FRONT LINES/ BORDER POSTS

Spring 1997
Volume 23, Number 3

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When I first proposed "Front Lines/Border Posts" in 1992 as a special issue of Critical Inquiry, my ambitions were largely abstract and archaeological. My purpose was to survey the terrain of the postfoundationalist humanities from the perspective of the "jargon of the minorities," as I described it in my call for papers. The phrase itself speaks of a certain ambivalence on my part about the prodigious production of discourses of "othering" that, in their turn, have given rise to formulations of affiliative alterity that get described--both by the left and the right, traditionalists and progressives--as the mantras of multiculturalism. It is frequently acknowledged that the formulaic invocation of the equality of oppression and the moral well-being of minorities elides the specificity of cultural differences. Such political pieties should not obscure the difficult transition that characterizes the political demands made by members of "new" social movements. These transitions do not represent not merely a shift in the subject of the political process but a translation of the very nature of what can be construed as political, of what could be the representational objects and objectives of social transformation: polymorphous and perverse desires, AIDS, the (un)translatability of cultural traditions, the melancholic social memory of slavery, the postcolonial tryst between Irish and South Asian feminists in their struggles against fundamentalism, to name but a few. Some socialist feminists might balk at the intrusion of the psychic dimension of desire into demands for gender equality in the workplace or the need to acknowledge the concept of fantasy in drafting sexual harassment policies; orthodox Marxists, intent on preserving the primacy of class contradiction in their understanding of the dialectic of labor and capital, might consider the growing attention to the gendered and racialized body of a diasporic or migrant workforce as a diversion from the class struggle; and social welfare activists who take a statist and institutionalized view of national health policy might resist the perspective of AIDS activists who insist that the ethics of community or civic health cannot be founded on the policing of pleasure or the sanitization of sexual choice. The contentious and contradictory conditions of political affiliation, even within progressive social forces, suggest that there is a significant shift in the conversation around the values that constitute cultural and social citizenship when human rights and needs are cross-referenced, in complex ways, with group interests and the contingency of collective demands.

My title is emblematic both of an editorial and an intellectual dilemma. Special issues are customarily built around acknowledged themes or established topics that illustrate the state of the craft. This volume, however, departs from such protocols. It attempts to unearth explanations for, and examples of, the paradoxical positioning of theory in that decade of difference and diversity--the mideighties to the midnineties--that we might call, after the manner of historians, the long 1990s. "Front Lines/Border Posts" functions as a kind of synoptic signature, or ideogram, of a tension that haunts the theoretical enterprise. To harbor advance-guard aspirations, to be in the front line of conceptual innovation, has been one of the most significant gestures of the theoretical adventure. Theory's work has occupied the border posts of political and disciplinary intervention, measuring, mapping, and surveying metadiscursive activities that the metaphor of militancy within my title makes apparent. Such maneuvers are made necessary because of the culture wars, the battle of the books, the subtle subvention of popular cultural traditions to the national(ist) cause--conflagrations connected with conflicting conceptions of the core of a syllabus or a society. These, then, are the ways that counter-public spheres, subaltern studies, and unofficial knowledges are figured. But, on the other hand, my title evokes those key words of a decade committed to the borderline conditions of split subjects, discursive regimes, concepts under erasure, and accounts of iterative and performative social agency. The crossing of cultures, the grafting of genres, and the hybridity of knowledges and identifications have become the activity of a theoretical enterprise that negotiates a range of critical conditions with the post mark--poststructuralist, postfeminist, postcolonial, postmodern. Between the one and the other, I found a set of originating questions: Post-this, post-that, but why never post-the other? Was the other the political bottom line, the last ethical frontier?

For one who had played a modest role in mothering this very "othering," I was not about to turn Medea, but there was something about the regnant and resistant orthodoxy of the other that I wanted to explore. The oblique slash that I placed in "Front Lines/Border Posts" might have been better represented in other ways--perhaps a run of ellipses. Or an expectant gap might keep open the possibility of an emergent space, a potential object of address. Or, more simply, why not a host of question marks placed at that very point where the frontline approach is articulated to the borderline condition: Front lines? Border posts? What authorizes the postfoundational humanities? Can discourses so deeply concerned with epistemological and institutional transition speak from a liminal position? How can we face the task of designating identities, specifying events, locating histories?

Homi Bhabha is the Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is also a visiting professor at the University of London. He edited Nation and Narration (1990) and collected his essays in The Location of Culture (1994). He is at work on two books, one entitled A Measure for Dwelling, the other a history of vernacular cosmopolitanism.