concepts and ideas get tr anslated,and w hen they get tr anslated,they get tr ansform ed.They get adapted for local purp
os. And that is w hat should happen,for that is one w ay in w hich new ideas g et created.
Sheng:Yes,in that n,misreading is v ery
understandable.But do yo u think it s no rmal o r
constructive?Fo r the po stco lonial theories,nation-alism is not something very healthy.It w as once constructive before the national independence,but after that it becomes retr ogressive,so w hat do you think of this kind of nationalism?
Young:If that is how Postcolonialism is being
ud,then it is disturbing becau it suggests that
it is being appro priated alm ost ag ainst itlf.You could say that the w ho le po int o f the post of Postcolo nialism has been to br ing a specific focus to bear on hig hlig hting the problems that natio nalism brings,particularly the w ay that it tends to impo unifor mity upon national cultur e,w hich is a kind of esntialism,and to deny the prence o f cultural m ino rities and their languages,r elig io ns,etc.A nd then o f co ur ,nationalism so easily flo w s over into forms of aggression ag ainst other countries:so many countries beg in by being nationalist in a positive w ay in order to cure their ow
n autonom y,but then in order to maintain that the mom entum end up by attacking their neighbors.It s a very double-edged sw or d.If postcolonial theo ry can encourag e people to reflect critically on nationalism then it is doing its w ork.If they are using it w ithout any kind o f lf-critical reflection so that it ends up being ud for pure nationalist purpos,then in a stro ng n it is no t postcolonial anymo re,it has beco me som ething el.It has reg resd to being simple natio nalism.What Po stco lonialism is tr ying to achieve is a w ay of order ing the w or ld,and its civ il societies,that is not predicated either o n nations or natio nalism.
Sheng:You became the Julius Silver Professor o f Eng lish and Co mparative Literature at New Yo rk U niv ersity in2005.Co uld you plea say som ething about the future of Com parativ e Literature and also about the curr ent problems w e are facing in the field of Comparative Literature?
Young:Well the fir st question is:Do es Com-parative Literature have a futur e?The field itlf w as basically inv ented after the Seco nd World War w hen people felt that by comparing liter atures from different countries,this w ould produce international understanding and discourage w ar,w hich w as very o ptimistic.T hat w as w hy Com parativ e Liter ature had a European basis.The result was that it was often, and still can be actually,very oddly constructed so y ou ll have an essay like the o ne by Paul de M an, for example,called simply Keats and H lder lin. De M an s essay takes the form of a c
ompar ison of the English and German w riter,w ho lived at roughly the same time,comparing them as Ro mantic poets. In actuality they did not have any direct co nnection at all.I think that kind o f comparative liter ature has reached its limit of ufulness,and peo ple have r ecognized that.What has happened is that becau, in par t,of the critiques o f natio nalism,peo ple have begun to question the w hole w ay of treating litera-ture according to national identity and national boundaries.And in the tw entieth century this has become empirically problem atic,v ery o ften,becau w r iters themlves have mov ed ar ound a lo t.Lo ok at Salmo n Rushdie fo r ex ample.H e w as born in British India,then came to Britain and then moved to the US.What nationality is he?What national tradition w ould y ou put him in?H e w rites w ith r eference to a number of tr aditions.So it doesn t make any n to put him in a sing le national literary tradition at all.M ay be he is an ex ample of the way
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that literature itlf has become tr ansnatio nal.Com-parativ e literatur e is best placed to pick up o n that, and to make som ething of the fact that really from the tw entieth century,beginning from m oder
nism, literatur e w as no longer,if it ever w as,a m er ely national activ ity.In fact at that time,literature becam e an inter national activity.It may be w ritten in different languages,but that do esn t mean to say that there are strict m onoling ual traditions even within a single language becau one of the par adox es ev en of the idea o f a national literature is that it assumes that w riters simply read other w riters w ho w rote in the same lang uag e,so it creates its ow n narro w traditio n.But actually all writers have tended to read internationally:I mean,in the Renaissance, they all read the classics,classical w riters,and many Renaissance w riters in English w ro te in Latin,and Italian,as w ell as in English.In the eighteenth-century they r ead the classics and the Fr ench;the Eng lish Rom antics read German w r iters.So no more than yo u or I do,w riter s didn t confine them-lves to reading in a sing le language.T oday,if w e pick up a novel,it could be by anybody,it m ight be Indian,it might be South A merican,it m ig ht be Germ an,it doesn t really matter to us as readers, and w riters are like that too.So w e have to find of a new w ay of talking about literature in a different fo rm.长城作文
如何做好销售On the o ne hand,you have got to look at the lang uage in w hich a tex t is w ritten,becau litera-ture at the end of the day is made up of w ords and w ritten in a particular language.So w e need to acknow ledge w hether it is w r itten in the Chine o r in the English languag e.A t the same time,w
e need to think about literature w itho ut necessar ily draw ing national boundaries betw een w riters,and to think abo ut w ay s of analyzing and histor icizing literature other than according to natio nal boundar ies. And that,it ems to me,is w hat Co mpar ative Literature as a discipline is best designed to do. Becau Co mparative Liter ature is basically mult-i ling ual,and actually literature itlf is mult-i lingual, and many w riters are multilingual.M any tw entieth century w riters in particular hav e w ritten in different lang uages,not just one lang uage.A t one point,I thoug ht that literature w ould be dead in the w ater if w e limited it to national literatures o r a rig id com pariso n betw een discrete liter atures.But now I actually think that the future for literary studies is that all literature ought to be studied in a framew ork where every other literature is prent.You shouldn t be able to study English literature w itho ut thinking about other literatures around the w orld.All litera-tures are part of a huge inter-related glo bal netw o rk, and it is in this env ir onm ent that co mparative liter-ature really com es to the fore.It is the only for mal discipline w hich allow s for w riting across different languages and studies them in that fram ew ork,and that s ho w I think literature should be considered. Yo u can call it w orld literature if y ou like,thoug h the problem of calling it w orld literature is that w o rld literatur e tends to end up being literature in Eng lish plus translated texts.
T he w ay w orld liter ature is often taug ht, certainly in the US,is still w ithin one languag e (Eng lish
o f cour),but it ems to m e that one of the fundamental things w e have to chang e is the idea that,y ou only need to u one language w hen y ou are study ing literature.Ev ery bo dy should be encouraged to think of literature as something that appears in different lang uag es,and to look at its different m ultilingual manifestatio ns.Obviously no sing le person can know all the w orld s languages, so you are alw ay s standing on the edg e of a hug e unknow n,w hich is quite hum bling.It helps us to r ealize that liter ature is about the languag e that it us as its medium,and that actually differences o f lang uag e,are constantly emerging,as w ell as disappear ing,even for ex ample w ithin Eng lish literature.Just to give y ou one ex am ple,people g enerally study English liter ature and French litera-ture as parate traditions,but they don t think of the fact that m uch medieval French literature w as actually w ritten in Eng land.For200y ears,French w as the national language of Eng land!Som e of the m ost famo us medieval French poems ar e in fact technically part o f English literatur e in the n that they w ere w ritten in Eng land.But of co ur they ve been put into the French tradition as if they had had no contact w ith England at all.H o w different though it suddenly looks w hen y ou realize that actually a hug e chunk of Eng lish literature w as w r itten in French.And indeed,as I mentio ned, m any Renaissance w riters in Eng land w rote in Latin;they w er e w riting in different lang uages w ithout feeling it to be contradictory.Since it is defined by its oppo sitio n to sing le language study,I think that Comparative Literature offers a w ay
of r ethinking the w hole form of literature,taking on board the fact that literatur e is w ritten in a w hole range of different languages,and that the lang uages are often interco nnected in differ ent w ays:they are not and never hav e been parate.
Sheng:As far as I kno w,y ou hav e lectur ed in m any Asian countries including India and Eg ypt. Yo u have been m arr ied to an Asian w oman,a British-born Pakistani w oman for tw enty years.So I assum e you have a lo t of ex perience w ith Asian cultures.I know it s very difficult,but could y ou try com paring the Western culture in w hich y ou g rew up and the Eastern cultures y ou know,such as Indian culture,Pakistani culture,Egy ptian culture o r m ay be Chine cultur e?
Young:Well,that is a difficult one!One thing
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后殖民理论的反思与期待 罗伯特 杨教授访谈录
I w ould say is that British culture now is par tly South Asian.It has becom e ver y m ix ed.And British people have actually hybridized.A ll British people hav e taken on all so rts of aspects of Asian and so me other cultures,Car ibbean for ex ample.
Sheng:Isn t the m ainstream still European?
Young:Well yes,and you think it is until you go to another,fo r example,English-speaking culture, such as the U.S.and you suddenly r ealize that how Indian or So uth Asian British culture has beco me.I think it is very interesting the w ay that they mix. For exam ple,there are a lot of South Asian people in the m edia now in term s of film and TV and so fo rth.M any o f them have taken on a cer tain British tr adition of hum or.A lot o f South Asian wr iting in Britain is humo rous that s the w ay they hav e found most effective in dealing with the issues about race in particular.The kind of hum or they take o n der iv es fro m an older w orking-class British tradition.So there has been mixture,w ith form s of appropriation there w hich makes the British Asians very different fro m,let s say,the Indian Asians,w here it is no ticeable that humor has been a much less sig nif-i cant factor in Indian fiction for ex ample.And mo st British people are fair ly comfortable w ith the w hole variety of aspects of Asian cultures.It s not so me-thing they feel bothered by.It has indeed enriched British culture in all sor ts of w ays,so that it is v ery different fro m the British culture that I g rew up in w hich w as m uch mo re traditio nal.
This is the ar gument of m y new est boo k,T he I dea of English Ethnicity.Black and Asian cultural critics in the1980s and90s tended to assum ed that British culture w as ho mog eneous.Actually it w
as never so.It w as alw ays m ix ed,made up o f different fo rms.So for ex am ple,there w as a lo t of conflict but similar kinds of abso rption of Irish culture in particular in the nineteenth centur y to w hat has gone on w ith South Asian and Caribbean culture at the end of the tw entieth.That sort of transfor ma-tion has,to some ex tent,occurred tr ansnatio nally, so that India for ex ample is itlf v ery different fro m the India of1947and particular ly since the 1990s has become m uch m ore A mericanized,w ith shopping m alls and the like.So all sorts of trans-form ations are constantly taking place.The issue then is r eally w hether there is any kind of kernel of cultural difference that has remained untranslated, perhaps w hether it is untranslatable,w hether there is fundam ental difference,if you like.And I am not so sure that ther e are esntial differences.I think there are differ ences that emerg e at certain points. For ex am ple,if you thro w in the factor of class, let s say take middle class people in Gr eat Britain and m iddle class people in India,if you put them to gether there would be much less of a cultural sho ck than betw een w orking class people in Eng land and,let s say peasants in India,w here the differences are mor e substantial.H aving said that,a lot of im migrants into Britain from South Asia w ere people w ho w ere from w orking class backg rounds. T he big difference that som e critics miss is that w hereas it is probably true that a lot of im migration o f South Asians into the U S has been from the professio nal m iddle class,and certainly many So uth A sian academ ics are ty pically Brahmins,in the UK immig ration larg ely cam e fro m the w orking o r peasant class.
Sheng:Is there any special reason for that?
Young:Different immigration policies.Basically, Britain encouraged immigr ation after W orld War becau it needed manual w or kers,w her eas in the U S until the1960s im migration w as larg ely tar geted at Euro pe;ev en after Bobby Kennedy o pened it up to no n-Euro peans,yo u still basically had to be a qualified person to g et a v isa to g o to w ork ther e. Yo u can t just say that I am a laborer,can I get a w o rk v isa unless you win the Green Card lottery of cour.In the UK,there w as a shortage of m anual laborers in Britain after the Seco nd World War,and a lot of people fr om Caribbean and fro m w hat had been British India,came ov er.
T o rever t to your original question,though.I suppo I am somebody w ho is m ore ud than many people maybe to dealing w ith cultural differences on an ever yday basis.An Indian friend of m ine once described m e to ano ther fr iend as different from m ost Eng lish and A mericans becau,she said, he doesn t o ther the o ther .I m probably more alert to the little things,yo u kno w just the little differences of behavior and so forth,w hat is acceptable and w hat is not,that make a difference in ev er y cultur e. Becau I som etimes will e thing s that others do not no tice;I am pr obably mo re aw are w hen people are making mistakes,or m aking peo ple feel uncom-fortable.To take one ex am ple,w hether you touch people w hen you m eet them,for ex ample shake their hand,or,if you know th
em a little,kiss them on the cheek.In some cultures it s OK to touch people; in o thers it s no t,particularly acr oss genders. Physical contact is something that w or ks differently in different cultures.The are the thing s you pick up by experience.That allo ws me,I suppo,to negotiate being in different cultures perhaps mo re easily than I w o uld o therw i.At some level it s there that the difficulties ari that create the n o f alienation.It s really w hat ends up as som ething alm ost clo to manners that makes a difference.
A nd that s som ething that I think people can learn but they do no t necessarily cho o to learn,or even notice the differences to learn from.People probably don t learn becau they don t spend m uch time o utside their ow n g roups and cultures.For me it w as just that for v ar io us reasons I ud to spend a
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当代外语研究
除了英文
